In the dying hours of the COP15 Conference in Copenhagen last year, I called up the USSC’s Robert Hill for the third of our series of chats about climate change and the process of negotiating a means to address it. At the time, no one knew quite what the end result would look like, but the outcome was beginning to take shape, and Mr Hill was kind enough to give us a look into the end game. See the view from inside below, and look …

I've been thinking a lot, as the decade ends, about things that have changed since 2000. In particular, I've been thinking a lot about changes in American culture.  Sure, there are the really big things one cannot ignore, but there's a cultural change I just can't seem to get past: the changes in American TV over the last decade.  After reading Emily Nussbaum's wonderful piece titled When TV Became Art, the first decade of the…

I hope everyone has enjoyed their Christmas period; it's certainly been an exciting time for us here at the USSC blog. Exciting and filled with upheaval, actually: We've shifted the entire blog, that is, we've shifted Erin Riley and myself over here to Washington D.C. Erin and I will be spending the next couple of months interning at Capitol Hill, under a program arranged through the USSC called the Uni-Capitol Washington Internship Pro…

This past Thursday morning, I once again dialled Copenhagen and spoke to the USSC's Adjunct Professor in Sustainability, Robert Hill. Hill will be teaching a course here at the Centre titled "Climate Change After Copenhagen: Australia, the U.S. and the world," in Summer School 2010. He was once upon a time a Senator for South Australia and a Minister in the Howard Government, which he followed with a stint as Ambassador to the United Na…

Last Tuesday morning Australian time, Monday evening Copenhagen time, I spoke with the USSC's Robert Hill, who also happens to be head of the Australian Carbon Trust, a former Australian Ambassador to the United Nations, and a representative at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Here's what we talked about:

There was something almost American about the front page of last Friday's Sydney Morning Herald. Front and centre, above the fold, in black and white: a free press advocating the overthrow of the government. Well, sort of; it was actually the only slightly less-dramatic beginning of a campaign by the paper to change the New South Wales state constitution to allow the electorate to recall the government of the day. Now, that is something…

For the next couple weeks, at least, Denmark is going to be known for something other than Hans Christian Andersen and an Austrian pastry: add to the list Copenhagen's United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009! Representatives from nearly 200 countries have shown up, and the fun and festivities kicked off yesterday. Since nobody expects a binding deal to result from the summit, you would be forgiven for feeling pretty cynical about …

John Adams, the award-winning miniseries about the second president of the United States, was on SBS last night. It’s a powerful telling of the life of John Adams, his involvement in the founding of the United States, and his time as President of the United States.

Is it any surprise that Barack Obama's speech to West Point cadets announcing an additional 30 000 troops for the war in Afghanistan has been so poorly received? Given, in essence, the question the Clash's Joe Strummer posed in 1982 - should I stay or should I go? - Obama answered with a decisive "Yes!" 

At the moment here at the Centre we've got Professor Fred Greenstein, a presidential historian from Princeton University, visiting us. He's going to be chatting with Bob Carr about the Obama Presidency this afternoon at a public event at Sydney Uni (details here if you're interested in an evening of American politics), but he gave a smaller lecture yesterday over lunch. (You might have seen me tweeting updates from it if …

It's not unusual for the press to decide upon a narrative and stick to it.  President Obama has many times been a beneficiary of this practice.  But after his trip to China, Obama found the press had chosen a decidedly negative narrative: that the trip was pointless, and that it achieved nothing.

That's the USSC's Simon Jackman writing on the results of the USSC's survey on the opinions on climate change of Australians and Americans [PDF]. He wrote that before the events of the past week, which saw the Senate delay and probably reject the Labor Party's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, but his point still stands. Australia will almost certainly introduce an ETS, even if it doesn't get it done before Copenhage…