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June 27, 2008
It didn't take long for the nuclear power lobby to restart up their campaign to sell nuclear as the green solution to greenhouse gas emissions. This time round their voice is Paul Kelly in The Australian, who says that the pro-green Bob Carr and Paul Howes, from the Australian Workers Union, are far more strident about the need for nuclear power than Howard was before last year’s election. Kelly is articulating the view of the NSW Labor Right. He adds:
While few people champion the nuclear option, this obscures the real point - mounting alarm from the unions, business and politicians about the design and consequences of an emissions trading scheme.The corridors of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue were infected this week with multiple sources of this alarm. The unease is profound. It is as though Australia is sleepwalking into the biggest restructuring of its economy for a generation, with a popular culture that thinks climate change solutions are about light bulbs and carbon-free concerts. The community is utterly unprepared for the harsh application of climate change mitigation - if the Rudd Government has the will to impose it.
Sleepwalking? Utterly unprepared? Thinks climate change solutions are about light bulbs and carbon-free concerts. Why then are people putting solar power on their roof, buying smaller more fuel efficient cars, catching public transport, and making their homes more energy efficient? The Australian public voted in a political party that stood for doing something about climate change as opposed to one that refused because it had been captured by Big Energy.
Surely Kelly has things around the wrong way. It's the people who make up the Australian American Leadership Dialogue -- who are unprepared. These--particularly the corporate conservatives amongst the foreign policy/national security mob--are the ones who have traditionally resisted climate change. They are the ones whose fears are contradictory and confusing.
We don't know the internal conversations in the various sessions of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue because they are not leaked. Presumably Kelly is not spilling the beans either. So he is the voice of the campaign against emissions tradiing given his talk about Australian industry and jobs being the losers, that any Australian action will be environmentally insignificant as China’s economy advances undeterred, and that nuclear power must be assessed as a commercial option and not banned.
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I heard a unionist from the AWU on Radio National Breakfast the other morning saying that geo-sequestration would save all the jobs in the La Trobe Valley. Nuclear was not even mentioned. Neither were renewables.
The unionist in question was Paul Howes, National secretary of the Australian Workers Union. He gave the impression that he was in the US as part of his campaign to protect the jobs of resource industry and manufacturing workers in Australia.