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hatrack

(59,446 posts)
Wed Jun 18, 2014, 08:44 AM Jun 2014

Harper & Abbott - Bush Ten Years On, But In Duplicate

EDIT

Abbott’s only real concern is protecting Australia’s world-topping coal industry, whose expansion plans would make it utterly impossible to bring climate change under control. You would think Abbott might have noticed this – his continent is located closer than almost anyone else’s to the Antarctic, where scientists last month offered definitive proof that melting glaciers have committed the planet to an extra three metres of sea level rise. But instead Abbott’s travelling the world to try to stop international efforts to combat global warming. In Texas, he told his audience we must prevent the "ostracizing of any particular fuel", as if he were the global ambassador of coal, determined to prevent his favourite hydrocarbon from having to take a back seat to what his Treasurer recently referred to as "utterly offensive" wind turbines.

Stephen Harper, Abbott’s Canadian counterpart, is just as dangerously single-minded. Harper’s particular joy is not coal but tar-sands oil, perhaps the only fuel source that’s just as foul. A former oil company executive, he’s turned the country’s diplomatic corps into salesmen of the dirtiest petroleum on earth, and in general treated the rest of his great nation as if it were a grubby convenience store tacked on to his Alberta gas station. It’s gotten so bad that hundreds of scientists in white lab coats marched on Ottawa recently to protest his attacks on environmental regulations and scientific monitoring.

Because Canada and Australia have mostly benign and productive histories on the international scene, it will take a while for most world citizens to catch up with their new status. But those who are paying attention know already. Last year, for instance, the staid and venerable journal Foreign Policy began its cover story on Canada noting that it was now a "reckless, rogue petrostate". Those radicals at The Economist called Harper a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent". Australia and it’s obsessive effort to keep King Coal alive despite its key contribution to climate change is getting similar international attention with the likes of Deutsche Bank and HSBC announcing they would not invest in projects that would bring coal through the Great Barrier Reef as planned.

All of this matters mightily. These men are decades behind the science – Abbott plans to combat climate change by planting trees, which would work better if his country was not by now battling constant drought and record heat – and they’re trying to blow up international negotiations in Paris next year. Canada has already renounced its treaty commitments and Abbott promises no new commitments. That could be enough to derail any agreement. Both Canada’s tar sands and Australia’s coal would then fill the atmosphere with enough carbon that it wouldn’t matter what their successors did. This new Axis of Carbon is a great threat to all of us.

EDIT

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/tony-abbotts-climate-change-policy-makes-me-cringe-20140617-zsa7t.html

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