carbon emissions

Josh Frydenburgh, the minister for Energy and the Environment has belatedly released the greenhouse gas pollution data for the period up till the end of 2016. According to the report there has been a considerable improvement in the way the data is recorded allowing them to give more accurate estimates from individual sectors. The data show a total increase of GHG emissions of 0.7% for the last 2 quarters of that year but a considerable drop in emissions from the electricity sector. This could be due to more solar, hydro and wind use, the closure of big users like smelters but also the impact of high energy prices causing more restrained use.

Canadians for a Sustainable Society is a research and activist NGO focused on changing our society’s pursuit of endless growth and ever higher levels of consumption. Simple growth is neither sustainable nor conducive to reducing inequality, debt, fiscal imbalance or achieving environmental sustainability.

The cruise industry is just as shameless as the rest of the shipping industry.

The US EPA concludes one cruise ship can emit the same amount of SO2 as 13 million cars and as much soot as 1 million cars1[1]. But, despite this, the cruise industry is delaying introduction of new health regulations, trotting out scare tactics such as maritime jobs will be lost, astronomical fare increases etc. The cruise industry even sued US EPA so it could keep burning dirty fuel [2]2 – and it won as far as I can ascertain.

If you think aviation emissions are bad, the even bigger problem is the unregulated shipping industry.

[Candobetter.net Editor: To view entire poem, you need to click on the title]

I had trouble keeping up with it a few short years ago ,
But I’m here to tell you all today that I’m still on the go,

I found a way around the fact that “Toys North Pole's" too dear to run
So I globalized activities, outsourced , off-shored and won.

Instead of one big trip each year, I spend nearly all the year in flight,
Placing orders in the Orient in the night and in the light

Population analyst, Brian McGavin, writes about the silent crisis in our midst, of overpopulation. "Today there is a ‘Silent Crisis’ in our midst. The crisis, still largely unrecognised, is potentially greater than all the other problems that transfix our policy makers. For many decades now there has been a willful blindness in recognising that relentless human population growth is one of the pre-eminent problems we face. Rather than providing solutions and leadership, "More and more developed countries offering new ‘baby bonuses’ make it even less likely that we will achieve the lower figures being quoted in the media."

“Why this strange silence? I meet no one who privately disagrees that population growth is a problem. No one – except flat-earthers – can deny that the planet is finite”.
A population growth of 20% by 2020, and at the same time a symbolic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is inherently contradictory and people will be forced to pay an ineffective carbon tax.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard's stated intention to remove from our roads vehicles made prior to 1995," which guzzle a lot of petrol and they spew out a lot of pollution," is naive. Instead of reducing our carbon guzzling, it will increase humankind's consumption of non-renewable materials, contrary to its stated purpose. Touted fuel consumption savings of more modern vehicles will be cancelled out by the carbon and other natural non-renewable resources which the new vehicles will require for their manufacture. Consigned to the scrap-heap as 'old cars' the valuable and non-renewable materials and fuel embodied in the older supposedly less fuel-efficient vehicles will represent a regrettably permanent deficit in our energy and materials accounting for what is known as natural capital.

World-famous physics professor, Al Bartlett, takes Australia's Climate Change Minister Penny Wong's figures apart on climate change emissions and population numbers, showing that Ms Wong is wrong. "To accommodate the projected population growth AND to reduce overall annual emissions by 60% would require an annual rate of decrease of per capita emissions of polluting greenhouse gases of 3.543 percent per year over the next forty years. The per capita annual emissions would have to be cut in half every 19.6 years!" Bartlett also says that at its present rate of growth, Australia’s population will double by 2050."

The 2009 Copenhagen Conference “took note” of an 'Accord'.

Well, what a hell of an expensive note taking exercise that was!

The full cost of the Copenhagen Conference should be disclosed including all return flights, accommodation, livestock killed and A4 paper printed off, etc. Given that green house gases are their specialty, the conference hosts (the UN) should also disclose the total tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions of this latest Conference of the Parties (COP15). This then must become the decadent standard never to be exceeded in future.

See also: "A climate con: Analysis of the 'Copenhagen Accord' of 21 Dec 09.

Copenhagen was a deadline without a plan.

Too many issues, too many causes, too many delegates, too much reading, too many options and yet forced to deliver a global consensus solution in just 2 weeks!

Why was a Viking speed expectation imposed on such complex and polarising issues? Participants must have spent the first week just reading the plethora of reports and getting acquainted with the issues and with one another.
Plundering of foreign lands may have taken just 2 weeks, but to reach consensus on complex global negotiation between 192 countries with differing priorities in 2 weeks?

When the ABC put to her that a population trending to grow by 65% to a level of 35m people by 2035 was contradictory to a target of reducing Australian carbon emissions by 60% in the same time period, Penny Wong replied, incredibly, that we have to 'delink our levels of carbon pollution from economic growth and population growth, not try to reduce population. She did not say whether we would do this by using magic or religion, but a morbid fascination with my own survival, not to say scientific curiosity, has prompted me to write to her and ask for details. See also: "Depression forces MP Andrew Robb from the frontbench"

The Garnaut Report has failed to discuss the energy assumptions underlying its conclusions. Tim Flannery argues that the core assumption that alternative energy technologies can be scaled up by the huge magnitudes required to replace fossil fuels is invalid. This failure should invalidate the Garnaut Report.