Renfrey Clarke

Not in so many words, mind you — frankness has rarely been the strong suit of News Corporation journalists and editors. The editorial in question, published in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian on September 10, argued in support of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS): in other words, “clean coal”.
From desert-fringe villages and drowning atolls, global warming is predicted to set climate refugees on the move. But arguably, the first climate refugees to reach Australia’s major cities are arriving already. And the places from which they have come are not exotic — rural towns like Mildura, Renmark and Griffith.
"Forget ‘alternative’ energy — it can’t work!" That — and in almost those exact words — was among the messages of an article published in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekend Australian on August 8 by journalist Terry McCrann.

If combating climate change is left up to the governments of the world’s wealthy nations, much of humanity is likely done for.

In the state that claims to have the greenest energy on the Australian mainland, South Australia’s climate camp will confront two of the country’s dirtiest power stations. The Northern and Playford B plants, fuelled by cheap but low-grade brown coal, are just outside Port Augusta, a four-hour drive north of Adelaide.
With its belching cows and giant diesel-powered tractors, the farm sector is widely known to be an important contributor to Australia’s impact on climate change. Just how important, however, is not often recognised.
“One hundred percent renewable energy in Australia by 2020!” That was the bold call endorsed by members of more than 150 climate action groups at the Climate Action Summit held in Canberra in January.
Sometimes you have to hand it to capitalism. It’s sheer magic the way the system takes promising concepts, hands them over to the market and turns them into howling social and environmental disasters.
Biochar production has been the object of considerable research and experimentation in Australia.
The key United Nations report used as the basis for climate change policies in many countries, including Australia, seriously underestimated the dangers of global warming, one of its leading compilers has warned.
With Victoria’s bushfire holocaust now confirmed as Australia’s worst-ever natural disaster, people are reasonably asking: are these events linked to climate change?
If the world’s foremost scientific authority made a point of condemning what we were doing, most of us would at least pause to wonder if we were getting things right.