Trams in Brisbane and Per Capita Carbon Emissions

China expert raps luxurious Aussie life

Prof Pan was unimpressed with Australia's environmental standards, saying public transport seemed poor and the buildings and street lighting were not energy efficient.

He labelled as "insufficient" Australia's pledge to cut greenhouse emissions by five to 15 per cent by 2020.

The Chinese experts called for a global climate pact that would involve each country being allowed to emit a certain amount, based on their populations.

This is ominous for Australia because it has very high per capita emissions, whereas China has fairly low per capita emissions.

Australian climate adviser Ross Garnaut backed the per capita push in a video address to the conference, saying it was fair.

This was at the Australia-China Climate Change Forum.

Although the biggest mistake is that while there is hope that there is clean coal serious investment in other technologies doesn't exist, as highlighted by the recent Clean Coal Air Freshener advert from This is Reality.

As for public transport, Brisbane used to have trams including a line along Milton Road. There was fire in Paddington where Paddington Central is now and the trams were replaced by buses. The tram e-petition got a massive 600 signatures which puts it well behind things like a petition against recycling water.

Plastic Ocean

"Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has some interesting points including that there's no such thing as a free range fish (because the oceans are so polluted) and that the island of plastic is more a concentration of plastic - which sounds far worse as far as the environment is concerned.

Somewhere

Alarm Bells Sound for the Amazon

Brazil's land mass and farming industry make it one of the most agriculturally productive countries in the world. It has already been dubbed "the world's feeding bowl" and is exporting more and more to emerging economies, such as India and China.

As China's middle-class continues to grow, so, too, does its demand for food. Brazil exports 10 million tons of soybeans to China a year for both animal feed and human consumption, trade that is crucial to Brazil's economic development.

And it's not just poverty that's an issue.

The state of Para has some of the worst human rights abuses in Brazil. People are trafficked from across the impoverished northeast of the country to work in slavelike conditions in the sawmills, illegal charcoal ovens and cattle farms.

They usually work in horrific conditions, with no basic rights and existing on roughly $5 a day. If they try to seek help from the authorities, they are threatened with death.

There's also the WHO page on "Deaths from Climate Change".

Years to Days

Dr J Craig Venter – A DNA-Driven World (video)

For the past 15 years at ever faster rates we have been digitising biology. By that I mean going from the analog world of biology through DNA sequencing into the digital world of the computer. I also refer to this as reading the genetic code. The human genome is perhaps the best example of digitising biology. Our computer databases are growing faster per day then during the first 10 years of DNA sequencing. The databases have been filling even faster with the results of our global ocean sequencing project. As a result we have now over 10 million genes in the public databases, the majority of which have been contributed by my teams.

Instead of evolution happening only due to random mutations that survived selective pressure, we can see how by adding chromosomes to or exchanged between species, that thousands of changes could happen in an instant.

Now they can happen not just by random chance but by deliberate human design and selection. Human thought and design and specific selection is now replacing Darwinian evolution.

The biggest question in my mind is the one of scale. Last year we consumed more than 83 million barrels of oil per day or 30 billion barrels during the year. In addition we used over 3 billion tons of coal. These are mind boggling numbers and the only way that I can see replacing oil and coal is through a widely distributed system. If there were one million bio-refineries around the globe each one would still need to produce 17,000 liters per day.

He also talks about the rise of fundamentalism, that 25% of people in the US don't know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, half think people and dinosaurs co-existed and that 58% don't know how to calculate a 10% tip.

Why Riding Your Bike Doesn't Help Global Warming

An interesting article, "Climate Change – an alternative approach", which highlights that the current supply of oil fails to meet demand. So reducing your usage of CO2 emissions, like riding your bike to work, does not help - the drop in demand is quickly met by consumption somewhere else. The author is suggesting a more viable approach is to focus on production rather than consumption.

He was talking about flying to Sydney and stated that if you chose not to fly you were making an immediate carbon saving (as apposed to offsetting the flight where the saving was at least delayed if it ever happened at all). Does tearing up your ticket to Sydney reduce carbon emissions? Ask the question, have some fossil fuels been left in the ground that would otherwise be extracted? The answer, absolutely not, and I’m not talking about how the plane’s still going to fly without you.

I’m talking about the fact that oil extraction is not determined by demand, it’s determined by supply. It has been since earlier this decade when the market price diverged markedly from the production costs.

According to the author, the answer lies in the oil and coal producing nations reducing production which is much easier to coordinate than billions of consumers. This doesn't detract from investing in reducing consumption and the usual suspects (Australia, India, USA and China) are involved on both sides of production and consumption.

More Gore

A few years ago I tried to imagine what would have happened if Al Gore hadn't won the 2000 election. Well now that we're half way through his second term you can only wonder what kind of problems would've occurred if he hadn't turned solving global warming into the Apollo project of the 21st century. Although his critiques have labeled it a quagmire I guess it's better than half the world becoming so.

Update: In the comments Paul pointed to an introduction to Saturday Night Live introduction by president Gore (the direct link didn't work but this one did).

Update 2: Lawrence Lessig links to two adverts that are surely directed by Paul Verhoeven (from Robocop or Starship Troopers).