Criminally reckless: The Climate Commission has gone. The carbon tax is to be rescinded. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency is to be abolished. The promise of a Million Solar Roofs is broken. And in what can only be described as an ideological move, the Abbott government introduced bills to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, despite it making a profit last year. The Prime Minister has declared war on the Australian renewable energy industry, the environment and science itself. The overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming is based on evidence, whether Tony Abbott chooses to act on it or not. A sceptic is someone who doubts accepted opinion; a denier is someone who refuses to accept fact. Scepticism is healthy, denial is dangerous, and intentionally dismantling the entire renewable energy industry of a country that is not only wealthy, sun blessed and windswept but also has the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the OECD is criminally reckless. Furthermore, it will cripple our future economic growth. Elsewhere, R&D is recognised as the path to future economic prosperity and not a burden on the present. The value added to British GDP by research is conservatively estimated at £30 billion ($55 billion), from a total research budget of £3.5 billion. This is why, when Britain faced a far greater debt to GDP ratio, several banking collapses and a GFC-induced recession, the level of nominal research funding was kept constant. Cuts to ARENA, ANSTO, the CSIRO, and many other research bodies will severely damage our long-term economic health. Perhaps then we will have a real deficit crisis. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of research means that the Medical Research Fund will be ineffective without adequate support from physics, engineering, chemistry and many other scientific areas Abbott is currently de-funding at research, doctorate and undergraduate level. Worryingly, the long payback periods of research mean that this reckless economic damage will be hard to recover from; coaxing once-betrayed investment, business confidence and research expertise back to Australia will be difficult if not impossible. That this onslaught against renewable energy, the environment, research and science comes from a government with no science minister is unfortunately and even predictably unsurprising. The late Carl Sagan commented, We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. The fuse to this mix was lit on budget night, it remains to be seen whether the Australian public will allow it to blow up. Read more: theage.au/comment/science-going-back-to-dark-ages-20140531-zrqmx.html#ixzz33M2jB3kW Read more: theage.au/comment/science-going-back-to-dark-ages-20140531-zrqmx.html#ixzz33M1iLvfn theage.au/comment/science-going-back-to-dark-ages-20140531-zrqmx.html
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 03:28:11 +0000