<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/trump-lite-coalition-promises-purge-of-experts-who-call-out-nuclear-bunkum/>
"The federal Coalition has given another insight into what life might be like
under a Peter Dutton-led government, with the promise of a purge of experts who
disagree with its policies, in a potentially horrifying redux of the mass
sackings occurring right now in the United States.
The Dutton-led Coalition did not respond well on Monday to the Climate Change
Authority’s conclusion that the Coalition’s nuclear power policy would result
in a blow out of emissions, both in the short and long term, and make
Australia’s Paris climate commitments impossible to meet.
There should have been nothing controversial about this analysis because the
CCA was simply crunching the numbers on the impact of the Coalition’s own
stated intentions – to keep burning coal, and more gas, for as long as it takes
to build new nuclear. It even used the Coalition’s improbable and fanciful
timelines.
Almost immediately, Coalition finance spokesperson Jane Hume indicated that a
Coalition government would sack CCA chair Matt Kean – a former Liberal energy
minister and treasurer in the NSW state government – and would seek to scrap
the CCA itself, having eviscerated and ignored it when last in government.
“I cannot imagine that we possibly maintain a Climate Change Authority that has
been so poorly, so badly politicised. It simply isn’t serving its purpose to
provide independent advice to government on its climate change policy,” Hume
told the
ABC on Monday afternoon.,
Opposition energy spokesperson Ted O’Brien, the architect of the Coalition’s
nuclear power policy, then described Kean and the CCA as “puppets” of the Labor
government.
“The Climate Change Authority has become a puppet of Anthony Albanese and
[Climate Change and Energy Minister] Chris Bowen, as its latest report parrots
Labor’s untruthful anti-nuclear scare campaign,” O’Brien said in a statement
reported by the
AFR.
“I feel sorry for many decent public servants who work in the Climate Change
Authority who have been thrust on the front line on the eve of an election
taking a hyper-partisan position in favour of a government whose own record is
to drive emissions higher.”
The Coalition’s attack on the CCA is not surprising, given it ignored its
advice while in government for nearly a decade, and because it has attacked
other key institutions, including the economists at CSIRO, and the engineers at
the Australian Energy Market Operator, because they don’t like that they
disagree on nuclear power.
The CSIRO points out that nuclear is very expensive and small modular reactors
do not yet exist, and AEMO has pointed out that the future grid needs to be
based on flexible and dispatchable generation, and is moving away from “alway
on” baseload that requires its own massive back-up in case of trips and other
failures.
The Coalition, now given a reasonable chance of returning to power according to
the latest polls, is learning from Trump, which is to say that if a position is
indefensible, then you attack the messenger, insult experts, tear down their
institutions and flood the zone with misinformation and disinformation."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
