This week your intrepid hosts return some friendly fire from esteemed peer and friend of the pod Erwin Jackson! Despite Erwin’s commentary on the positive role IAMs have played aligning the finance sector around rallying support for a 1.5C scenario, one currently immuno-compromised T. Reed refused to de-escalate and doubled down on the critique. Frankie weighed in on guard rails and it all went south quickly. We await further commentary from Erwin and others to populate our newly minted IAM CRISIS CORNER section of the pod :-)  

Our deep dive this week sees us wade into controversial waters to tackle the most talked about paper in town, the Commonwealth’s “Safeguard Mechanism Reforms consultation paper”, currently open for comment until Tuesday 20 September.

Helping us unpack the fraught history of this Steven Bradbury of climate policies and ‘last fire in the forest’ is a very very special guest: none other than the battle-hardened, climate politics guru of note, the inimitable Katharine Murphy! We were super chuffed and not a little starstruck that Katharine, political editor at Guardian Australia, took time out from her writing sabbatical (look out for her Quarterly Essay at the back end of this year) to talk all things Safeguard with us.

In the course of the pod we also flag another, related and ongoing policy review that will have implications for the Safeguard and is also not without a level of controversy: the independent review of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) being led by former Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb. The panel led by Chubb is yet to begin public consultation but that is due to kick off imminently so stay tuned!

Luke, Tennant and Frankie’s collective One More Thing for this week was appreciation to the marvelous Katharine Murphy for taking the time out to join this pod. We hope her writing sabbatical goes well and on the off chance you’re not already following her on socials, you can find her on twitter @murpharoo.  

That’s all folks, see you next time! Please keep tweeting your thoughts to us at @LukeMenzel, @TennantReed and @FrankieMuskovic and email us your suggestions for papers to read at [email protected]!