Energy

Gemma Weedall from Climate Emergency Action Network (CLEAN) and Socialist Alliance shares her insights into the early days of the campaign that won solar thermal for Port Augusta.

Capitalism’s constant drive for profits cannot be reconciled with Earth’s defined boundaries. Ecological destruction is not a side-effect of capitalism, it is built into the system: there cannot be infinite growth when the planet has finite resources.

"The NSW Coalition government's 2017 budget might be better described as the ‘biggest con-job in the Western world’," Susan Price, Socialist Alliance candidate for Ashfield in the upcoming Inner West Council elections, said on June 21. She was responding to state Treasurer Dominic Perrottet's declaration that his inaugural budget was "the envy of the Western world".

Complaints by conservative commentators that Treasurer Scott Morrison and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull have delivered a “Labor budget” show how low expectations are that any federal government in Australia will deliver a budget aiming to advance genuine social justice in this country.

The disastrous Adani mine project illustrates why the entire mining and energy sector should be brought into public hands and dangerous fossil fuels rapidly phased out in favour of renewable energy.

There is ample evidence that people across Australia want a transition to renewable energy. But if we are serious about taking action on climate change and swiftly moving to 100% renewables, we need to take the banks and energy sector into public ownership.

For serious climate action to be a reality we need a society where the majority of people — workers, farmers, students, the poor, First Nations people and refugees, the victims of climate change — are making decisions in the interests of our collective future.  

It is time to turn back the privatisation tide, reject the sale of Ausgrid unconditionally and prepare to take it back into public ownership.

Rational argument by the world's most informed scientists have not been enough to convince the decision-makers of the coal, oil and gas giants to voluntarily stop holding a blow-torch to the planet; nor to persuade the political leaders of the Coalition, Labor or Greens to go beyond what is palatable.

"NSW Liberal Premier Mike Baird is in danger of going the way of his Queensland counterpart Campbell Newman, if he continues down the path of selling essential public assets," Howard Byrnes, Socialist Alliance candidate for the NSW Legislative Council, said on February 11.