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Mark Bailey is returning to duty as Minister for Main Roads, Road Safety and Ports and Minister for Energy, Biofuels and Water Supply, effective today.

Fears of the unstoppable energy transition are reinforced and amplified by vested interests and selfish, small minded losers who try and slow it down. Look at how energy prices jumped since Coalition's intervention on Liddell.

Something is fundamentally wrong in the NEM. Frequency control costs have risen dramatically, but the quality of the service has dived.

ARENA tips $2.5m into feasibility studies for doubling of Tasmania hydro capacity and developing 2.5GW of pumped hydro storage.

It seems there is no climate and clean energy myth conservatives and the Murdoch media won't repeat. Just as well we have renewable energy and smart businesses.

Shareholder action has struck again (perhaps). The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, on behalf of more than 120 shareholders of BHP, has convinced the Big Fella to reconsider its membership of the Minerals Council of Australia.

Business associations and umbrella groups exist to advance the interests of their members. The ones we know most about are those that are in the public eye, lobbying, producing position papers that put forward controversial and unpopular positions (while giving their members plausible deniability), running television adverts, and attacking their opponents as naive idealists at best, or luddites and watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) at worst.

Read more: Risky business: how companies are getting smart about climate change.

This has been going on for a century, as readers of the late Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty will know. (Another Australian, Sharon Beder ably continued his work, and more recently yet another Australian, Kerryn Higgs, wrote excellently on this.)

Alongside the gaudy outfits sit lower-profile and occasionally very powerful coordinating groups, such as the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (see Guy Pearse’s book High and Dry for details).

Ultimately, however, membership of these groups can have costs to companies – beyond the financial ones. If an industry body strays too far from the public mood, individual companies can feel the heat. This happened in the United States in 2002, with the Global Climate Coalition, a front group for automakers and the oil industry that succeeded in defeating the Kyoto Protocol but then outlived its usefulness. It happened again in 2009 when a group of companies (including Nike, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson) decided their reputations were being damaged by continued membership of the US Chamber of Commerce, which was taking a particularly intransigent line on President Barack Obama’s climate efforts.

Doings Down Under

What’s interesting in this latest spat is that it involves two very powerful players. Let’s look at them in turn.

The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) began life in 1967, as the Australian Mining Industry Council, when Australia’s export boom for coal, iron ore and other commodities was taking off.

From its earliest days it found itself embroiled in both Aboriginal land rights and environmental disputes, having established an environment subcommittee in 1972. Over time, the Council took a robust line on both topics, to put it mildly.

In 1990, at the height of green concerns, the then federal environment minister Ros Kelly offered a scathing assessment of the council, saying that its idea of a sustainable industry was:

…one in which miners can mine where they like, for however long they want. It is about, for them, sustaining profits and increasing access to all parts of Australia they feel could be minerally profitable, even if it is of environmental or cultural significance.

Meanwhile, the council’s intransigent position on Aboriginal land rights, especially after the 1992 Mabo decision, caused it to lose both credibility and – crucially – access to land rights negotiations.

Geoff Allen, a business guru who had created the Business Council of Australia, was called in to write a report, which led the Minerals Council to adopt its present name, and a more emollient tone.

The MCA’s peak of influence (so far?) was its role in the Keep Mining Strong campaign of 2010, which sank Kevin Rudd’s planned super-profits tax. The following year, it combined with other business associations to form the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance, launching an advertising broadside against Julia Gillard’s carbon pricing scheme (which was not, as former Liberal staffer Peta Credlin has now admitted, a “carbon tax”).

Bashing the carbon tax.

The MCA has since kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on renewable energy, and most infamously supplied the (lacquered) lump of coal brandished by Treasurer Scott Morrison in parliament.

Read more: Hashtags v bashtags: a brief history of mining advertisements (and their backlashes).

The most important thing, for present purposes, to understand about the MCA is that it may well have been the subject of a reverse takeover by the now defunct Australian Coal Association. In a fascinating article in 2015, Mike Seccombe pointed out that:

Big as the coalmining industry is in Australia, it accounts for only a bit more than 20% of the value of our mineral exports. Yet now the Minerals Council has come to be dominated by just that one sector, coal… Representatives of the biggest polluters on the planet now run the show.

This brings us to BHP. As a global resources player, with fingers in many more pies than just coal (indeed, it has spun its coal interests off into a company called South32), it has remained phlegmatic about carbon pricing, even as the MCA and others have got into a flap.

Read more: Say what you like about BHP, it didn’t squander the boom.

To BHP, the advent of carbon pricing in Australia was if anything a welcome development. The move offered two main benefits: valuable experience of doing business under carbon pricing, and a chance to influence policy more easily than in bigger, more complex economies.

In 2000, the company’s American chief executive, Paul Anderson, tried to get the Business Council of Australia to discuss ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (which would build pressure for local carbon pricing). He couldn’t get traction. Interviewed in 2007, he recalled:

I held a party and nobody came… They sent some low-level people that almost read from things that had been given to them by their lawyers. Things like, ‘Our company does not acknowledge that carbon dioxide is an issue and, if it is, we’re not the cause of it and we wouldn’t admit to it anyway.’

The schism

As the physicist Niels Bohr said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. I wouldn’t want to bet on whether BHP will actually go ahead and leave the MCA, or whether the Minerals Council will revise its hostile position on environmental sustainability.

BHP has promised to “make public, by 31 December 2017, a list of the material differences between the positions we hold on climate and energy policy, and the advocacy positions on climate and energy policy taken by industry associations to which we belong”.

In reaching for a metaphor to try and explain the situation, I find myself coming back to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The heroic crew has captured an individual from the “Borg”, a collective hive-mind entity. They plan to implant an impossible image in its brain, knowing that upon release it will reconnect, shunt the image upwards for the hive mind to try to understand, and thus drive the entire Borg stark raving mad as it tries in vain to compute the information it is receiving.

This analogy is admittedly crude, I’ll grant you. It is, I submit, also a pretty accurate picture of what might happen when an MCA member grows a climate conscience.

Paula Kahumbu: Enlightened conservation efforts are needed to save the world’s rhinos, combined with a total ban on trade in rhino horn

Today, September 22, is World Rhino Day. Rhinos were once widespread across Asia and Africa and even in Europe, where they are depicted on cave paintings. Today their situation is precarious.

The world population of the northern white rhino now consists of 5 individuals. Sudan, the last surviving male, is now beyond breeding age. He and two female companions are living out their lonely final years under the care of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

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Victoria's renewable energy target of 40% by 2025 has passed the lower house – but the state opposition has vowed to kill it if they get into power.

Tesla prepares to announce "big battery" milestone, as Musk drops in for a space conference and storage industry awaits results of Victoria tender.

The 5.2m male reptile, one of the biggest ever seen in the state, was found with a bullet in its head in the Fitzroy river in Rockhampton

A massive saltwater crocodile – said to be one of the biggest ever seen in Queensland – has been shot dead in Rockhampton.

Police and state environmental officers were investigating after the 5.2m male reptile was found with a bullet in its head in the Fitzroy river on Thursday.

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Origin Energy will trial peer-to-peer solar energy trading using the blockchain-based platform of Perth start-up Power Ledger.

How Andrew Bolt and other right wing commentators picked up a new climate study published in the Nature Geosciences journal and got it hopelessly wrong.

It will enter clinical trials to prevent and treat the infection next year.

A new study shows that Neanderthal brains developed more slowly than ours.

The call of storm petrels are recorded for the first time on islands where rats came ashore from shipwrecks.

Why firms are spending millions to beat each other into orbit

The fast-growing US solar industry is at odds with itself - and the decision may be left to Trump.

Sir David Attenborough spoke to the BBC about Zoo Quest, the environment and the planet's future.

One of the ironies of fighting climate change is that developed countries – which have benefited from decades or centuries of industrialisation – are now asking developing countries to abandon highly polluting technology.

But as developing countries work hard to grow their economies, there are real opportunities to leapfrog the significant investment in fossil fuel technology typically associated with economic development.

This week, researchers, practitioners and policy makers from around the world are gathered in New York city for the International Conference on Sustainable Development as part of Climate Week. We at ClimateWorks will be putting the spotlight on how developing countries can use low- or zero-emissions alternatives to traditional infrastructure and technology.

Read more: How trade policies can support global efforts to curb climate change

Developing nations are part of climate change

According to recent analysis, six of the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gases are now developing countries (this includes China). Developing countries as a bloc already account for about 60% of global annual emissions.

If we are are to achieve the global climate targets of the Paris Agreement, these countries need an alternative path to prosperity. We must decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. In doing so, these nations may avoid many of the environmental, social and economic costs that are the hallmarks of dependence on fossil fuels.

This goal is not as far-fetched as it might seem. ClimateWorks has been working as part of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, a global collaboration of researchers looking for practical ways countries can radically reduce their carbon emissions – while sustaining economic growth.

For example, in conjunction with the Australian National University, we have modelled a deep decarbonisation pathway that shows how Australia could achieve net zero emissions by 2050, while the economy grows by 150%.

Similarly, data compiled by the World Resources Institute shows that 21 countries have reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously growing their economies since 2000. This includes several eastern European countries that have experienced rapid economic growth in the past two decades.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Low Carbon Index also found that several G20 countries have reduced the carbon intensity of their economies while maintaining real GDP growth, including nations classified as “developing”, such as China, India, South Africa and Mexico.

‘Clean’ economic growth for sustainable development

If humankind is to live sustainably, future economic growth must minimise environmental impact and maximise social development and inclusion. That’s why in 2015, the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals: a set of common aims designed to balance human prosperity with protection of our planet by 2030.

These goals include a specific directive to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. Likewise, language in the Paris Climate Agreement recognises the needs of developing countries in balancing economic growth and climate change.

The Sustainable Development Goals are interconnected, and drawing these links can provide a compelling rationale for strong climate action. For example, a focus on achieving Goal 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) that also considers Goal 13 (Climate Action) will prioritise low or zero-emissions energy technologies. This in turn delivers health benefits and saves lives (Goal 3) through improved air quality, which also boosts economic productivity (Goal 8).

Read more: Climate change set to increase air pollution deaths by hundreds of thousands by 2100

Therefore efforts to limit global temperature rise to below 2℃ must be considered within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. These global goals are intrinsically linked to solving climate change.

But significant barriers prevent developing countries from adopting low-emissions plans and ambitious climate action. Decarbonisation is often not a priority for less developed countries, compared to key issues such as economic growth and poverty alleviation. Many countries struggle with gaps in technical and financial expertise, a lack of resources and inconsistent energy data. More fundamentally, poor governance and highly complex or fragmented decision-making also halt progress.

It’s in the best interest of the entire world to help developing countries navigate these problems. Creating long-term, lowest-emissions strategies, shaped to each country’s unique circumstances, is crucial to maintaining growth while reducing emissions. Addressing these problems is the key to unlocking the financial flows required to move to a just, equitable and environmentally responsible future.

Meg Argyriou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Damning assessment by one of the UK’s chief scientific advisers says global regulations have ignored the impacts of ‘dosing whole landscapes’ and must change

The assumption by regulators around the world that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes is false, according to a chief scientific adviser to the UK government.

The lack of any limit on the total amount of pesticides used and the virtual absence of monitoring of their effects in the environment means it can take years for the impacts to become apparent, say Prof Ian Boyd and his colleague Alice Milner in a new article.

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