Oh If Only We'd Ratified Kyoto Earlier!
noob
December 1 2009
QUOTE: Damn that John Howard again, for depriving us of having
air-conditioning-free summers and invigorating heat-free winters.
A READER with a droll sense of humour has come up with an inspired way to
achieve the same environmental effect as KRudd and Malcolm Warmbull's
Emissions Taz Swindle, but without the cost.
Simple, a National Apology on Climate Change. Same effect on global
emissions as an ETS, but with zero cost.
More humour came less intentionally from an online commentator who set out
to detail "What ignoring Kyoto has cost us".
Two things it appears.
Living in smaller houses.
Damn, if only we'd adopted Kyoto we could have been living in British-style
shoe-boxes. Sorry, 'cosy' cat-friendly accommodations. Cat-friendly? Well,
you can't swing ...
Secondly, not being serious about Kyoto has condemned us to cheap
electricity prices. At least 50 per cent below the rest of the world.
If we'd gone for wind farms, nuclear, solar, etc, we could have had more
expensive power over the past dozen or more years.
Damn that John Howard again, for depriving us of having
air-conditioning-free summers and invigorating heat-free winters.
These other countries would soon "have an (unspecified) advantage over us",
according to the commentator.
One rather obvious course of action seems to have escaped the said
gentleman. That a sane government in Canberra, peopled by grown-ups, would
keep our coal-fired power and would keep it cheap.
He'd opened his comment by noting that we still have 85 per cent of our
electricity generated by coal and that coal remained our largest export.
Err, yes. And cutting them will make as much difference to the environment
as the said apology.
Coal is our largest export because people want to buy it and burn it in
steel mills or in power stations.
And will keep doing so.
They actually have grown-ups running their countries.
Warmest Regards
Bon_0
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps
US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists
worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct
from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville