News Brief by Kip Hansen

Australian climate scientists are whinging about the newly announced Federal budget for 2019.  Who can blame them?

The total to be spent on climate-related research has been reduced to the abysmally low sum of AU$1.6 billion for the next fiscal year which begins 1 July 2018. [Yes, that is billion with a B].

While 1.6 billion Australian dollars (just over 1.2 billion US dollars @ today’s exchange rates) may seem like a lot of research money for a country that doesn’t have the necessity of maintaining fleets of satellites or ocean-going research buoys, but it is a very sharp reduction from the AU$3 billion they were allotted  for the current year.

All this according to a report from Science News , which quotes Martin Rice, an environmental scientist and head of research for the Sydney-based Climate Council of Australia as saying;

“Once again, [the budget] failed to address climate change.”  The article continues:  “The council projects that spending related to climate change is dropping from AU$3 billion this year to AU$1.6 billion next year. Rice notes that the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases have risen for three consecutive years. And the planned phaseout of a renewable energy target and other measures ‘could bring Australia’s renewables boom grinding to a halt,’ he says.”

While this news is shocking — some might ask………What’s not to like?

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