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This is, of course, the same Australia that banned incandescent lightbulbs! while remaining the per-capita most polluting nation on earth.
Meanwhile the UK government has joined in with the lightbulb ban, while adding a third runway to Heathrow Airport and building our first new coal-fired power station in decades. Yay, governments care about climate change!
5 comments:
Yeah, I'm hoping the newly elected PM does more about climate change; Howard was rather noncommital about it.
I'd've imagined it wouldn't be so hard to switch a deal of Aus's power generation from coal to solar...if you can get the storage facilities good enough to handle surges. It is possible that I am talking out of my ass. But hey, he is SuperRudd, and will fight Climate Change with his magical aeroplanes! ¬¬
I now have an image of Rudd in Superman costume, underwear outside the pants included. Thanks, Thene. =P
The whole climate change debate is a joke. While there is no doubt that we are having an effect on the environment, the planet will heal itself - it always has. The hootest year on record isn't recent it was in 1934, (ok that could have been a freak year), but during the Ice Age the glaciers reached down to Hull and dissapeared with remarkable rapidity - long before we started emitting CO2. And while the planet may need our help, and I fully believe we should all try and be more green, I would guess that over the next 20 years technology will provide us with enough benefits to assist in the self-healing of our planet. As a former trader, I can't help but feel that the "green tax" being applied to anything in the UK is just another rip-off from the joke government we have. And wait for London to open up its carbon emissions exchange soon.
As for Australia, well I have long-suspected that OZ is the whore of the pacific rim they like to make a lot of gestures but have little to back it up. A good example is the Brit and Aussies that borded the Japanese whaling ship. I don't agree with whaling, and we all know it is not for scientific research but if Australia was serious about its protests, they would simply ban all Japanese fishing fleets from australian waters. But then there is the possibility that they would lose some of that Japanese investment, (just take a walk around Darwin), and what about those long-standing commodity trades with Japan?
I think I read somewhere that the recent global warming conference in Bali generated as much carbon emissions in 10 days as Chad generates in a year - result! They should have held it in my old town of Medan where they could have gone to see what remains of the oldest rain forest in the world and how it has been decimated by the palm oil plantations used for bio fuels. Unfortunately Sumatra doesn't have an Oberei Resort or a Grand Hyatt hotel.
Carbon emissions trading is a scam. The environmentalists are the first to admit it, too - according to their figures, the required cuts are so massive that there's no one to 'buy' them FROM. And if you *don't* agree with the environmentalists' figures, what's the point? Emissions trading is just a way for the government to throw money at the problem in the hope it will go away. (same goes for all green taxes, unless those taxes are directly invested in specific useful projects. The new coastal wind project sounds fantastic, but will it ever happen, or is it just - ahem - hot air?)
Climatic variation is a weird beast. The big thing about the ice age, though, is that we weren't there and didn't have to worry about whether our lives, economies and cities would survive it. It's not the planet that needs our help - it'll still be here no matter what, and life will go on - it's just that if we don't stop hindering, the planet is going to undergo changes that will make it far more hostile to us. We won't be able to rely on seasonal weather patterns for food production or water acquisition any more, for instance. So it's us and our domestic crops and animals that need the help here.
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