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April 28, 2005
What is it about Australia?
One thing about this country is that we have more raw resource just waiting to be dug up, packed into ships and floated overseas than just about anyone. Certainly any first-world country. By and large we buy the same resources back off of other countries like Japan after they've turned them into cars and paper.
So, when it comes to energy efficiency our Government is not really all that interested. In fact, the Productivity Commission, a Federal Government initiative, recently released it's draft results of it's inquiry into the economic and environmental potential offered by energy efficiency.
Now, your average high-school student (they do tend to be rather idealistic) can tell you that energy efficiency is good because: it's efficient; it helps protect the environment (ie: the greenhouse effect); and it improves the nations ability to produce and survive in a world of limited (all resources on the planet, with the exception of sunlight are only available in a limited amount) resources.
But no. The productivity commission says otherwise. It says, "Australia must achieve the right level of energy efficiency for its own context."
What does this mean? Well, basically, we have coal. Lots and lots of coal. It's cheap to dig up and easy to burn to make energy. Sure, it's dirty, it's adding CO2 to the atmosphere as well as particulates which form part of the problem of global dimming, View image(which by the way makes a nonsense of there being unlimited amounts of sunlight), but who cares?
Does Australia? No, not really. When you get down to it, we just don't care. The 'I'm alright jack, stuff you' mentality is clear in as much as the first people to suffer from some of the effects of global warming will be our immediate neighbours in the Pacific. Tiny islands like those in the The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
The smartest thing anyone working in a heavy polluting industry ever did was to call someone an environmentalist. The tag's used now days not so much to refer to someone who spends their spare time communing with trees and hugging wombats as someone, anyone infact, who deigns to point out that the planet is heading into deep water. Calling a rat that runs about looking freaked out when you set his cage on fire a 'pyrophobic animal' is the rough equivalent. Everyone who is not insane should be an 'environmentalist'. We all live in the same environment and there's nowhere else for us to go.
Posted by IndianInk at April 28, 2005 11:09 PM