A new Australian Energy White Paper, released this week states the governments continued support of “establishing and supporting the Oil, Gas and Energy Resources, and the Mining Equipment, Technology and Services Growth Centres”
The White Paper, which is supposed to provide the Australian government with long term goals has been rewritten again – the last one was only written in 2012 (the next latest one was released in 2004).
Although the Paper states the renewable energy sector is an “important part of Australia’s diverse energy mix and the Australian Government is committed to supporting (it)” a few sentences later it states that the Australian Government will abolish a range of renewable energy agencies responsible for developing renewable energy enterprises.
The Paper caters heavily towards the oil and gas industry with promises of priority training for oil and gas resources, priority funding for mining equipment and promises to renegotiate enterprise agreements “so negotiations do not unduly delay or jeopardise… investment projects, including resources projects”
Bizarrely the Paper goes on to mention that fossil fuels has an uncertain future due to an “emissions constrained” time ahead.
The current conservative government has been frustrating Australian environmentalists since being elected in 2013. One of their first actions was to abolish the contentious (but highly successful) so called “Carbon Tax”. The idea was that polluters will pay per tonne of carbon they release into the atmosphere. This resulted in emissions from companies subject to the tax going down 7% within its first month of implementation.
Since the tax’s removal Australia’s carbon emissions jumped to its highest level in three years.
Read the full White Paper here
* NB: The author of this article is one of the ‘frustrated Australian environmentalists’ mentioned in the article.
Lets call it like it is: The oil and gas industry owns the current politicians and dictates the country’s energy policies through these surrogates. The people simply installed the wrong leaders in office if they want clean energy. We have made the same mistake in the U.S. for many years and need to vote the rascals out of office.