The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.

Speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, the opposition’s climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, also said a Coalition government would consider supporting Generation III+ large-scale nuclear reactors, and not just the unproven small modular reactors it has strongly touted.

The statement at the global summit confirmed the Coalition was on a markedly different path to Labor. The Albanese government last week joined more than 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030, but did not sign up with 22 countries that supported tripling nuclear power by 2050.

While only 11% of countries at the talks – mostly nations that already have a domestic nuclear energy industry – backed the nuclear pledge, O’Brien declared “Cop28 will be known as the nuclear Cop”

[. .]

  • jmd_akbar@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Weren’t you idiots the ones who brought coal into the parliament office and we’re brandishing it as “clean”?

  • Gbagginsthe3rd@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    Liberals have been in power most of the last 2 decades. They only spout this bullshit in opposition.

    Nuclear was the way to go 20+yrs ago.

  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Nuclear power is an amazing technology with enormous potential… in the 70s.

    50 years later, solar and wind is the way. We can use it to crack sea water and sell hydrogen.

  • shirro@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    I am moderately pro nuclear but the coalition is not. They are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (as are some in the ALP) and their fake fascination with nuclear is entirely a delaying tactic to prolong the value of fossil fuel investments. Renewables have been getting all the investment and R&D and that is reflected in the declining costs and ease of deployment. Nuclear has stagnated and the economics and time to market suck. The fossil fuel lobby is not threatened by nuclear which won’t take business away from them in Australia. Send uranium to France where they have a mature nuclear industry and restart reactors shut down by fools in places like Germany. Meanwhile lets ramp up our deployment of renewables and shut down more carbon emitters.

    Whatever your political leanings, unless you are a billionaire with huge fossil fuel investments they aren’t looking out for us, our families or our country. They represent people like the Saudi royals and Adani not us. They care about local coal jobs about as much as Thatcher did and our kid’s futures even less.

    • Thisfox@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      He is a serious creep. It’s one of those “do not get trapped in a hall alone with this bastard” vibes.

  • rainynight65@feddit.deOP
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    1 year ago

    The Coalition want Nuclear to be the next coal and gas. Meaning big, long-running industries that will receive tons of taxpayer money. Everybody knows that big nuclear projects almost always run over budget and over time. If they start building big nuclear reactors in Australia, I’ll take almost any bet that we are going to see ludicrous cost ‘blowouts’, just so they can maximise the amount of money they extract from the taxpayer. And who will run these projects? Coalition donors. Also it’s going to be the Coalition-affiliated mining companies who dig up the nuclear materials.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    O’Brien’s speech was at a side event hosted by the World Nuclear Association and the Australian group Coalition for Conservation, which flew seven Liberal and National MPs to the summit.

    New South Wales Coalition MP Matt Kean, a former state treasurer, acknowledged O’Brien’s commitment to reaching net zero emissions but said “obviously nuclear is a long way away” and the country should back renewable energy now.

    The convener of the political fundraising body Climate 200, Simon Holmes à Court, said he was not opposed to a global nuclear expansion, but argued O’Brien’s proposal for Australia had “only one conclusion, and that is blackouts”.

    The Australian domestic debate over nuclear energy came as the negotiations over a deal to accelerate global action to tackle the climate crisis entered their final days.

    The Cop president, Sultan Al Jaber, called on countries to be open to “flexibility, compromise, cooperation and a true understanding of the urgency of the task”.

    In a signal of compromise language that Australia could support, Bowen pointed to a statement at last month’s Pacific Islands Forum that the world should “transition away from coal, oil and gas in our energy systems, in line with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pathways for 1.5C, with a peak in fossil fuel consumption in the near term”.


    The original article contains 977 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • rainynight65@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      This kind of segregation of topics didn’t work on Reddit - I doubt it will work here on Lemmy, where there’s way fewer users. In my opinion, post traffic is not high enough to introduce fragmentation at this point.

      Just my $0.02.

        • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          For me, i’ve always treated c/Perth as WA in general, but i think thats more to do with having such a dominant city, for instance half of applecross is owned by wheatbelt farmers (i might be exaggerrating here lol). Perth as a stand in for WA kind of makes sense because almost everybody has a connection to it anyway.

          For somewhere like Queensland maybe it makes less sense though.

      • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for the feedback,

        I’ve been having a think about it and the divide between politics and news is always going to be difficult to maintain given how important politics is to our daily lives and people should be more informed.

        Also considering @[email protected]’s comment, I think @[email protected]’s comment answers that. I think we were treating Aussie Zone more like a forum until we started to discover some of the limitations of federation. The segregation has always helped the local feed to be more organised and users can subscribe to only what they are interested in. A further discussion probably needs to be had surrounding the Australian News community, since a lot of that content could be helping this one to grow.

        Perhaps we should make a “Good News” community to balance out all of the bad news about Climate Change, Politics, the Economy, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and Public Transport.

        What this all comes down to is the wishes of our users, our userbase has changed alot in the last few months with some disappearing and some new ones coming in from other instances

        • WaterWaiver@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Thanks DHMO.

          Several thoughts merged into one (pick any choose bits, not all or nothing):

          • c/Auslocal <- replacing /c/Syd /c/Melb etc. General discussion
          • c/AusInterestingNews <- “interestingNews” is probably better wording than “goodNews” as it might avoid some politics ending up there. Less drama for users & mods perhaps.
          • c/Australia <- people posting politics will probably default to the general “Australia” regardless of what rules you try to put in. If you roll with that and intentionally keep it as a honeypot then it might be an easier solution for users and mods? ie don’t try and move the politics out of /c/Australia, instead move everything else out into c/Interestingnews.
          • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            Thanks for sharing these ideas.

            For the first idea: While it may increase exposure and activity, this might not be what people are after, likely only being interested in their own local community’s news. But on the other hand exposure is good if you want to ask a question about something to do with Australia in general but not get lost amongst politics and news.

            I like your thinking with the second two and they’re definitely actionable. The content segregation is always going to be an uphill battle because not everyone will read the sidebar - especially since it doesn’t get shown when creating a post making it almost useless. Perhaps we could repurpose the [email protected] community (currently called “Australian News”) for the purpose of interesting news.

    • WaterWaiver@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      What’s the motivation of splitting things into Australia-general and Australia-politics? Is it to have a space that’s less stressful than the other to read?