There is nothing quite like opening the Armidale Independent (Sept 21, p.10) and being confronted with a sermon from Greenpeace. The old-time hell and damnation preachers are still among us, if with a somewhat different motivation. The traditional questions about morality have been replaced by humanity’s sins against the globe.
Mr Adam Blakester’s exhortations about pricing carbon to save the world began with a very odd question. A “what if…” and what would we do in response approach? The question itself invited another question — what if we changed the wording a bit?
We could ask, what if all humans were given a second brain? How might this change the way we consider putting $10 per person per week into medical research? In many ways, the high-priests of modern technology are already substituting their electronic brains for human intelligence. Human thinking has been replaced by computer modelling.
Mr Blakester’s fundamental proposition needs to be refined before it can be discussed seriously. He clearly believes that his question is explained by his list of extravagant generalisations and assumed causal relationships. These generalisations become self-explanatory simply by being expressed.
The conflation then becomes even more incredible when he asserts that Australian pensioners are among the world’s most affluent people. However, like most of Mr Blakester’s data, this is achieved merely by playing with numbers.
Perhaps Mr Blakester needs to consider that it is the numbers in the poorest “4/5ths of the world’s population” that has created the disparity in living conditions and poverty? Ecological footprints are certainly more critical when global population densities are too high. Does that mean that a more efficient response to Mr Blakester’s stated problems would be dismantling the world’s cities? But, then, would the consequent dispersals of people merely disperse the problems, not remove them?
Pricing carbon will do nothing to add more fertile land, minerals, water, etc. A tax — without compensations of any kind to anybody at all — would help to change consumption, by making most Australians as poor as the world’s “4/5ths”.
Pricing carbon for trading purposes simply opens us all up to yet another reprehensible derivatives trading market which will benefit only the multi-millionaire traders and their political acolytes.
We certainly need to switch to renewable energy sources. The CSIRO is doing splendid work on thermal solar generation which will produce the necessary base-load power. But this requires immediate and necessary financial commitment from government. Mr Blakester’s “$10 per person per week” would be better spent on this. The results would be far more beneficial and would be achieved far more efficiently.
The current wave of enthusiasm in New England for solar and wind energy would be far more persuasive if local entrepreneurs were actually investing in local production, employing local people to manufacture all the components, instead of merely importing them from overseas.
Such a commitment would also be more credible in Mr Blakester’s environmental morality, because we would be creating the pollution caused by manufacturing the components within the area we are seeking to protect. The responsibility would be our own.
Bruce Watson,
Kentucky
