How I love politics and big business, Johnny come lately indeed!

Amory Lovins has since 1970 odd been advocating energy efficiency as the way to deal with energy needs and shown as recorded in Factor Four many examples some already adopted by business. His research unit Rocky Mountain Institute www.rmi.org has produced many commercially viable ways of reducing energy usage most paying the cost in a commercially acceptable time. Like minded people, Germany Japan Holland and more have followed years ago.
Yet Lovins is rarely cited, he has been here, and though his ideas are used by some and pushed by the States business has yet to acknowledge particularly in Australia.
Probably watching cricket!

Carbon trading or more correctly selling thin air.

History is full of examples of snake oil salesmen selling products of dubious value.

Remember the dot com bubble. It burst. I seem to remember an example being given about the tulip bulbs in Holland where prices skyrocketed to astronomical heights and investors got burned badly.

A trend which emerged was a countries introduced restrictions on polution by the manufacturing industry, the industries simply pulled up shop and moved to countries which did not have the same restrictions on polution. For the simple reason that it was cheaper for them to polute, than it was for them to reduce their polution emissions.

It's going to be a spectacular sight when the thin air comes crashing down and then watching the ducking and weaving of those involved trying to avoid taking responsibility for selling thin air.

I would merely point out that emissions trading is not without precedent. It was used in North America to great success to address acid rain. Naysayers predicted economic catastrophies but the overall cost to the economy was a fraction that originally predicted. Market based measures like emissions trading allow a least cost response to environmental issues, foster innovation and new industries and are hardly comparable to the .com bubble or tulip bulbs or "selling thin air".

The only alternatives to emissions trading I am aware of are likely to be considerably more expensive for the world's economies and more difficult to implement on a global scale.

"Carbon leakage" from economies is explicitly addressed in the emissions trading design proposed by the States and Territories. For more information visit http://www.emissionstrading.net.au/

Trying to disceen whether climate change (and carbon trading) is of sincere concern to the Coalition and Labour parties, or simply a timely election issue is proving difficult for me.

While the economy remains more important than the society (a la Margaret Thatcher) I remain sceptical of any altruistic motives by the politicians.

With a free-market economy that regards each person of society as a potential consumer and consequently inundates us with a variety of non-essential stuff, the most important aspect of initiating change hasn't even been whispered.

The argument as to which source of energy will triumph is predicated on the notion that consumption will continue to rise at the annual rate of 53% per annum and this has to be met to ensure continuity.

Similarly to water, where, on water restrictions we have had to learn to do more with less, as a society, we have to take personal responsibility for how much we are taking from the Earth's resources as compared to proactively regenerating them.

Do we really need the latest whizz-bang gadgets?

Do we have to have more petro-chemical derived plastics in our households when industrial hemp plastics are available (in some countries) that actually break down in a few years, rather than centuries?

In the words of Ghandi, 'be the change you want to see'. Personal responsibility is the most powerful change-agent and now is a perfect time to commence altering our own attitudes and behaviours to consume less, and be the example to other generations.

bush goddess

I read the editorial in to-days Australian with great interest. Could it be that the global warming scare has run its course? Are we about to witness the end of a paradigm?

Reckon the present carbon-tax schemozzle sounds simply like
more trillions in profit for the corporate mafia.

Have a macro-economics volume here as part of my post-grad in the general social sciences in 1989.

The volume also dwells on Reagonomics and the supply side economy.

It also has a section dealing on - would you believe - environmental problems. Also so surprisingly for these days, the section contains a paragraph suggesting that all factories like Alcoa et al, should have meters fitted to their smokestacks and discharge pipes, the money used for scientific research on ways to clean the poisonous waste before it goes out.

From a social science point of view, it could be now asked why have not corporates who now own most of the world's capital, been accordingly taxed for polluting the environment over the years?

Certainly the real culprits are our leaders and politicians who seem so bent on letting the Big Biz capitalist racketeers call the profit tune most of the time