Australia and climate change: Greens and the black stuff

[root]

The climate-change prime minister loses some green points

COALMINERS in New South Wales (NSW), Australia's most populous state, boast that they export enough of the black stuff to supply New Zealand, Indonesia and Singapore with all their electricity. Along with Queensland and Victoria, the state also digs up enough to provide Australia as a whole with 83% of its power. This dirty energy has turned Australia into one of the world's highest per person emitters of greenhouse gases. With more than 200 years' supply of black coal left, Australians have never much questioned this. But that may be about to change.

The Labor government, under Kevin Rudd, outlined plans in a green paper on July 16th to cut carbon pollution with an emissions-trading scheme. Mr Rudd's promise to tackle climate change played a large part in Labor's election win last November. During its 11 years in power the former conservative coalition, under John Howard, largely ignored the issue. ...



More... (http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11793340&fsrc=RSS)

[disobey_the_norm]

Thanks root for spamming this garbage. Coming from Australia I'll post a bit of background. Mr Rudd is a ignorant do-gooder type who wants no one to live in poverty and blah blah blah.

Banning the supply of a resource like coal will cut jobs, cost Australia money and give the Countries wanting to buy it the issue of where their energy comes from.

Dumb dumb dumb.

[mayor of monkey town]

If you can get Australian companies to solve the sustainability puzzle, that is worth trillions to the rest of the world for many more years to come.

Also shutting down this much coal will raise the prices, which will turn alot of people off it and onto cleaner fuels.
There will always be more jobs, we just need to create a new industry.

[Issue313]

Australia has more solar capacity than it could ever use. The entire country is a hot shitty desert in the middle of the third world. The bastards have no business burning coal. Solar power can melt steel, produce electricity, whatever you want.

Australia is a shitty third world nation. People in Iceland and Ireland are constantly trying to use solar power for electricity and heating water, I don't know if you desert dwellers realise that we get so little sunlight here that it's like trying to boil a kettle with a matchstick. Most countries have no need for fossil fuels, they are just copying/aping the technology of the Northern European countries because that's all they have the brains to do.

[KwinnieFuckingBogan]

Thanks root for spamming this garbage. Coming from Australia I'll post a bit of background. Mr Rudd is a ignorant do-gooder type who wants no one to live in poverty and blah blah blah.

Banning the supply of a resource like coal will cut jobs, cost Australia money and give the Countries wanting to buy it the issue of where their energy comes from.

Dumb dumb dumb.

Case in point that most of the Liberal supporters you have to hear drooling shit 24/7 are young morons. In the 70's you could die of chicky pops.

[disobey_the_norm]

Case in point that most of the Liberal supporters you have to hear drooling shit 24/7 are young morons. In the 70's you could die of chicky pops.

I think I'm older than you...

Not that this fact matters but you did bring it up. I hate Kevin Rudd and his bad regime. I don't care what you thought about John Howard either. Kevin Rudd is fucking blind and he doesn't know what he is doing. I wake up some days and think how did this guy get into power?

He wants computers in front of every kid in schools...but a reduction in greenhouse gas emmissions...and he flies in jets to other countries when the technology he is bullshitting on about enables him to speak to other world leaders without fucking flying around. But he is having a holiday so why would he give that up?

Yes yes this isn't a political discussion...I'm just wondering how this moron predicts he is going to power all those kiddies computers...are they steam powered?

For fucks sake, he'll throw out any notion to go nuclear too, the cunt and than we'll be fucked. The dumbass is allowing uranium be sold for weapons (potentially) but wants to step on coal and squash it? It sure does make sense though...when power mad pricks drop their bombs we want to see them coming at us, and not be blind to it by all the soot in the air right?

[KwinnieFuckingBogan]

My mistake, I thought were comparing a potential Howard government, which would have zero interest in climate change to begin with, against the new Rudd government. I didn't pick up that you were just criticising Rudd.

The 'every child has access to a computer' is something that we need in place, though I don't agree with how the government went about solving the issue. A computer, that will be redundant in 2 years time, for every child in the country, at great expense to taxpayers, the government, and inflation is not the answer. I believe that instead of trying to not only deliver all their campaign promises, but deliver them ASAP, this issue could have stayed in the womb for a little more development. Give them time to contract out a bunch of geniuses.

An established high speed internet is also a must. This is coming from someone who doesn't play any computer games, and only uses the net for research, and communication (MSN, e-mail, and Totse).



That is only one, of many many things the government is doing though, and it's quite unfair to criticise a government out of context - Howard fucked a lot of things up (His 'strong economy' is more or less an illusion, but at least we were able to ride off it for a while, as he planned, instead of it completely going to shit.), so naturally it's going to be shit in every direction for a while.

[The Methematician]

Fucking Aussies pussies are just trying to drive the price of coal to make a hefty profit.

Not because they're green pussies, or some environmental faggies,

fuckin' aussies pussies.

[disobey_the_norm]

Fucking Aussies pussies are just trying to drive the price of coal to make a hefty profit.

Not because they're green pussies, or some environmental faggies,

fuckin' aussies pussies.

I think you have it wrong. The douche parliament (or just the Prime Minister) want to hold onto a profit making substance and NOPT make money for unknown reasons...well they say to save the environment.

If it is a ploy to drive up the value and than we try to rip it off to people, those people should not buy it to fuck these 'aussies pussies' over and generally piss them off.

[The Methematician]

I think you have it wrong. The douche parliament (or just the Prime Minister) want to hold onto a profit making substance and NOPT make money for unknown reasons...well they say to save the environment.

In the end, they still wanted to make profit more than they should be, using lame excuse to justify thier action such as "environment"

If it is a ploy to drive up the value and than we try to rip it off to people, those people should not buy it to fuck these 'aussies pussies' over and generally piss them off.

Wth are you talking about ? It's not like people are buying coals for bbq. It's the power companies that buy them. And I don;t think power companies give a fuck. They'll just increase the power bill.

So, yeah, fuck Aussies pussies. It's their parliament. I blame them.

[SLP]

If Australia stops exporting coal, then the countries importing it (mostly Japan and PRC) will find other sources.

Kevin Rudd is full of talk. You hear all of those ads on TV nowadays "think climats, think change". It's funny how they don't mention what we or the government has to do. He hasn't come up with any physical ideas. It's all bureaucracy.

Only the parties that are not represented in the lower house have real ideas. The way Australia can improve is to use geothermal power. Since we don't live near fault lines it normally wouldn't work. The way it can be done is to use radioactive rocks buried not far below the ground (a few thousand metres) and pump water down to them. There are plenty of sites in Australia capable of doing this and we could run the whole country off geothermal power. The only major party I heard suggesting it was The Greens.

[Mellow_Fellow]

Kevin Rudd is such a wormy little douche (i LOLd when he tried acting all jokey cool at that international summit...), as for the bloke from Midnight Oil in his new eco-warrior role -- he's pretty fucking shit!

Solar power all the way, you guys have zero excuse for not doing it (apart from the obvious moniezzz), if current coal/oil/gas resources are used to create one of the most effective recyclable energy systems in the southern hemisphere, you could well export electricity to NZ/South-East-Asia etc etc in years to come, when technology makes that more possible.

Shame that "Liberal" governments in the West are exactly the same in their uselessness as most others, there's just a bit more self-indulgent whining and lip trembling and "softly, softly" to it. Pffttt.