Compton's Comment

Chaos At Copenhagen

^{Everald Compton | February/March 2010}

In my lifetime, the world’s population has more than doubled. Later in this century, it will pass ten billion.

Despite what the sceptics say, it is a fact that every one of us, no matter how disciplined we may be, causes some harm to the environment every day. When we multiply that impact by billions, there is cause for genuine concern, particularly as half of those billions live in poverty and squalor.

Clearly, a viable plan to restore and protect the environment has to be implemented and I had hoped that the Climate Change Convention in Copenhagen would lead us in the right direction. Sadly, it failed. Stated more accurately, it ended in utter chaos because it was badly organised, utterly leaderless and without an agenda that could lead to positive decision making.

Astoundingly, its failure didn’t relate to Climate Change issues. The cause was China’s determination to establish itself as the driving force of international power politics, clearly replacing the United States. With the backing of India, Russia and Brazil, China used Copenhagen to change the direction of history.

As these emerging powers have no intention of signing an international agreement regarding the environment, every nation can now implement its own policies in its own time with no sense of panic.

This poses the question – “What should Australia do right now?”

An Emissions Trading Scheme has been defeated in Parliament and we can be thankful for that as it was deeply flawed – too many big polluters were exempted, while the burden fell on too few and carbon traders would have reaped billions of dollars in profits.

Sadly, the Opposition, at the time of writing, has not presented an alternative policy, but has ruled out any form of carbon tax, a decision which is quite astonishing as we can’t clean up the environment without the cost being shared by all.

This is far too important an issue to be the subject of cheap politics in an election year. As Rudd and Abbott have many other major issues on which they can fight an election, they must come to a bipartisan agreement on this matter so we can commence the long term task of restoring the environment.

What we do will have little impact on the world scene as we are a tiny part of the problem but we can, as an act of responsible nationhood, clean up our act, even if the heavily populated nations do nothing.

You and I must tell our political leaders that we want small and pragmatic steps taken every year to make Australia clean and green and we are prepared to pay something to achieve this provided we do not have to put up with the hysterical panic that they are inflicting upon us.

Its time for the emotional fundamentalists at both ends of the Climate Change debate to get off their high horses and show some common sense.

Some good will then come out of the chaos at Copenhagen and we can organise another conference to determine how we find the resources to provide the basic needs of an over-populated planet.