11/03/2017

'It's A Tragedy,' Clive Hamilton Says Of Turnbull's Climate Transformation

The Guardian - 

Former Climate Change Authority member reveals what went on before he quit and offers a withering assessment of the PM
Professor David Karoly, left, and Professor Clive Hamilton during happier times at the Climate Change Authority in 2012. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
Clive Hamilton has been at the pointy end of public discourse on climate change for more than 20 years.
Among lots of other things, he's written challenging books on the science, founded a progressive thinktank and had a failed crack at being an MP for the Greens.
He got his Order of Australia medal for his contributions on climate and sustainability almost eight years ago. His book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change is now a decade old.
In 2012, Hamilton was appointed to the Australian government's Climate Change Authority (CCA) – a body charged with making recommendations to government on climate policy in line with the science.
But last month, Hamilton quit the CCA after hearing a chorus of government ministers, led by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, touting the oxymoron of "clean coal".
Now Hamilton has spelled out his antipathy towards Turnbull – a politician who only six years ago was a climate change hawk, who advocated for a massive shift to renewable energy, and who was utterly sceptical of "clean coal".
In an interview for my podcast, Positive Feedback, Hamilton gives a withering personal assessment of the prime minister and reveals what was going on inside the CCA before his resignation.
"I wasn't disappointed, or upset," says Hamilton on Turnbull's recent advocacy for building more coal plants, "I was disgusted."
"For Turnbull to be using that outrageous term [clean coal] to describe coal-fired power stations – I was disgusted."
It's a tragedy to watch a man like Malcolm Turnbull shrink into the kind of shell of a person that he has become.
Clive Hamilton
"It's a tragedy to watch a man like Malcolm Turnbull to shrink into the kind of shell of a person that he has become. I don't understand why a man like that does not say 'look, I have some fundamental principles and I might lose the leadership but at least I will be able to look at myself in the mirror for the rest of my life.'"
Hamilton points out that a decade ago Turnbull was pledging he would "not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am."
"The truth is that he now does lead a Liberal party that has the same views as he does on climate change," says Hamilton.



"The Liberal party has undergone a transformation in the last 10 years and it's now dominated federally by troglodytes from the hard right – the anti-science brigade, some of whom probably cheered when Pauline Hanson attacked vaccinations the other day. These are the anti-science, anti-expertise crowd — the kind of people who now advise Donald Trump."
Trump's election, believes Hamilton, has galvanised climate science deniers around the world, including those in Turnbull's party.
"I think that [climate science] deniers now are more inclined to believe they were right and history is on their side and this whole thing will be shown to be a hoax and a scandal – that does embolden them and undoubtedly that's a factor in Turnbull's partyroom."
Hamilton publicly resigned from the CCA last month, citing as a final straw the government's advocacy for coal. That's public knowledge.
But in the interview, Hamilton tells me the problems seemed to start in October 2015 when the new Turnbull government made fresh appointments to the authority.
"The whole character of the authority changed," Hamilton says. After that point, the CCA was "dominated by people who want action, but not too much action."
In a story from inside the CCA, Hamilton says: "There was this talk of a secret plan … to develop a tricky policy, the emissions intensity scheme in the electricity sector, which [the authority] would recommend in a report and this would be used by Malcolm Turnbull to justify what he wanted to do."
This, Hamilton says, was touted by some members of the authority as a tool for Turnbull to use against a backbench reluctant to do anything on climate change.
Hamilton was told to "pull his head in" and get in line with the plan that he was told represented the best chance of progress.
He was initially "half persuaded" by the idea but as time wore on, he says he realised the "secret plan" wasn't plausible and that Turnbull was drifting further away from any meaningful action on climate change.
In late 2016, the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said an emissions intensity scheme, or something like it, could be part of a government review into climate policy. That position lasted only a few hours before Frydenberg backtracked and Turnbull dismissed the idea.
"Pathetic," says Hamilton.
In August 2016, the cracks in the authority went on public display.
The CCA had published a report recommending cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in line with the government's current target – a reduction of 26% to 28% by 2030. The CCA had previously recommended that target should be at least 40%.
Hamilton and his CCA colleague Professor David Karoly, a climate scientist, refused to sign the report and instead issued their own, leading calls for them to resign.
So now the professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University is out of the authority and readying himself to launch a third book in a climate change trilogy, Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the anthropocene.
He thinks readers will feel "reflective… but you won't feel hopeful."
He says: "If you look at what the scientists are saying and you're not despairing then you are not really listening to what they are saying."

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So Long, Climate Institute – Too Sensible For The Current Policy Soap Opera

The Conversation - 

Climate Institute chief executive John Connor launching the Pollute-o-Meter in 2013. AAP Image/Alan Porritt
The Climate Institute, which was among the first Australian NGOs to focus solely on climate change, is to shut down at the end of June after 12 years.
It was born into an era when politicians and voters were finally waking up to the importance of climate policy. But now, its self-described “centrist, pragmatic advocacy” has run out of financial backing.

Early years
It’s easy to forget, given the political theatrics we’ve witnessed over the past decade, just how little attention was being paid to climate policy before the explosion of concern in late 2006. Life was bleak for environmental groups under the four Howard governments from 1996 to 2007, with the partial and controversial exception of WWF.
Climate change was simply not an issue that had traction with the federal government, and the business community had fought itself to a standstill on the topic of whether Australia should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which John Howard resisted to the end.
Bob Carr, the then premier of New South Wales, had been trying to get carbon trading onto state and federal agendas with limited success.
By 2004 attitudes were shifting, not least because of the ongoing Millennium Drought. In a 2015 interview Clive Hamilton, a climate policy academic and inaugural board chair of the Climate Institute, noted:
In the early 2000s when the environment groups started to get serious about climate change, they adopted their standard tactics, which had run out of steam. The problem for environmentalism in Australia, as well as internationally, is that they had this glorious period of the 1980s and ‘90s, and then they became institutionalised; their tactics became stale. It wasn’t their fault – it’s just the world changed.
Hamilton explained that in 2005, Mark Wootton, director of the Poola Foundation, approached him saying that he had A$5 million and wanted to spend it on something that would “cut through” the stagnant climate change debate. Hamilton thought about it and proposed the Climate Institute, which he put together over the ensuing months. After chairing the board for its first year Hamilton returned to his duties at the Australia Institute.
Launching a tour of rural Australia the following year, Wootton told journalists:
People have to see there is a solution, that there is a way out… It’s about people moving on and not feeling that sense of despair, which I’ve genuinely felt, and that’s why we set this up.
The institute opened its doors in October 2005 and was soon in the headlines. Howard attacked Carr, declaring himself “amazed a former Labor premier should advocate that we should sign up to something that would export the jobs of Australian workers”.
A month later, the Climate Institute returned fire with an attack on the Howard government’s Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, widely interpreted as a way for polluting nations to dodge Kyoto.
This pattern of well-timed reports and timely rebuttals has continued over the past 12 years. During this time the Climate Institute has challenged successive governments to do more, to create stronger policy and a more predictable investment environment – something that is sorely lacking to this day.
The institute’s critics will claim it never escaped the neoliberal paradigm – the idea that the market can and will deliver as long as the right policy levers are pulled at the right time. In fairness, though, it never pledged to transcend free-market economics anyway, although it also tried along the way to expand the argument to include moral (and religious) values.

Main achievements
In the reporting on the institute’s demise, its main claims to fame are listed as helping to expand the renewable energy target in 2008, saving the Climate Change Authority from Tony Abbott’s axe in 2014, and building bipartisan support for Australia to ratify the Paris climate agreement in 2016.
But there was much else that the Climate Institute worked on, which is in danger of being forgotten.
It toured rural Australia to listen to farmers’ concerns.
It tried to signal to politicians that voters cared. For example, before the “first climate change election” in November 2007, it commissioned a poll of 877 voters in nine key marginal electorates. It found that 73% of voters thought climate change would have either a strong or a very strong influence on their vote at the election, an increase from 62% in August.
It also played a part in stitching together what political scientists call “advocacy coalitions”. One notable example was its help in producing the Common belief: Australia’s faith communities on climate change report, released in December 2006 with input from 16 Australian communities including Aboriginal Australians, Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and other denominations.

Why it died and what next?
The institute’s outgoing chief executive, John Connor, told Reneweconomy that the decision ultimately comes down to funding:
We haven’t been able to plug the [funding] gap. Centrist, pragmatic advocacy is not sexy for many people who want to fund the fighters or pour funds into new technology.
As such, the Climate Institute is another victim of the policy paralysis that has exasperated and bewildered commentators.
It is indeed hard to justify the funding of calm, measured policy advice when the mere mention of the most economically tame of notions – an emissions intensity scheme – causes panic and retreat in the federal government.
Climatologist and Climate Council member Will Steffen, interviewed on the ABC, suggested that over the past two or three years many organisations have begun to take climate change on board, and so the institute’s unique role was lessened.
But one piece of the furniture that urgently needs saving is the institute’s Climate of the Nation, the longest trend survey of the attitudes of Australians to climate change and its solutions. Hopefully another organisation (I’m looking at you, Australian Conservation Foundation) will pick this up.
The staff of the Climate Institute will hopefully find new roles within the now smaller ecosystem of environmental policy advice. With the impacts that the institute and others were warning about in 2005 arriving with depressing predictability, Australia desperately needs three things.
It needs community energy programs. It needs effective opposition to plans for yet more fossil fuel extraction. And most relevantly here, it needs a cacophony of well-informed and relentless voices advocating for the most useful policies to get the carbon out of our economy.
There’s a fourth thing, actually: luck. From here on we are going to need an enormous (and undeserved) amount of luck if the lost years of ignoring sensible climate policy advice are not to come back and haunt us.

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Great Barrier Reef Just The Tip Of The Climate Change Iceberg

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Australia and other nations must be held to account for obligations they have made to protect World Heritage sites such as the Great Barrier Reef, legal groups say.
US-based Earthjustice and Environmental Justice Australia on Thursday unveiled legal analysis in Paris that they said demonstrates Australia was failing to fulfil responsibilities to protect and conserve the reef.
Bleaching near Port Douglas last month as sea temperatures exceed coral thresholds. Photo: Brett Monroe Garner, via Greenpeace
They also called on the World Heritage Committee to finally give priority to climate change following widespread coral bleaching in 2016 that resulted in the death of about one-fifth of the Great Barrier Reef's corals alone.
The demand comes as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch pointed to many reefs facing the threat of renewed bleaching in 2017, including the Great Barrier Reef. (See chart below)
"Over the past three years, almost all of the world's reefs have experienced summertime heat stress, with more than 40 per cent of reef locations accumulating stress to a level where we expect coral bleaching", said Dr Scott Heron of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch from Townsville.
"At present, many southern hemisphere reefs are at or near bleaching levels, including in the Great Barrier Reef and the South Pacific - and some of those for the second time in the three-year period."

'More dire'
"Corals around the world are bleaching and dying because of ocean warming and acidification caused by out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions," Noni Austin, an Earthjustice lawyer and report author, said. "The plight of these corals – and of the World Heritage sites on which they depend – is growing more dire every year."

Great Barrier Reef's bleached coral up close
Parts of the Great Barrier Reef are enduring sustained periods of heat stress worse than at the same time during last year's record-breaking coral bleaching event, raising fears the natural wonder may suffer another hammering.Vision supplied: Biopixel.

"It's ambitious and it sets out in law and science, what [nations] could and should do," said Ariane Wilkinson, lawyer at not-for-profit law firm Environmental Justice Australia, another of the authors.
"It's very clear that by mid-century, many coral places will not survive," Ms Wilkinson said, adding that the necessary action had to include halts to major new fossil-fuel projects such as those planned in Queensland.
Another coral bleaching event is unfolding over parts of the Great Barrier Reef for the second year in a row. Photo: Brett Monroe Garner, via Greenpeace
The report's release comes as lobbying of the World Heritage Committee's 21 members intensifies ahead of a meeting in Krakow, Poland, in July. The groups want the committee to finally give priority to climate change.
"The committee can't squirm out of it any more.They've got to focus on it," said Jon Day, formerly a director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and an ex-Australian government official who attended 11 committee meetings between 1998 and 2013. "It isn't just about the [Great Barrier] reef – it's affecting many, many of their world heritage sites."
Coral bleaching near Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef during 2016. Photo: EarthJustice, EJA
Dr Day said he had recently been in France showing World Heritage delegates photographs of the reef's bleaching. "Committee members were pretty shocked to see what corals looked like after bleaching," he said.

'In-danger watch list'
The Abbott government managed to have the Great Barrier Reef removed from the in-danger watch list, prior to last year's big bleaching event and further bleaching in 2017.
Dr Day said that the committee may consider putting the reef back on the watch list. While such a move would place the reef back in the global spotlight – and the government's policies – it would not remove the threat.
"The thing that's going to fix the problem is when the government and the world start to address climate change ... which is what the papers [such as the legal groups] are trying to do," he said.
Josh Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister, said the federal and Queensland governments would spend $2 billion over the next decade to support the reef's health, including to improve water quality, remove the crown of thorns starfish and bolster scientific knowledge.
"In the first 18 months of the 35-year [Reef 2050] Plan significant progress has been made including a ban on the disposal of dredge material in the World Heritage Area," he said, adding that "global efforts to tackle climate change are critical to the long-term outlook for coral reefs around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef".

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10/03/2017

How Climate Change Battles Are Increasingly Being Fought, And Won, In Court

The Guardian - 

Around the world courts are stepping in when politicians fail to act, with South Africa's government the latest to lose a groundbreaking climate lawsuit with judges ruling against its plans for a new coal-fired power station
Campaigners outside Pretoria high court during South Africa's first climate change lawsuit. Earthlife Africa challenged the government's approval of the proposed Thabametsi coal-fired power plant. Photograph: Courtesy of James Oatway/CER
The South African government has lost the country's first climate change lawsuit after the hight court ruled against its plans for a coal-fired power station, the latest in a rising tide of international climate litigation.
Environmental NGO EarthLife Africa challenged the government's approval of the proposed Thabametsi coal-fired power station on the grounds that it should have been preceded by an evaluation of its climate change impacts. The North Gauteng high court agreed and ordered the government to reconsider its approval, taking into account a full climate change impact assessment.
A draft assessment shows that the project slated for the drought-prone Limpopo province will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions, and that the climate impacts threaten the future viability of the plant.
The case comes shortly after a groundbreaking climate case decided last month in Austria. A federal court blocked the expansion of Vienna's international airport because the increase in carbon emissions that a new runway would generate is inconsistent with Austria's commitments to tackle climate change. The Austrian decision not only echoes controversies around airport expansions in the UK and France; it's also the latest example of courts around the world stepping in to hold governments to account for escalating global temperatures.
Since a landmark Dutch climate change case, filed by my colleagues, resulted in an order that the government significantly reduce its carbon emissions, lawsuits challenging inaction on climate change have been filed in courtrooms in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Some lawsuits target the inadequacy of policies intended to reduce carbon emissions (as in the US, New Zealand, Belgium and Switzerland) while others challenge individual projects that have potentially catastrophic consequences for the climate (as in Norway, where the government has permitted new drilling for oil in the Arctic).
In Pakistan, where rising temperatures are already threatening lives and livelihoods, a court found in favour of a farmer who argued that his rights to life and dignity were under threat because of the government's inadequate climate change policy.
Climate change litigation is an invaluable strategy at a time when governments have failed to live up to their repeated promises, affirmed most recently in the Paris agreement, to prevent dangerous interference with the climate system. Current pledges to reduce emissions are projected to lead to warming of 3.2C above pre-industrial levels – way above the agreed target of "well below 2C" and likely to lead to radical changes in the environment.
Aside from highlighting the obligations of governments to protect their citizens from foreseeable harm, these cases have the considerable advantage of putting the facts of climate change on the public record. These facts, endorsed by governments through the adoption of scientific reports at the UN, include that climate change is real; that it is caused by human activity; that it will dramatically affect every region in the world; and that it is more cost-effective to act now than later. While it might be expedient for politicians to obfuscate these facts, it is another matter altogether to produce evidence to substantiate their position in court.
The political and social ripple effects of climate change cases are also enormous. While the Dutch government is appealing against the court's ruling in the Netherlands, the case has already had a huge impact on national policy making and public debate.
Emboldened by the ruling, opposition MPs have drafted a new, more ambitious climate change act and a majority of parliamentarians have voted to phase out coal-fired power as quickly as possible. It has also catalysed an unprecedented level of social mobilisation around climate change as an issue.
These cases are powerful vehicles for the progressive action on climate that is urgently needed. Far from being an undue interference with policy making processes, courts are reaching decisions in accordance with existing law and science. For as long as governments fail to take the steps necessary to avert dangerous change, courts can be expected to act as vital checks on political inaction.

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Australia Faces Gas Shortage, More Blackouts From 2019: Market Operator

Reuters - Sonali Paul

High voltage power lines are pictured as storm clouds roll in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, February 19, 2017. REUTERS/Jason Reed
Australia faces a gas crunch from 2019, raising the risk of power blackouts from a shortage of gas-fired generation and gas supply cuts if no action is taken, the country's market operator said on Friday.
The warning comes after a string of outages and electricity price spikes in Australia's eastern states over the past year that have highlighted the need for gas-fired generation to shore up power supplies.
"We're going to see security of both systems, gas and electricity, become more challenging," Mike Cleary, chief operating officer of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), told Reuters.
More gas-fired plants will be needed to beef up power supplies as they can raise and lower output more quickly than coal-fired plants as a back-up for wind and solar when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, the AEMO said in its annual gas outlook.
However the need for more gas for power has arisen just as three new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plants have opened in the northeast, tripling gas demand and drawing supply out of the domestic market.
While gas goes for export, the AEMO projects production for the domestic market will drop from 600 petajoules (570 million MMBtu) in 2017 to 478 PJ in 2021.
That will result in a shortfall of gas supplies to homes, businesses and industry of between 10 PJ a year to 54 PJ a year between 2019 and 2024, or it could result in electricity supply shortages of between 80 gigawatt hours and 363 GWh between 2019 and 2021, the AEMO said.
To encourage new supply, gas and power prices will inevitably rise.
"We're going to see gas-fired generation increase demand (for gas) and we're going to see an impact on price," Cleary said.
The AEMO said options for dealing with the shortage include diverting a small amount of gas away from LNG into the domestic market, increasing output from existing fields or developing new gas fields.
However developing new fields by 2019 will be a challenge, as the state of Victoria has just approved a moratorium on conventional gas drilling onshore until 2020, while several other states have limited fracking of unconventional gas.
A coal seam gas project proposed by Santos, called Narrabri, could alleviate all of the gas shortfall if it starts producing by 2020, the AEMO said, but that project faces a lengthy approval process amid strong local opposition.

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Climate Institute To Shut Due To Lack Of Philanthropic Support

Fairfax - 

Australia's original climate change-focused think-tank and lobby group will shut after it failed to replace the multi-million-dollar bequest it relied on.
The Climate Institute, known for its research and leading role in public debate since being set up in 2005, will close in June.
Outgoing Climate Institute chief John Connor. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
It comes 18 months after the institute called for public donations to offset the lapsing of the foundational support set up by Rupert Murdoch's niece, Eve Kantor, and her husband, farmer Mark Wootton.
Mr Wootton, also the institute's chairman, said he was proud that the institute had built understanding of a complex issue during a tumultuous time in Australian public life.
He said he was particularly gratified to have seen the shift in the business and finance communities, where many who were opposed to the institute's goals had in recent years become allies.
"We are disappointed that some in government prefer to treat what should be a risk-management issue as a proxy for political and ideological battles," he said.
"They are increasingly isolated as the costs of inaction mount and the opportunities and benefits of action become ever clearer."
Where membership-based environment groups are necessarily focused on building grassroots support in the community, the Climate Institute has developed a reputation for policy analysis and building partnerships across the ideological spectrum.

APRA's blunt climate change warning
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's very blunt warning of the obvious physical risks and transition risks of moving to a low-carbon economy. Michael Pascoe comments.

It played a central role in the campaign for a limit on greenhouse gas emissions, and in bringing together groups representing business, investors, unions and the welfare sector to push for change.
It also focused on improving understanding of the importance of climate risk-management in the financial sector, particularly superannuation funds.
Climate Institute deputy chief executive, Erwin Jackson, said the world saw Australia's climate commitments as "woefully inadequate". 
The closure follows the resignation of the institute's long-time leaders, chief executive John Connor and deputy chief executive Erwin Jackson.
Mr Connor will move to Fiji next month to head the secretariat supporting the Pacific nation's presidency of this year's United Nations climate negotiations. Mr Jackson resigned late last year for personal reasons.
The institute was originally planned to run for five years through the Poola Foundation, set up from the estate of Ms Kantor's late brother Tom. It was extended to a decade when the first round lapsed in 2010, but not expected to continue beyond that.
Australian Industry Group chief Innes Willox said the institute had been a "very strong actor" in public debate, advocating for sensible discussion and workable outcomes.
"Their voice in the debate will be missed," he said.
Australian Council of Social Service chief Cassandra Goldie said the institute was a key partner in bring groups together and making the case for addressing climate pollution in a fair and equitable way.
"We are losing a major brains trust for the country on these issues, and a voice that has been such an important contributor on an agenda that clearly remains alive and extremely urgent," she said.
"It is very sad. I hope there can be some intervention to keep its doors open and continue to build on the vital work they have done."
Olivia Kember, the institute's head of policy, will act as chief executive until it closes in June.

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09/03/2017

205 Records In 90 Days: 'Angry Summer Is The New Normal', Says Climate Council

Fairfax - Stephanie Peatling

Scientists have confirmed what anyone who lived through the past summer knows to be true - climate change is driving hotter and longer summers that are becoming "the new normal", according to scientists, with worse to come unless tough decisions are made.
The summer of 2016/17 produced not only Sydney's hottest summer on record, Canberra's hottest summer for daytime temperatures and Brisbane's hottest summer in terms of mean temperature, but Queensland's second hottest summer on record and the hottest summer temperatures on record for almost 45 per cent of NSW.
Dryer conditions are making inland Australia less habitable.  Photo: Mal Fairclough
Scientists have called it "the angry summer" as more than 205 records were broken in just 90 days, according to a new report from the Climate Council.
"We are into the latter half of the critical decade, and temperatures are continuing to increase and extreme weather events are worsening. Climate change is increasing the frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves and warm spells. Hot days and heatwaves, like those experienced in the 2016/17 angry summer, are becoming the new normal, and even more extreme heat is on the way in future unless rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are achieved around the world," the report warned.

Australia's fossil-fueled summer
Eastern Australia experience an unprecedented heat wave this summer as evidence linking climate change with burning fossil fuels grows ever stronger. Courtesy ABC News24.

The reports authors, which include Professor Will Steffen, the inaugural director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute, warned that Australia will continue to warm up throughout the 21st century and experience increasingly severe impacts.

But it is not too late to stop the worst case predictions from coming true.
"Whether or not extreme heat becomes even worse during the second half of the century depends on whether the world, including Australia as one of the 15 largest emitters, can rapidly and deeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a carbon-neutral global economy by mid-century," the report says.
Scientists are calling for a rapid uptake of renewable energy to drive down Australia's use of fossil fuels. Photo: Pacific Hydro Limited
If present rates of greenhouse gas emissions continue, large areas of Australia's interior would become uninhabitable while, in NSW, the current one-in-50 year extreme heat event would occur every five years.
But if greenhouse gas emissions are cut very rapidly and deeply then the rise in temperature increases could be minimised.
The summer of 2016/17 was the hottest summer on record in Sydney. Photo: Getty Images
The Climate Council is an independently crowd-funded organisation. It took over the work of the Climate Commission, the independent body set up in 2011 by the then Labor government, which was abolished by the Coalition after it came to office in 2013.
Despite Australia's commitment to decrease its production of greenhouse gas emissions at the Paris international climate change talks in 2015, our emissions rose by 0.8 per cent last year.

"This rise puts into serious doubt whether even Australia's very weak emissions reductions target of 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 can be achieved," the report warned.
"With Australia's emissions continuing to rise, it is clear that the federal government's current climate policy is failing. Australia needs to transition rapidly to cheap, clean, renewable energy to reduce our emissions as opposed to 'clean coal' plants."
The federal government said last month that coal-fired power stations could be eligible for funding from Australia's $10 billion green bank.
In what would represent a significant weakening of the country's environmental financing rules, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg confirmed the government is considering issuing a new ministerial directive to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to put investment in so-called "clean coal" on the table.
Professor Steffen told a press conference on Wednesday morning that the government needed to realise that coal fired power stations were "20th century thinking".
"I hope we realise, like any big technological breakthrough, going to renewable energy and smart systems is the way of the 21st century...Rather than fighting this transition we need to support them [forms of renewable energy] and embrace them and make them work to our benefit."

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