keywords: Renewable Energy
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ENVIRONMENT
- Cristy Clark
- 27 September 2018
8 Comments
In light of the evidence, a national energy policy prioritising renewables should be uncontroversial. But is seems ideology is impermeable to evidence. Instead, we have the government continuing to try to pressure AGL into keeping the Liddell coal-fired power plant open despite clear-cut economic and environmental reasons for its closure.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Greg Foyster
- 13 April 2018
16 Comments
Every time the self-appointed Ambassador for the Little Black Rock fronts up to the cameras he reinforces the message that coal power is the technology of a bygone era. The Coalition old guard's thinking hasn't changed since Abbott's 'carbon tax' sloganeering of 2012 and 2013. But the landscape has changed considerably.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Greg Foyster
- 19 January 2018
1 Comment
The digital currency Bitcoin consumes more electricity per year than New Zealand. Yes, the entire country. Escalating energy intensity is actually a security feature of the currency. With the related carbon dioxide emissions from this escalating electricity consumption, Bitcoin is a formula for climate change catastrophe.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Greg Foyster
- 08 December 2017
4 Comments
Summer is here, and so is the political spin about blackouts. This year, with a record November heatwave in Victoria and a press gallery hypersensitised to energy politics, the blame game started early - well before anything has actually gone wrong.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Greg Foyster
- 17 August 2017
9 Comments
In the last few years, vested interests have changed their strategy for opposing action on climate change. Where they once focused on denying the problem, they’re now putting their efforts into sabotaging the solutions. Instead of funding fake experts to say the ‘science isn’t settled’, fossil fuel companies and their political backers have been running a smear campaign against renewable energy technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Ketan Joshi
- 06 April 2017
1 Comment
A 2015 cartoon by Bill Leak depicts an Indian family squatting, smashing solar panels to pieces. A woman chews on a shattered piece of glass, and a man attempts to smear mango chutney onto glistening shards. The initial reaction centred around the racist depictions of Indians. But it also represents a broader and worrisome attitude towards global energy politics, that assumes idiocy in developing countries, combined with a push to burden them with the dangerous wares of a dying industry.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Jarni Blakkarly
- 09 November 2016
4 Comments
The death-knell was sounding for Hazelwood long before the announced closure last week. The 50 year old power plant is one of the country's oldest and most inefficient, making it extremely vulnerable to the lower electricity price and supply surplus. As the most polluting power plant per unit of energy produced in the industrialised world, many will be glad to see the power station go. But its closure also flags a rising dilemma, over who bears the cost of the transition to clean energy.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Thea Ormerod
- 09 September 2016
10 Comments
With the grip of climate change tightening, few seem to understand the urgency of the crisis. This is why the announcement of over 3500 churches in the UK switching to clean power is so significant. At last, a solution presented by religious communities that matches the scale of the problem. They are providing the kind of leadership for the needed transition to an ecologically sustainable future. Unfortunately, one reason why it is so exciting is that we're nowhere near this in Australia.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Tim Hutton
- 08 November 2019
6 Comments
Miners are not the enemy. In fact, those who once worked in mining are key to implementing change. After all, renewable energy isn't going to build and maintain itself. Our coal-fired power stations are starting to reach the end of their life cycle, and many countries are rapidly divesting from coal. We owe it to our nation’s workers to plan for the future.
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MEDIA
- Greg Foyster
- 18 September 2019
3 Comments
The visual language of climate change has become predictable and stunted. In the 1980s activists used an image of a polar bear adrift on a floe of ice to tell the story of global warming and rising sea levels. It's become visual shorthand for the topic — useful for quick categorisation, but stale and easily dismissed.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Tim Hutton
- 17 September 2019
14 Comments
The problem with the discussion about nuclear energy is that it is a distraction; an ideologically driven misdirection by those who are more concerned with opposing renewables and the 'green-left' than solving our country's energy problems. Nuclear just doesn't make sense for Australia at this stage of the game.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Vivienne Cowburn
- 16 September 2019
7 Comments
From overly sheltered baby boomers to millennials too fatigued with the state of the world to care, the reality of climate change can be a lot to handle. Here's a snapshot of the people living with their heads in the sand, employing tactics including pessimism, cognitive dissonance and deflections to stay where they are.
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