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?
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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
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!