Your intrepid hosts embark on a possibly ill-considered attempt to sum up both Professor Ian Chubb’s review into Australian Carbon Credit Units and the Albanese Government's Safeguard Mechanism design paper.
Weeeeee’re baaaack! Miss us? A very happy 2023 to you Summerupperers, we hope you all had a fabulous break and respite from reading ALL the climate and energy papers. And as we kick things off in the new year, the landscape is serene and quiet, not a climate paper or consultation in sight… *jokes* *trigger warning*
Before diving into our double header, we note some early success for Tennant’s weird-and-until-recently-rather-obscure obsession with CBAMs because, in their Safeguard mechanism design paper, the Government committed to a review of policy options to further address carbon leakage - including an Australian CBAM! Tennant is just a bit excited. Given he wrote the paper on implications of CBAMs for Australia (hell he even made a cake out of it and talked to Luke on his other podcast about it) we felt it only appropriate to give a hat tip to Tennant’s role in stimulating local CBAM curiosity - bravo Mr Reed!
Of the ELEVENTY BILLION consultations and reviews running at the moment your intrepid hosts simply cannot choose just one! This episode is a double header doozy delight where we unpack the findings of Professor Ian Chubb’s review of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) and then dive into the proposed design of the Safeguard Mechanism in the Government’s reform paper and THEN talk about the implications of one for the other, and vice versa. Incidentally, the Safeguard design paper is out for consultation. If that tickles your fancy, you can have your say on the design here until February 24.
Frankie’s One More Thing is a report on the latest frontier of the American culture wars, this time featuring gas cooktops! Following comments by a US Consumer Product Safety Commission on the hidden hazards (increased child asthma anyone?) posed by gas cooktops and the suggestion that unsafe products could be banned, the right fringe of the Republican party lost their collective minds and set about to protect ‘God. Guns. GAS STOVES’. Yikes. Here’s hoping we can have a more sensible debate at home.
Tennant’s One More Thing is suitably on brand for both nerdery and obscurity. A book called ‘Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants’ by John D. Clark. From red fuming nitric acid to the latest liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen rockets, this book has you covered. The bonus climate-related spoiler is that liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen rocketry will be a source of greenhouse gases. A Project Orion breadcrumb followed by tangent on why we don’t just build a bunch of nuclear power stations and shoot the waste into space (Luke has you covered with this educational video) and we are in danger of never finishing the pod.
Luke’s One More Thing thanks Twitter user @rockwallby for proposing the people's choice for the inaugural Papie awards, the ‘Wonkys’ (an extra special thanks from Frankie) and also reflects on how our podcast of record for climate and energy in Australia has eschewed the lamestream media’s focus on climate papers! Carbon Brief’s analysis of the climate papers most featured in the media in 2022 revealed your intrepid hosts covered but one of their top 10. We’ve decided we like our hipster climate paper niche and are less ‘Quelle catastrophe!’ and more ‘Can we fix it, yes we can!’.
And that’s all from us this week Summerupperers! We shall see you next time and until then, please keep tweeting your thoughts to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic and if you would like to weave some golden threads through our back catalogue, give us your feelpinions or suggest papers to read we are always here for that - hit us up at mailbag@letmesumup.net.