Last Friday kiddo and I trammed down St Kilda Road together in the morning. We past a low and long concrete sign, about 15 feet long, which said “COPENHAGEN”. I guess it is a reminder to passers by, of what is happening in a very cold Denmark this week. It isn’t the wisest choice for a climate change and global warming summit. Delegates would be less inclined to think global warming is an issue, in a wintery Scandinavian city in December.
Majority of Australia has been chest beating and lamenting that it needed to act on global warming and climate change before it loses icons like the Great Barrier Reef, the Kakadu and the Tasmanian wilderness and before devastating drought pulverises Australia in general. So Rudd and Penny came up with the emissions trading scheme (ETS) – a carbon trading scheme which basically touch us for more taxes. Forget about any trading scheme – we will basically be taxed even more, and for what? For all the chest beating and self righteous forking out Australia will not make a dent in pushing back global warming, if indeed it is man made in the first place. Not especially if the biggest polluters would have been exempt under the scheme anyway. Coal miners will be able to continue mining and exporting their products and be exempt under the scheme.
But even if we are happy to pay higher prices for all of our goods and services and paralyse our industries, are we ever going to make any difference? Wouldn’t China, India, Brazil and the US for example, continue to choke this planet by their billions? Like many issues in the past, Australia appears to be punching way above our weight, except this time around it is going to cost us dearly.
It will be like I am paying for the mess on my street and in the park across the road when my home is one of the smallest houses on our street and I hardly contribute to the mess whereas the huge houses up the road who mess the street and park heaps more than I do, refuses to pay for the clean up. Even if I am generous enough to pay for it, surely I must make sure there is a way for these huge houses to stop messing up? Otherwise, I would be burning a hole in my pockets for absolutely no benefit. Is Rudd that shallow? Surely he cant miss the fact that while the ETS can accord him temporary bragging rights, world leaders are really going to see him as a goose instead?
Ante 