"Carbon Party" undermines Gillard on carbon price

John Brumby made a good case for carbon pricing and low-emissions economic opportunities in his Saturday opinion piece in The Age. In it he makes an admission that State and Federal Labor need to act on, not just acknowledge. Standing in the way is the "Carbon Party". Here's my letter, published today (scroll to "Green initiatives are totally cancelled out").

It's good to hear former Victorian Premier John Brumby acknowledge that "Australia won't always be able to rely on what we dig out of the ground". That's true not because of the exhaustion of our large fossil fuel reserves, but because under the inevitable global pricing of carbon, the market for fossil fuels will disappear, and products we produce from emissions-intensive energy sources will become very expensive, and therefore uncompetitive.

Given the greed of large corporations and the short-sightedness of our less reflective investors and shareholders, it is understandable they will seek to capitalise on fossil fuels to the maximum possible extent before this happens. Understandable, but not acceptable.

As they rush to squeeze value out of their dinosaur powerplants and fossil fuel reserves, they push Australia and the world towards or even across the boundary of dangerous climate change. Their misleading campaigns foretelling economic ruin and energy insecurity place dollars above disaster.

While John Brumby argues well for the economic benefits of low-emissions investment and development, the timeframe in which too many Labor governments see the transition would allow the exploitation of fossil fuels and their climate impacts to substantially play out. We are, in fact, expanding our search for oil, coal and gas, and we operate in a deluded two-climate economy - one where we invest in green initiatives, and one where we cancel these out through the headlong pursuit of fossil fuels.

It is this duality within Labor at state and federal levels that is undermining the argument for carbon pricing. With federal Labor MPs like Martin Ferguson, it is almost as if there's an implicit Carbon Party at work in Australia, drawing its members in lesser or greater numbers from Labor and the Coalition respectively. If we're not to lose the race - the human race - that has to stop.

Comments welcome

Ferguson's desperate evasion on climate

Back in early September, I wrote a letter to The Melbourne Times in protest at Martin Ferguson's recent opening of an environmental refurbishment at HP Zwar Park in Preston, part of his Batman electorate. Well, Ferguson has struck back with some quite misleading claims in letters to the paper and to Preston locals.

His letter in this week's edition of The Melbourne Times infers that the protest at the park called for zero net emissions for Australia by 2020. Instead, the climate advocates attending were simply supporting the 2020 zero net emissions community target recently adopted by a newly progressive Darebin Council.

True, zero net emissions is a worthwhile aim for Australia, but that will require a significant transition and many Darebins to achieve. What is certain is that achieving a safe climate will require far deeper emissions cuts by 2020 than are currently proposed by the government Ferguson serves as pro-fossil-fuel energy and resources minister. His appeal to science in framing a climate solution is laughable given that his proposed solution fails so miserably on every scientific measure.

Along with dirty coal and climate inaction, it was the contradiction between Ferguson's government role and the environmental values of the park that we were protesting - not the refurbishment itself, which was universally supported by everyone present on the day.

Yet in a letter to local residents, Ferguson claims I dismissed the park refurbishment, simply because for him it could only have been an empty, feel-good PR opportunity.

The letter also makes the false claim that I am a 'Greens activist', when I am not and never have been a member of the Greens party. I have, in fact, a strong record of running as an independent in Council and State elections. Still, far better the Greens than Ferguson's brand of climate vandalism.

So what is the upshot of Ferguson's cheap campaign? The answer is that it's nothing more than a desperate climate evasion by a federal MP sitting in a seat whose constituents are keenly aware of the threat of human-induced climate change. That's an awkward position to be in when the CEO of a resources company has you down as a prominent climate sceptic and you've been included in Clive Hamilton's Greenhouse Mafia 'dirty dozen'.

Comments welcome.