Energy Efficiency

So what’s upsetting the apple cart in Peter Garret’s – no nuclear power (except when I vote for it cause I have to toe the – Rio Tinto – party line) and kRudd’s Kyoto protocol going down like a kamikaze pilot and the token Penny Wong setting back the Asian cause by 50 years (now you Asians know how we feel when yobbo Aussies give us a bad name overseas).

But the worm is turning and newspapers seem to be coming out of their hiatus (probably because there was no longer investigative journalism, just namby pamby kowtowing to the high spending politicians.

I’ve long lamented that Victoria has been selling ‘green power’ derived from burning off of old growth forests and how Energex sold GreenSmart at a premium to well meaning consumers when there was no way that much alternative energy (solar and or wind power) was available.

The Federal Government’s GreenPower scheme is crap, a major exercise in spin-doctoring and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has asked a state government agency and energy suppliers to stop telling customers that using GreenPower will ‘‘make a real difference’’ to the environment.

The report suggests (as I have complained about for many years now) that almost a million households buy GreenPower, paying extra on their power bills to support renewable energy and shrink their carbon footprint.

But the problem isn’t so much that the energy companies now have to support and seek out alternative energy, they just not allowed to tell us suckers that using their energy leads to ‘‘significant results for our environment’’.

Federal Minister for Climate No Change, Penny Wong, is said to be facing a growing revolt over changes to the GreenPower scheme, amid claims from the consumer organisation Choice and environmental groups that voluntary efforts to cut emissions will simply allow large polluters to pollute more, but she doesn’t care.

From her perspective, we don’t pay her wages, her salary is chump-change, she is in it for her real employers (which includes post politics) and the big money; the fact that her quality of life like the rest of her family and future generations will be far worse off is of little concern.

While GreenPower customers have made a great contribution to the financial coffers over the years, the fact remains that even with the best efforts of Australian households and businesses in buying Green Power, Australia’s emissions have still grown every year since 1998.  Instead of marketing words ‘You can make a real difference’, they will replace it with ‘You have the power to choose’, but no doubt will be allowed to use green colour themes and rainforests shots (taken overseas as our rain forests are progressively cut down).

The next spin-doctoring phrase is changed from ‘significant results for our environment’ to an equally misleading fabrication ‘renewable energy for our future’, what a crock of shit; this just proves that the energy corporations have succeeded in making believe energy can be renewed … there is no such thing as renewable energy.