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The Australian Government Has Given Up on Climate Change

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott gutted the clean energy budget so intensely one major climate scientist claimed “It will take us a decade to recover.”
Image: Tim J Keegan/Flickr

This is not a good time to care about climate change in the land down under.

As news broke that a collapsed Antarctic ice sheet now all but guarantees 10 feet of global ocean rise, Australia’s ultra-conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott released a budget so scathing in its attack on clean energy that one major scientist claimed “It will take us a decade to recover.” Abbott could care less what people think. “My job is not necessarily to win a popularity contest,” he told the Brisbane Times on Monday.

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Australia was once considered to be among the world’s more progressive countries on global warming. But those days are long gone. Abbott’s new budget abolishes the government’s leading supporter of clean technology, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, and cuts overall funding for climate research and clean energy from $5.75 billion to $500 million over the next four years. “Australia's climate change action,” concluded the Sydney Morning Herald, “has effectively ground to a halt.”

Scientists, green activists, clean energy businesses, and most anyone else terrified by a warming climate have dreaded this day since Abbott’s election last fall. Infamous for describing climate change as “absolute crap,” Abbott spent his first days in office shuttering the Climate Commission, a respected research group. “This might give one the impression that Abbott is looking for any program or office that contains reference to ‘climate’ and shutting it down,” Motherboard's Brian Merchant reported.

Abbott’s newly gutted budget suggests that impression correct. Australia’s “Million Solar Roofs” initiative will shrink from $1 billion to $2.1 million. Its Carbon Capture and Storage program lost three-quarters of its funding. Almost $112 million was cut from the country’s leading scientific agency, $10 million from the Bureau of Meteorology, and $16.8 million from the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative. “There’s a hope that the [climate change] problem will go away, that someone else in the world will actually fix it,” former government scientist Graeme Pearman told the Herald.

More than that, the budget also reflects an ideological distrust of clean energy. “I absolutely understand why people are anxious about these things that are sprouting like mushrooms,” Abbott has said, referring of wind turbines. “Utterly offensive,” is how Joe Hockey, Australia’s treasurer, described them. Yet to Greens party leader Christine Milne, the most offensive thing about the budget is how it elevates right-wing dogma above climate science. “[It’s] selling-out future generations,” she told Sydney media.

Deemed Australia’s “toughest budget in almost two decades” by the Wall Street Journal, the plan also contains $80 million in funding cuts for schools and hospitals. Not too surprising that more than half of Australians think it’ll make their country worse off, or that Abbott’s approval ratings have dropped 21 percent since the budget’s release.

“In the end we weren't elected to take easy decisions,” the prime minister shrugged in response. No leaders ever are. But as climate change makes our world warmer, wetter and more dangerous, neither should they be making such reckless ones.