THE [Australian] minerals industry has demanded [the Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd overhaul his proposed emissions trading system or risk smashing Australian jobs and the nation’s industrial competitiveness. Read more here.
Carbon Trading
US Senate Delays on Carbon
Democratic leaders in the US Senate said last night they may wait until next year to take up climate change legislation, jeopardising the prospect of reaching a deal to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of global warming. The delay would prevent Barack Obama from delivering on his promise of demonstrating firm US commitment on climate change action in advance of negotiations at Copenhagen next December. –Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, 16 September 2009 [via Benny Peiser]
US Rejects Kyoto Ahead of Copenhagen
Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. US negotiators have told European counterparts that the Obama administration intends to sweep away almost all of the Kyoto architecture and replace it with a system of its own design. Read more here (The Guardian) and here (German Press). via Benny Peiser.
No Place for Morality in School Science
IN some Australian schools science teachers are being asked to tell about the dangers of global warming and show Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in order to prepare the students for the big vote at http://youthdecide.com.au/ .
The vote is sponsored by World Vision; Australia’s largest charitable organisation with a history of working with schools.
When I was about 13, in about 1976, my school promoted World Vision’s 40 Hour Famine to raise money to feed children in poor countries. I only raised a small amount through the sponsorship program but it made me feel like I had participated in something good – something worthwhile.
Now World Vision is involved in not only humanitarian work but also the politics of climate change: ‘Youth Decide ’09’ is a national youth vote on climate change sponsored by World Vision and no doubt results from the poll will be used leading up to the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to tell the Rudd Government how Australian Students want cuts in emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020. [Read more…] about No Place for Morality in School Science
Carbon Crooks
The British tax office arrested seven people in London on Wednesday in a suspected 38 million pounds ($62.6 million) value-added tax fraud in the European market in carbon allowances. [Reuters.]
Carbon Credits for Prescribed Burning: A Note from Green Davey
THE Tiwi Islands (Bathurst and Melville) are off the north coast of Australia. They are mostly covered with grassy savanna, much like that in parts of southern Africa. In Africa, this savanna is the result of thousands of years of burning by humans.
If burning is interrupted, then woody shrubs thrive, and the savanna turns into thickets. Due to lightning, fires will still occur, but they will be at longer intervals, and much fiercer, potentially lethal to both humans and wildlife, as in Kruger National Park (http://ag.arizona.edu/oals/ALN/aln54/govender.html ).
I have never been to the Tiwis, but I suspect that they are very similar in this respect to Africa, or Madagascar, where Dr Kristian Kull (Isle of Fire 2006) has eloquently described the political ecology of regular burning by humans.
My attention was caught recently by a television news item about the ‘Tiwi Carbon Project’, in which CSIRO is working with the Tiwi islanders to reduce the carbon released by their fires, and so win them large amounts of cash as ‘carbon credits’. I pursued this back in time, and found a few events which may relate. In 2006, the ABC’s Catalyst program carried a story about a similar scheme in the Northern Territory. The then Northern Territory Environment Minister, Marion Scrymgour (a Tiwi woman), seemed to be working with several Aboriginal Elders, and Dr Jeremy Russell-Smith, a scientist at the CRC Tropical Savannas Management, to promote mild traditional burning, early in the season, to avoid fierce fires later on – wonderful. [Read more…] about Carbon Credits for Prescribed Burning: A Note from Green Davey
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.