Australia shares a similar challenge in moving away from coal as Saudi Arabia does in reducing its economic dependency on oil, the United Nations’ top climate negotiator says.
Speaking at a conference in Melbourne on Wednesday, Christiana Figueres drew a parallel between Australia and the oil kingdom as countries that would need to diversify their economies as the world grapples with global warming.
Ms Figueres – who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, overseeing international climate negotiations – also said Australia should take on a leadership position on climate change.
In an interview with Fairfax Media on Wednesday evening, Ms Figueres was careful to stress that the comparison between Australia and Saudi Arabia only stretched as far as that both had previously benefited themselves and the world from large fossil fuel endowments, but that point in history had come to an end. Otherwise they were completely different countries, she said.
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Ms Figueres said ultimately Australia would have to move away from coal for environmental reasons and changes in global economic patterns. She said nobody was saying this would have to happen overnight, but the transition should be orderly, gradual and progressive.
'“The science is very clear, there is no space for any new coal,” she said.
. . .
I see this UN committee has decreed that “global warming” should be limited to two degrees. Why stop there? Why not decree additionally that there be only 1 1/2 hurricanes per year, no tornados at all in Oklahoma and no rain on any May Day parade?
Later, perhaps it can decree that Polar bears no longer bite humans, that bats no longer carry rabies and earthworms stop being so slimy. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
Australia and Saudi Arabia will, of course, ignore this pronouncement except to challenge it. But one thing is for sure, this committee’s goal is to force Australia and S.A. to “buy their way out” of a UN schedule to eliminate their use of an abundant resource. I don’t see the UN calling for reduced use of thorn tree sticks and camel dung for fuel in Somalia or reduction in the number of those pickup trucks on which the gangs mount machine guns. You see, there’s no money in Somalia and even if there was, they would kill you long before you laid hands on it.
The U.N. rule for the nations of the earth: If you have cheap energy sources, you can’t use them. You are hereby ordered to use only expensive energy sources.
I personally think the developed world should move away from coal and oil and make more use of Nuclear Power. Greenhouse emissions are much lower, and pollution is very low (except for the radioactive waste, which can be stored until a way is found to recycle it).
I personally think we should destroy the environment.
The Earth is trying to kill us (with floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions), so I think we should kill it first as an act of pre-emptive self defence.
However, what is possible is for government to use the environment to take away liberties, control one’s life and use the revenue and support to launch a full-pronged assault against the Catholic Church and other values institutions.
Whether or not global warming, or climate change, or whatever, is actually occurring (personally, I’m very confused on the matter, since it’s so intertwined with politics), I think it’s commendable that so many countries are trying to switch over to more sustainable sources of energy, regardless of the agendas they’re trying to push at the same time.
If the worst thing that comes out of all this climate change debate is sustainable energy, I won’t complain one way or the other. (Of course, I doubt they’ll stop at sustainable energy…)
We are supposed to be stewards of the earth, after all.
I was only joking in my initial post. In all honesty, that was just a jibe at all the eco-fascists who want to order us to rearrange our lives according to how THEY deem it to be more environmentally friendly.
I agree with what you said about government regulation. Catholics should promote conservation (by recycling and saving water for example) but the radical statist solution that the left advises (which you correctly derided) is not the answer
Man’s influence on climate “change” is very minimal.
It’s true that oil companies haven’t been, shall we say, forthcoming and altogether nervous about the concept, HOWEVER, if they had done the studies properly, they would have found the same thing the Australian study found: man’s effect is negligible.
As far as the political left goes, it’s clear to me that this is in fact about looking and feeling good and maybe even control as most of their “solutions” to climate change are actually more harmful to the environment. Alternative energy has done considerable to the environment in the emotional haste of academia and the elite to fulfill personally selfish goals.
So in other words, we are damaging the environment so a select group of people can have fuzzy nerve impulses to solve what is for all practical purposes an imaginary problem
“Australia prides itself on leadership on many fields, not just cricket, and this cannot be an exception,” she said.
The conservatives in Australia have had a leaning towards nuclear power since the 1950’s in forseeing the limitations of fossil fuel both as a limited resource and an environmental problem. (Australians conservatives aren’t as radically polarised as in the US).
In 2007 Liberal leader John Howard did his best to get the uranium power idea up and running again. The left opposed it due to its weapons uses but I think now may be the right time to bring the idea to the fore again. Carbon emissions are an environmental problem not withstanding climate change.
I totally agree, I dont believe in humans being able to effect the earths climate in any major way either, but I do think its a good thing to get away from something that WILL run out eventually, and even when it gets close, prices will SKYROCKET, so most people could not even afford it anyway. I mean, most nations just keep ‘opening the tap on full’ every day, pumping out as much coal as they can daily…duh…anyone can recognize this wont go on forever! LOL
I believe Nikola Tesla had the solution, but as the powers that be at the time told him, “there is no way for us to meter usage of the earths electomagnetics to the public like other resources”, as this would be 100% free for everyone to use, as much as they wanted, plus the vehicles powered by such a thing are very simple, so not much to break down/ wear out on them, the fact is, they cant make as much money on anything else except fossil fuels.
God forbid ANYONE who discovers some form of transportation where people dont have to ‘pay as they go’, oh we cant have people driving around their entire lives without paying anything for a fuel! LOL They are literally stifling progress so a few people can get to insane levels of wealth…?? LOL I guess that why alot of his papers are still highly classified to this day though!
“It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO₂ emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error. It’s not surprising,” Mr Newman wrote on Friday.
“Why then, with such little evidence, does the UN insist the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on futile climate change policies? Perhaps Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s framework on climate change, has the answer?”
Mr Newman continued that global warming was a “hook” to install a new world order.
“Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model,” he said.
While China and India want our coal, we’ll keep selling it.
However we do also need to move towards other forms of energy, and to stop wasting it.
Australia for example has a lot of sunlight, and I think I remember reading we now have over a million homes using solar panels. We’ve got a 2KW system ourselves, and we produce the equivalent of about 80% of our electricity usage.
But we still need mains power at night, and we don’t produce enough to directly run our own whitegoods eg. refrigerator, freezer etc.
I personally think that hydrogen fuel cells will be the way to go for cars, but at the same time, we waste a lot of energy commuting ridiculous distances to work each day. When I was a kid, people lived a lot closer to where they worked. I still remember quite a number of people walking past our home to a rubber factory nearby each morning and afternoon.
I remember seeing a documentary on a Soviet era town in Russia somewhere where everybody could walk anywhere within the town in 20 minutes. It was an academic based town, so they were probably happy enough to walk, and be seen as “Green”.
Apparently, desertification has been proceeding apace for quite some time; largely due to improper farming and grazing methods. Desertification does increase atmospheric temperatures, as anybody who ever walked across a significant stretch of hardpan in the summer can tell you.
It also reduces CO2-utilizing plants. There are literally millions of acres that have been desertified (including in a lot of federal lands in the U.S.). Remove the plants and you remove “CO2 eaters”. What an irony it would be if someday it was widely recognized that desertification is the major cause of CO2 increases in the atmosphere, precisely because it removes some of the self-correcting features of the ecosystem.
I do a bit of ranching myself, and it is obvious to me that the way human beings treat the land can not only reverse partial or serious desertification and greatly enhance plant growth. But it will take a lot of doing. Huge areas in northern China, Africa and Central Asia have been desertified within the memory of people alive today. And, as i mentioned above, very large areas of North America have been desertified by government practices that encourage it.
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