Australia doesn’t yet export renewable energy. But the writing is on the wall: demand for Australia’s fossil fuel exports is likely to dwindle soon, and we must replace it at massive scale.

China’s President Xi Jinping surprised the global community recently by committing his country to net-zero emissions by 2060. Prior to this announcement, the prospect of becoming “carbon neutral” barely rated a mention in China’s national policies.

As the COVID-19 pandemic devastates the global economy, there’s an opportunity for governments to support a green-led recovery. This involves spending fiscal stimulus on renewable energy and other clean technologies to create jobs while addressing climate change.

The Nobel Prize-winning US economist William Nordhaus fired a salvo recently when he published an article on how to drastically revamp international efforts to deal with climate change. He argued that climate negotiations operate according to a deeply flawed structure that has no chance of success, with no penalties for free-riding and non-membership. He proposed an alternative solution centred on ‘climate clubs’ made up of like-minded nations that would agree between themselves on fundamentals. These would include both a carbon price covering emissions and an agreed tariff on imports from countries that refuse to join the club or are expelled from it.

The chaos of COVID-19 has now hit global energy markets, creating an outcome unheard of in industrial history: negative oil prices. With the world’s largest economies largely in lockdown, demand for oil has stagnated.
Essentially, the negative prices mean oil producers are willing to pay for the oil to be taken off their hands because soon, they will have nowhere to store it.

Since the COVID-19 crisis began, Australia’s Morrison government has shown itself willing to cast off many of its long-held ideological positions, on everything from budget deficits to stimulus spending and minimum welfare payment levels. But the government appears determined to hold onto its energy policy and the Australian Liberal Party’s obsession with maintaining Australia’s links with fossil fuels

Australia is the world’s third largest fossil fuels exporter – a fact that generates intense debate as climate change intensifies. While the economy is heavily reliant on coal and gas export revenues, these fuels create substantial greenhouse gas emissions when burned overseas.

From an appalling environmental scorecard 20 years ago, China has pioneered a “global green shift” towards renewable energy and recycling. The country’s drive to dominate renewables manufacturing benefits both China and the world, by sending technology prices plummeting.

The Future of Trade

Presented by QUT Faculty of Law Intellectual Property and Innovation Law Research Program, QUT Institute for Future Environments, and QUT Chair in Digital Economy

Over the past three years — in an apparent rush to sign off on as many trade deals as possible — Australia has failed to ask the hard questions about the purpose of trade policy and how trade deals specifically help the country advance its economic, geopolitical and social goals.

With the U.S. pulling out of the TPP, Donald Trump talking tough on the South China Sea and hints that Barak Obama's refugee deal with Australia might be on the skids, we ask where Australia fits in this new geopolitical landscape.

With all the debates on whether China will join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement now that President Trump has officially rejected it, or if the TPP can exist as a 12 nations minus one agreement, you’d be forgiven for thinking it still could go ahead. It can’t.

Partisan tensions over the desirability of preferential trade deals and the conflation of trade and foreign policy are by no means new to Australia, nor are tensions over the “trade as” vs “trade and industry policy” positions. However, as this extract from Navigating the New International Disorder makes clear, these tensions were amplified over the 2011–15 period thanks largely to key policy elites.

President-elect Donald Trump is right: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a damaging deal and deserves to be killed off. But he tells a half truth about why the trade accord among a dozen Pacific Rim nations is a bad deal.

Explaining the Striking Revival of Financial Activism in South Korea since 1997: Towards an agent-centred understanding of developmental states and their evolution.

Dr Elizabeth Thurbon (UNSW)

Dr Elizabeth Thurbon from UNSW Australia argues the Australian government is disempowering Australian companies

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is just the latest in a string of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) concluded by the Australian government since the 2013 election win, including the China, Korea and Japan deals.

Here are five of the key things you need to know about the TPP.