belching

The Biden administration’s global initiative to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade will affect Australian industry despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison refusing to sign on to the pledge, investor groups and analysts say.

But they caution the initiative – endorsed by more than 100 other countries – will wash through the Australian economy inefficiently, meaning industry will be forced to act, but less consistently and productively than might have been possible via a nationally adopted approach.

Australia is the world’s fifth-largest methane emitter not to sign up to the agreement, according to 2020 data from Climate Watch. The rebel pack is led by major fossil fuel and agriculture economies China, Russia, India and Iran.

saucisson...

Effective leadership on climate change is in short supply. Are our leaders too stupid or too cynical to respond to the world’s greatest problem?

One of the more remarkable aspects of the debate about climate change is that something like 99 per cent of recognised climate scientists agree on the basic drivers and likely consequences of unmitigated global warming. While this is an unambiguous vindication of the scientific method, perhaps, there are still lots of people who genuinely believe that climate change is either not happening, isn’t caused by humans even if it is, or that there’s not much we can do about it anyway.

ECB

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Marsh, Christine Lagarde became president of the European Central Bank on Nov. 1, 2019. How would you rate her first two years in office?

David Marsh: I would give her a medium grade. On the one hand, she has pacified the most important body, the long-divided ECB Governing Council. On the other hand, under her direction – mainly because of the COVID-19 crisis, for which she naturally bears no responsibility – the ECB's dependence on euro-area governments has increased. She doesn’t have any deep fundamental principles when it comes to monetary policy.

pledge...

Conservation and farming groups are digesting the impact of a pledge by Australia to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade.

Australia is one of the 105 countries that has signed the declaration at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Underpinning the deal is an investment of $25 billion in public and private funds to protect and restore forests.

“We will have a chance to end humanity’s long history as nature’s conqueror, and instead become its custodian,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said of the pact.

maryse

Senator Payne is expected to visit Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam on the trip.

Cambodia has just taken over the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while both Malaysia and Indonesia have sharply criticised Australia's plan to build nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS technology pact with the United Kingdom and the United States.

grant

The $5.5 million grant to fund a 1,000-person convention centre at a gun club in Wagga Wagga was the only one – of over 90 grants – in the NSW Murray-Riverina region that went to a non-government entity.

rich...

The American tycoons apparently prepared for the UN Climate Change Conference (which kicked off in Glasgow, Scotland on the weekend) aboard luxurious superyachts in the Aegean Sea. According to the British media, the weekly rental price of Gate’s vessel is $2 million.

grit...

Scott Morrison has stridently defended his integrity and personal conduct in the wake of the French President accusing the Prime Minister of lying about a $90 billion submarine contract.

cormann

... Morrison also loses his pin-up girl to what sounds unmistakably like corruption on taped calls, allegedly between the ex-premier and her former paramour.

Worse, it’s an ill-timed reminder of the government’s promise of a federal ICAC, impotent, unworkable and now three years’ old.

The PM doesn’t want any type of ICAC at all, least of all one with teeth, Rachel Withers notes because most of his government’s ministers would be hauled in to answer to it. Like a squid squirting ink, the Coalition quickly exudes a noxious miasma of lies to discredit the state integrity body and to cloud our view of its own transgressions.

It’s “a witch-hunt”, “the Crucible” and “a kangaroo court”.

scoMo...

The Government’s booklet and the entirety of its contents purporting to be a plan the Morrison government has adopted for a mid-century target of net zero emissions by 2050 has met with universal criticism.

After weeks of melodrama, the Coalition parties have adopted a plan hastily put together in a matter of days with all the swiftness of an African antelope.

There is much to be said about this agreement between the Liberals and the Nationals, and it is, in my view, a superb exercise in nothingness. Probably the worst in Australian political history is about the best I can do.

By John Lord

for good luck...

In the post-summit communique, the leaders of the world’s largest economies called for “meaningful and effective” action to limit global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Reuters reported shortly before the final document’s release. 

research...

The Spectator and the IPA have little influence on the "proles", as Pru Goward calls you, us — the plebs who work like slaves and believe in windmills… But The Spectator and the IPA are the primal sources feeding The Australian newspaper and ALL the right-wing policies of the Liberal (CONservative) Party. If you listened to the raw arguments of the IPA, you would still be smoking cigarettes "like chimneys" (not very original, I know) and, by rights, you would be filling the hospital bed with your lung cancers, emphysema, gangrene of the big toes, instead of filling the wards with your Covid-19 cases — and die before your grandmother.

curtains

The [Australian] navy is "very unlikely" to select a hybrid nuclear submarine design that combines both British and American technology, as it looks to replace Australia's ageing Collins-class fleet.

settlements

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday said it strongly opposed Israel's plans for Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank as damaging for peace prospects between Israelis and Palestinians, in the Biden administration's harshest public criticism of Israeli settlement policy to date.

"We are deeply concerned about the Israeli government's plan to advance thousands of settlement units tomorrow, Wednesday, many of them deep in the West Bank," State Department spokesperson Ned Price told a briefing.

"We strongly oppose the expansion of settlements, which is completely inconsistent with efforts to lower tensions and to ensure calm, and it damages the prospects for a two-state solution," Price said.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

cowcreek

The prime minister has dismissed claims from his deputy Barnaby Joyce that the Nationals secured the exclusion of livestock methane emissions in negotiations over the government’s net zero 2050 target.

On Thursday, the Nationals leader said he had successfully negotiated a “carve out” commitment from Scott Morrison to exclude agricultural methane emissions from Australia’s emission reduction task.

A report published in The Australian on Thursday indicated this related to Australia opting out of the global methane pledge, which is a commitment to reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030 that will be launched at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow next week.

Joyce said the document signed off by Morrison to secure the Nationals’ support for the net zero pledge by 2050 had excluded methane cuts, “100%”.