Comment: One Liberal minister dared to say the bleeding obvious - climate change and fires are related - and all hell rained down | JacquelineMaley
Matt Kean, the Energy and Environment Minister in the NSW Liberal government, has no hair and was educated at an elite Jesuit private school, and in these respects he is an unlikely Greta Thunberg.
Early in the week Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke about the fires but said that volunteer firefighters didn’t need further assistance because “they want to be there” – a misjudgment of the mood and an inadequate response, even if he did later announce more firefighting funding.NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said now was not the time to be having “philosophical debates” about what caused the fires.
By Thursday, when Kean spoke, it had begun to feel like our politicians were gas-lighting us – the term used to describe the way abusers undermine their partner’s sense of reality, manipulating them into doubting their own sanity. The message was well rehearsed because the same switch has been flicked so many times before, against so many other politicians, ever since the war against the so-called carbon tax was waged.
The cost of emissions reduction to the economy is already large. According to economist Henry Ergas, writing inIt is often hysterically claimed that more ambitious emissions targets will “wreck” the economy, but the counter-factual is never addressed: what are the economic costs of not cutting further? And what are the economic benefits of shifting away from coal?
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