Louise is an award-winning advocate with 20 years’ experience encompassing climate, energy, forest protection, and law reform in the not-for-profit sector, and federal politics before joining The Australia Institute.
National Cabinet has just made its choice on how Australia's AI boom gets powered. The Albanese Government went into this week's meeting insisting new data centres will be powered by renewable energy across the nation. And yet, the government came out of the meeting with a communique that drops that requirement all together.
10 of 46 articles
The only reason a country needs to create more ‘carbon offsets’ is because it expects to fail to decarbonise. Which is why the Greens are about to face a decision that has less to do with technical detail and everything to do with who they are.
The Safeguard Mechanism lets around 200 of the country's biggest polluters buy unlimited carbon credits to use as so-called offsets instead of cutting their own emissions at the source. It is the single largest source of demand for the kind of credits now at the centre of the Great Koala National Park fight, and that is no coincidence.
Last week, Woodside's Browse to North West Shelf project got bigger. Not in reality, just in terms of government-sponsored spin. The WA government granted Browse ‘State Significant Project’ status, a designation with no legal weight but plenty of political theatre.
This week, the federal and WA governments stood alongside Perdaman to announce a $4 million pre-feasibility study into a new large-scale oil refinery at Karratha in Western Australia. It is the first in Australia in more than half a century, under a $15 billion "fuel security" package rushed out after the war on Iran sent oil prices soaring.
Reading Catherine King's press release announcing $32 million for HAMR Energy's forest-to-jet-fuel project, I found myself doing a familiar bit of translation. Where the government says, 'forest waste,' read 'woodchips.' Where it says 'residues,' read 'the bulk of what comes out of a logging coupe.' This is not a new idea dressed up as innovation. It is the export woodchip industry finding a new customer, right as its old one disappears.
This is the first time since the Gunns 20 that a resources company has tried to use the courts to obtain information about an entire activist campaign, rather than just punish the individuals in front of them. That Woodside's attempt has now failed is a genuine relief. But it should not be mistaken for proof the system worked.
This month, we witnessed the spectacular collapse of two offshore gas companies, and now their rusting rig off the coast of Dongara in WA is everyone’s problem
The Great Koala National Park was supposed to be a promise kept. Instead, it has become a hostage. The NSW government has confirmed that the park's final creation is contingent on federal approval of a new carbon credit method, the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method, which would allow the state to sell carbon credits for not logging a forest it had already promised not to log.
We're being positioned as more than the driller, digger and exporter. We're being lined up as the Asia-Pacific's dumping ground for CO2; geology for hire to help cook the books. Australia isn't doing this instead of expanding fossil fuels. It's doing it as well.
