Failed climate gimmicks axed in budget

Gimmicks axed

Because anything Australia does unilaterally to “tackle climate change” is nothing more than a pointless gimmick, wasting money that could be spent on schools, medical research, housing – anything, in fact, rather than climate change.

WAYNE Swan has taken the razor to a raft of green programs, particularly those aimed at cutting emissions from coal consumption, and mopped up a string of failed green programs in a budget that, as expected, makes little mention of the impending carbon tax.

While carbon capture and storage have borne the brunt of the cuts, the government has moved to wind up failed programs such as Green Loans, the Home Insulation Safety Program and Green Start.

The cutback to the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships program has been slated to provide $420 million of the $22 billion in savings measures announced in the budget. Of this, $260m has been deferred beyond the forward estimates.

The government has also delivered on its election promise, cutting funding for the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, one of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s pet climate change programs [my hear. The cuts to the CCS Institute, which was charged with promoting the technology internationally, yield savings of $45m over two years from the next financial year.

Also cut was $12.8m over five years from the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative, which was designed to support the development and deployment of technologies to reduce emissions from coal use.

But it’s not all good news, as some of these savings will be wasted yet again:

But some of the savings from the cuts to the CCS Flagships program have been used to create a $60.9m National CO2 Infrastructure Plan, which will fund exploration of geological basins for long-term storage hubs and the acquisition of CO2 storage data in basins in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.

The CO2 Infrastructure Plan will also help fund a National CO2 drilling rig deployment strategy and a national CO2 storage and transport infrastructure assessment.

What a relief. The world can sleep soundly knowing Australia now has a CO2 Infrastructure Plan…

Read it here.