Australia announced a staggering 92% cut to their global warming budget. The budget will adjust from $5.75 billion this year to $500 million over the next four years. Environment Minister Greg Hunt promised $2.55 billion for CO2 reductions–however budget discussions with Minister Tony Abbott required that budget a cut to approx. $1.14 billion. “The carbon tax is an act of economic vandalism,” Abbott said in March. Academics and Scientists are expected to emigrate following the mass-elimination of a spectrum of science spread-out across several academic fields.
http://dailycaller.com/...
Robson also found that a year after being enacted, the carbon tax caused electricity prices to rise 15 percent. The country’s unemployment rate shot up by 10 percent after the carbon tax was implemented.
“The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,” Abbott told The Washington Post last year. “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.
http://guardianlv.com/...
The budgetary facts are inescapably grim for researchers and scientists based in renewable energies and research. The funding for all government programs related to climate change is set to shrink at an alarming rate, going from $5.75 billion this year to a scant $500 million in the next four years. Additionally, the Emissions Reduction Fund which is meant to help lower greenhouse gas emissions in Australia is going to be reduced to only $1.14 billion. This was devastating news after Environment Minister Greg Hunt had gone on record promising to provide $2.55 billion to fund the program. Nevertheless, it is not only climate change programs that are feeling the pinch of the Abbott budget. The Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, will have $111 million worth of funding slashed over the next four years, which will affect an uncertain number of programs and a loss of tenth of the CSIRO workforce.
The outlook is bleak from the standpoint of scientists and researchers in Australia, many of whom will probably leave the country in order to find work elsewhere. This represents a loss of a skilled workforce for a country that is already seeing a six percent unemployment rate. Despite harping on the jobless rate, the Abbott government has not provided a solution to getting more people working. Cuts to climate change programs and scientific research are only the tip of the unemployment iceberg. Under this budget, unemployment rates are set to rise to 6.25 percent by June next year. This is worrying news for the hundreds of thousands of Australians currently out of work or who are facing the prospect of unemployment in the wake of the new budget plan.
http://www.reddit.com/...