5 March 2021
There’s a lot riding on predictions of the future, when it comes to climate. In Australia, the future of coal is mostly a debate about whether its demise is fast, or slow. For the country’s gas-fired power generation, the debate is slightly more complicated.
The government, for instance, believes that Australia ought to be building new gas-fired power stations, in order to buttress grid reliability and “affordability”. 1,000 megawatts of new gas in the Hunter Valley is erroneously justified on the grounds that it is “required” to ensure reliable provision of electricity. This view is supported by Australia’s Labor party, with their draft policy platform declaring that “Labor recognises that gas-power generation has a critical role to play in firming the National Electricity Market (NEM) to ensure reliability and price affordability as it transitions to net zero emissions and as other technologies emerge”.
Almost alone: Australia isolated on climate despite PMâs ambitions
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The world has shifted in the two years since Scott Morrison warned electric cars would end the weekend during the election campaign.
This week President Joe Biden completed a policy U-turn for the US, pledging to convert his federal governmentâs fleet of 650,000 vehicles to electric cars as a centrepiece of the nationâs commitment to hit net-zero emissions by 2050.
The bold policy was a catalyst for General Motors which announced that week it would stop making petrol commuter vehicles by 2035, and itâs now rolling out big-budget advertisements claiming its commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040 can jumpstart the countryâs beleaguered auto industry.
The state has also found the COVIDSafe app s effectiveness to be insignificant.
December 14, 2020 03:52 GMT (19:52 PST) | Topic: Innovation
A parliamentary inquiry into Victoria s contact tracing system and testing regime has found that the state was not fit to deal with any escalation of cases, which eventually led to significant errors during its second wave of the pandemic.
This finding, made by the Victorian Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee, came with 46 others along with 19 recommendations that were published in a 260-page report [PDF] on Monday morning.
According to the report, the Victorian government s communicable diseases track and tracing system, called the Public Health Event Surveillance System (PHESS), experienced an unprecedented volume of data during the pandemic, which affected system performance and reporting timeliness .