Month: May 2015
State government anger at the Abbott Government’s stalled Renewable Energy Target is likely to grow with a new report this week revealing nearly eight million people are now employed in the sector globally.
The report, released by the International Renewable Energy Agency on Tuesday, found that more than one million jobs were created in the last year alone, bringing the total figure world-wide to 7.7 million.
But back in Australia, the fledgling renewable energy sector is in turmoil.
When the federal RET was established in 2009, the Rudd government prevented states from implementing their own schemes, which would have forced electricity retailers to buy renewable energy from the states.
The trade off was that states would be able to compete within an open national market to each generate as much of the 41,000 Gigawatt hour (GWh) target as they could.
Negotiations between Labor and the Abbott government, though, appear to have finally settled on a reduced target of 33,000GWh, after more than a year of uncertainty.
That uncertainty – and the reduction – has left state governments angry. The revised RET requires electricity providers to buy less renewable energy, meaning that attracting investment into the renewable energy sector will be more difficult.
The Victorian government actually scrapped a state-based RET when the federal scheme was established, and it’s given the 33,000GWh target a particularly icy reception.
“The scaling back of the RET will reduce the number of major renewable energy projects built in Victoria, costing us jobs and growth,” a spokesperson for the Andrews government said.
“The clean energy industry in Victoria supports over 4,000 jobs, and many companies that currently supply the automotive industry are looking at renewable energy projects as a lifeline for their business.”
Investment in renewables tanked by 90 per cent last year as the Abbott government moved to slash the target, and in the two years to April 2015, the Australian Bureau of statistics revealed that 2,500 jobs had been lost.
The beleaguered Australian industry is a pariah in the global market, which the United Nations said grew by 17 per cent in 2014, attracting near-record investment of $270 billion.
That investment correlated to approximately 1.5 million new jobs, an overall increase of around 18 per cent, according to IRENA’s report.
“This increase is being driven in part by declining renewable energy technology costs, which creates more jobs in installation, operations and maintenance,” said Adnan Amin, Director-General at IRENA.
“We expect this upward trend to continue as the business case for renewable energy continues to strengthen.”
As the major parties at the federal level agree to cut the RET back to 33,000 GWh, states governments’ ability to share in that “upward trend” has become tenuous.
At a recent meeting attended by the top UN diplomat on climate change and a number of Labor state ministers, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and the ACT discussed what could be done to increase the uptake of renewables.
“We will examine all impediments to states and territories acting, including Commonwealth legislation which might prevent a State and Territory Renewable Energy Target,” a spokesperson for the South Australian government, which hosted the meeting, told New Matilda.
One way to boost renewables uptake is through a ‘reverse auction’ scheme like the one the ACT has developed, which it announced earlier this year would supply 33 per cent of Canberra’s electricity by 2017, through the wind component of the program alone.
The Queensland government has also proposed a ‘reverse auction’, which involves companies bidding to provide the most renewable energy for the lowest price to government.
The high targets states have set themselves, though, may be difficult and expensive to achieve through reverse auctions: South Australia, for example, aims to achieve 50 per cent renewables by 2025, while Queensland is gunning for the same target by 2030.
With the reduced Renewable Energy Target expected to amount to roughly 23 per cent of total electricity generation by 2020, it is increasingly likely that states’ ambitious targets will be difficult to meet through the federal scheme alone.
The federal Labor party has indicated it will seek to install a higher target for the post-2020 period after the current scheme expires, an ambition on which advocacy groups like Solar Citizens have seized.
“There is now no clear vision for the future of jobs in solar and renewable energy beyond 2020,” National Director Claire O’Rourke said when responding to the IRENA report.
“There is a real risk that without clear policy Australia will fall behind countries like China, India, Germany, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Colombia who have some of the highest employment rates in renewable energy.”
![Displaced Iraqis from Ramadi gather at the Bzebiz bridge after spending the night walking towards Baghdad [AP]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/5/19/00aa6c40c9b4479c98ca4ff885038b16_18.jpg "Brutal truths about ISIL victories")
NEW YORK – (CT&P) – With ISIS on the attack around Ramadi, Shiite and Sunni militias fighting each other as well as Islamic State forces, Coalition airstrikes blowing up empty patches of desert, the Iraqi military in full retreat, and inanimate objects exploding all over the country, United Nations President Sam Kahamba Kutesa officially declared Iraq an official “24 karat Clusterfuck” at a press conference this morning.
The distinction is important because clusterfuck status enables the United Nations to speed up relief shipments of food and medicine to the country whose borders were pulled out of white people’s asses shortly after World War I.
“We don’t hold out much hope that peace will come to the area in our lifetimes,” said Kutesa, “but we hope that eventually the fighting will die down to the point where we can distribute food, water, and cyanide tablets to the surviving population.”
The White House hailed the decision as a “real breakthrough” and expressed hope that fleeing refugees would be offered at least one last good meal before being obliterated by wayward drone strikes and terrorist car bombs.
“The situation is improving day-to-day,” said President Obama at a press conference in the Rose Garden, where he thanked Dick Cheney and George Bush for leaving Iraq and the Middle East in such good shape.
“I’m confident that all these religious nut cases will stop murdering each other real soon,” said Obama. “After all, they’ve been at it for several centuries now and I’m sure they’re sick and tired of all the bloodshed.”
Cheney, who was in Washington to negotiate the purchase of a soul to go with his new heart, told reporters that the entire fucked-up situation was Obama’s fault because he offered health care to the poor and failed to bomb the shit out of Iran over their nuclear program.
Fox News was completely silent after a Christian minister pleaded guilty to plotting to attack American Muslims in New York, continuing a habit of downplaying threats to Muslims and ignoring extremist acts with no ties to Islam.
Robert Doggart, an ordained Christian minister and former Tennessee congressional candidate, was arrested and pled guilty to attempting to recruit “expert Gunners” to aid him in a plot to kill residents of Islamberg, NY, a largely Muslim community at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. RawStory reported on the details of Doggart’s plan:
He met with the informant in Nashville and discussed using Molotov cocktails to firebomb buildings in the Muslim community, which was founded by African-Americans who had converted to Islam from Christianity.
Doggart told the informant during a recorded conversation that he planned to bring 500 rounds of ammunition for the M4 rifle and a pistol with three extra magazines – as well as a machete.
“If it gets down to the machete, we will cut them to shreds,” he told the informant.
He said during a recorded call that the “battalion” he commanded hoped the raid on Hancock, which is also known as Islamberg, would be a “flash point” in a possible revolution.
“So sick and tired of this crap that the government is pulling that we go take a small military installation or we go burn down a Muslim church or something like that,” Doggart said.
The Daily Beast pointed out that the media has remained largely silent on the story, wondering at the absence of “the Fox News panic” and noting:
It goes without saying that if Doggart had been Muslim and had planned to kill Christians in America, we would have seen wall-to-wall media coverage. Fox News would have cut into its already-daily coverage of demonizing Muslims to do a special report really demonizing Muslims.
And in fact, Fox News has made no mention of the story at all. What’s more, the network does have a history of downplaying threats against Muslims while hyping any Islamic connection to terror it can find. After the Boston Marathon bombings, the network ridiculed former Attorney General Eric Holder for warning against retaliatory acts of violence, ignoring years of threats against Muslims. In 2010, Fox host Brian Kilmeade claimed that “all terrorists are Muslims.”
And Fox has reacted to terror attacks committed by right-wing extremists with a yawn. After the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing terror in 2015, Fox News’ Eric Bolling claimed “you can’t name” instances of right-wing terrorism “in the last seven years,” ignoring dozens of examples.
Right-wing media have also been known to fearmonger about often-unsubstantiated Islamic terror threats. Outlets like Fox News, The Drudge Report, and The New York Post hyped an unfounded “jihadist” plot against Fort Jackson in South Carolina. And Sean Hannity and other conservatives promoted an unsubstantiated story of an Islamic State (ISIS) training camp on the U.S.-Mexico border around the same time Doggart was arrested.
Islamberg, the town Doggart was planning to attack, has also garnered Fox News’ attention in the past — a 2007 FoxNews.com article wondered if it was a “terror compound” and a report by Fox Business host Lou Dobbs claimed the town was home to a group engaging in “guerilla war training.”
Three foreign countries may be changing their historical weather data to show warming trends, according to a scientist in the field.
Dr. H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute claims in a story that Australia, Paraguay, and Switzerland have altered their data in an effort to prove global warming is real.
“Switzerland joins a growing list of countries whose temperature measurements have been adjusted to show greater warming than actually measured by its temperature instruments,” Burnett writes. “In previous editions of Climate Change Weekly, I reported weather bureaus in Australia and Paraguay were caught adjusting datasets from their temperature gauges. After the adjustment, the temperatures reported were consistently higher than those actually recorded.”
![T E Lawrence, Portrait as a Bedouin [Getty]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/5/19/7145d8b27a3845db88902aa43d94e819_18.jpg "T E Lawrence naivete lives on")
Right-wing media have a plan to solve the national crisis of poverty in America — and it’s all about “personal responsibility.”
Roughly 45 million Americans live in poverty, 1 in 7 received food stamps just last year, and 20 percent of children under the age of 18 were impoverished in 2013. Politicians and media figures have offered many possible solutions to help low-income Americans break free from this systemic cycle of inequality, including expanding the social safety net and educational opportunities for all.
But over the years, conservative media have offered their own strategies. Watch as Media Matters looks back at the five easy steps they’ve proposed to help Americans living paycheck to paycheck find that “richness of spirit”:
Mic’s Elizabeth Plank fired back against Fox News’ absurd anti-feminist rhetoric on the May 19 edition of Flipping The Script. Plank highlighted the outrageous claims frequently perpetuated by conservative media figures in order to discourage men from being feminists. Pointing to Fox News host Doocy asking “when did it happen, where men and husbands became doormats” and a Fox guest who claimed that all “feminism has delivered is angry women and feminine men,” Plank tackled the absurdity of such claims during an interview with Orange is the New Black‘s Matt McGorry.
Conservative media have actively adopted a “blame feminism” approach to many of the world’s problems, including sexual assault and the lack of infrastructure funding. Fox News in particular has gone as far as to blame it for boys falling behind in school and men no longer wanting to marry.
NEW YORK – (CT&P) – Three weeks ago, a Nassau County Supreme Court justice ended a bitter three-year custody dispute between Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly and his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy, by granting custody of the couple’s two minor children, Pinhead and Talking Points, to McPhilmy.
Though nearly all documents pertaining to New York family court cases are sealed, and O’Reilly himself has issued a fatwā threatening the life of anyone who speaks publicly about the case, Gawker is reporting that the judge heard testimony accusing O’Reilly of physically assaulting his wife in the couple’s Manhasset home.
A source close to the court who wishes to remain anonymous because she fears for her life told Gawker that a court-appointed forensic examiner testified at a closed hearing that O’Reilly’s daughter Pinhead claimed to have witnessed her father dragging McPhilmy down a staircase by her neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was watching. The precise date of the alleged incident is unclear, but appears to have occurred before the couple separated in 2010. The same source indicated that Pinhead, who is 16 years old, told the forensic examiner about the incident within the past year.
Pinhead went on to explain to the examiner that O’Reilly water-boarded McPhilmy on a weekly basis while trying to extract various confessions from her regarding her love of rap music and what O’Reilly called her “socialist tendencies.”
“He would almost drown her time and again until she admitted she was part of the ‘War on Christmas’ or something equally bizarre,” Pinhead told the examiner. “After he got what he wanted out of her, he would put her in this barber chair that had a motor in it and spun her around and around until she threw up. He called it the ‘Spin-Dry Zone.’ It was just awful.”
The list of abominations carried out by O’Reilly was nearly endless, from the family having to answer bizarre questions about the deterioration of the black family while O’Reilly yelled at them to drown them out, to forcing them to watch him masturbate while he stared at himself in a full-length mirror.
O’Reilly’s younger daughter Talking Points was unable to corroborate her sister’s testimony because she is in a semi-permanent fugue state. Experts believe it was induced by her being catheterized, strapped to a chair, and forced to watch a loop of O’Reilly’s show for up to 72 hours at a time ever since she was three years old.
However, the judge in the case apparently did not need further corroboration of McPhilmy’s and Pinhead’s testimony in order to render judgement.
“Anyone who watches O’Reilly’s show knows he is a giant insecure prick who has some really severe psychological problems,” said the judge. “That in itself would not decide the custody case, because if it did I would have to remove children from the homes of the majority of Fox News’ on air talent. But the testimony of Ms McPhilmy and her poor daughter has convinced me that this manchild O’Reilly should come nowhere near his spawn until they are over 18 and able to tell him to ‘fuck off and die’ right to his face without fear of reprisal.”
O’Reilly is said to be appealing the decision and has threatened to kill everyone involved in the case as well as the entire staff at Gawker.
http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2015/05/19/40050/fnc-factor-20150519-bikergang
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly interviewed a former biker gang leader about a recent biker shootout in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead. O’Reilly’s interview with his white guest was a sharp contrast to interviews the host regularly has with African-American guests, where he lectures them about black violence, culture, and family structure.
On May 17, authorities arrested roughly 170 bikers following the deadly shootout between biker gangs and police in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead and 18 wounded outside of a restaurant. According to The New York Times, “Law enforcement officials and gang experts said the conflicts between two motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, led to the shooting.”
During the May 19 edition of his show, O’Reilly interviewed former Bandidos biker gang member Edward Winterhalder to comment on the bloody shootout. During the discussion O’Reilly asked Winterhalder about alleged violence and criminal activity among biker gangs and allowed Winterhalder to explain uninterrupted that “there is a lot of different types of individuals in a motorcycle club” but most are law abiding citizens who “are just regular guys who have jobs, families, and kids … the only thing they’re guilty of is having a little too much fun on the weekends”
But when discussing violence in the black community and recent police shootings of unarmed black men, O’Reilly regularly conducts contentious interviews with African-American guests where he blames black culture and family structure for violence and poverty in the inner city.
During the recent protests in Baltimore, O’Reilly hyped black crime statistics and declared “personal behavior” is the problem behind violence and arrests of blacks. In 2014, O’Reilly invited Martin Luther King III to talk about recent police shootings against unarmed black men where O’Reilly suggested that instead of protesting police shootings, African-Americans should wear t-shirts that say “don’t get pregnant at 14.” Following the 2012 killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin, O’Reilly demonized the teen claiming that he died because he looked “how gangstas look,” referring to his wearing of a hooded sweatshirt.
WACO, TEXAS – (CT&P) – Bobby Joe Sphincter and Daryl Leroy Dimwit, co-owners of the Twin Peaks Biker Bar and Family Fun House in Waco, Texas, told CNN the motorcycle gang recruitment party that took place on Sunday was judged “an overall success” despite massive loss of life and nearly 200 arrests.
Nine people were killed and scores were injured during the wing ding on Sunday, but that did not seem to put a damper on recruiting, said Sphincter, who MC’d the event.
“You have to expect a few minor altercations whenever these rival gangs get together,” said Sphincter, who was wearing a tourniquet on his upper thigh to staunch the flow of blood from his femoral artery. “We took precautions by making the wait staff wear ballistic bras and panties on Sunday, and watering down the beer a little. I think all in all it was a great day, and we plan on having even more of these events in the future.”
Dimwit, Sphincter’s business partner, agreed.
“We like to promote membership in these vicious biker gangs because it helps our bottom line,” he said. “The more young people who can get involved in drug running and prostitution in this area, the better it is for us.”
Rufus “Friction Burn” Baker, rush chairman for the Devil’s Buttplugs based in nearby Lubbock, told reporters that his gang picked up some promising new members including two out of work pipe welders, a retired mortician, and a “damn good” meth cook.
“We couldn’t be happier,” said Baker. “We only lost three members in the shootout, and they were getting a little long in the tooth to be running around extorting shopkeepers and kidnapping illegal Messicans for the sex trade anyhow. I’m really a big fan of these little get-togethers ’cause they keep our members on their toes and they help give us that psychotic edge that we need to compete in today’s marketplace.”
Although all of the five gangs registered to participate in the event as well as the owners of the establishment declared it an unrivaled success, Twin Peak’s corporate office has decided to revoke Sphincter’s franchise over fears that the ATF and FBI will sit on the place and reduce cash flow.
“I’m not worried about that,” said Sphincter. “Daryl and I were already thinking about going out on our own and changing the name of the place. Right now the favorite seems to be Two Giant Scantily Clad Redneck Tits. What do you think?”
SEOUL – (CT&P) – Secretary of State John Kerry say he’s confident that the cave dwelling fanatics that have been slaughtering each other for centuries over a religious dispute will stop killing each other long before the end of time.
Kerry, who is traveling through South Korea, says that he’s always said the fight between different sects of the “religion of peace” would be a long one, but would eventually burn itself out just like the Hundred Year’s War between Catholics and Protestants did in Europe.
He said that Ramadi was a “target of opportunity” for the savages from the Islamic State but he’s confident that the savages that we currently support will get the upper hand in coming days, which in turn will lead to another round of murder and mayhem, thus reducing the numbers of fighters on both sides.
Ramadi fell to ISIS on Sunday, as Iraqi forces that we spent billions to train and equip ran like frightened schoolchildren in the face of a few black and white flags mounted on top of pickup trucks. The brave Iraqi troops abandoned their weapons and armored vehicles to flee the provincial capital in a major loss despite intensified U.S.-led airstrikes.
“I’m confident that once all of these idiots on both sides are dead the fighting will stop,” said Kerry.
When asked by a reporter why the fuck we continue to get involved in this ridiculous bloodletting over imaginary friends in the sky, an exasperated Kerry replied, “Because of the oil, you dumb shit!”
“Look, everyone knows these 7th century cretins are going to continue to murder each other until the camels come home, but we hope we can immolate enough of them with air strikes and artillery barrages to secure the oil supply for at least another few decades. After that, we really don’t give a fuck.”
Kerry closed the impromptu presser by saying that we were not at war with Islam and had great respect for its long history of showing tolerance and love for members of different religions just before killing them.
“We hope that in the future other countries can be more like America where we tolerate people with a wide variety of fucked up religious beliefs and usually stop short of burning them alive no matter how wacked-out and batshit crazy they may be,” said Kerry.
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