Baby steps: Australia’s carbon tax passes Senate vote

Today could be viewed as an historic day for Australia, where the carbon tax has just today been voted through the Senate. Historic, yes, because it’s taken 20 years for Australia to finally implement this legislation. Finally, a price has been put on carbon in Australia. O my, what a fight it has been. If the NZ Herald thought Robyn Malcolm’s attack on John Key at the weekend was “vitriolic”, I’m not sure how they’d label the toxic politics across the ditch.

Tony Abbott has vowed in blood to repeal the package. He’s been obsessed with blood, baying for Julia Gillard’s all year. But it doesn’t seem to have got him anywhere — his unpopularity has reached new heights today, according to a news poll today.

I’m not going to go into the details of the tax and how it compares with NZ, as Mr February has covered that far better than I ever could in two excellent blogs here and here.

The tax has rallied the right. And boy have they rallied, with anti-carbon tax rallies up and down the country, festooned with abusive placards like “ditch the bitch” – and much, much worse. At one point even Tony had to distance himself from these, his most avid supporters.

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The denial tango

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrURLJ6Vlsg&w=480]

A telling little ditty to start your week with a chuckle: Australia’s Men With Day Jobs perform the Denial Tango (lyrics below the fold). And for your further amusement, Joe Romm at Climate Progress notes an interesting cartoon at the New York Times — Happy Climate Change Denial Season.

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Riddle-me-ree/open thread

We haven’t had an open thread for a while, and as there seems to be some desire to discuss Matt Ridley‘s recent lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh (see Bishop Hill for the first appearance thereof), here’s your chance. There’s a lot of other interesting stuff around — feel free to roam. But first, I’d like to offer some observations on Ridley, his lecture and the response from the usual suspects.

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The promise of renewables

No sooner had I finished reviewing Fools Rule, which recounts the determination of many nations to carry on with the further discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels in blunt defiance of the warnings of science, than I read Fred Pearce’s article in Yale Environment 360 detailing how the world is in fact burning more and more coal. He pointed to the irony of the forthcoming UN negotiations in Durban, South Africa, where the talk of how to kick the coal habit will take place in a country with high CO2 emissions and a thriving export industry in power-station coal. Not that he was singling out South Africa – the trend is shared over many countries. As if in confirmation our Prime Minister on the same day, during the leaders’ debate, affirmed yet again his government’s commitment to expand mining and drilling operations – in an environmentally responsible way, of course. He offered Australia as an example of the prosperity to be obtained thereby.

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Cracked PIG spawns big berg

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuvAtyXvpoc&w=480]

NASA’s IceBridge operation for this Antarctic summer has discovered that the Pine Island Glacier is in the process of calving a massive iceberg — 880 square kilometres of the floating glacier tongue is about to go floatabout, leaving the glacier snout shorter than any time since its position was first recorded in the 1940s. The crack was first spotted by a flight on October 14, and surveyed during a flight on the 28th — featured in the video above. NASA’s Earth Observatory has more pictures and commentary, and there’s a background piece for the video at the NASA IceBridge news page. See also the NASA Ice Fickr stream and NASA Explorer Youtube channel.