The new Australian Cabinet will be the first in six years to not have a ministerial role for climate change issues, merging instead global warming with the wider environment portfolio. Announcing his Cabinet on Monday, incoming Prime Minister Tony Abbott appointed Greg Hunt, the Liberal-National Coalition’s spokesman on climate change issues since 2009, as the new Minister for the Environment. “The change signals that as expected, the Abbott government will not give climate change the same weight as the previous government,” said Frank Jotzo, deputy director of Australia National University’s Climate Change Institute. --
Reuters Point Carbon, 16 September 2013
International leaders are failing in their fight against global warming, one of the United Nations’ top climate officials said Tuesday, appealing directly to the world’s voters to pressure their politicians into taking tougher action against the buildup of greenhouse gases. The lack of progress in recent years has fueled doubts over whether a binding deal is possible at all. Halldor Thorgeirsson, a senior director with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, seemed to strike a pessimistic note Tuesday, talking down the idea that Paris — or any other conference — would produce a grand bargain that would ensure the reductions needed to prevent a dangerous warming of the Earth’s atmosphere. --Raphael Satter,
Associated Press, 18 September 2013
Politicians who dismiss the need for urgent action on climate change are like the South African leaders who contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths by claiming that HIV did not cause Aids, a scientist has claimed. Professor Nilay Shah, of Imperial College London, said that politicians such as Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister of Australia who has raised doubts about the science behind climate change, would be judged as harshly by future generations as those who questioned the medical evidence on Aids. He made the remarks when launching a report saying that the world needed to spend $2 trillion a year by 2050, or one per cent of GDP, to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels. --Ben Webster,
The Times, 18 September 2013
Dr Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which argues that the threat from climate change has been overstated, dismissed the Imperial College study. He said: “Most experts agree that the benefits of moderate warming of up to 2C this century would outweigh the damage. In the meantime, there has been no rise in global temperatures since 1997 and nobody knows if and when it will recommence. “It is premature to gamble trillions on a speculative alarm that may turn out to be the biggest mis-investment in modern history.” --Ben Webster,
The Times, 18 September 2013
Connie Hedegaard doesn’t need science to tell her that Europe’s green policy is on the right track. She’s the EU’s Climate Commissioner, and she has discarded science, the oft-donned mantle of green policymakers around the world. In an interview with the Telegraph, she said, ”Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?” We’ve long known that greens make stupid policy decisions, but we can’t recall seeing the twisted logic behind them being displayed so starkly. Hedegaard might not see price as a relevant factor in choosing energy sources, but you can bet that Europe’s households and industry do. --Walter Russell Mead,
Via Meadia, 17 September 2013
Given how deeply the IPCC is invested in the issue — it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007 — there’s little doubt the report will give environmental activists at least something to work with. They will repeat previous calls for action against warming on a global scale. There will still be dire warnings. But the political debate will change. There’s no way Congress will consider upending the American economy with far-reaching tax or regulatory schemes on the basis of flawed computer projections about a phenomenon that may or may not require any action at all. The activists can produce as many ads as they want. They can call opponents “deniers” all they like. It just won’t work. --Byron York,
The Washington Examiner, 17 September 2013
Shale oilfields in countries such as Argentina, Russia and Algeria hold larger reserves than the regions at the heart of the US energy boom, and have the potential to make a significant contribution to global crude supplies in the next decade, according to new research. The 23 most promising tight oilfields outside the US and Canada could hold 175bn barrels of extractable oil, IHS estimates, compared with about 40bn barrels in similar fields in North America. --Ed Crooks, Financial Times, 18 September 2013
As the production of unconventional oil and gas in the United States rises — and as the United States increasingly exports that energy — the world’s economic map will be forever changed. The power of today’s petro states, such as Iran and Russia, will continue to wane. More and more, the United States will be the stable, competitive source of choice for gasoline, diesel, natural gas liquids, and, soon, liquefied natural gas (LNG). -- Amy Myers Jaffe and Edward L. Morse,
Foreign Affairs, 16 September 2013
A new study (“Beware of climate change skeptic films”) claims that sceptical films have a more powerful influence on viewers’ attitudes than climate change advocacy films. When it comes to a lack of belief in the human causes of global warming, Greitemeyer said, his results suggest “the media are part of the problem, but may not easily be used to be part of the solution.” --Christian
Jarrett, British Psychological Society Research Digest, 18 September 2013
