This is scary:

Did you know that Western Australia, Victoria, NSW and Queensland are talking about recommissioning or refurbishing old coal fired power stations, or even building new ones?

All they are waiting for is for the Rudd Government’s emissions trading bill, with its woeful targets and weak carbon price, to pass and they’ll have the signal they need.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, legal advice to the Greens from two senior barristers shows that, if this bill passes, the Government won’t be able to turn it around without paying even more billions in compensation to the polluters.

This puts paid to the flimsy notion that we can pass this failure of a scheme now and easily improve it down the track.

You can read more about how the CPRS locks in climate failure here. Source.

I believe that there should be no compensation for any business because of carbon trading. Let the companies raise their prices to cover the extra costs. Then compensate the consumers who can’t afford it, the pensioners and the low income earners.

There are lots of other comments on the Green’s site.

“Australia has tonnes of land to put solar plants [on] for all the cars in Australia. If you think about it, over a period of 10 years, Australia could build a 50 gigawatt solar plant in a heartbeat, all made by Australians, all installed by Australians. There’s nothing in science or technology that’s missing. It’s a question of will and a question of financials.” (from SMH)

Let’s stimulate the economy by spending on something like this. Let’s make non-polluting transport a reality.

Malcolm Turnbull has called on the government to delay the start of emissions trading because of the world financial crisis!

Emissions trading, though flawed, is a vital step in the fight against climate change. The cost of delay far outweighs the cost of such a light start to the scheme.

The emissions trading scheme must start as soon as possible.

We have finally done the right thing by the world and ratified Kyoto!

I have just read a very poor article in SMH titled Recycling offsets car emissions – study.

It starts by comparing the recycling of a bin of paper and cardboard to driving 7200km. This is a significant error. 7200km at 8L/100km gives 1382kg of CO₂ (from Australian Greenhouse Office). This is compared to 90kg from recycling 26 bins of paper. Try 450km.

The article is based on a draft report (pdf 766k) from the Waste Management Association of Australia. The report quantifies the source of the 2.7% of Australia’s CO₂ emissions that come from solid waste landfill.

According to the report almost 50% of paper and cardboard in waste is recycled, most of it from homes. If this was increased to 100% we could reduce the annual CO₂e emissions by 5 million tonnes. A worthwhile goal. The report also explores other avenues of reducing emissions and even generation of biogasses to replace fossil fuels. Laudable goals.

However, I can find no mention of the figures Hannah Edwards used in her article. Maybe they came from Mike Ritchie, the NSW president of the Waste Management Association of Australia who is quoted saying “Recycling effectively offsets those car emissions”.

That is the problem with this article. Recycling does not absorb greenhouse gasses as trees do (over many many years). It just stops some of those gasses being produced. It definitely does not give us permission to drive our car further.

Another disturbing implication is that if increase the amount we recycle by consuming more then we are benefiting the environment. In fact we are just consuming more and requiring more to be recycled.

Don’t misunderstand me – recycling is good. But calling it an offset is at best misleading and at worst a license for people to continue polluting our poor old planet.