The past is your present, the future is mine. (Confusion by New Order)
by Pippa ~ February 5th, 2007. Filed under: List, environment, politics, thoughtoutloud.I’m no economist. I’m not a business person either. I’m just a modern day hippie who consumes and thinks about how she consumes. So, here are some thoughts about current responses to managing climate change:
Thought One:
Moving to more efficient and less polluting energy sources, adding in carbon dioxide emission taxes / trading etc will increase energy costs. I understand that increased energy costs will affect prices of everything leading to inflation and unemployment. But quite frankly, wouldn’t slightly increased energy costs help reduce energy use?
I don’t want to be harsh, but in general, people don’t seem to recognise how climate change will affect their future, they primarily care about how they will finance their futures. If mindlessly using electricity and gasoline has no immediate financial burden, consumers are unlikely to change their behaviour. Whereas, if energy were more expensive, wouldn’t consumers (both industrial and individual) be forced to use it more efficiently?
Thought Two:
Why on earth is the government not leading the momentum on increased standards for efficiency and reuse in design and manufacturing? For example, if there are requirements that by 2015 all white goods (fridges, washing machines, airconditioners etc) sold in Australia have to meet stringent efficiency requirements, won’t manufacturers produce such products leaving the consumers with no alternative but to just buy the device they prefer? And shouldn’t such standards require demonstration of closed loop recycling at the end of the product life time?
Thought Three:
Is it possible to blanket broadcast An Inconvenient Truth on all networks at once? Either people will watch the best demonstration of how f*&^%d we all are or they’ll switch off their TVs and spend time doing something else.
February 5th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
somehow I feel grass roots ideas are increasingly useless.
I think it is really up to our government now to effect large scale changes. So the best thing to do is lobby politicians.
Making things cost more doesn’t really defer people’s behavior. One simply needs to see the recent petrol price increases; people sill bought the petrol, albiet after more grumbling, and I am pretty sure there wasn’t a huge increase in motorists switching to public transit or walking etc.
Michael says there are ways to reduce our energy consumption without huge job losses or long term economic stresses. Its just short-term money (which would be spent mostly by government and big business) invested in renewable energy like wind, solar, geothermal etc.
The government is just lax to commit such a large sum of money to -any- project that has no direct consequences in the evolution of our state, as say, war.
Because changing energy sources is a short-ish term project (15 years?) but not short enough to happen in one Government’s reign, or perhaps not long enough to not affect taxes signifigantly.
And the government is lax to do anything as it slowly becomes apparent that they should have been doing something 25 years ago, and since when did we loose our world leadership on the research and production of solar?
But people not watching so much TV isn’t really a great solution, its more that we should be expressing our concerns to government and getting them to bite the bullet and commit to this cost. Big business will wear it, in the end.
February 5th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
1. Realistically speaking, we don’t need to curb our CO2 emissions, we need to stop them. Right now. In fact, unless we start pulling CO2 _out_ of the atmosphere pretty soon, we’re fscked.
2. CO2 / emission taxes are a nice idea, provided that the money actually goes towards schemes that repair the damage. Here in sunny London, you can bet your bottom peso that the cash from the flight tax (enforced _restrospectively_, no less), won’t go into trees. Or alternative energies. Or anything much beyond the &^%£ing olympics, and maybe Labour’s slush fund.
3. Nuclear is our only, really viable alternative. It’s not that bad, either. We can work around meltdowns these days, and if we use Thorium, the by-products are relatively harmless (”miostly harmless”).
4. Governments are only interested in re-election. That means not pissing off your campaign-funders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoters. (Keywords: Merkel, Mercedes, BMW, EU Commision).
5. There are rumours of an “emergency broadcast” facility in the Australian telecommunications industry. I’m not sure if it really exists, but this would do what you want, I think. >:)
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:01 am
Meh. I like warm weather, so in the words of many famous cartoon archetypes and a really cool dnb track… BRING IT ON!!!!