Malcolm Turnbull, .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull .. was briefly leader of the Australian Liberal (our conservatives remember) Party "16 September 2008 to 1 December 2009" .. and could be again before the next election ..
Abbott walks with arms in quick draw cowboy mode like your George Bush does .. you know, kinda banana like from shoulder down, half moon-like .. he reminds of George in other ways to .. another Malcolm, Malcolm Fraser, another ex Australian PM, after Whitlam was ousted in November '75, (some say the CIA was involved .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Australia ) puts that case again ..
SAN FRANCISCO — The headlines last week were dramatic: Australia abandons its carbon tax. The move seemed to confirm suspicions that putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions is politically toxic.
The reality, experts say, is more nuanced. Australia has not abandoned its commitment to reducing climate-warming emissions. And carbon tax systems, while rare and rife with controversy, retain a firm foothold in a number of advanced economies.
In Australia, the government’s decision entails a change of methodology. By next July, the country will shift from its controversial carbon tax system to a cap-and-trade system, which is a different way of limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Australia had already planned to make the shift in July 2015 and will now accelerate the changeover by a year, bowing to the touchy politics of what constitutes a “tax.”
“Calling a policy a ‘tax’ certainly makes it difficult to sell it to the community,” David Pannell, director of the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy at the University of Western Australia, said in an e-mail.
Carbon taxes control emissions by establishing a fixed price that polluters must pay. High prices discourage pollution. By contrast, cap-and-trade systems limit amounts of carbon emissions, leaving the market to determine the price for polluting.
Economists and policy makers like to argue over which method is best. But both seek the same goal. In fact, the two may be somewhat similar in practice, given the tweaks and nuances that often accompany their implementation.
Carbon taxes, with their fixed prices, are easier to implement than cap-and-trade systems, noted Janet Milne, director of the Environmental Tax Policy Institute at Vermont Law School. That is why Australia started with the tax in 2012 and then planned to change over.
Australia’s move is “really just a one-year acceleration of what they had planned in any event,” she said in a phone interview.
But critics of Australia’s announcement, who include the country’s Green Party, have a point. Switching to the cap-and-trade system will allow Australian industries to pay less to reduce pollution. That is because the trading system, unlike the tax, will link into a similar system in Europe. In Europe, abundant pollution permits have dramatically reduced the market price of carbon emissions. So Australian industries will be able to take advantage of those low prices to access the pollution credits more cheaply, and ahead of schedule.
“In effect they’re lowering the cost that Australians can expect to pay,” Thomas Heller, the executive director of the Climate Policy Initiative, which analyzes climate and energy policies around the world, said by phone.
That means, of course, that it is easier and cheaper for Australian industries to pollute. Christine Milne, leader of the Australian Greens, who is not related to Janet Milne, described Europe’s carbon prices as “far too low to drive pollution cuts or clean-energy growth.”
For Australia, the key question now becomes whether Europe will “fix the significant problems that they’ve had with oversupply of emissions permits,” said Mr. Pannell, of the University of Western Australia.
Europe is trying, a bit weakly: This month, the European Parliament approved a measure intended to remove some of the excess permits that have been keeping carbon prices low. However, whether the move by itself will do much to drive up carbon prices is doubtful.
Climate experts say there is still an appetite for carbon taxes in parts of the world. Janet Milne, of Vermont Law School, points out that Ireland’s carbon tax — born partly of the need for additional government revenue — is relatively new. So are carbon taxes in Japan. Switzerland recently announced that it would increase its carbon tax next year, and South Africa plans to introduce a carbon tax system in 2015, after delays and protests from mining companies.
But even in climate-conscious Europe, where taxes on heating fuels and transportation exist alongside the better-known emissions-trading system, expanding carbon taxes can be a tough sell. Lithuania, which recently assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union, has said it plans to revive discussion of a stalled 2011 proposal to harmonize energy taxation across the Continent. However, approving tax measures requires a unanimous vote, according to Stefan Speck, an environmental economics expert with the European Environment Agency, and several E.U. members are blocking it.
Michael Mehling, president of the nonprofit Ecologic Institute in Washington, D.C., said in an e-mail that, “Given the current diversity of views on future E.U. climate policy among member states, I would be surprised to see any movement towards significantly higher energy taxes.”
Avoiding the term “carbon tax” may make such policies a bit easier.
In Australia now, “it will be possible for the government to say that it has removed a ‘tax,’ and avoid the unpopularity of that word,” Mr. Pannell said. “The opposition is arguing that the new system will still be effectively a tax by another name. But the political effect of their arguments is diminished.”
Apocalypse No! The Law of Life and the Law of Death
.. excerpt with David Suzuki mention ..
All My Relations
It hasn’t always been like this. The world renowned paleoanthropologist, Richard Leakey, came to a stunning and beautiful conclusion about human evolution. He says that what set us on the path to human-ness was one thing: sharing - that sharing is the key to our evolution and the primary cause of the evolutionary leap that created us.
No other primate shares its food. While other primates occasionally hunt, and have even been seen to hunt cooperatively, no other primate gathers its food and shares it with others. Other primates don’t gather food and share it, they forage for it, and eat it themselves, where they find it.
No other primate has a division of labor that is predicated on sharing what the gatherers gather with the hunters and what the hunters hunt with the gatherers. Leakey suggests that in the most literal sense sharing fueled human evolution, making immense stores of energy available to our ancestors. Sharing fueled our growth in every sense.
Sharing food involves what Leakey calls reciprocal altruism; those that shared had better chances of survival; he says that our evolution “selected” for certain traits; “sympathy, gratitude, guilt and moral indignation” – empathy, in a word. Those who will not or cannot share are ostracized; their chances for survival plummet.
Leakey is unequivocal. “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation,” he writes in People of the Lake (emphasis added).
In every original, ancient human culture this sense of sharing, honor and obligation – this sense of kinship – extends beyond the self to the family, beyond the family to the band, beyond the band to the tribe, and beyond the tribe to the plants and animals, to the very stones.
Our primal sensibility is that we are related, that we belong, that we are wrapped in a matrix of living that is fundamentally secure, and that our part is to reciprocate, to ensure the balances that sustain our living matrix, our living mother.
The Lakota nation has a word for this: mitakuye oyasin: all my relations. The term so deeply expresses the indigenous sensibility of an honored and beloved network of reciprocal obligation with land and life that it has been adopted as a byword, a sacred expression, by indigenous peoples throughout the US.
But something has gone terribly wrong. Around the Earth those who hold to this original law have been systematically destroyed.
Such destruction is called genocide, but it is more than that. It is the mass murder of the keepers of the Law of Life, the Law of the Land. It is an act of profound spiritual darkness.
The destruction of those who remember the original law of our being implies, in the most obvious and literal sense, the abandonment, destruction and repudiation of the Law of Life and the destruction and repudiation of our actual, practical relationships to one another and to life itself.
The violation of this Law, and the spirals of pain that have resulted from it, have set us on a path to suicide, to omnicide. For ten thousand years, since the advent of “civilization,” we’ve been on a path to a single destination: apocalypse.
The “fathers” of civilization have, at some level, always known it: that’s why the myths of a coming apocalypse have been with us for so very long.
Entrapped in what we call “civilization,” we live by another law. Robert Oppenheimer, progenitor of the atomic bomb, understood himself, and perhaps he understood the matrix of pain and destruction that has captured us:
“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” he said.
The law we live by is more than obvious. We live by the law of death. We have replaced the Law of Land and Life with the law of death, with a law of reverse evolution we call “progress.”
The Aboriginal peoples of Australia understand the matter with utter clarity. David Suzuki and Peter Knudston describe the Aboriginal view of the radical disconnection in the Western, civilized experience of the world:
“In their cultural detachment from the true dynamics of life’s origins and the fundamental burdens and boundlessness of time, these arrogant intruders are hopelessly confused. Not knowing what to remember and what to forget, they follow dead laws, fail to recognize living ones, and in their power and denial promote death.”
The letter is reported to have read: "The Climate Commission does not have an ongoing role, and consequently I am writing to advise you that the Climate Commission has been dissolved, with effect from the date of this letter.
He thanked him for his personal contribution and then said "The Department of the Environment will soon write to you concerning administrative arrangements for finalising your engagement as Chief Climate Commissioner."
All other climate commissioners will also be sacked.
The commission's work will be taken over by the environment department, to save the budget $580,000 in this financial year and $1.6 million a year in running costs.
Mr Hunt has already moved to immediately close the Climate Commission, even though the decision will require consultation with the authority and legislation to be passed by the parliament, which is due to return in late October or early November.
A spokeswoman for the Climate Commission said the authority understood it was the government's position to abolish it through repeal legislation.
"At this time the authority has received no further information from the government," the spokeswoman told AAP.
Professor Flannery said there was a strong need for accurate information on climate change as "propaganda" aimed at misinforming the public increases.
"I believe Australians have a right to know, a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change," he told reporters in Melbourne.
He said Australia had endured the hottest 12 months on record, with last summer breaking more than 120 heat records across the country.
The commission was established in February 2011 to provide authoritative, apolitical information to the Australian public on all aspects of Climate Change at a cost of $5 million over four years.
Professor Flannery said all commissioners would continue their work in one way or another, informing the Australian public that climate change is happening.
"It's a grave threat, but a threat that can be overcome," he said.
He said a well-informed public was key to action on climate change.
"We desperately need a well-informed public, especially in areas of complex policy," Professor Flannery said.
"Without an informed public, we will go astray."
Professor Flannery did not want to comment on political matters, or whether the current government believed in climate change.
He said about six to eight per cent of the Australian population were "rusted on" climate sceptics.
Staff at the commission would be re-assigned, he said.
Labor leadership contender Anthony Albanese said the government's priorities were wrong.
"They only got sworn in yesterday but they have already begun ... rolling AusAID into DFAT, sacking senior public servants and just today the shameful act of shutting down the Climate Change Authority," he told a forum in Melbourne.
He said it was a "step back in time".
The move comes as the Coalition says it is taking steps to deliver on its promise to cut down on government waste.
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