Spin Dentist - Flossing the plaque out of Aussie Politics

How green was my policy?

Stern picked it up, Gore ran with it, and now everyone wants some of that green action. In the space of a year the concept of Global Warming has gone from being a vague notion of doom, akin to swimming too soon after eating, to something much more frightening. After all, this was going to cost the world money!!! GDP would plummet, the weather would tear strips from the neglectful, wretched, shortsighted human race, and worst of all the value of the beach house would be seriously depreciated when it slips beneath the waves. The village folk collectively shuddered....

So the world has got on with the business of working out how they are going to fix it. Wind Farms, Solar Energy, Geothermal power, Moon rocks, hydrogen, helium, lithium, berilium.... everything is a possibility, for the brave new children of the revolution.
Which is all well and good, unless polluting the earth with the contents of your sandpit is the backbone of your GDP.....

Australia, rather early on in the piece found that it had a natural talent for pulling rather valuable things out of the ground. And from this gift, the nation has risen in prominence, dutifully digging things out of the ground and growing rich for the exertion. Indeed coal alone contributes 15% to the merchandising exports of this sunburnt country. Due to rising demand for all things subterranean from our good friends in China and India, Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented boom period, a surge in wealth that has resulted in Wide Screen Plasma TV's becoming legal tender.... but now....what with Global Warming... nothing devalues the currency when you're using it as a life raft, after your holiday home has taken on a rather Atlantis-like quality. Global Warming is going to be catastrophic... we must find alternatives....

And so, I went hunting for the grand environmental plans of the Liberal Party and the Labor party in this election year. For the ALP I found as follows from this location: http://www.alp.org.au/policy/index.php

As you can see the thrust of the Global Warming solution for Labor is heavy investment in the development and proof of concept of Clean Coal... You can read about how the technology theoretically and in some places, practically works, yourself, but from my reading of it, it is a rather expensive and large scale unproven technology. The time frames put together are also rather a worry.... Labor aims to have The technology reducing CO2 emissions at power plants by 2020, and at close to zero emissions by 2030.

The Liberal Party's environmental "policy" or as near as I can make of it, can be found here:
http://www.pm.gov.au/government/sustainable_environment.cfm

There does not appear to be any clear policy on the money set aside for Solar energy development in the Budget, but perhaps Mr Costello hasn't got around to advising his staff to update their webpages yet.

They vaguely mention a bit of funding to make clean coal viable, but the jewel in the crown of their policy is their Nuclear Platform. We're sitting on piles of radioactive rocks so lets use them... and even better lets sell them to other countries as!
This idea perhaps has some merit, but I believe you need to read a little further down the page to see how seriously little Johnny takes this debate:

Australia contributes only 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which when compared to China’s greenhouse gas emissions, are an extremely small percentage globally. If Australia was to close down all of its power stations tonight, the savings in greenhouse gas emissions would be replaced by the growth in China's energy sector emissions in less than 12 months

Australia is home to roughly 20 million of the world's roughly 6.5 billion population. Let's do the maths shall we? 20000000 / 6500000000 = .3%
It appears to me that whilst Johnny is trying to emphasize the trifle that is our carbon emissions, we're actually contributing 5 times our "share". By emphasizing our "relatively low" carbon emissions, it appears he is trying to trivialise any contribution we make to reducing them.

This highlights the massively schizophrenic positions of both the Liberals and Labor on the issue of the Environment. The truth behind the matter is, for the short term at least, Australia is profitting off the polluting habits of the rest of the world. Whilst Labor talks about cleaning up coal to reduce it's emissions, there can be no safeguards on how the coal is burnt to whomever we export it to. The Liberals aren't even interested in cleaning coal up in any serious way. They maintain their policy of poking trivially around the edges of opportunities to make things better, with no real conviction.

The liberal party have always seen the environment as secondary to industry. From their trivialisation of the issue and buck passing, they still do. Their policy of "everyone else is doing it, and we'd be disadvantaging australia if we don't do it too", reaks of short term gain. 18 points behind in the polls, they are motivated by retention of power and are keen to belittle the environmental threat, while emphasising their commitment to Industry... One wonders whether little Johnny will still be speaking of "Knee Jerk" reactions when Kirribilli is swallowed up by the harbour. One thinks he will.

The Labor party, mindful of the perception that they are poor managers of the economy and unemployment rates (even if the liberals supposed economic "credibility" is heavily derived from the economic policies of Keating), have committed to an option which they hope will demonstrate their commitment to the economy as well as the environment, but which may very well not quite demonstrate either.

So where does that leave us? With all our eggs in one basket, or all our eggs in the other. Only time will tell, which basket, if either, is the right one.

Labels: Clean Coal, Environment, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Policy, Solar, Uranium

posted by The Dentist @ 12:45 am