Page 3800 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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health and reduce atmospheric pollution, and improving water systems to withstand drought.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which does not endorse the signing of the Kyoto protocol, suggests some measures that will provide economic and environmental benefits whether or not climate change is a real threat; that is, it endorses precautionary measures. These include removing regulatory barriers to innovation, eliminating energy subsidies, deregulating energy markets and deregulating transport markets. All of these coincidentally further the neoliberal economic project of deregulation; in other words, they all rely on the market and thus perhaps we can begin to understand why Mr Mulcahy prefers this approach.
Mr Gentleman asserts that the Canberra public are educated about climate change. Perhaps he has checked the numbers of people who viewed the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth when it was showing here a month or so ago. Perhaps he is referring to the thousands that walked against warming on 4 November this year. Perhaps he is talking about the environmental education that children receive in our schools, or the high proportion of Canberrans who support and are members of environmental organisations. Indeed, many of them do know what they can do at a grassroots level to contribute to a cleaner world. They put their recyclables out in the bin—in great numbers apparently according to the latest survey—with the yellow lid. They put the lights off when they leave the house. They may even purchase energy-efficient light globes. They may take the bus when it suits. They might walk to the local shop. But many of these actions involve some inconvenience in a car-dominated city where the bus services are not always convenient and the local shops lack the diversity needed for any but the most basic purchases.
Mr Mulcahy points out, rightly, that Canberra people are on average earning good incomes and, not coincidentally, producing the highest per capital greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, which means in the world. But are we selfish as a community? I would contend that we are not. Individuals among us might be less thoughtful than others about our impact on the earth and its multitude of organisms, on future generations and on other people who do not enjoy the same level of wealth and choices that we do. Many find the problems so enormous and daunting that they prefer to live in denial of the impacts of climate change; it is easier to have a drink, to go shopping, to lose oneself in television or the internet than to think through the ways that we can reduce our environmental impact.
The truth is that even if all of us took the no regrets actions that seemed so important and quite adequate in the early 1990s—and remember that doing even this minimal amount means swimming against the currents of consumerism, the car culture and the pictures screaming, “Want me, want me” at us from the magazines and TV—they would merely be a drop in the ocean of what needs to be done to bring our levels of CO2 production down to a level where we can hope to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Yes, by all means introduce the no regrets measures immediately—I believe the government still has a way to go on that bottom rung of the ladder measure—but make this just stage one of a carefully thought through climate change strategy that requires actions from business and government, many of which will be aimed at making it easier for Canberra people to live lives that impact more lightly on the planet.
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