Let’s see if we can just clarify this emissions trading debate.
Tomorrow the Government’s ETS bill will be defeated, but the Government is insisting on a vote anyway rather than talking to anyone. And the Government insists on wrecking its own renewable energy target into the bargain.
The Government’s bill won’t do anything about emissions, and nor will the nearest thing to a Coalition policy, its Frontier Economics modelling. We’ll just pay the rest of the world for the right to keep polluting, and make sure our big polluters don’t have to do anything. In fact, the only real dispute between the Government and the Opposition on emissions trading is whether polluters should pay a tiny fraction of their emissions costs, or nothing at all.
Big polluters are insisting that, despite having to pay virtually nothing for the cost of their emissions under either model, they face financial ruin.
And the public don’t have the faintest idea how emissions trading works and are completely disengaged from the debate over model details. They just want something done about climate change and know that the experts think emissions trading is the way to go.
This entire debate is being conducted under false pretenses or on the basis that what is manifestly not the case, is. Is this the best a democracy can do?
Of course this is all a furphy. Your analysis is dead-on. Making the ‘solutions’ very abstract and removed to a global forum of international ‘experts’ is the best way to keep people from local action and critical thinking and to mire action in impenetrable jargon and unverifyable accounting of C02 tradeoffs, offsets, sinks etc.
There is so much more we can do for ourselves, crucially by stopping removal of vegetation for population, infrastructure and economic expansion. For instance we have in Victoria a record of climate change related fires which can be linked at their worst to the thinned and managed forests here. See Victorian Bush-fires: ABC 7.30 Report ignores facts, creates scapegoats”. We have climate refugees now living in tents in the winter cold as a result of these fires. Yet, in this most cleared of states, Mr Brumby is about to send in the loggers to Brown Mountain, where 600 year old trees testify to the very low risk of out-of-control fires in old growth forests. Most recently scientists have tied forest to inland rainfall (Deforestation drys continents – new theory explains how and a huge environmental and political experiment in Borneo by Willie Smit demonstrated they are right (“Recreating Eden”. Climate activism is a huge source of organised public action in the name of which small groups should be able to act. Instead we see a crowd hypnotised by Al Gore and captured and harnessed by various local political groups in their usual quest for power and dollars. It amazes me that the Al Gore Climate Change activists, for all their repetitive noise are apparently unaware of or incapable of stopping the destruction of forests in Australia.
We also have at least two homegrown major applied science theories and practice in the structural ecology of Peter Andrews’ Natural Sequence Farming (NSF) and the social theory (as well as the farming theory) in Bill Mollison’s Permaculture.
With this in mind, I hope I may now call peoples’ attention to some crucial local political action to save Brown Mountain Forest for tomorrow in Melbourne. News just in is that the Brown Mountain decision will be made in a week or so and loggers will go in immediately afterwards! This is a huge forest and logging it will make a HUGE difference to CO2 emissions and local and regional temperature and rainfall if allowed to proceed in this (it bears repeating) the most cleared of Australian states. Protest tomorrow (12 August) at 10.30am on the steps of Parliament House Victoria. Everyone who can come along – young and old. Contact 0413927044