How much money will local councils spend and federal government provide of rate and tax-payers money to try and hold back the ‘seas of time’? When will the fact that global warming is an issue that comes as a result of humans burning fossil fuels get traction; or will corporate government spin-doctoring and bare-faced liars (like Abbot) with untold funds hold sway?

We are celebrating the return of the inland sea, but how has it come about? One sixth of Australia’s landmass is up to 10 metres below sea level, so should we be considering the threat to farmland (usually in lower lying areas) and that Australia is now a net importer of food; that farmers will lose their water rights …. does it make sense? Well yes, if you control corporate government and foods imported pass through your hands, you will make a lot of money.

But let’s keep it simple; when you heat water, it expands ….

Connecting Extreme Weather Dots Across the Map:

Talking about the weather isn’t small talk any more by Janet Redman (USA).

I took a cross-country road trip in late June that became a race to outrun the triple-digit heat waves that have literally buckled highways between the Midwest and the East Coast. The record-breaking scorcher was an apt send-off. As I weaved my way across the United States, I found the consequences of extreme weather everywhere I looked.

After the heat, the first sign of something unusual came in Iowa. There, every creek I crossed seemed to overflow its banks. Water pooled in cornfields. By the time I reached Nebraska, radio advisories warning about bridges closed due to swollen waterways seemed routine.

Late one night, I pulled under an overpass between Sydney and Potter, Nebraska, to find refuge from hail big enough that it cracked my windshield. There, I met an off-duty police officer who said he’s spending more and more time cleaning up after an increasing number of tornados and micro-bursts like the one we were trapped in.

Meanwhile, the drought-wracked southwest was blazing. New Mexico was experiencing the largest wildfire in state history, and an all-out battle was being waged by fire-fighters to steer the flames away from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where radioactive material for making nuclear weapons is housed.
Now the concern is contaminated soil being washed into the Rio Grande by flash floods in deforested canyons. Fires in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are adding up to a record-setting wildfire season.

This year’s waves of floods and fires followed the unprecedented series of tornados that hammered towns in Missouri, Alabama, Kansas, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Talking about the weather isn’t small talk any more. Something is amiss.

But for some reason we’re loathe to take the next step and connect the dots of extreme floods, heat waves, droughts, and storms popping up across the map to reveal the bigger picture: climate change. For years, scientists have told us that as the planet warms up, we can expect changes in whole patterns of weather and in trends like how much moisture the atmosphere will hold. Some places will get dryer, others wetter, and others hotter. In its 2010 State of the Climate report, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traced some 41 indicators showing that broad shifts and individual extreme events that have occurred over the past year are indeed consistent with scientists’ predictions of a warmer world.

Notably, for the first time two studies published in the journal Nature have demonstrated a cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and increased rain and snow events, and thus with increased flood risk. The question before us now is not whether the natural disasters making headlines across the United States are somehow connected, but why we are so reluctant to connect them.

My theory is that it’s just too scary. If we admit that these extreme weather events have something to do with a global system, it feels too complicated to do anything about or prepare ourselves for. If we accept that climate change is something caused by the way we consume and produce everything from food to fuel, then we also have to admit that we need to fundamentally change the way our economy works.
But no matter how daunting the challenge of climate change, we have to get our heads out of the sand. If we don’t, the rising waters will drown us. We need to demand investment in ideas and infrastructure that will reduce our emissions and create good jobs like rapid public transit, renewable energy systems, energy efficient buildings, and local food production.

We have to rein in the power of corporate interests like coal, oil, gas, and big agriculture that take government handouts with one hand and push us deeper into ecological chaos with the other. And we have to strengthen the social safety net that will catch and care for families when the inevitable natural disasters hit vulnerable communities. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Janet Redman is co-director of the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network (SEEN) project at the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS is a community of scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. www.ips-dc.org

Three days on from Julia Gillard’s policy announcement, and the most striking characteristic of the carbon tax debate is just how closely it resembles a dozen retards trying to fuck a doorknob. The only apparent solution is a massive airdop of Xanax into our reservoirs, because really, everyone needs a few deep breaths and a spell in the quiet corner.

Sure, the weeks leading up have all been hysteria: Tony Abbott marching that bulldog grimace up and down the length of the country, like a Cassandra made of old leather and stunted dreams, cawing grim warnings of imminent ruin and destruction at the gates of Troy. But you might have expected, once the details had been released, there would arrive a little more perspective.

Nothing doing.

Far from being objective carriers of information, media outlets have been trying to manufacture furore. “Families earning more than $110k will feel the pain of the carbon tax,” warned the Herald-Sun, straightfaced. “Households face a $9.90 a week jump in the cost of living.”

$9.90.

Cry me the motherfucking Nile.

Households on less than that income would be even less affected. Those in the upper range would have their ten bucks a week at least partly compensated, while others would be fully or over-compensated.

The tax, after all, was not on people, but on 500 high-polluting companies. The compensation was to guard against costs those companies might pass on to their customers.

So, no big deal, I said to myself when the details were announced. Surely this’ll all blow over. And then, found myself more than a little surprised when a Herald-Sun commenter (one step above YouTube on the food-chain, I’ll admit) said “Somebody needs to assassinate Julia Gillard NOW before she totally destroys our way of life.”

Just… hold up a minute. Ten bucks a week? Our way of life? Aside from incitement to murder a head of government being ever so slightly illegal (and something the Hun mods should probably have picked up on), the response just doesn’t make any sense. Here is legislation that might make some things marginally more expensive. Probably not much. It isn’t going to drive industries offshore, because things like power generation and mining Australian resources kind of have to be done in Australia.

And yet the hysteria, even when not reaching Lee Harvey Oswald levels, has been constant throughout, led by the paper who defines ten bucks a week out of a hundred grand as “feeling the pain”.

“Social demographer David Chalke said the tax threatened values at the core of Australian society. `To an extent it will make people question, “is it really worth the bother?” They’ll smell in this something of a class war,’ Mr Chalke said.”

Ten bucks a week. Core values. Class war. Then, “Generous payments to those on low incomes and higher taxes for high income earners would anger hard-working Aussies.” Because, people on less than $110,000 don’t have to work hard. That’s why they get paid less! Scrubbing toilets is easy and only takes five minutes, while high-level boardroom execs spend 20-hour days chained to some kind of awful lunch machine being beaten with lobster foam.

I also enjoyed “On 3AW yesterday, Treasurer Wayne Swan was unable to say how the carbon tax would affect a Falcon. He also couldn’t say what the price change for a can of tomatoes would be.” The random grocery quiz had undone the Treasurer yet again. “Wait, wait, wait, got one…uh… large box of Libra Fleur? Nope. Uh, Sara Lee Chocolate Bavarian? Hah, you got nothin’, Swanny!”

Then there were the numerous headlines about airfares set to “soar” (geddit!). Well-meaning travellers were interviewed saying higher airfares would make it much harder to afford family holidays. Tres sad, especially when Qantas “said it would need to fully pass on the carbon price to customers, with the price of a single domestic flight ticket to increase on average by about $3.50.”

Three dollars. Fifty cents. They currently charge you more than that for a bottle of water. They charge $7.50 to buy a ticket online, $8 for a cup of noodles, $25 to use their check-in counter, and $6 to board the plane first. The best comment left after that article was, “So people won’t be able to buy a newspaper for the boarding lounge anymore? Good.”

So let’s never hear any talk of ABC bias ever again, because the Sun has well and truly picked its horse on this one. Any online article on the tax was headlined by a video of the lovely Andrew Bolt, telling us it was “the greatest act of national suicide we’ve ever seen.” Funny, I thought that was when they gave him a TV show. There was also a great line about “so-called solar energy” – because now solar energy is just a theory too. Like gravity, or Adelaide.

I am a sometime journalist. In that sense, the staff in the Herald and Weekly Times building are my colleagues. This makes me feel a bit like whorehouse linen. No doubt they all say they’re just doing their jobs, looking for opportunities. Nonetheless, they’re still actively promoting harm for the sake of attracting an audience. Concentration camp guards are just doing their jobs, too.

And with that level of reporting, the effort from their readers is no surprise. “Co2 is not a pollutant. It is vital for life on Earth. Without it, trees will die,” said John. Get that man on the climate panel.

“How much will Australia’s temperatures decline once the tax is implemented?” asked Marty. Well, Marty, the atmosphere takes notes about where its constituent particles come from, so we’ll get a full report from the Hole in the Ozone Layer each quarter. He wears a jaunty hat, and gives every boy and girl a delicious melanoma.

The dumbshititis was also evident in the audience of the Prime Ministerial Q and A on Monday, where the average question could be summarised as, “I’m a person, and I don’t like paying money. Can I not ever pay money for things?” My favourite line, from a surgical swab of a man towards the end of the show, was that because he earned too much to be eligible for low-income handouts, “I feel I’ll be taxed into poverty.”

This taps into a very prominent feature of our political landscape: the constant line from Tony Abbott that Australian families are hurting, that Aussies are doing it tough, that life is somehow getting harder, that the cost of living is on the rise.

Shenanigans, Tony. Let’s get one thing very clear. Australians, en masse, are enjoying a better standard of living than has ever been enjoyed in this country’s history.

And not just marginally, but by a huge degree. Really, along with a few other developed countries, we are enjoying a better standard of living than any group of people has in human existence. We have every kind of food and beverage from around the world deliverable to our doors. We have technological advances that make a decade ago look archaic. We have goods and luxuries of every conceivable kind; cheap and accessible. We have more and better options with transport, entertainment, comfort, place and style of residence. We have the most advanced medicine and best life expectancy of all time.

While there is still poverty in Australia, it does not even touch the kinds of poverty experienced in most countries on earth. Support systems and sufficient wealth exist to cover at least basic needs. The small proportion of genuinely homeless usually have other factors that keep them away from those systems. Being poor in Australia means living in a crappy house, in a crappy area. Maybe a commission flat. It means living on welfare, getting by week to week, not having any money for nice things. It might mean the kids have to go to their friend’s house to play X-Box, or that they don’t get sweet Christmas presents. It sucks, but it’s safe. It’s solid. It keeps you alive. It’s a level of stability and security that half the world would kill for, and even the basic amenities of a commission flat are amenities that half the world doesn’t have.

Poor people in Australia do not starve to death. They don’t die of cold. There is clean water running in any public bathroom. If they’re ill, they can walk into a hospital and be treated. If they’re broke, they can get welfare. They can get roofs over their heads, even if they’re temporary. They have options. If the utilities are shut off, they can find a tap, or a powerpoint. They can make it through the night.

And those poor aside, the rest of the country is doing very fucking nicely indeed, thanks very much. Reading these stories of parents bitching about working long hours to afford their private school fees just makes me want to give their little tow-headed spawn a spew bath. The lack of perspective is astonishing. Their kids are safe and fed and healthy and getting every opportunity to do whatever they want with their lives. They’re not getting sent out to suck tourist dick for enough US dollars to get their siblings through the week.

It should make us ashamed that there are people with good earnings ready to claim victim status on national television over a worst-case scenario of five hundred bucks a year. This is what is driving people into a panicky rage. Five hundred dollars, if you can afford it. Less if you can’t. If you run a red light camera in Victoria it’s $300. Do 40 ks over the limit, $510. If we get fines, we bitch about it, but inherently accept the rationale: the fine is levied as a penalty by someone endangering others in the society. It’s the basic structure of how a society works. We all agree to abide by certain rules as a form of insurance, to make sure that we’re not on the receiving end of the negative consequences of lawlessness. When people refuse to abide by those rules, they’re variously censured by or removed from that society.

If we obtain energy by burning irreplaceable fuel, and the consequences threaten the safety of our society, then surely we should pay a penalty for that (adding to a fund to guard against those consequences). The rule is basic: you make the mess, you clean it up. Ten bucks a week is a sweet deal.

But in being part of the luckiest couple of generations of people to yet walk the earth, most of us still like to imagine we’ve got it tough. It’s that same sense of entitlement that I was discussing regarding Raquel a couple of weeks ago. When you grow up with a certain standard of living, you come to regard it as the natural state of affairs. If someone threatens that state, they are depriving you of what is fundamentally yours. To your mind, you have a right to live like this, purely because you’re lucky enough to have lived like this.

Well, you don’t. So if you claim you can’t afford ten bucks a week, I call Shenanigans, with a healthy dash of You’re a Dick. One dinner at the Flower Drum would make up your year’s liability in one hit. Genuinely struggling people will get compo anyway. But even they could afford it if they had to. Buy one less deck of Holiday 50s a week. Buy two less beers. Leave off the Foxtel subscription. Wear a franger, save half a mil. What the fuck ever. Remember that you live in a country where drinkable water comes out of a tap inside your goddamn house, and where the power runs 24 hours a day. This in itself is a goddamn privilege, and if you are going to bitch and moan about having to pay for that privilege, you can fuck off and die in a ditch.

Because you do not have a right to this way of life. No-one does. We just have the extreme good fortune of enjoying it, and that won’t last forever. We should appreciate it while we can.

Perversely, part of me wants to see what would happen if the sea levels rise a couple of metres, the coastal cities get swamped, the rainfall dries up, the power goes out, the militias take to the streets. Part of me would love to see these squawking indignant right-to-luxury dickwipes learning how to live in the dust, scraping out dried plants from the earth and hoarding their remnants from the Beforetime. It’ll be a sight if it happens. Dirty red skies will rise up from the ground each morning like a curse. The only creatures that seem to thrive, the cockroaches and carrion birds, will swarm black against the sand and the sunset, rasping dry songs with their throats and with their legs. The water will be gone. The world will not remember ice floes. And for her sins, for ten dollars a week from each and every one of us, Julia Gillard will hang from the garret at the gates of Troy.

In his GCI Insight Seminar Series presentation, GCI Research Fellow Guy Pearse takes us behind the ‘Climatesmart’ branding and asks how much longer Queensland expects to tackle climate change by increasing spin rather than cutting emissions.

Last year the Queensland government released a glossy 424 page strategy called ‘ClimateQ: Towards a Greener Queensland’. There were lots of new ‘Climatesmart’ initiatives, but no timetable for cutting the state’s greenhouse gas emissions from their current level—the highest in the country. Instead, the government acknowledged that current policy would leave Queensland’s emissions 36% higher in 2050.

Though the emissions generated by the state’s coal exports are Queensland’s biggest single contribution to climate change by far, they were not mentioned in the strategy once. Meanwhile, the government is spending billions of dollars on infrastructure to help Queensland double coal exports over the next decade or so. The legacy of that is a state generating more than 50% more greenhouse pollution at home and abroad than Australia’s current national total. Seemingly en-route to becoming the ‘greenhouse ghetto of the South Pacific’, Queensland looks determined to fuel climate change as much as it feels it.

http://gci.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=142366

Transcript and References of Presentation © Guy Pearse 2010 [PDF 4.3 MB ]

Amazing fact: Queensland exports the annual emissions of the average Queensland household every second.
Dave Kimble

Would you argue climate science with this fellow?

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him. The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge. Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion – which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.

“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.” The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.

Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive – for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form “It’s 113 degrees outside – good thing global warming’s a myth!”

Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn’t actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.

In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics – allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves. In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/

Man-made global warming theory [AGW] says that climate change is caused by the CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels. As the human population increases the inexorable need for energy from fossil fuels increases and therefore the level of AGW increases.

AGW is similar to the theory of Thomas Malthus, the 18th century clergyman who thought that human population would outstrip natural resources and that natural calamity would be visited on humankind through disease, starvation and pestilence. Malthus’s theory could never have understood what a person like Norman Borlaug achieved in applying agricultural technology to farming to greatly increase food production or how modern medical technology has saved billions of people.

But Malthus has modern advocates like Paul Ehrlich and science advisor to president Obama, John Holdren. Both Ehrlich and Holdren think there are too many people on Earth; they both think too many people will exacerbate AGW and that natural retribution will be as bad as Malthus predicted.

In their 1977 book, Ecoscience, Holdren and Ehrlich advocated forced abortions and community sterilisation. They also supported a world superagency for control of population and the environment. This idea has underpinned the United Nations approach to AGW and was central to the recent Copenhagen process with the Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] solution to AGW based on the UN having governmental status and powers.

Population control and reduction is a view shared by other leading AGW supporters. In Australia Clive Hamilton and Glenn Albrecht advocate drastic reductions in population. Albrecht, a former Newcastle academic now based in Western Australia, thinks that the true sustainable population of Australia should be no more than the Indigenous population which existed before European settlement occurred. Other leading green commentators like Keith Farnish and Finnish philosopher Pentti Linkola also see humanity as a threat to nature, and again their solution is for the population to be severely reduced to a few million living in a non-technological primitive state.

This message, that humanity is bad and destructive, is one that is increasingly informing AGW philosophy and promotion. The `evil’ has been extrapolated from the fossil fuels and CO2 to humanity itself. Instead of James Hansen’s coal trains of death and the demonization of CO2 it is now humanity which is the problem.

It is a message which is focused on and directed at children. Al Gore gives special induction seminars to young people where he tells them they know more than their parents; and the EPA’s head, Lisa Jackson, has developed the Environmental Justice Movement based on cadres of children fighting AGW.

The promotion of the Copenhagen conference on AGW was based on advertisements showing children threatened by AGW. Other videos also feature children as victims. Lately, however, the tone of victim has been changed to instead show children as conscious activists and potential eco-warriors.

The threat is palpable; AGW is the cause and the battle to beat it will be ruthless. The most recent video defines the problem and the solution.

The group behind this video are known as 10:10. Their homepage describes their mission as being to cut CO2 emissions by 10 per cent. The homepage is colourfully presented with lots of young smiling faces. The incongruity of the juxtaposition of young, potentially fertile people and the message in their video of culling those people who do not believe in AGW [the "final solution"] has obviously been overlooked by the 10:10 organisation. Irony is not a strong point amongst AGW advocates.

The irony is that AGW as a concept has been driven because it is ostensibly a threat to humanity. But what appears to be really driving AGW is not concern for humanity but a hatred of humanity; misanthropy. Paul Taylor in his book, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics states: “The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty `Good riddance!’.”

Biologist David Graber, in a Los Angeles Times book review of Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower says:

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Perhaps Graber can get together with Prince Philip who wishes “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

The insidious aspect of this misanthropy is that it is being inculcated to children. What a desolate form of self-loathing we are bequeathing our future generations. The comparison with the 1969 moon landing is stark. On that occasion when Armstrong said “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, a generation were empowered and inspired.

By comparison what has the great moral issue of our time, AGW, given us; only fear and loathing and an obscene amount of wasted expenditure. It is time for the vilification to stop; it is time for humanity to reclaim its self-confidence and for our children to be no longer used as vicious propaganda tools.

Anthony Cox is a lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics. Joanne Nova is a freelance science presenter, a professional speaker, TV host, radio presenter, author and blogger.

Both the ALP and the Coalition have brought policies that most independent analysis suggests will fail to reach the presumed bipartisan target of a 5 per cent reduction in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020.

That, in itself, makes both policy positions untenable. They don’t match the science, they don’t match the expectations of public polling and they don’t match the business need for some sort of certainty to unlock the tens of billions of investment that must be made to bring Australia’s energy network, and its broader economy, into the 21st century.

The most remarkable thing is that the media and the electorate will let them get away with it. The extent to which they do will be answered by the performance of The Greens, the party – according to RBA board member Warwick McKibbin – that has produced “closest to the best policy on climate change”. And the only party that is unable to deliver it.

How the politics of Dumb and Dumber entered the climate debate can be traced back to the fateful day in Canberra when the Liberals rolled Malcolm Turnbull and, much to their own surprise, put Tony Abbott in his place.

Abbott’s climate scepticism didn’t win him any greater support, but his “great big tax” mantra certainly hit a nerve – mostly Labor’s. It fits neatly into a newspaper headline and an audio sound bite: so effectively, that Abbott hasn’t been compelled to produce another original thought on the matter ever since.

The Labor government has been unable to resist the scare campaign, centred as it is around the impact of energy prices in the western suburbs of Sydney. Ever since Rudd pulled the ETS, destroying the last vestiges of his credibility, and was finally dispatched, and Gillard and her advisors dreamed up the Citizens Assembly, the ALP has tried to create a smaller target for the Opposition.

Gillard didn’t even mention climate change in the official election launch, but the Opposition took a shot at it anyway, suggesting it had a secret deal with The Greens to produce an interim carbon tax. So Labor retreated further and promised it would not.

The ALP has promised a suite of policies that sound nice and are steps in the right direction, but don’t mean a lot because they lack ambition. The fuel efficiency measures still leave Australia well behind the rest of the world, the emission caps on new power stations will not affect those already in the planning stages, and the reward for early action for business means nothing unless company boards can see a carbon price.

The Liberals, bizarrely, have chosen a direct action scheme that rewards the two groups that argued loudest against an emissions trading scheme – the farmers and the heavy emitters – by creating a private and exclusive “abatement market” run by bureaucrats and to be paid for by taxpayers. How did this get through?

It reminds some observers of the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme which was panned by a subsequent audit as being next to useless. Even more bizarrely, the Liberals climate spokesman Greg Hunt compares it to the UN Clean Development Mechanism. That, though, produces a tradable commodity, a Certified Emission Reduction unit. It’s a carbon market! Albeit one that has been rorted horribly because it is run by bureaucrats.

None of this is quite as bizarre as the concept of the citizens assembly. As soon as 14 million Australians go to the polls to elect their leaders, the ALP (presuming its re-elected) will go to the phone book to find 150 souls to consider a strategy to address the greatest moral and business challenge we face.

It turns out that UTS researchers have already done something similar, but much more extensive. A project they conducted, targeting not just 150 Australians, but 7000, and staggered over four in-depth studies, concluded that most voters want the government to adopt an ETS now, and to target bigger reduction targets.

The four studies – conducted at yearly intervals – showed that voters wanted revenues generated by an ETS to be used to ease poverty, assist seniors and invested in research and development, and not to be used to reduce taxes for business.

Professor Jordan Louviere, who headed the research, said it showed that the proposed Citizen’s Assembly was unnecessary – what the community has clearly wanted for years is an ETS.

“It is possible, now, for the government to come up with a workable ETS plan that meets the community’s expectations and makes the trade-offs clear that will come with an effective plan,” he says.

“From the public’s perspective any climate change plan consists of eight key features: When does it start? How will revenue be collected? What will be done with the revenue raised? What happens with the transport sector? Are energy-intensive sectors of the economy given special treatment? Does the plan have a strong R&D component? What reduction in carbon emissions should Australia aim for? Finally, should Australia move now or wait for other countries?

“We asked our survey respondents to choose between plans consisting of different options for these features. In doing so we made it clear to them the nature of trade-offs that would be involved in, say, holding back on the start of an emissions trading scheme or protecting certain industries.

“Overall our results suggest that Australians are committed to a climate change plan that works. They believe that it is happening and clearly recognise that there are substantial costs to adopting a plan.”

Try getting a politician to say that. Maybe on Monday.

http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/path-least-resistance-0?utm_source=Climate+Spectator+daily&utm_campaign=a5bcf06f72-&utm_medium=email

Climate Institute deputy chief executive Erwin Jackson said the government’s approach “was the kind of standard you would have introduced 15 years ago if you were trying to drive a change in technology; it’s the standard you have when you do not have a standard,” he said. The standard would apply only to new stations that are not yet proposed and can change after consultation with state governments, the energy industry and environment groups.

Ms Gillard is a manipulative piece of work; small wonder she and Tony Abbott get on.

She recommitted to considering emissions trading in 2012, with its earliest possible introduction in 2013 – the about-face that she backed and which played a central role in Kevin Rudd’s downfall, she also promised to;

• Create a 150-person “citizens’ assembly” to examine the science of climate change and the consequences of emissions trading.
  But isn’t that what we elect people to Parliment for; and we’re going toi ask 150 – unskilled people – to talk about it for a year? Will it be like the 2020 community discussions?
• On top of the 150 people, we get a Climate Change Commission of experts to inform the public about climate science and report on the level of international action to cut emissions. Huh? And then Invest $1 billion over the next decade in the electricity grid? That’s just a modest deposit on one power plant!

I am annoyed … Bob Brown has sold the preferences for what? While the Greens climate change spokeswoman Christine Milne said Labor’s proposal
was a farcical stunt straight from the script of television’s political satire The Hollowmen, my question to her and the Greens is, ‘what are you going to do about it?’

It’s like watching a smaller person being picked on and saying “Stop that behaviour” but not raising a hand …. we need another political party!

Derivatives are a rort as the GFC (Global Financiaol Crisis) shows, but if they put a price on carbon, will it just make more money for the finance sector, where more derivatives are sold than exist (like shares) at assumed increased vaules or that arent even owned by the seller (who hopes to buy some in the interum and then on-sell at a profit) ?

Julia Gillard isn’t dumb and she must appreciate right now, she can weight much of the proposals put in front of her with her own touch while she has a full head of steam and seen to be leader of Australia. If she exercises this power now, it will entrench her more and weaken those who will wait for her light to burn less bright as time and lack of absence takes effect.

Combating climate change is the single most important challenge of all time and people should not make money out of it. We need to tax carbon emissions heavily, so that emitters – everyone – starts to watch their emissions because they cost too much; but like taxing tobacco, alcohol and fuel, these taxes reduce consumption of goods. The cost to the environment massively outweighs any GST or conventional tax, so a big emissions tax will see everybody pay at a rate equal to their consumption.

Tobacco is taxed at about 75% of the retail price and alcohol and petrol are taxed at about 50% of retail price; and these products still seem to hold popularity. The Australian population is convinced that action on climate change is essential, so a big tax on carbon is imperative; the more energy that goes into a product, the greater the emission tax component. Its like cereals, rolled oats is about $1.20 per kilo whereas a highly processed oat flakes with honey and nuts sell for $8+ a kilo.

And lets start placing some higher tarrifs on imports to cater to the emissions generated overseas and in transport to Australia, to keep that ‘level playing field’ the politicians are so often keen to talk about.

Co-chair of the three-day conference and director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Professor Jean Palutikof, warns Australia will be one of the hardest hit developed countries in the world when climate change starts to bite. “The science tells us climate change is happening faster than we thought and that the window for us to adapt and prepare is smaller than we thought,” Professor Palutikof said.

“Australia is already experiencing the effects of climate change and is likely to be one of the most severely affected among developed countries. “Regardless of what mitigation actions we take now as a nation, or globally, to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it is too late to mitigate our way out of the problem; we will need a mixture of adaptation and mitigation measures.”

The CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship Director Andrew Ash said the conference is the first to focus solely on practical adaptation measures. “Adaptation is about preparing for climate change in order to minimise its impact on our natural, built and social environment,” Dr Ash said. “The precise level of impact is difficult to pinpoint, so successful adaptation also means building our resilience to cope with uncertainty.

“The impacts from climate change will be felt first and most severely in developing countries, and international co-operation is required to ensure developing countries have the tools and resources they need to adapt.” The conference topics span the economic costs of adapting; options for health, emergency and community services to cope with the added strain climate change will place on them; and adapting agriculture to cope with changing weather patterns to ensure long-term food security.

The trust recently compared the costs of six carbon-reducing measures. To save a ton of CO2 requires an investment of $131 in electric-vehicle technology, $51 in solar energy, and $18 in wind. It takes $57 to capture and store a ton of carbon from coal and $13 to save enough trees.

The biggest bargain? Birth control. At $7 per ton of carbon, family planning can reduce emissions by cutting the number of unintended births.

The idea has sparked controversy, not least because of the implicit suggestion that carbon sinners in the West should limit the reproductive capacity of the carbon poor in the developing world. But backed by David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Paul Ehrlich, and other prominent conservationists, Project Director Roger Martin hopes the project will cut through the politics to address the impact of a burgeoning world population.

As Martin says, “It [Popoffsets] offers a practical and sensible response. For the first time ever individuals, companies, and organizations will have the opportunity to offset their carbon voluntarily by supporting projects to provide family planning services where there is currently unmet demand.”

The Optimum Population Trust has created a website (www.popoffsets.com) that allows travelers the opportunity to reduce their impact by contributing to family planning in countries with limited access to contraception.

A calculator on the group’s website determines typical carbon emissions for individuals in different countries: an American family of four emits about 82 tons of carbon each year; a donation of $575 can offset the impact. It would cost more than $4,600 to capture and store the same amount of carbon from coal.

The project sponsors insist that they oppose initiatives that advocate coercion. Instead, funds will go to regions where contraception is in short supply. In Madagascar, for example, women have an average of five children, and only one in five women has adequate access to birth control.

http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/589