Tuesday 11 November 2014

Australia's PM Abbott + Canada's Harper + Trudeau=Triplets

Australia has a lot in common with Canada.  

As is the case with Canada, Australia went into full speed reverse on the green economy with the arrival of its current government, the Australian Liberal coalition government. 

First, Prime Minister Abbott abolished the cap and trade system making it the only government in the world to have set one up and then dismantle it.  Not all that unusual if one compares the Australian cap and trade withdrawal with Canada being the only signatory of the Kyoto Protocol to withdraw from the Protocol.

Then, in May 2014, Prime Minister Abbott abolished the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and transferred  $A1.3B earmarked for clean energy projects to general government coffers with a large percentage of the amount concerned going to road construction. -- sort of like the Canada Action Plan.

Now the Australian Climate Council is saying that the results of the above-mentioned measures are such that investments in clean energy are down 70% in 2014 compared to 2013.

Alas, it seems that PM Abbott, like Harper and Trudeau, has a resource economy obsession.  In Abbott's case, the obsession is about coal exports that would be facilitated by the dredging of The Great Barrier Reef to make way for a humongous coal port to export Aussie coal to China.  

But hey global banks are withdrawing their support for the fittingly named Abbot coal port.

But hey, China has declared war on coal and has become the world leader in clean energy and clean transportation technologies, backed by ambitious current and upcoming green economy initiatives.

But hey, here in Canada, like in Australia, we're also counting on the world's largest energy consumer, China, to not change the global traditional resource-economy paradigm by going green instead.  We are counting on the status quo forever, because we want to sell them on our tar sands.

But hey, here in Canada, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has said he opposes the cap and trade concept because, as Trudeau put it, cap and trade did not work in Australia

But hey, Trudeau has also said opposition to Energy East and Keystone XL is not based on science.

But hey, like the former Chrétien Liberal government, PM Abbott has come up with this great idea to award his country carbon credits based on carbon sinks, or Australia's trees that absorb carbon -- the something for nothing formula promoted by Canada's former Liberal Minister of the Environment, Stéphane Dion.  under the Chrétien government.

Yep, there are a lot of similarities between Australia and Canada.  This whimsical portrait of Australian conservatism could easily be used to describe Canada's conservatives.


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