Things are rather quiet at the moment as we wait to see wether we get a “Climate Change is Crap” government or “the Greatest Moral Challenge of our time but we haven’t got the guts to upset anyone”. Commentators seem in general optimistic that a hung parliament will help rather than hurt.
Labor always had to do a deal with the Greens if they were going to govern and the agreement reached yesterday is a measured one, with no major promises but many hopeful signs, which might move the odds just in favour of a Labor government, and if some sort of stability can be reached I agree that this may be a positive step, with many of the independents having good histories on Climate (Katter excepted). Fingers crossed.
Meanwhile there seems to be no chance that the USA will do anything except lurch to the right, and hide its head in the sand.
In both countries the high stakes and ever more urgent need to do something which will increase our cost of living in the short term does seem to have driven many on the political right into what Marc Roberts calls an Apocalyptic Feedback Loop.
Just one recent example is the Tea Party questionnaire to prospective midterm candidates which includes this:-
“The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.”
Strangely this comes as we are getting some good news, with one of the authors of the Planetary Boundaries Study that I discussed a while believing that we can reverse the nine indicators in their study in an interesting Video from TED.
Separately we have news that Europe is moving to renewable energy faster than thought, with for example, Portugal getting nearly 45% of its energy from renewables, up from 17% in 5 years and a town in Maine has cut its landfill by 50% by charging on the basis of rubbish volume, which will result in major savings for the residents as their trash removal fees are cut. Three different houses have been built to a German design which generate up to five times the power they use.
Unfortunately it’s not all good news, with a recent study showing that the previous increase in plant productivity of 3% per decade has reversed in the last 10 years becoming a 1 per cent decline, mainly due to climate change induced drought. At the same time a coral expert warns that the Earth’s oceans are already about 30 percent more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution and states:-
“There is no escaping the fact that we are going to need major reductions in our CO2 emissions — something like 80 to 90 percent. When we see governments arguing about reductions of 10 to 15 percent, I think all of us in the marine science community need to say that CO2 reductions of this scale are simply not going to be sufficient. We have to get off fossil fuels.”
Sunday the 12th September is Sustainable House Day with over 200 homes across Australia, including our own, open to the public and showcasing different sustainable techniques.
Lastly this nice bit of street art I saw on Grist
