Flagrant double standards

28 04 2013

The season of burning is upon us! 

 As we collect firewood for the cold days ahead, we are facing not one but two challenges. While the State government allows us to go into forests and collect dead dry timber, their ritual burning program threatens to beat us to it. The object of this induced bushfire for disappointed arsonists is ‘Fuel reduction’ – that’s to say the burning of all the dead timber accumulated on the forest floor,- as well as the burning of flammable thickets which make for problems controlling a ‘wildfire’.   Considering the minimal gain to public security – ‘health’ – from this burning, as well as its significant contribution to asthma problems in nearby communities, and economic losses to wine growers from ‘smoke taint’, one wonders whether similar results of fuel reduction couldn’t be produced by encouraging people to go and get firewood with incentives.

 But our public health bodies and government departments have other ideas. Far from encouraging us to burn ‘Biofuel’ to heat our homes, and recognising that it is one way to reduce dangerous CO2 emissions, these bodies have concluded that the particulates from wood heaters are an intolerable health hazard, and on that basis would be better banned or regulated out of existence.  The Age reports:

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/wood-fires-focus-of-pollution-cut-20130426-2ik44.html

The recommendation -

“Options being considered by COAG range from doing nothing and letting emissions decline as households moved to gas and electricity heaters, to introducing regulations that would require all new heaters to carry efficiency ratings and release just 1.5 grams of particulates per kilo of wood burnt.”

It is one thing to suggest people burn gas for home heating; gas is relatively clean, and using it this way makes use of most of its energy. But the suggestion that by using electricity to heat our homes ‘emissions would decline’ is dangerous nonsense.  Not only is the main source of electricity in Victoria from Brown Coal, and so inherently more than twice as ‘emissions intensive’ as gas, but the process of transforming it into electricity and bringing it hundreds of Kms to the consumer makes it perhaps FIVE times dirtier than gas. This is because the power station only extracts 35 – 40% of the heat energy from the Coal – the other 60 – 65% goes to heat the air in the Latrobe valley, and then a further proportion is dissipated in the transmission lines.

 These days of course, many people have solar power for electricity, and may use this as an excuse to use more electricity for home heating than they otherwise would. I actually have friends with underfloor heating who have done this – previously it was simply too expensive.  This however is not only a false economy but an extraordinarily decadent  option. If you want to heat your home with solar energy you need roof windows and good insulation, or a solar water heater and hydronic system; neither will be much use when the sun isn’t shining, and this is the time that your home will need heating.

 The problem with using the solar electricity in this way is that it simply means that the other things in your house which would run on it, like TVs and lighting, are powered by that dirty old coal in Gippsland; as we know it isn’t possible to run TVs or lighting on COAL directly. This means that those people who look out on Loy Yang’s smokestacks, between coughing fits and with watery eyes, will get even more of the same while we warm our toes on beautiful clean electric power.

 But back to the WOOD.  Even though the government and bodies who came up with this stupid advice admit that the dangerous particulates from wood burning happen mostly because of using damp wood and badly operated stoves, they still see the change away from them to Fossil Fuel power as ‘progress’, and alarmingly as progress that is already underway. Well it’s not progress! And if they like to give this advice on public health they first need to stop burning the bush except close around settlements, and restrict it to times when a genuine slow burn will not kill everything except old trees, leading to a progressive loss of ecological diversity. They also need to think hard about using ‘dry wood’ in Hazlewood power station, where 30% of the energy from brown coal is wasted in evaporating the water in it.

 So get in those wood stores, and don’t let them tell you there’s anything ‘cleaner’ than this remarkable renewable energy source.

– David Macilwain, Rayburn owner.


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Categories : Community Action, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation), Renewable Energy

The critical decade report

10 04 2013

Last week the government released its latest report from the Climate Commission – “The Critical Decade – climate science, risks and responses.”

 
A useful summary of its findings, relating mostly to the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, and the necessity for action now, is contained in this digest:
 
 
It is very regrettable that despite some interest being shown in the media when the report was released, its serious concerns and calls for immediate action have not registered and other matters have allowed the focus to shift elsewhere.

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Categories : Climate Change Adaptation, Evidence for Human-induced Climate Change, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation), Scientific reports on climate issues

On storing Carbon in Soil

24 02 2013

There’s a fair bit of talk going on right now around the issue of so-called ‘Carbon Sequestration’ in Soil, and most of it is avoiding the key issue. This of course is that there is only one good long term storage method for Carbon in the ground, invented by mother nature some 250 million years ago when there was an awful lot of the stuff sloshing around in those swampy humid Carboniferous forests: it’s called ‘fossil fuel’.  Although this stuff is all ‘Carbon’, it’s not all the same; Coal is pure Carbon alone, whereas Natural Gas is Carbon with Hydrogen – Methane, and Oil is Carbon with Hydrogen in chains – Hydrocarbons.  Also stored by mother nature is an interloper, Carbon Dioxide, and its relative Carbon Monoxide, in varying amounts mixed with natural gas.

 One needs to know this most basic science to understand the ‘Carbon Cycle’, where Carbon is used as a means to convert energy from the sun into plant and animal bodies.  Carbon exists in the atmosphere as Carbon Dioxide, which is a stable gas and a useless one; it is the final waste product of all living processes, following its ‘combustion’ in their metabolism, or its combustion by fire. In living plants and animals, compounds containing Carbon and Hydrogen – Carbohydrates and Hydrocarbons – are the energy source necessary for life. To extract their energy they are ‘burnt’ in the body by combining them with Oxygen, so the Carbon becomes Carbon Dioxide, and the Hydrogen becomes water – Hydrogen Dioxide.

 The other side of this cycle is performed only by plants, which use ‘photosynthesis’ – solar energy – to separate the Oxygen from the Carbon Dioxide and synthesise compounds such as fats and starches….

 Why this matters  is that there is currently far too  much oxidised Carbon in the atmosphere from which all the energy has been removed, and not enough energy and space for plants to remove it to restore the balance. We desperately need to restore this balance before the increasing CO2 overheats our home, and so look for ways to ‘sequester Carbon’ in the soil and take it out of circulation. This means it must be in a form that cannot be broken down by microorganisms, or eaten by animals or termites.  While some forms of ‘organic matter’ in the soil are very slow to decompose, ecosystems require that they eventually do; the only consequence otherwise is an accumulation of carbon such as happened in the Carboniferous era, or as happens in Peat bogs, where carbon compounds are prevented from breaking down because of lack of oxygen in waterlogged ground.  There is however one exception to this – Charcoal.

While various bodies, both governments, research stations, and private businesses, all try to promote the idea of ‘Carbon Farming, or sequestration, as an opportunity and a necessity, all such schemes fall down at the first two gates.  The first of these is that all  carbon that goes into the soil through natural processes will finally come out again, with no net gain. ( unless it is charcoal as the result of fire that gets buried)

 The second gate is that Charcoal is chemically much the same as Coal. So we may go to extraordinary lengths to safely  bury Carbon as Charcoal, for instance by growing tree crops, burning them for fuel in limited oxygen, and burying the Charcoal – while in the next paddock some bloke is digging up COAL. And until we stop mining and burning coal, and mining and exporting coal to be burnt ( what else?) we are simply kidding ourselves that our efforts have the slightest effect.

Some recent reports about the subject:

Background briefing on Carbon Farming:
The World Today on the Australian Terrestrial Carbon Budget:
Abstract of Aus terrestrial carbon budget:
Abstract. This paper reports a study of the full carbon (C-CO2) budget of the Australian continent, focussing on 1990–2011 in the context of estimates over two centuries. The work is a contribution to the RECCAP (REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes) project, as one of numerous regional studies. In constructing the budget, we estimate the following component carbon fluxes: net primary production (NPP); net ecosystem production (NEP); fire; land use change (LUC); riverine export; dust export; harvest (wood, crop and livestock) and fossil fuel emissions (both territorial and non-territorial). Major biospheric fluxes were derived using BIOS2 (Haverd et al., 2012), a fine-spatial-resolution (0.05°) offline modelling environment in which predictions of CABLE (Wang et al., 2011), a sophisticated land surface model with carbon cycle, are constrained by multiple observation types.
 
(If this seems incomprehensible, the key to its essence is in the ‘Net ecosystem production’ – a quantity based on various models which the report explains can vary so much as to be more than Australia’s total annual emissions, depending on whether it’s wet or dry for instance. The idea contained in the WT report, that soil is currently sequestering one third of Australia’s fossil fuel emissions, is to my mind a complete fabrication, and little more than wishful thinking. In any case, as related early in Background briefing’s report, since settlement Australia has lost 70% of the carbon in it soils. SO we need to replace ALL that before we’re even back to square one!)
 
But that’s just my view—  David Macilwain.

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Categories : Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation)

Is this a hot summer?

24 01 2013
  By chance I had a conversation with a neighbour this morning, and being a hottish day it started with the weather. I didn’t mention the question of ‘warming’, but he did, and soon admitted to reading the Herald, which was evidently going on about ‘people fudging the data’.. A story on how some years were deleted from the temperature record because they were thought unreliable, and so on to Krakatoa and god knows where else. I said “so you’re a climate change denier then” –but “Oh No”!  And he wasn’t denying that something was changing ( it’s always changing), but the changes had been bigger in the past, but also importantly “It’s not as hot now as when I was a kid sometimes and it was over 40……”
 
 So this is the warning – I think ‘we’ may be overplaying our hand here.
 On the ABC this morning there was some chap from the Harrietville store, with a bushie’s view of things, and he complained that yesterday some ‘hi-fallutin’ bloke had dropped in in a chopper and “put the livin bejesus into us”, and consequently most of Harrietville’s population had left, leaving the town, which wasn’t imminently or necessarily threatened by the fire front, relatively unprotected. He was concerned that if there was ‘ember attack’, that there wouldn’t be enough people to stop fires igniting in all the properties where the owners were away, and any fire would clearly be a threat to all.
 
 Despite the complete failure of the government and others to talk about climate change when they should have, when the Tassie fires were at their worst, the message seems to have got through to the collective semi-conscious that this summer is ‘hotter than usual’ and bad things will happen, and we all need to be alert and alarmed. Perpetual doubters like me then get told off for playing down the risk, and specially for saying that climate change won’t necessarily make this part of Australia hotter..it all depends which way the wind blows.
 
So on the average, has this been a ‘hot summer’ so far? – in this particular part of Australia.  It has certainly been an odd summer, and sometime before Christmas it was actually rather cool, with a few snow showers in the Alps. We have had a significantly long dry period, but despite that, the land is not dessicated as the water tables started the year very high. Springs are still flowing well, and Sandy Creek, which dried up several years back for the first time in decades, is now burbling like it used to because the its catchment in the bush is still relatively damp.
 
  But it’s not that  I agree with my neighbour; when I said “Ah but what about the Arctic melting?” he bounced back with “It’s been ice-free before”….
 
  The big problem as I see it is in the variability; who can say whether the Indian Ocean will start to cool again, or how this will affect our weather? We were just told to expect some ‘cooler than normal’ weather because the Indian Ocean is hotter than ‘normal’, but oddly it’s been like this for most of the last decade, and this was allegedly why we had two cool wet summers.
 
  On a vaguely related note, I’ll just note that I heard the head of the IMF Christine Lagarde, talking about the necessity for measures to restore economic growth in Japan, Europe and the US, and then a moment later talking of the urgency to act on climate change because of its threat to, well, growth?  How is it that someone like her can stand up and say “Black is the new White”, and then immediately start talking about it as Black, without anyone saying “but surely Mme Lagarde —-”

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Categories : Australia's emissions targets, Community Action, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation)

For Auld Lang Syne –

30 12 2012

Not about to get sentimental or self congratulory about ‘our’ achievements in 2012, or make any conciliatory approaches to the leaders of governments and industry who are making life hell for the next generation, in an indulgent orgy of forgiveness and consumption.  I can’t even say that it will be good to see the back of 2012, as it will inevitably be followed by a year in which the current downward spiral continues. There will be no ‘saving graces’ with  the only moderation provided by uncertainty as to how rapid this decline will be.

  In a recent indication of how things are stacked against us, and how the failure in 2012 to even start to redress the balance will be repeated, the International Energy Agency released a pre-Christmas report of its projections and plans for global energy supply for the next 30 years.  In a report on this from the ABC :  http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3658714.htm

the thinking of the energy industry and ‘resource analysts’ is revealed, and in particular their failure to take account of the emissions aspect of energy sources, or even apparently to be conscious of it:

STEPHANIE SMAIL: The IEA report found coal demand is increasing in nearly every region of the world apart from the United States, where natural gas is displacing coal.

David Lennox says that trend is unlikely to catch on in other countries.

DAVID LENNOX: Unfortunately around the rest of the globe, natural gas is not an easy commodity to be transported. It does require billions of dollars to actually convert it to a state where it can be moved.

This makes coal very competitive, and hence coal will for probably many years to come actually still stay quite a significant supplier to the energy market, and especially electricity generation markets.

The implications of this increasing use of coal for CO2 emissions are admitted to in the report, but the ABC lines up someone who can put a positive spin on this, rather than someone who calls for government regulation or change to prevent such a disaster situation developing.   Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute, who is clearly an industry advocate explains his viewpoint:

TONY WOOD: The forecasts that we’re talking about in the IEA do not, cannot happen if the world is to meet its greenhouse gas reduction emissions that the IEA and the World Bank say that we have to meet without carbon capture and storage. And right now we don’t have, in Australia or anywhere else in the world, the technology developments such that carbon capture and storage will work.

— The rest of the report goes on to discuss the lack of spending – “investment” – on CCS, and having just portrayed it as the only solution to the conundrum of controlling emissions while continuing to burn coal, discusses how we can accelerate and develop this (fantasy) – and must:-

Tony Wood says that’s well short of what’s needed.

TONY WOOD: It’s not a very nice solution, but practically it’s the only alternative there is and we are not doing the things that we need to that would be consistent with achieving that.

So in Australia, we’re making a small amount of progress. The Australian Government, to give them credit, did establish the global CCS (carbon capture and storage) Institute and they have established the CCS flagship program, but the rate of progress is appallingly slow, but we are not alone.

Around the world, there is nothing like enough activity to go anywhere near meeting the IEA’s projections of what would be required to have a consistency between expanding fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And with the Australian government fully committed to expanding Coal and Gas extraction and export in the mid term future it is clear that his extraordinarily blind – delinquent really – attitude to fossil fuels  is shared by our government. Their pathetic attempts to appear to tackle emissions are thus revealed for what they are  – green window dressing.

In the light of all this, we should consider carefully our ‘new year’s resolutions’ – avoid ‘try to do better’ and go for ‘try to do differently’, but most importantly, if you think an ‘extreme’ message might be unpopular, shout it louder….


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Categories : Australia's emissions targets, Climate Change Adaptation, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation)

Australia’s commitment to Emissions reductions.

29 11 2012

For anyone who’s been following our pretences in the international arena to emissions reductions under the Kyoto protocol, this weeks announcement of a ‘target’ under the second Kyoto period – 2013-20 -will come as no surprise; we don’t plan on making any further ‘cuts’.

 In fact this isn’t quite true – we plan to make a cut of 0.5% on 1990 levels by 2020 – a cynical and ridiculous target which is necessary to avoid rejection from the whole process, and official categorisation as a pariah state on climate change action.  There are many countries around the world who are at least making an effort to do the right thing, and prepared to make some sacrifices for the global effort to tackle and slow climate change, and it is to be hoped that they will see straight through Australia’s ‘bad-faith’ commitments. At some point these countries may begin to think about punishing Australia for its pursuit of self interest, by putting taxes on Australia’s high carbon exports – a categorisation that will now apply to everything we export as it will be tarred with the one dirty brush.

  Central to understanding our bad-faith commitment to action on carbon emissions is the realisation that we started with an original sin – fiddling our figures on the 1990 base line with some bogus claims about land-clearing, and arguing a ‘special case’ to be allowed this concession when no other country is.  This has given us a head start to claim increases as reductions, but now the rort is finally catching up; we have no more land-clearing to stop and so  must find something else, and this is — stopping land clearing somewhere else!

  So our planned real emissions for 2030 will be in the order of 30% greater than now, but by claiming foreign offsets as well as dubious domestic offsets, we will pretend to make a reduction.. (a little reduction)

 In the recent Energy White Paper, the government predicted increasing use of gas for electricity generation, and a corresponding reduction in emissions from this source. Some recent events however put this in doubt. 

 There is currently a big push on to ‘exploit’ our reserves of Coal Seam Gas – that is Methane currently locked in Coal deposits – and this is being portrayed by the energy industry as necessary to ensure ‘energy security’ for the future. Notwithstanding the well publicised hazards of CSG extraction, or at least the hazards of copying cowboy operators like Halliburton in the US who have made such a killing out of ‘Shale gas’ there in the last five years – research last week revealed that the ‘carbon emissions’ from CSG extraction may be a lot higher than they appear because of Methane leakage in the process. This research showed that it was highly likely that these ‘fugitive emissions’ from CSG extraction could constitute 2-4% of the Methane taken out. Because methane has a ‘greenhouse effect’ around 75 times that of Carbon Dioxide in the short term ( less in the long term thanks to its shorter life in the atmosphere), a leakage of this order is equivalent to 150 – 300% extra emissions of ‘CO2 equivalent’ gas.  When one takes into account also that methane is commonly ‘contaminated’ with carbon dioxide, up to 20% depending on the source, the ‘Golden Age of Gas’ foreseen by Energy minister Martin Ferguson doesn’t look so golden at all, except in the way of the bags of gold energy companies plan to extract from the Australian householder.

  – And all this in a week when reports of melting Arctic permafrost portend an accelerating problem with methane’s Greenhouse warming ability; the quantities of the gas which could come from these mountains of thawing organic matter in the tundra would dwarf even our profligate emissions.


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Categories : Australia's emissions targets, Coal Seam Gas, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation)

WATCH Press Release: Comment on ‘The Critical Decade’, Australian Climate Commission Report

14 05 2012

THE CRITICAL DECADE: New South Wales Climate Impacts and Opportunities

Report by the Australian Climate Commission

 Download full report here.

WATCH response to above report, compiled by Lizette Salmon.

 - – -

The impacts of climate change described in the Climate Commission report did not come as a surprise to WATCH spokesperson, Lizette Salmon.

“This report, like many that have preceded it, makes it clear that much of NSW, including, by implication, the Border region, will be vulnerable to increasing climate variability and increasing intensity of extreme weather events, such as severe droughts and occasional flooding rains, crop and livestock losses, more destructive bush fires, more severe heat waves, flourishing of invasive plants and pests and adverse impacts on human health. This is not the sort of future we want for ourselves or our children. We need to change it and we can change it”, said Ms Salmon.

WATCH supports the opportunities and actions and outlined in the Report, including the need for more public transport and to move beyond coal.

“Too much money is being spent on roads and not enough on rail. This report emphasises the need for much more investment in low pollution public transport,” said Ms Salmon.

The Report reveals that “A train line can move 50,000 commuters per hour, whereas a freeway lane can only move 2,500 in the same time.” Despite this, research by the Australian Conservation Foundation shows that NSW has been spending twice as much on roads as on rail. “Given that rail is 20 times more efficient in moving people around, and has less than a quarter the pollution, it’s time governments got serious about improving rail infrastructure”, said Ms Salmon.

WATCH is also very supportive of the Report’s plan for more renewable energy. “Here in Australia coal mining is a fast growing source of greenhouse pollution, while the Asian economic power houses are busy making plans to transition to renewable energy. Japan installed 1,000MW of solar photovoltaics in 2011 and is introducing a feed-in tariff for renewable energy that starts in a couple of months, while China has targets to build a massive 210GW of solar and wind by 2020. Yet NSW is planning to double coal exports from Newcastle, and build the equivalent of 15 new mega mines in the Upper Hunter and Liverpool Plains. This is so counter-intuitive to climate action it’s ridiculous”, said Ms Salmon.

“Currently only 6% of electricity produced in NSW is from renewable sources, even though the NSW government has a target of increasing this to 20% by 2020. Why isn’t the Government working harder to achieve this target? WATCH recently conducted a second large survey of local residents, and found that support for renewable energy remains very high. Border residents want more renewable energy and they want the government to build large scale renewable energy; actions that are consistent with the recommendations in the Climate Commission report.”

“The opportunities for regional Australia to capitalise on renewable energy are enormous.  Regional areas such as Albury Wodonga have a massive solar resource which has barely been tapped yet.  Developing these resources means jobs for Australians, stable electricity prices and a more stable climatic future.”

“The NSW Government has been playing cheap politics over the carbon price, Australia’s first serious attempt at reducing greenhouse pollution. Instead of pandering to the interests of the mining industry, which are clearly not in the national interest, they should be showing leadership, be part of a global effort to avoid the future shown to us in the Climate Commission’s report, and put people and communities ahead of mining executives.”

 - – -

For more comments on the potential for solar energy in our region, see also:

http://www.bordermail.com.au/news/local/news/general/solar-plant-pie-in-sky-says-sophie/2475691.aspx


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Categories : Climate Change Adaptation, Media Releases, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation), Renewable Energy

Event Review: ‘Let’s Build Big Solar’ Campaign Launch

3 03 2012

The morning of Friday 2 March saw a small but hardy bunch of renewables enthusiasts congregate on the outskirts of Wodonga to launch the ‘Let’s Build Big Solar’ campaign. Plans had included sunscreen as well as gumboots.  Luckily the weather was kind and it was at least dry if a bit windy.

The launch location was a large block of land behind the Wodonga Salesyards in Bandiana which had been identified by the North East Greenhouse Alliance as a potential site for a large solar thermal power station. Indeed with its existing power substation (i.e. existing transmission line infrastructure) and flat, open land it appeared an ideal site.

The purpose of the national Let’s Build Big Solar campaign is to rally community support for medium to large scale solar energy plants and to encourage the Federal Government to provide funding for such plants through its $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation. This month will see many other grassroots Climate Action Groups from around the country conduct similar launches in their local areas.

After viewing the site, posing for photos and speaking to reporters from the Border Mail and Newsweekly, attendees of the Albury-Wodonga launch were treated to a stimulating presentation by the Managing Director of PSE Communication and Electrical, Paul Shelley. Paul and his wife visited Spain recently and attended guided tours of the three solar thermal power stations (Gemsolar, Valle 1 and Valle 2). Spain has undergone an incredible transformation, moving from being a net importer of electricity to a net exporter, thanks to the construction of countless acres of photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines as well as the solar thermal power stations. For a country with less solar intensity than Australia it is clear they are streets ahead of us. The Australian Government needs to get its act together and make good its commitment to large scale renewables.

In the next couple of months, WATCH members, together with people from many other Climate Action Groups around Australia, will be conducting thousands of community surveys to gauge community attitudes to big solar and then present the findings to Parliament. If you would like to participate in one of these brief (less than 5 minutes) surveys or are able to assist with conducting some surveys, please contact Lauriston Muirhead on 0419633297.

For more information on the Let’s Build Big Solar campaign visit: www.100percent.org.au/bigsolar

Further information on the Spanish Gemsolar power station is available at: www.torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar-plant/en

***The Let’s Build Big Solar launch was covered in the local media…


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Categories : Events, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation), Renewable Energy

Media analysis in the leadup to COP-17 in Durban, South Africa

28 11 2011

The seventeenth annual meeting of the council of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins today in Durban, South Africa, where the international community will continue negotiations to strengthen the global greenhouse gas mitigation regime.

You can follow the progress of the COP-17 via the official website.

Here is analysis from several different media outlets and think-tanks on the prospects for the talks…

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SBS World News Australia

Durban – Quick guide to the climate summit

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Peter Christoff

The Conversation

And what if nothing happens at Durban?

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The Climate Institute

Policy Briefing: Durban Climate Summit

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Giles Parkinson

The Climate Spectator

Durban talks off to a bad start

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The Guardian

Durban Climate Change Conference 2011 (news portal)

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Simon Retallack

The Huffington Post

Durban Climate Conference: The Only Way is (Bottom) Up

_________________________________________________________________________


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Categories : Climate Change Adaptation, Evidence for Human-induced Climate Change, Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation)

WATCH in the Media: David MacIlwain – ‘Carbon tax is the way forward’

7 08 2011

WATCH member David MacIlwain had the following letter published in the Border Mail, 26th July 2011…

“When Julia Gillard declared six days before the last election that “there will be no carbon tax” our hearts sank. This had been the last chance for urgently needed action to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions.

For years under Howard nothing had been done, even to hold steady our emissions.

In 2007 there was much concern and Australia voted for Kevin Rudd partly for his commitment to act on “the great moral challenge of the generation”.

Sadly indeed this was a challenge he was unable to rise to and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme his government created would actually have assured Australia’s ongoing status as global climate action pariah and shelter for the world’s dig and burn billionaires.

The Greens, who manage to preserve a modicum of independence from the rich and powerful, as well as some disdain for their treatment of our only home, couldn’t vote for the scheme even though they were desperate to “put a price on carbon”.

After political difficulties over the Emissions Trading Scheme, the Greens began advocating a Carbon Tax, ironically an alternative previously favoured by Tony Abbott.

When Julia Gillard had the chance to save the country from the COALition by joining with the Greens, her only option was to adopt this carbon tax, and break her earlier promise.

At least there was now a chance of joining other nations benefiting from expanding renewable energy supplies and cooperative action.”

See original article here on the Border Mail website.


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Categories : Reducing Our Carbon Footprint (Mitigation), WATCH in the Media

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