Saturday, November 28, 2009

PAID TO POLLUTE

If you pollute you get paid and if you pollute more you get paid more. That’s the policy of the Rudd government now and it’s the policy all over the world. Who pays for this? Those who don’t have the money to pay, and don’t have the money to lobby and buy government and therefore democracy- if you are in some sort of a so-called democracy. And if you are in a totalitarian nation state you can’t even try and buy it! Democracy is not for all, even in a democracy, but its very much better having at least some democracy in a democratic state and if you are of the majority, and the majority in Australia is 70% who believe that global warming is real and is happening at ever increasing rates and will threaten our very existence soon, then you would want to do something about it now!! No you can’t! At least you can’t do all that’s necessary to save the planet. And you wont be able to channel enough money into the right areas. You haven’t got the money to do that even if you are of the majority because the Pondsi schemed financial sector has ensured that they will be paid for the pollution they’ve created, the crash of the economy they’ve created and the threat to the environment they’ve made and go on business as usual continuing the lie and hoodwinking you. But the environment is not silly even if we are. We are basically environmentally, economically and ethically bankrupt.The environment has limits and we are seeing those limits right in front of us as we smash into the world’s finite resources. Like it or not we are going to have to change immediately!! Otherwise we will keep on smashing into the environmental limits and we will be bounced back each time. None of the proposed options to reduce CO2 emissions by the polluters will work in any effective way because to do so will close their businesses. The polluters will probably control the Copenhagen meeting in December and make promises and perhaps listen to the poorest and most affected nations. That’s likely all that will happen. Effective emissions reduction means a total cut in emissions now!! The anthropogenic triggered rise in CO2 has tipped the fine balance between positive and negative feedbacks of this planet resulting in a summed positive warming effect rising exponentially. This is a disastrous situation to be in. Disastrous global warming will now happen certainly at least in our grandchildren’s lifetime or possibly sooner instead of playing out over the millennia. We need to understand that the planet is a heat sink gradually absorbing heat from the sun hence the rise in temperature as result of positive feedback. We can’t say the planet is cooling because of local temperature decrease. Or warming because of an increase in local temperature but we can say it is warming because we see more extremes of weather everywhere. And we all know about the polar icecaps melting. An analogy would be to see convection currents becoming more vigorous as more heat is applied to a pot of water on the stove eventually resulting in boiling. Already just a half-degree sea temperature rise has caused fish to migrate out of their usual areas to other areas. This is both good and bad as we are now seeing fish we never have seen before resulting in the collapse of some fishing industries. Overfishing and pollution has exacerbated it. More warming and hence more vigorous convection currents in sea and air –well you know the result. There now is a never-ending list of environmental degradation and collapse that could be cited. Carbon capture and storage for the coal industry, with all its other pollutants, will never work on a global scale and certainly the amount of money being spent to realise this is far too small and it will never happen. Nuclear power has its inextricable connection to nuclear weapons and is very costly. The pebble bed nuclear power system has not been proven for global scale and still involves transport of uranium with its inherent dangers and has more waste to deal with. The only way forward is to dump the model we have, understand how we are interconnected with the environment and all its ecologies and build an economy based entirely on the environment. We can use immediately already proven technologies for the energy sector using the environment for energy production and using it in a way that doesn’t destroy it and us, as we are part of the environment. We have taken a long time to learn and as an example we have built and are still building large-scale hydroelectric schemes but they have tended to destroy the environment at best and at worst destroyed it entirely and with it also peoples livelihoods. We need to know how to not do it that way. It’s hard to see how future projects of damming rivers to produce hydropower could help the environment. So we need to concentrate on technologies that impose little or no degradation and are not dangerous to human, and environmental health or security. Large-scale wind farms spread throughout the country in uninhabited areas or out at sea away from sight an analysis has shown will provide base power if connected to a grid over a sufficiently large area as at any one time there will always be a third of them producing base power 24/7. Tide and wave power together with direct absorption of photons from the only safe nuclear reactor we have-the sun in solar thermal installations with storage will provide the rest of needed base power. Solar thermal installations can be sited in desert areas. There’s plenty of desert in China, the Middle East, North Africa, Australia, America. And only relatively very small areas would be required and connection to where the power is needed by High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines which loose less power typically 3%. The present push for carbon capture and storage system of credits, it would be better to have a carbon tax all over the world where carbon taxes can’t be bought. This tax could then be put into financing renewable power systems. Worldwide cooperation will be needed. The Copenhagen talks should work along these lines.

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