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Objectives: To estimate the carbon footprint of five common hospital pathology tests: full blood examination; urea and electrolyte levels; coagulation profile; C-reactive protein concentration; and arterial blood gases.Design, Setting: Prospective life cycle assessment of five pathology tests in two university-affiliated health services in Melbourne. We included all consumables and associated waste for venepuncture and laboratory analyses, and electricity and water use for laboratory analyses.Main Outcome Measure: Greenhouse gas footprint, measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2 e) emissions.Results: CO2 e emissions for haematology tests were 82 g/test (95% CI, 73-91 g/test) for coagulation profile and 116 g/test (95% CI, 101-135 g/test) for full blood examination. CO2 e emissions for biochemical tests were 0.5 g/test CO2 e (95% CI, 0.4-0.6 g/test) for C-reactive protein (low because typically ordered with urea and electrolyte assessment), 49 g/test (95% CI, 45-53 g/test) for arterial blood gas assessment, and 99 g/test (95% CI, 84-113 g/test) for urea and electrolyte assessment. Most CO2 e emissions were associated with sample collection (range, 60% for full blood examination to 95% for coagulation profile); emissions attributable to laboratory reagents and power use were much smaller.Conclusion: The carbon footprint of common pathology tests was dominated by those of sample collection and phlebotomy. Although the carbon footprints were small, millions of tests are performed each year in Australia, and reducing unnecessary testing will be the most effective approach to reducing the carbon footprint of pathology. Together with the detrimental health and economic effects of unnecessary testing, our environmental findings should further motivate clinicians to test wisely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the number, ideological congruence, and/or individual cohesion of veto actors influence policy making to be incremental or drastic? Rather than compare veto actors across different states as is already extensively addressed, this article compares the different veto actors involved in Australia's 2011 Carbon Tax Policy and its 2014 "Carbon Tax Repeal" policy. It uses quantitative data to measure the number, ideological congruence, and individual cohesion of the different veto actors. The results show that, because of the smaller number of veto actors, their higher ideological congruence, and lower individual cohesion, policy making was rather drastic than incremental for the 2014 repeal policy compared to the 2011 Carbon Tax Policy. The results, however, challenge the assumption that many veto actors hinder effective policy change and suggest that because a single or few veto actors can easily execute drastic policy making, they can likewise easily halt effective policy. These have implications for policy making. Related Articles: Båtstrand, Sondre. 2015. "More than Markets: A Comparative Study of Nine Conservative Parties on Climate Change." Politics & Policy 43 (4): 538‐561. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12122 Fisher, Sarah. 2015. "Federalism's Fractured Decision Making in the Kyoto Protocol." Politics & Policy 43 (1): 1‐29. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12110 Kwon, Sung‐Wook, and Sylvia Gonzalez‐Gorman. 2019. "Influence of Local Political Institutions on Policy Punctuation in Three Policy Areas." Politics & Policy 47 (2): 300‐325. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12295 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change research relating to "co‐benefits" suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to "co‐benefits" as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively. This article uses a policy case study approach to explore how social and environmental discourses can be better integrated in Australia, rather than constructed as being at cross‐purposes in political debates about the costs and benefits of addressing climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the 'Australian national climate', claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia-in particular, Australians' emphasis on the climate's inherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability-is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within Australian climate policy, the dominant framework for determining national emission reduction targets has been 'burden sharing'. The prevailing view, both within and outside government, has been that there should be a rough equivalence in the costs that countries bear in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, at least where countries share similar wealth and capacity traits. This article looks at the practical problems with this approach that stem from its reliance on economic modeling. It is contended that any principled approach to target setting should strive for objectivity but that burden sharing based on projected welfare losses cannot provide this. To illustrate the fallibility of the economic projections that are done for these purposes, the article reviews how one of the greenhouse reporting sectors, known as land use, land-use change and forestry, has been dealt with in the modelling exercises that have been done in Australia for climate policy purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cases where assisted colonisation is the appropriate conservation tool, the selection of recipient sites is a major challenge. Here, we propose a framework for site selection that can be applied to the Australian biota, where planning for assisted colonisation is in its infancy. Characteristics that will be important drivers in the decision-making process include the size of a recipient site, the potential to augment corridors and respond to niche gaps, the maximisation of climatic buffering, bioregional similarity, tenure security, and the minimisation of opportunities for hybridisation and invasiveness. Sites we suggest be precluded from assisted colonisation include sites of high species endemism, IUCN category 1 reference reserves and fully-functioning threatened ecological communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self-identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of 'the public' as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal-mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship-based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a 'climate movement', diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks three questions. First, how do carbon taxes drive economic and environmental outcomes? Second, what is the appropriate economic base on which carbon taxes should be levied? Finally, how well does a carbon tax deliver economic and environmental outcomes compared to a comparable emissions trading scheme? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northern Australia's globally significant savannas and rivers face major threats, from cattle to weeds to land clearing to climate change. In the face of imperatives and pressures such as reducing carbon emissions, nature conservation, alleviating Indigenous disadvantage, the resources boom and global food security, how should development be managed to protect its globally significant ecosystems? Nine planks in a ‘Sustainable Northern Australia’ agenda are proposed: (i) enhance investment in mitigating pervasive landscape threats; (ii) strengthen support for Indigenous Caring for Country activities and incorporation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge into land management; (iii) align and strengthen invasive species control and management; (iv) facilitate new economic development pathways focused on sustainability; (v) build climate resilience by maintaining and enhancing landscape-scale connectivity; (vi) protect free-flowing rivers from dams and major water resource development; (vii) establish and effectively manage a large interconnected network of protected areas; (viii) develop cooperative governance arrangements; and (ix) enhance knowledge generation and research and monitoring capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of the sorry business and its link with climate change and global warming. The expression "sorry business" is used by many indigenous Australians to refer to the death of a family member and the profoundly difficult and extenuating circumstances that follow. Sorry business is a time of significant grief and sorrow, coupled with ways and means to assist surviving loved ones through long-term periods of mourning, reconciliation and adaptation to the absence and memories of a former living presence. It is not as simple as sorry business versus climate change, but it is as straightforward as realizing that there is a continual, often inequitable and transformative relationship between people and their social, economic and ecological environments.

The article presents an introduction to a series of articles on some economic policy issues of climate change as part of the "Policy Forum" section of "The Australian Economic Review." Warwick McKibbin discusses a mixed policy approach for Australia and beyond that combines both short and long-term goals to reduce carbon emissions, Paul Jensen and Elizabeth Webster present a critique of Nicholas Stern's "Stern Review," and Philip Adams Philip Adams uses a general equilibrium model to determine the economic viability of changing environmental policy in Australia.

An overview is presented of recent work on the environmental changes impacting on Australia and the policy responses of the State and Commonwealth governments, especially over the last ten years. This period has seen a remarkably stable phase of conservative government administration in Canberra and consistent resistance to a strong environmental policy agenda, both domestically and internationally. Attention is focused particularly on rural and regional Australia, rather than on urban areas. The paper discusses the role of environmental issues in recent elections and also details the results of relevant opinion polls charting changes in environmental attitudes. The problems posed by the federal system of administration are outlined as are recent analyses and counter-analyses of the state of the Australian environment. A more fundamental problem with liberal democracy and environmental values is also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the move of Australia's first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard to sign an alliance with the Green Party which ended the longstanding leadership of the Coalition of the conservative Liberal and National Parties in the country. It mentions that most voters turned to the party when the Labor Government abandon the vaunted emissions trading scheme (ETS). It affirms that Gillard offers a formation of a climate change committee to win the approval of the Green Party.

The article reports that new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has approved the Kyoto Protocol in Australia. This move was coincided by the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Indonesia. The new Prime Minister has also committed to reduce the nation's emissions by 60% of 2000 by 2050. The administration has also pressured Japan to drop plans for a summer hunt of humpback whales in the Southern Ocean. Despite these progress, the new administration is still resisting calls to overturn federal approval of a controversial pulp mill that poses serious air and water pollution risks.

The article reports that three top Australian climate scientists fear that their expert opinion would reflect badly on the Australian Government's fossil-fuel friendly greenhouse policies. Graeme Pearman, a former CSIRO atmospheric division director, said he fell out with his superiors after joining the Australian Climate Group, which supports carbon trading. Pearman's superiors told him not to say anything that would indicate his disagreement with government policy, and inspired him to resign after speaking out on the dangers of climate change. Barney Foran, CSIRO biofuels expert said that he was asked not to discuss ethanol by the department of the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. Barrie Pittock, also of CSIRO, said that he received request to remove sensitive information about the impact of climate change from a government publication. The claims were denied by CSIRO executives and the Government.

The article presents information about a new international climate agreement. The agreement, widely condemned as an attempt to undermine the Kyoto Protocol, has been signed by six major nations including the U.S. and China. The major objective of the pact is to limit greenhouse emissions using mandatory targets and market mechanisms such as carbon taxes and trading. In addition to the U.S. and China, the climate pact has been signed by Japan, India, Korea, and Australia. Together, the six nations account for 40% of global emissions. Although Australia is responsible for emitting only 1.4%, it was included since it is a staunch U.S. ally in Iraq and against the Kyoto Protocol. Australia's Environment minister, Ian Campbell, said that global emission must be cut by at least 50% over the next century. He also said that the climate pact reflects the reality that coal will remain the world's main energy source. The new pact is being promoted as an alternative to Kyoto Protocol, but Greenpeace energy campaigner Catherine Fitzpatrick believes Australia is trying to cover its failure to rein in emissions, which have soared by 20% since 1990.