OKAY everyone, look here. It is time for a mega-thread of just the nastiest, shittiest, most planetarily destructive things that the Australian government has done over the past 3 yrs.
There will be swears. Tears. Charts. Articles. And I'll add to it as we get closer to May 21
Sections I'll be covering
- Greenwashing and tricks
- Fossil expansionism
- Delay, obstruction and denial of transition
- Other / just, the batshit wildest most bonkers things that we've somehow lived through
GREENWASHING
The gov’t falsely declares their projections show 2030 emissions will be 35% below 2005 levels. How they did it: just deadass changed the assumption in the spreadsheet to get a higher number. No shame
This one still just drives me up the wall. At the Biden climate summit in April 2021, Morrison + Taylor flat-out invented a new accounting method to inflate emissions reductions.
The gov’t constantly lies about “beating” other countries on climate. They do this by wrongly padding out emissions with land use. It’s wrong: carbon from underground can’t be stored on the surface + the data is shoddy.
To illustrate this another way - check out the comparison between Australia and Canada, depending on whether you include 'land use' data (again: you shouldn't - you can't cram carbon from underground into trees and soils)
They keep claiming a 20% drop in emissions. Mostly achieved by wrongly including land carbon, the rest = claiming credit for drought, disease and renewable schemes Labor implemented.
That's it for today! Let me know if I missed any key greenwashing themes. We're not even a quarter of the way through, lol 😅😅😅😅😅😅😅
Before I kick off today's section, a GREENWASHING I forgot (thx @CA_Latest). The gov over-focuses on solar capacity per capita because (a) Aus already has high energy / capita and (b) obscures continued fossil reliance
The government is overseeing a huge expansion of fossil fuel mining projects, which will blast the world past climate targets if the fuel they extract is burned (~200 coal plants worth)
Every single quarter since 2005 has seen a rise in Australia's emissions, except mid-2020 to mid-2021, due to the pandemic. Excluding that, rising coal/gas mining and worsening transport emissions have cancelled out growing renewables.
FOSSIL EXPANSION
Those fossil mining projects - wrecking domestic emissions accounts - are also being exported and are burned. 2019 - 2021 = ~3,500 MTCO2. Comfortably more than double domestic emissions.
Aus punches above its weight when it comes to causing climate disasters.
FOSSIL EXPANSION
Ties in w/ greenwashing: hydrogen made from fossil fuels = a new demand source. But Aus' gov't just **has** to do the filthiest, nastiest version of it. My thread below + @CA_Latest -> [climateanalytics.org/media/australi…]
CCS, before we get onto the next few, just needs to be reiterated as a catastrophic and total failure in essentially every regard, *except* as a tool for justifying worsening climate change, for which it has done exceptionally well.
FOSSIL EXPANSION
One of the sneakiest, nastiest little fossil fuel expansion schemes is the generation of carbon credits by CCS. Dreamt up by Santos and written into legislation by the company's gov't representatives
This one is a bit more slapstick: Angus Taylor has been trying to get the gov renewables agency to fund CCS, except it's been implemented and reversed many, many times now.
Sometimes, their own ineptness is a brake on their harmfulness
And then, after using a deadly pandemic to justify worsening climate change, the government has been using a deadly war to justify worsening climate change.
That's it for fossil expansionism today. Tomorrow, actively delaying the transition and stymying progress. Please let me know if I've missed anything out so far! 💕🙏🏽
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Just judging by the absence of any debris on the ground or falling down, I'm pretty sure this turbine stood its ground from a direct hit from a tornado
Shell did an 'update' on the progress of their energy transition plan a few weeks ago. They've literally just erased their renewable energy goal (50 million households (???) worth by 2030). Just isn't mentioned anywhere. Like it never happened.
Shell already do this extremely weird thing where they simply do not disclose how much renewable energy they generated + sold. Anywhere. But now they're just cooly jettisoning their climate "milestones" and hoping no one notices 😎😎😎😎
Their 'energy transition' update says 0.4 mt of CO2 captured and stored, but their 'greenhouse data' says 1.05 (0.7 if you exclude the CO2 they passed on to other people to do whatever with).
Regardless: their 2021 emissions were 1,361 so.......yeah
First - a disclaimer! David Griffin, the chief exec of SunCable, is a former boss of mine, and a bunch of people who work at 5B, which would supply the panel deployment tech, are friends.
So, @jrmygrdn got the photo from the ABC article above, which is about the environmental impact statement lodged by the proponent. I don't think *anyone* (including the journalist, of course), has actually linked to the thing. So here it is.