Eaten by the carbon monster?

The sun came up this morning, predictable as the latest Niki Savva column on the embodiment of evil that is Tony Abbott. If you find Mrs Woolcock’s patter tiresome, skip to the bottom and see these lines:

On Friday morning, on the eve of its closure, he [Abbott] had written a sneering opinion piece for Melbourne’s Herald Sun urging the Prime Minister to keep the ­Hazelwood power plant open. That would be the same ­Abbott who colleagues cannot ­recall even mentioning the fate of the plant when he was leader.

Darren Chester, an easygoing kind of guy, allowed his frustration to boil over when he warned that ­Abbott risked leaving politics as a bitter and twisted old man. Chester, a cabinet minister whose seat of Gippsland includes the Latrobe Valley, received plenty of constituent feedback about Abbott’s intervention and very little, if any of it, was complimentary of Abbott. Using their plight to get himself cheap headlines summed up the reactions. It was cruel to them to raise hopes and discourteous to Chester, who did not even receive a phone call warning him the opinion would be appearing.

The Abbott column to which Mrs Woolcock refers concerned the Hazelwood power station, which supplied better than 20% of Victoria’s electricity until this week and helped stop South Australia going as dark as it has been, deserves to be, and will likely be far more often from now on.

Darren Chester is perhaps more than a bit worried that unemployed locals might remember just how he endorsed the move away rom coal-fired power, dirty coal being the reason for Hazelwood’s closure. Or perhaps it is just a computer glitch that has made his earlier fretting about the state of the global environment so hard to find on the web. Go to this link, for example, and all you encounter is the ‘page not found’ message reproduced atop this post.

The curious can rest easy, however. Thanks to web archive waybackmachine.com, Chester’s pride in saving the world from coal can still be read, just as it could be on the open web until March 9, after which date the page mysteriously vanished. Here’s what the archive captures:

The Turnbull Government’s renewable energy policies will ensure 23.5 per cent of Australia’s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020. This will see a doubling of large scale renewable projects. The government has established a $1 billion Clean Energy Innovation Fund to support emerging clean energy technologies and is delivering a $350 million solar strategy.
 
The Coalition is working with business and the community to support the transition to a low emissions economy. Our environmental policies deliver both economic growth and jobs whilst reducing our emissions.

Chester, a National, holds his seat by better than a 30% margin. Could he really be that worried?

His archived web page can be read in full via the Wayback link below.