how putting a new tax on the green house gases is going to help. is the money going to be spent on planting Trees??
smoking Kills and they cost so much cause of taxes but people still smoke
my old Volkswagen's cant be helping eva but I ain't getting rid of them.

I don't understand either Ian,the only explanation that I can come up with is that our prime minister wants a seat very badly on the UN council and is desperate to show that he is a good guy by passing an ETS (which I don't understand) and allowing heaps and heaps of illegal "refugees" into our beautiful country.These turkeys can't get along with each other in their own countries and are fighting in the detention centres and making demands before they even get here,what chance do we stand.At the same time we are sending our young servicement to these countries to fight for them and they are buggering off to Australia.
My rant for the day!
If some one can explain in plain english why we are doing this crap and why and who is going to benefit from the extra costs please do.

the demand for our coal is so great here in Newcastle that they are building more coal loaders ,as the demand aint slowing and it may cost a bit more but what does the nsw government think the other countries are going to do with the millions of tones of coal. Fark they are going to burn it.

Bend over the barrel and get ready for some GREEN lovin' boys & girls. Kerching!$$$$$$$$

ETS just another way for the fat cats to glean some money off the majority, maybe i should become a fat cat that sounds like a plan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mmmm.....................let me start with
1) i work in a culprit industrie
2) i drive an old car

No one has yet proved to me that the pollutants i cause by driving a well tuned old car is more than if i buy a new car every 3 years - greener as they are

That said - if people honestly believe there is as much water in the Murray Basin as there has been in the past or that coal fired power stations are not a major contributor to the changes in our enviroment or that (insert half a million examples) then they have their head so far up their bum that nothing will change their narrow mind

Some one needs to start the move and i think it is about time

Whatever - each to their own

I will be looking at the underneath of a daisy long before a lot of the youngsters on here

YEAH
Why don't all the polly's chat on the phone instead of wasting all that jet fuel, petrol in all those big cars traveling all over the world. They could even chat face to face over the net these days.
They could also stop wasting water on that grass at the Parliament house in Canberra and how much power does it waste having that water jet in the lake
they could even turn some street lights off at night we don't need em on as we all sleeping.

Hi

I hear that there has been a plethora of new ETS jobs being created Canberra.

I didn't vote for the milky bar kid, the other lot aren't any better.

The whole carbon thing has been exposed recently anyway.

Steve

What can is say, we live in Australia, thats life : ( Maybe its time to move to Italy or small town in Europe.... somwhere where they make sports cars.

Ryan

It's a chance we just can't take.

If human caused global warming turns out to be wrong - and we put all these plans & taxes in place, then all that will happen is a cleaner environment and maybe some economic problems....... and we've got over them before.

If it turns out to be right, and we do nothing, then it's bye bye human race, some time after our current lifetime.

I'd rather err on the side of caution (and pay extra for it too)

Doing nothing now seems a selfish attitude to me.


Regards,

Matt.

Well put Matt

If people dont believe in pollution the we should go back to pouring chromates into Parramatta River

Being cynical is healthy

Shoving your head in the sand and saying "all governments just have their noses in the trough" well............ that isnt where i want to live


As for living in Europe..... have a look at their electricity prices

I'm helping the environment.....I bought a NEW car that gets 58lt/100 when i put the boot into it

Hi

The "WE" as in Australia is only part of the problem, so what do we do stop selling our coal to China?

If Australia closed right this very instant, nothing would change. Granted we maybe part of the problem but only a very small part, so we get hit with a tax, the tax goes to some South American or African economies run by despot, cant see how that will help us, there was an article in Sydney Sun Herald about last weekend.

I don't know if everyone is aware, but the whole carbon thing in the atmosphere can now be measured, and its not the boggy man that Rudd & Wong make out, Google Lord Monckton to hear the real story, not something from the con artists at East Anglia.

Steve

Oh by the way, well done everyone, no slagging each other off etc.

The goal is admirable but they way they want to achieve it is flawed. By charging these taxes it doesn't bring down the emissions, it simply is creating a new bureaucracy and will not benefit the environment at all. Also, bringing our own version in before anyone else is only for KRUDD to grandstand himself on the international stage. To ACTUALLY get carbon back to a level that doesn't adversely affect the environment means bringing it back to the levels of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The population has increased massively since then as well as our reliance on technology so being able to get back those levels would be virtually impossible. That is not to say we shouldn't make things as clean as we possibly can as any clear thinking person wants to minimise pollution, it just means (I believe) that we will not get a clean world unless we work out a way to convert pollution in to clean air (recycle the air). There should be more emphasis on putting a solar power station on the top of EVERY house in the country and water tanks to go along with them. That will be a good start but more will need to be done as well.

Yogie

Politics, religion and money are topics you never discuss among friends, as you will never agree on anything, and only loose friends over it.



I guess you can add the environment to that list as well.

She told me this
Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive
double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the
contractor who installed them.

He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and
I still hadn't paid for them.

Hellloooo,.............just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am
automatically stupid.

So, I told him just what his fast talking sales guy had told me last
year, that in ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves!

Helllooooo? It's been a year! I told him.

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just
hung up.

He never called back.

I bet he felt like an idiot.

Ian that's good i must admit I laughed .Steve I'm with you why do we support these supposed 3rd world countries that keep buying guns & ammunition but can't afford to look after their people and then it becomes our problem.Yogie your ideas would work so don't hold your breath as the pollies wo't support something that works and doesn't fill their miserable pockets.Look at our previous Ministers etc who get govy cars,pensions,staff,office space etc etc.Who pays for this crap whilst they then get a position on boards or as advisers with a huge salary.

One interesting point with the ETS.
If you decide to do the green thing and minimise your own carbon footprint, all you have effectively done is made a few more carbon credits available for someone else.
The only helpful thing you can do is buy carbon credits and not use them!

Hang on, wasn't this whole global warming problem fixed up by that world wide concert over a year ago!

I drive through Port Kembla every day. We get iron ore from WA, as far away as possible. THye burn shitloads of diesel getting it out of the ground and shitloads more dragging it all the way over here. We dig coal out of the ground here on the east coast, some of the highest methane producing coal mines anywhere. We dump it into a frikken big melting pot and turn it into expensive steel. I made my living there for 14 years but I am out of there now and my employment is totally unreliant on anyone elses employment. The computer system that looks after 1 million peoples superannuation needs the same amount of people working on it even if there were only 100 members. So screw the steelworks.

You cant have any sort of car show in wollongong (or any large conference) because there simply isnt the accomodation. THe little accoomodation we do have is too spread out. I reckon we'd be flat out hosting a hens tooth expo. What I am calling on governents to do is bulldoze the steelworks. 50% could be revegetated into unnatural bushland. Imagine the credits! A further 20% will be turned into solar and wind powered electricity generation. More credits! The remaining 30% gets turned into a major tourism location. We have the deep port that will easily handle the biggest ocean liners that havent evenbeen thought of yet. Motels, casino, conference centre. decent caravan park. Bungy jumping jet boats. parasailing. We retrain the fitters and they make up beds. Electricians can look after the lawns. riggers can tie the knots in the bungy cords. The money we save by not having to repair our roads from the 100,000 truck movements per year will pay for lot of it. Truck drivers become eco friendly bus drivers.

If it can look this nice as a steelworks imagine how good it would look without a steelworks!

Hi

Nice photo Chris, coming down to the gong soon for the sons final school do, parts of the gong a very pretty and steelworks occupies some of the nicest real estate.

You cant run base load power on solar or wind, unless you want to put up with blackouts (I resist the yank term power outage) and cold showers, so its either burn coal or (start chewing your hanky and put on the Oils CD) go nuclear.

Steve

Remember the scientific projects that, in the early days of the internet, relied on people all over the world signing up to allocate a small portion of their computer to a project, thus creating a massive world wide computer to finish research years earlier than it would have taken normally?

That's the sort of thing governments should be sponsoring. Micro generation of electricity, it won't eliminate the need for coal fired power stations but will reduce the need for them significantly. If they only have to kick in at peak periods and at night the emissions would be minimal compared to now.

How many factories vent off steam that could be driving a small turbine. How many times do you see film of mines or refineries that are burning off emissions that also could be driving a turbine?

The increase in prices/ taxes is the stick that will make this stuff happen. Electricity has been too cheap for too long for the industrial users.

If your property has a watercourse there should be a generator in place, national building codes should MANDATE solar panels, hot water and general thermal building principles.

These are the things that should be getting government rebates. For Christ's sake if you haven't got ceiling insulation by this day and age you are already 20 years behind.

Regards,

Matt.

Ahh the refreshing sound of hopes and dreams. All the genius's who think science will save the planet forget one thing, we have to feed and dispose of the waste of all these billions(and growing) creatures. I have not heard one sensable solution to this power/food supply problem yet and until we(the dreamers) stop uncontrolled population growth I am afraid we are doomed. Try this at home kiddies, everyday add another goldfish to a standard size goldfish bowl and see what the end result is. Keep wishing upon that star folks!

Chris that's a great idea. Australia stopped being a serious manufacturing country years ago and today we are a 'services' country. I imagine China would make more steel in half a day than Australia does in a year. BHP closed their Newcastle steelworks a while ago - does anyone miss them?

One of my pet hates is the endless rows of Mcmansions that aren't designed for our climate. Ugly concrete or brick cubes with no eaves, so the sunlight makes them hot inside. So they all need to have air con, which uses electricity. What's wrong with smarter design that uses Queenslander-style wide eaves and verandahs to shade the walls, or even build them up off the ground to make them naturally cool?

The world has always gone through periods of warming and cooling. It cooled in the 1800s and warmed in the 1900s. It has been cooling for the last 5 years. Greenland was warm enough 400 years ago to be colonised by the Vikings. At present the world is still recovering from the last ice age - parts of the European and North American land masses are actually rising each year as they slowly rebound from having km-thick ice sheets over them (geologically only a moment ago). The Earth currently still has ice sheets at both poles - a most unusual occurrence over the entire geologic period. The earth is currently still in a 'cold' period. The Triassic, Jurassic and Cretacious periods were much warmer and wetter than now. Whoever said that the way the earth was, say 200 years ago before the industrial revolution, is the 'correct' way it should be? The earth is naturally returning to it's more usual warmer profile whether we like it or not.

As for CO2 - well methane is far more opaque to infra-red radiation (hence a 'greenhouse gas'), but I haven't heard Kevin Rudd callling for all the world's cattle to be shot. Hysterical climate doomsdayers point to Venus as an example of a 'runaway' CO2 greenhouse as its surface temperature is over 460 deg C. Sorry, you can't compare them. For starters Venus' atmosphere is 96% CO2 and its atmosphere is over 90 times thicker than ours. At the surface the air pressure is equivalent to the water pressure on Earth around 1000m deep in the ocean! On earth the CO2 concentration is only 0.04% of the atmosphere. But the main heating effect is not Venus' atmosphere. Venus is only 72% of the Earth's distance to the sun so it gets 1.9 times as much solar energy per unit area. It also rotates much more slowly - sunrise to sunset is 116 earth days (the sun rises in the west and sets in the east), so each spot on the surface is roasted for a period 232 times longer, with 1.9 times more energy, than on Earth.

While I agree with making our industries and cars etc cleaner and less polluting, it won't make any difference to our climate. One volcanic belch from Mt Pinatubo or Mt St Helens releases more CO2 into the air than humans have. The biggest volacnic events of recent history - Mt Tambora in 1815 and Krakatau in 1883 - caused cooling of the Earth, not heating.

I will be voting against the ETS if we ever have an election on the issue, as paying $1100 a year in extra taxes will achieve zip.

I cannot think of anything more to say on this subject, as Phil74Camper has just said it all!!!!!!

That was superbly put Phil - why people aren't listening to logical talk such as this beats me.

Cheers, Greg

Another piece of bad science - the doomsdayers say the Arctic ice cap, and some of the Antarctic sea ice fields, are melting and will cause a disasterous rise in sea levels.

Wrong - they didn't pay attention in science at school.

If you have ice floating on water, and it melts, the water level WILL NOT CHANGE as the amount of water is constant. Do the experiment - get a large glass, put some water and ice cubes in it, and measure. Then measure again when they've melted. In fact, the water level will actually drop very slightly as ice is slightly less dense than water (which is why ice floats). When it turns to water, the mass remains the same but it takes up very slightly less volume as it's slightly denser.

If the entire Arctic Sea ice cap melted tomorrow, oceam levels would not change 1mm. Sea levels would only rise if the oceans are ADDED TO - by ice caps on land melting and flowing into the sea. Apart from glaciers receding, which is insignificant compared with the volume of the oceans, this isn't happening. The Antarctic ice cap is not melting - there's no new dry land in Antarctica.

CO2 into the atmosphere isn't nearly as bad as the reduction of CO2 sinks by landclearing, etc.

Instead of stupid-should-never-been-grown-anywhere crops like cotton demand that we all grow more POT!

More protein, more (and stronger) fibre, grows fast, uses little water, actually improves soil rather than destroys it, almost no chemicals needed in processing it... pot will save the world!