The spot price for squirrel glider credits in New South Wales last month was $425. That was down a touch from $450 in August, when koala credits were going for $600 – they’d more than tripled since June. These are real market values, reflecting performance and trading activity in a way that’s visually similar to

Momentum is building to fundamentally improve the way we care for and use our coastal waters, ahead of the Australia Institute’s Tasmanian Ocean Summit today.

Following the national state of the environment assessment release, Tasmanians deserve to know when a report on our state will occur, writes Eloise Carr.

Tasmania’s coastal waters are globally significant, and our island way of life is deeply embedded in our psyche. But our coastal waters are under threat from a range of pressures, including fishing, aquaculture, climate change and pollution. Our east coast waters are warming four times faster than the global average. We have depleted fish stocks,

When I was on the ABC’s Q&A panel in April I said, “whoever gets in at the next election, we need to see some investment [in regional Australia] because we’re on life support out here.” For too long, rural and regional Australia has been forgotten – out of sight and out of mind for both

Headlines about public funding in an election year are generally accompanied by hi-vis vests, the promise of more jobs and occasionally a bit of Top Gun theme music thrown in for good measure. So it was unusual to see a beachside photo-op with Scott Morrison to announce a “record” $1 billion investment (over nine years)

The return of Summernats to Canberra reminds us the Prime Minister promised Australia would be going into 2022 ‘looking through the front windscreen, not the rear vision mirror’. In reality, National Cabinet seems to be doing the policy equivalent of a burnout (or a doughnut as I called them growing up), spinning its wheels furiously

Sometime this month Scott Morrison will announce a net zero by 2050 emissions-reduction target for Australia. This announcement will be made with the expectation of praise. However, much like the world was indifferent when Australia signalled it would no longer be using Kyoto credits to meet its Paris targets, so too will this announcement be

If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, was the climate really saved? Sadly, such esoteric questions have become the main game in the topsy-turvy world of Australian climate policy, where rising emissions from the oil and gas industry are ‘offset’ by not chopping down trees. The polite term for the creation of dodgy carbon

Carbon taxes are coming to Australia whether we like it or not. They are coming despite the triumphant ‘axing of the tax’ in 2014. They are coming despite the updated but equally loud ‘technology not taxes’ sloganeering from the Morrison government in 2021. They are coming despite our government’s refusal to commit to a net-zero

The more a company invests in safely handling waste the more jobs it will create, the less damage it will do to the natural environment and the less harm it will do to the tourism, agriculture and fisheries industries that are built on the image and the reality of Tasmania’s clean environment. While it is

I’m a fifth-generation farmer. My family have run properties alongside the Darling/Baaka River for almost a century. We have watched as the once mighty river system that runs through the heart of our nation has suffered due to government mismanagement and over-extraction upstream. I’ve always said the red dirt of home runs through my veins,

You can’t be a leader if you follow people down the wrong path, which is why, with a heavy heart, I am returning the alumni award for National Leadership the University of Newcastle bestowed on me in 2017. I cannot understand how the council of a university whose motto is “I look ahead” could appoint

The best way to keep premiums down is to prevent climate change and the disasters it causes No matter how much you pay for your home or car insurance, if your property is damaged by mouse plague, nuclear radiation, war or rising sea levels you are almost certainly on your own. If you’re lucky, your

The only viable long-term solution to our liquid fuel insecurity is to get off fossil fuels. Instead we are giving them taxpayer handouts When I was a kid, every year in early December we would go to the Geelong oil refinery in Corio. The refinery’s fire engine would cruise around, flash its lights and hand

Nothing captures prime minister Scott Morrison’s approach to climate change better than his embrace of “clean hydrogen” – a BS marketing term that delivers nothing but obfuscation and helps no one but the fossil fuel industry. Tellingly, this approach isn’t even new: Morrison has simply dusted off an old polluter playbook and changed a few

New mines won’t boost world demand for Australian coal — but they will cannibalise jobs from existing coalmines The New South Wales government is simultaneously committed to a net-zero emissions target for 2050 at the same time as new coalmines in the Hunter Valley with the capacity to produce 10 times more coal than Adani’s

When Malcolm Turnbull was dumped last week from New South Wales’ Net Zero Emissions and Clean Economy advisory board as quickly as he was appointed, the move shocked many people. Turnbull was dropped by his own protégé, the state’s Environment minister, Matt Kean, and by a government in NSW that had previously seemed receptive to

The one thing we can say for sure about Australia’s economic recovery is that it has not been gas-fired. This week the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that employment in Australia has recovered to better than pre-COVID levels. This noteworthy achievement is made all the more remarkable by the fact that over the course of

Yesterday, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was unceremoniously dumped as chair of the New South Wales government’s climate advisory board, just a week after being offered the role. His crime? He questioned the wisdom of building new coal mines when the existing ones are already floundering. No-one would suggest building new hotels in Cairns to help

It’s incredible what can happen in a year. This time last year Australia was heading into lockdowns and recession. The Treasurer was still sipping on his “Back in Black” mug and clinging to the idea that any stimulus spending would be small, targeted and temporary, and hundreds of thousands of Australians were still recovering from

What would happen in your industry if a judge described someone’s methodology as “inflated”, “lacking evidentiary foundation” and “plainly wrong”? If your industry would stop using that methodology, then you probably are not an economist and you don’t work for coal companies. Exactly this happened in 2019 and, with no change and no reflection, the

The federal government has made much of its “face off” with Big Tech in the showdown over digital media, but do Australian governments have the courage to take on the coal lobby, in the big energy showdown of our era? In 2019, Australian governments charged the Energy Security Board (ESB) with the daunting task of

Just as people in the Middle Ages mistakenly believed the sun revolved around the Earth, many modern-day Australians mistakenly believe our economy revolves around the coal industry. Of course, such misunderstandings aren’t an indictment of those who have been misled, but those who did the misleading. Galileo was imprisoned for life for the “heresy” of

by Richie Merzian & Mark Ogge[Originally published in the Newcastle Herald, 18 November 2020] A gas-fired recovery from the economic damage caused by Covid-19 will not help the Hunter region.  In fact, a gas-fired recovery will struggle to employ anyone, except the gas executives that proposed the idea. The bottom line is, creating jobs in

by Ebony Bennett[Originally Published in the Canberra Times, 14 November 2020] Australia is experiencing climate change now and warming is set to continue, according to the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO’s 2020 State of the Climate report released yesterday. This news won’t come as a galloping shock to most Australians – we can see the evidence of global warming

by Richard Denniss[Originally published on the Guardian Australia, 12 November 2020] While it might seem heretical to suggest we stop exporting gas, it’s important to remember that we only started exporting gas from Australia’s east coast in 2015. But since that fateful day, the wholesale price of gas has risen from around $3 to $4 per

by Ebony Bennett[Originally Published in The Canberra Times, 19 September 2020] Gas didn’t even make AEMO’s top five list of potential sources of dispatchable power – but the Coalition is looking to divert taxpayer funds earmarked for clean energy into LNG projects. Picture: Shutterstock  Just months after Australia endured its worst climate-fuelled bushfire season on

by Richard Denniss[Originally published by the Guardian Australia, 03 September 2020] Rather than drill new fracking wells into prime farmland, the quickest, cleanest and most economically efficient way to boost the supply of gas in Australia is to stop wasting it. According to the Australian Industry (AI) Group’s budget submission, “Ramping up support for manufacturers to

by Ebony Bennett[Originally published by the Canberra Times, 22 August 2020] The same geniuses who hiked up domestic gas prices, raked in the profits and left Australia with bupkis to show for it are trying to convince us (once again) that Australia has a gas supply shortage requiring huge taxpayer subsidies. So, let me explain