News Brief by Kip Hansen
Australian climate scientists are whinging about the newly announced Federal budget for 2019. Who can blame them?
The total to be spent on climate-related research has been reduced to the abysmally low sum of AU$1.6 billion for the next fiscal year which begins 1 July 2018. [Yes, that is billion with a B].
While 1.6 billion Australian dollars (just over 1.2 billion US dollars @ today’s exchange rates) may seem like a lot of research money for a country that doesn’t have the necessity of maintaining fleets of satellites or ocean-going research buoys, but it is a very sharp reduction from the AU$3 billion they were allotted for the current year.
All this according to a report from Science News , which quotes Martin Rice, an environmental scientist and head of research for the Sydney-based Climate Council of Australia as saying;
“Once again, [the budget] failed to address climate change.” The article continues: “The council projects that spending related to climate change is dropping from AU$3 billion this year to AU$1.6 billion next year. Rice notes that the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases have risen for three consecutive years. And the planned phaseout of a renewable energy target and other measures ‘could bring Australia’s renewables boom grinding to a halt,’ he says.”
While this news is shocking — some might ask………What’s not to like?
# # # # #
Corrigendum: 31 May 2018 — For the permanent record, many commenters have pointed out that I might have better said, in the first paragraph “spending related to climate change is dropping from….” (which is a direct quote from the Science News article) and not “total to be spent on climate-related research“, which is not correct. – kh
Australian slang is so evocative== “whinging”? Whining and cringing?
normal use is to kids
stop the whingeing..you know the whiney voice spoilt brat… the I wanna icecream/go to freds to play/watch tv etc etc i wanna i wanna often accompanied by kicking the door the cat or the nearest other kid who starts up as well
the ABC and this mob are both in full whinge mode
and
I AM LOVING IT!!! 😉
pity theyve still been given FAR TOO MUCH taxdollars
actually it is whingeing (a soft g)
“Australian slang …”
It actually isn’t. From Kip’s link
“Origin and Etymology of whinge
Middle English *whingen, from Old English hwinsian; akin to Old High German winsōn to moan”
WHINGEING ==> I picked this up while in the Merchant Marine back in the 70s…more than half the crew were from the greater British Empire — Brits, Scots, Welsh, Aussies and Kiwis. The usage was “Quit the whingeing!” (meaning childlike whiny complaining).
Well, the main persons I have seen use the term were Australian. American English also uses some terms that fell out of use in the UK and other English speaking areas.
Usually followed by the word pom or pommie bastard 😉
Y’Know, if a country is to have money to spend on climate research and subsidies for renewable energy sources then in today’s world with today’s technological limitations that country will have to power it’s useful economy with energy sources that emit CO2, thus spending more money on research requires that more CO2 (and other IR reactive gases) be produced in the process. Wotta hoot. .
The proper use of “whingeing” is to keep Brits in line:
Brit: “Cor, it’s bloomin’ hot ‘ere in Oz.”
Oz: “Go back to Britain, yer whingeing Pom.”
Seems to be still too much if the science is “settled”
My thought too. If the Science is Settled, then no further expenditures are necessary for studying it
Didn’t France also offer CliSci employment to Aussi’s? Or just Americans?
Anybody know how that French CliSci offer is panning out? Has anybody accepted the French offer?
Another way to look at it is that CO2 emissions have been rising in Australia Despite the Billions spent on ‘Climate Research’.
Seems clear that the ‘Research’ is having absolutely No Effect on emission levels so its pointless to keep spending on it.
Bit like employing a security firm to stop shoplifting losses from your store only to find that the thefts and losses keep increasing and the security company ask for more money to continue their ‘success’.
Maybe the security company is cooking the books so more security seems necessary.
Jus’ sayin’.
Could it be because of rather than despite?
The money referred to was not being spent on science, but was subsidising renewable energy.
Shows its been a complete waste of money then – emissions are rising – but as wind turbines DON’T reduce co2 emissions, and switching from hydrocarbon fuel to electricity for vehicles actually Increases co2 emissions there’s no real surprise there. Its just bucketfuls of money taken from the poorest to feed the green blob and the climate-industrial money grabbers.
And BTW it risible to describe money spent on climate change ‘science’ as money spent on science – it has more in common with Tarot Cards and Voodoo than ‘science’.
So, money wasted to create fake “green” jobs.
even better then
“subsidizing renwable energy” …… it makes more sense given that some months/ a year(?) ago we learned here that Australian climate scientists had completed their work and many were to be no longer needed. What ever happened with that?
Then the money expenditure was an even bigger waste of resources.
“And the planned phaseout of a renewable energy target and other measures ‘could bring Australia’s renewables boom grinding to a halt,’ he says.””
“The money referred to was not being spent on science, but was subsidising renewable energy.”
That is a crock.
If the profit margin is there and a prototype is built and proven, government funds are not required. You could not hold privater business back from building more.
Obviously the profit margin is not there.
“If the profit margin is there and a prototype is built and proven, government funds are not required.”
And this budget reports that they are being wound down, as expected. Which will indeed test whether they can stand on their own.
Nick is right- but as we are being told that the costs of renewable energy forms are falling and are now cheaper than fossil fuels raises the question why continue to subsidize renewables?
Nick, do you believe that Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) is helping to avert AGW? And also, do you believe the RET and renewables are responsible for raising the price of electricity where you live (Melbourne) and are they responsible for destabilizing your grid? Do you think the RET be even stronger, making you more dependent on wind and solar?
“but was subsidising renewable energy.”
“renewable energy” which is called “free energy”. Needs subsidies.
Who makes policies, Homer Simpson?
“raises the question why continue to subsidize renewables?”
The answer has always been there, and the Budget numbers quoted reflect that. We won’t continue, and that is built into the RET. As wind and solar increase, the cost of RET certificates on the market reduces, and eventually fades away.
“Nick, do you believe that Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) is helping to avert AGW? And also, do you believe the RET and renewables are responsible for raising the price of electricity where you live (Melbourne) and are they responsible for destabilizing your grid?”
It helps a little and costs a little. The grid in Victoria seems stable enough. I think the rising cost of electricity here is part due to an awkward stage where our main power stations are getting too old, and no-one wants to invest to build new ones. The reason for that is that lignite-fired stations won’t be able to compete with renewables, or even black coal in NSW and Qld. Same basic reason as brown coal wasn’t viable in SA, though theirs was even worse. Another reason is of course the fact that our local gas is being diverted (via Moomba, SA) to Qld for export to Asia.
Exactly
The science is settled, but not the bill. They need a lot more research in order to tot up the total.
Wow, a real budget cut. Here how it work in the U.S. : EPA wants a 2019 budget of (less say) 50 billion. An increase of 10 billion over 2018 budget. Congress say sorry you can have 5 billion over 2018 budget. New Report: Congress cuts EPA budget by 5 billion.
Government should send EPA back to the 1970 budget of $1,003,984,000
See https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget
I have a better idea: Send them back to oblivion, then start over with an agency who is tasked to act in the best interests of the fifty states and in the best interests of the people who live therein.
You are correct Old, that is how bloated bureaucracy works, unlike in the private sector where a department manager gets a set of objectives to increase revenue by 10 million but only brings in a 5 million increase.. He get’s no bonus and a review critique that his budget has been cut by 5 million and next years objectives are now 15 million in additional revenue or he should polish his resume. He can whine or whinge all he wants so long as he successfully brings in 15 million next year with a budget that is 5 million smaller.
The government should scrap current climate models and set up at least two different teams to create brand new ones that actually have scientific value.
Why the hell does Australia need to make new models? Does every nation make need to make their own models? Is there any point to that?
The models are junk from the get-go, and they tell you nothing useful. They can not tell you the future, it’s all belief in fairies, nothing but confusion for those who think themselves wise.
Of course every country needs to make its own CAGW models, so that they can claim a global “consensus”.
That is not possible. The models are bunk, we already know the basic principles, and the problem is not better modeling, it is a vast world with very poor data coverage. The sampling scale is too small. Biological and oceanic interplay involve factors that are not or can not be measured.
Karim That was a very stupid statement you made. Climate models will always be worthless because they will never be able to model clouds properly thus making any future projections worthless. As for the past; they are just as bad because present day models have to be tuned even to get correct results for the past on each simulation. So they cant get it right either way and never will. The earth is just too complicated. There never will be enough computer power to get resolution down to molecule size.
Easier just to change data to match the models, thus explaining the last 30 years of climate science.
You can’t model chaos. Quit trying.
I agree, but why not at least choose the one or two that seem to be tracking observations and see how that is being accomplished. Might learn something but the averaging together of wildly divergent results is crazy.
……Especially since the cost of producing the models has been made a part of the burden that is being placed on the processes that are driving the emissions of so-called “greenhouse” gases.
The U.S. can’t do that, Paul. That’s because the most accurate models are from those damned hacking/election meddling Russians!
I remember someone in the CSIRO said Australia needs its own models to determine the regional impacts of climate change specific to Australia. Apparently other models don’t consider climate on such a small scale.
“Apparently other models don’t consider climate on such a small scale.”
Because it is impossible with existing computers.
Well, at least Trump sticks to real models.
*rimshot*
Reasonably accurate climate models aren’t feasible until we have computers at least 100 000 000 times more powerful than now. That would allow cell-sizes on the order of 1 kilometer where it begins to be possible to model convection and clouds at least reasonably realistically.
That’s a lot of money to waste on science that was settled many years ago. Just think of the poverty and diseases that could be eradicated if that money was spent wisely.
yeah building some decent homes for the poor would be smarter before we end like usa homeless.. we used to have a decent public housing setup till govt flogged em off as too costly to maintain(crap) now its a 10yr wait for “emergency ” cases with kids.
anyone else can go hang.
hell they can even stick solar panels on roofs if they must, stupid as it is.
which theyre doing subsidised in poor areas of public housing in sa.
with the pittance paid for generating power and having your home still go black if mains cuts out anyway
add the cost and the batteries if you can..and theres no way theyll repay the outlay before they rot.
…..Spending money does not eradicate poverty, spending money only transfers and redistributes an amount of poverty that is greater than the amount of prosperity (money) that is transferred and redistributed thus serving to increase the amount of systemic (or holistic) poverty. .
Governments are poverty generating and distributing systems………….
Government cannot create wealth; it can only ration shortages.
“Rice notes that the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases have risen for three consecutive years.
That can’t be right! Industry and coal power plants have been closed.
Why are emissions going up?
It must mean all the money spent has been a complete waste.
Or, perhaps, the CO2 is coming from a source their efforts have no effect on.
The analogy is they are in a self dug hole, and should stop digging.
Cut the budget another 50%.
Emissions are going up because the scientists and supporting politicians are flying around the country consulting and patting each other on the back.
Let’s all drink flat beer that’ll help.
Close all the breweries. Yeast eats sugar and makes alcohol and *gasp* CO2. :O
But getting between Aussies and their Fosters would be a very bad idea.
Amazing the supposition that CO2 can change the climate needs AU$1.6 billion in Australia alone. If it were real no money would be needed as it would so darn evident. It is not evident, a degree of temperature change since the end of the LIA sound quite normal to me. CO2 at 410 ppm sounds is within normal natural variations. And the weather for the last 80 years has not been getting markedly worse (or better).
Why so much money — so they can propagandize the politics, and not do some verifiable science.
“The total to be spent on climate-related research has been reduced to the abysmally low sum of AU$1.6 billion for the next fiscal year which begins 1 July 2018.”
I don’t think there is anything in the budget that refers to sums like $3B or $1.6B for climate research. Research here isn’t managed that way. And the report didn’t say that. What it said was
“The council projects that spending related to climate change is dropping from AU$3 billion this year to AU$1.6 billion next year.”
That’s basically a motivated guess from an advocate. And I think it is pretty unlikely. Funding isn’t organised on a year to year basis. As mentioned, the budget overall was pretty good for science.
I see the $3B and $1.6B numbers are actually in the budget papers. But they do not refer to climate science or climate research. The section is 7.15 in this paper. And what it says is:
“The key components of climate spending are:
• the Emissions Reduction Fund, which provides incentives to support abatement
activities across the economy;
• the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which invests in renewable energy, energy
efficiency and low emissions technologies; and
• the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which involves funding to support
research and development of renewable energy and related technologies. “
It’s actually about renewable energy, not climate science, and the reduction is the reduction of various subsidies, which had been long expected.
If Nick Stokes is correcting the post, the world must be ending tomorrow……
R
My post was correct
“I don’t think there is anything in the budget that refers to sums like $3B or $1.6B for climate research.”,/i>
The fed government doesn’t spend anything like $3B annually on climate research. The amounts referred to expenditures on renewable energy, mainly subsidy.
There shouldnt be any subsidies for anything
I think you might need to take that up with “Martin Rice, an environmental scientist and head of research for the Sydney-based Climate Council of Australia” Nick
“I think you might need to take that up with…”
Why? Rice said nothing about climate science or climate research. Kip Hansen just didn’t read it properly. I quoted the relevant budget paper.
I think Nick is correct. I was about to make a similar point that the quote says nothing about research but rabbits on about “not addressing climate change” though I would have thought that for a country like Australia with a population of 24 million and none of the commitments Kip refers to one billion dollars + is more than enough money to spend on a non-problem you can’t do anything about anyway.
The fact that that quote comes from “an environmental scientist and head of research for the Sydney-based Climate Council of Australia“ is simply further evidence that this is a gravy train. Whatever “environmental science” he practises is secondary to his advocacy for yet more money. Since we “know” (or so we are told) what it is that causes climate change and what the effects are going to be there can be no reason why the Climate Council of Australia should have any need for an “environmental scientist” to carry out any further “research” on the subject on their behalf.
Or even for that Council to continue in existence?
“Or even for that Council to continue in existence?”
The Climate Council is not a government organisation. It is funded by donations from the public.
ralf, the world can’t be ending today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
Whatever daft climate scheme it’s being spent on, it’s still chucking obscene amounts of money at a non-problem. I don’t know exactly when, but in the future historians will look back on today’s green madness with a mixture of horror and extreme amusement.
Nick and others ==> I’m afraid my knowledge of the Australian Federal budget is limited to this single Science News report and their quote of the chap from the Climate Council whose remarks conflate unknown, unnamed budget sums into a category he calls “spending related to climate change” — a Google search for news stories from Australia about the budget did not turn up anything more exacting. I do believe Nick is correct when he says that not all the climate-related spending refers to research — much of it is probably subsidies for renewables.
…and the impetus for all of this is because they ‘believe’ that if they do not do this the weather and climate will go awry! So the impetus falls flat on it’s pathetic face.
“I do believe Nick is correct when he says that not all the climate-related spending refers to research — much of it is probably subsidies for renewables.”
Update your article then
What did go up is Australia’s emissions in every sector except power generation. Who said Australia wasn’t a leader in climate change politics. You would have to change the entire structure of the Australian economy to fix that and there isn’t the money in any parties budget or the willpower of the voters to do that.
Like the other 99% of other countries Australia won’t even go close to it’s 2030 emission targets.
Climate Council – All hail Will Steffen and Tim Flannery. The Alarmists alarmists.
Tim Flannery told us in 2007 that the rains would never fill the dams again, Subsequently, four Labour states, Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia spent tens of Billions building desalination plants which have not been required since. However, thay must be maintained and run regularly to keep them in operating condition for when the rains don’t come. This costs over $200 million a year and will go on ad infinitum.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
IF the “science is settled”, what’s the point of continuing further climate research? Research that always begins with the pre-conceived notion that human emissions are causing X so we need to spend Y and you need to do Z in order to avert disaster 100 years from now, “based on our high-tech model simulations”.
RESEARCH to study natural variation, important for climate predictions for agricultural industry and emergency services etc is scoffed at and simply NOT granted.
SO, the $1.6 BILLION will again be spent purely on activist CO2-centric ‘science’ fermenting the ‘warming’ scare in order to maintain and even increase funding if the new problem discovered is bigger than the last one. The scare self-perpetuates.
WHAT a joke.
AUSTRALIA should cut all climate ‘science’ funding or at least dedicate 50% to natural variation studies that look at variables like maybe…the Sun! The real driver of climate change.
They should not be spending anything. The science is settled. Based upon the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. It is all a matter of science.
Well Nick seeing that the Leader of the Greens (Dr Dicky Di Nat) has stated that “renewables” are cheaper than old fossil fuels then there is no need for a subsidy.
Can’t wait for the truth to come about about Elon Musk’s big battery and how it saved South Australia from power outages this last Summer.
What is that I can smell? Gee it smells like old style Diesel, but of course it can’t be – or can it????
AFAICS, what Musk’s battery does is tackle the problems that wind and solar power output tend to be bursty and also that they are not “spinning reserve” whose output frequency varies with user demand. Without the battery to buffer wind/solar output, conventional generators and spinning loads have to handle the entire task of keeping grid generation stable while wind and solar do their damndest to make the job harder.. The conventional generators charge extra for that.
So basically the battery is a largely unacknowledged cost of making wind/solar play nicely with the power grid. I do wonder how many charge/discharge cycles the battery will deliver before it gets tired. And I also wonder if Lion is the optimum chemistry for the application.
Large batteries are a potential bomb. Do they put th3m in a Faraday cage to protect from electrical storms. A Model MS Tesla just crashed and burned in Florida killing two teens.
Gary
The battery is, I believe, 100Mw worth of 4.2volt, 2 or 3 Amp Lithium Ion cells. So, roughly 10,000 individual cells each about the size of an AA cell. Publicly available technical data on the battery and what it’s actually supposed to do seems to be scarce or non-existent. All you need to know is that Elon will save South Australia from further blackouts using a single battery that does not seem to be big enough to replace any of the tie-lines to Victoria or NSW should they drop off line (again).
Anyway, it’s parked in a field 200km N of Adeleide near the metropolis of Jamestown (pop 1561 in 2016). If it fails catastrophically, that may bother some kangaroos. But I imagine that Musk’s engineers will have taken care of the obvious problems like heat management. If it fails, my guess that it quietly shut down and leave SA pretty much exactly where it was before spending AUD 100M.
Just a guess.
We still have the new plan to spend $500 million on “saving” the Great Barrier Reef .
What a joke.
Yeah the poor old GBR – all 2000+ KM of it, all 2000+ islands and reefs – the size of the UK and Ireland combined – yeah and all dead??
No it isn’t, and, sure we must protect it, but not through the Lunacy we are hearing.
How did it survive the sea level rise and warming climate of the last 15,000 years anyway??????
Over to the consensus mongers?
Just people exaggerating the threat to guarantee their funding and status.
Same old story.
“How did it survive the sea level rise and warming climate of the last 15,000 years anyway??????”
Good question. Much of the GBR was presumably dry land 15000 years ago and was probably covered with coral limestone outcrops left over from the Eemian interglacial 120,000 years ago which was the last time sea was at modern levels. The reef corals presumably crept upward and inward as the sea advanced toward the present Queensland coast.
See Book Climate Change – The Facts 2017 for a couple of chapters on Australian data tampering, covering up zero increase in a century. Deep in the blogosphere is a study of long term met stations within 1000 km of Alice which show no warming for 100 years, but forget where I saw it.
Sans interest, it would take 375 years of NO CLIMATE RESEARCH to pay down the last decade of government debt.
New Zealand has decided to send NZ$1.4 billion per year overseas for 14 years because our cows emit an undetectable amount of methane. We almost never burn any coal for power generation.
Who wants the money?
“New Zealand to spend $14 billion to meet Paris Agreement targets” 22/05/2017
My all time biggest surprise re climate science was when 97% Cook revealed he had used 11,000(!) climate science papers published in only a ten year period. That, folks, is 3 papers a day, every day including weekends and holidays for 10 years! And they only have one ax+mb equation that governs this work! What research more in a settled science is required that needs even $100,000 worth. There must be a hundred thousand or more climate scientists and graduate students in the congregation. I’ve noted this before and my second biggest surprise is that nobody even commented on it. Hey, so what’s your point GP.
We produce a surplus of lawyers. They consistently need to evolve new theories to open up new pockets of money to exploitation by convolution. There are fortunes being made on “climate change”. If an entity accepts money to achieve “climate change”, yet I am damaged by the climate, can I sue for damages?
Even if my injury is not obvious, cannot I sue for damages from ‘secondary climate’. Why not set up a special master to distribute the fortunes of those promising to manage the climate no our behalf to the victims. Since climate impacts all, we could call it a climate spill fund. Of course, if you promised to mitigate the climate, and took our money for same, but the climate impacts us anyhow, don’t we have fraud and racketeering going on?
Or perhaps we’ll be told to read the research more carefully. WE aren’t allowed to litigate the headlines, and the weasel wording in the body of every report is a full prophylactic against liability.
So the only poor suckers who are hurt by this entire enterprise are those force to pay for it.
You know who you are. er, who we are.
From time to time emotion erupts in these comments, often in the form of attacks on those supporting action against ‘climate change’. Lack of civility is regrettable, but my life has gotten a lot more expensive, thus my fixed income further stretched, paying for something that has delivered no results, and, in the fine print, admits it all may be hookum.
Not only have we corrupted the fundamentals of science, we have corrupted the fundamentals reasonable commerce. If I buy a product, I can like it, or not. I can buy again, or not. A consumers perception of value obtains. I have agency. If I buy a service, I can like it, or not. I can buy again, or not. A consumers perception of value obtains. I have agency. If I buy entertainment, I can like it, or not. I can buy again, or not. A consumers perception of value obtains. I have agency.
The folks flogging climate change wish to treat me as one with no agency. When this happens in the commercial world, we call it monopoly, and stop it. Even if the price of kerosene goes from a dollar a gallon to a dime a gallon, we’ll break up a monopoly.
The libertarian in me hates it, but I may end up supporting some of those aggressive lawyers. Just as asbestos was deemed to have snuck its deadly tendrils throughout business, sometimes at the behest of government, to be ameliorated by criminal proceedings and civil awards, so the manifestations of “fighting climate change”, a results free corruption of out business and political system.
The climate psychology departments will suffer while trying to render aid to the other mentally ill pseudo research teams. The horror.
It looks like Christmas for the climate alarmist will be a bit thinner this year. At least they can bask in the glory of settling their science.
we could have a retraining program for unemployed climate scientists: starbucks barista and burger flipper, o wait, beef burgers is a methane source, make that a tofu burger
I hear there is work in the coal fields.
Australia is one huge contradiction. On the one hand, they are determined to ruin themselves economically with high energy prices trying to save the world from their own CO2 while basically supporting their lifestyle selling coal to China!
That’s only contradictory if you assume the Australian government isn’t being intentionally undermined by the Chinese. They win both ways: less competition from the West, and more cheap resources.
Perhaps Australian politics is squeaky clean, but I would be absolutely shocked if a significant number of Western politicians haven’t been bought off by the Chinese to push ‘climate change’ and all this other crap that undermines our countries.
UN votes are routinely purchased in Africa by the Chinese and Latin America by Russia and VNZ. It’s a black market on the global chessboard.
Earl Rodd is spot on We in Australia produce about 1.4% of the world’s CO2 but export coal to both India and China which together produce about 31 % of global CO2 emissions
We used to be one of the lowest cost electricity producer nations but not anymore
Even a billion dollars (one thousand million) is an amazing amount of money for a country of 20 million people. If a climate scientist is paid 100000 dollars per annum, on average, one billion dollars would mean there were 10000 climate scientists. As a child I had an engineering book that said the US had 40000 engineers for a then population of 200 million. Assuming similar or equivalent numerical proportions, that means for every engineer there would be 2.5 climate scientists, if only one of the three billion dollars was spent on their salaries. I do believe cash should be spent on the science instead of the alternative energy garbage, but surely 5-10 million tops for a country like Australia would suffice. For that sort of money we could have a decent space effort or something.
The money referred to in this article was not being spent on climate science.
Wasted, nonetheless, Nick.
That’s a relief. I was struggling with the concept of 2.4 climate scientists for every engineer, all dedicated to making dud predictions to garner some sort of attention. At least the Sumerian civilization may have ended when they devoted too many of their resources to the cultivation of crops to make beer. But climate science?
The problem is, that ~ half the politicians in power in the Australian government don’t believe the deception promoted about ‘climate change’ but the media has convinced enough voters that it is ‘true’, so that now, no government has the balls to stand up publicly and state the truth, for fear of being thrown out at the next election.
What a twisted, tangled web we weave.
Ian
I have realised that this article is even more of a nonsense than I thought. The reduction of $3B to $1.6B not only had nothing to do with climate science; it was more than accounted for by the legislatively mandated sunset of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. This, when ecanted in 2012, had a fixed duration of five years. From the link
“The CEFC has access to funding of $10 billion comprising annual appropriations to the CEFC Special Account of $2 billion every 1 July from 2013 to 2017 inclusive, in accordance with section 46 of the CEFC Act.”
So the remainder of “climate expenditure” probably increased. Not certainly, because CEFC funding was being underspent.
“Nick Stokes May 13, 2018 at 10:22 pm
So the remainder of “climate expenditure” probably increased. Not certainly, because CEFC funding was being underspent.”
Underspent? Are you retired on a taxpayer funded superannuation? No, don’t answer that, we know!