Emissions rising in Australia, data shows   


New Daily
Jun 27 2022

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in the past year, according to new data.   

A quarterly update of the national greenhouse gas inventory says there was an 0.8 per cent increase in emissions in 2021, equal to 4.1 million tonnes more than the same period in 2020.

Increased emissions were partly a result of the transport sector rebounding from COVID-19 restrictions and agriculture recovering from drought, the report says.

But an absence of climate policy during the former coalition government’s nine years in power also contributed, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said.   

He accused the coalition of relying on COVID and drought to “bank” emissions reductions.

“Their failure … undermines the great strides in emissions reduction made through household solar, the Renewable Energy Target and state-based renewable schemes in the electricity sector over recent years,” he said.

“Good climate and energy policy is good economic policy. It doesn’t rely on recession and drought for short-term and temporary emissions reduction.”

In the previous quarter to December 2021, national emission levels increased by 0.1 per cent.

But those increases were partially offset by decreases across sectors such as electricity, transport and land use, land use change and forestry, the report found.

Greenhouse gas emissions were 21.4 per cent below June 2005 levels, which was the baseline year for the 2030 Paris Agreement target, Mr Bowen said.

“The Albanese government has committed to a more ambitious 2030 target, to reduce emissions to 43 per cent below 2005 levels and finally put Australia on track to achieve net zero emissions by 2050,” he said.

whiteknight wrote on Jun 28^th, 2022 at 2:20pm:


What a load of yeah-but nonsense. "increased by 0.1 per cent but those increases were partially offset "     As if you can accurately establish the stats on 0.1% and fractions of 0.1%.  Silly nonsense, lapped up by goopy dopes.

The entire world's emissions rose and will continue to rise even as energy prices rise even more. Net zero by [your irrational deadline here] is as stupid as "climate emergency", "climate action", "carbon pollution" and the rest of the Green shibboleths.

But it isn’t difficult to spot in environmentalists’ work something more than mere concern with a practical problem. Their writings often show themselves akin to the calls to repentance of seventeenth-century divines in the face of plague epidemics, but with the patina of rationality that every ideology needs to disguise its true source in existential angst.

For example, a recent column in the Guardian, by the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, carried the headline THE PLANET IS NOW SO VANDALISED THAT ONLY TOTAL ENERGY RENEWAL CAN SAVE US. Monbiot, it is true, does not offer us heaven on earth if we follow his prescriptions; only the bare—and by no means certain, for “we might have left it too late”—avoidance of total biological annihilation. But behind Monbiot’s urgency, even hysteria, one senses a deep lust for power. He cannot really believe what he says, for starters. “Do we want to be remembered,” he asks rhetorically, “as the generation that saved the banks but let the biosphere collapse?” If it is really true that we must either have “total energy renewal” or die, however, we cannot be remembered as the generation that let the biosphere collapse, for if we let it collapse, ex hypothesi no one will be around to remember us. This reminds me of patients I used to see who would threaten suicide, in the clear expectation of a long life ahead, unless someone did what they wanted. And though Monbiot says that it is uncertain that anything we do now will make any difference, he nevertheless proposes that every human being on the earth follow his prescriptions.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/persistence-ideology-13158.html