Today’s green news:
Greens go hard on ETS. The Greens plan to play “hardball” on emissions trading in the Senate, says today’s Oz:
“We have always said that an inadequate target is worse than nothing,” Senator Brown told ABC television’s Lateline program last night.
He said if Australia locked in a scheme with a 5 per cent cut to emissions, then that scheme could not easily be changed if the news on climate change got more serious and deeper cuts were needed.
You can read the transcript of Brown on Lateline here.
In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s SMH, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong criticised the Greens and environmental groups for failing “to grapple with the economic realities of the transformation we need to make”, claiming higher targets would cost Australian jobs. But Brown has hit back, claiming Wong is “confused” about her own party’s scheme:
Penny Wong does seem to be confused — she’s saying that she could reduce the cap on carbon emissions each year… If you look at the [scheme] yes you can, but that’s for five years ahead. It won’t have an immediate impact…
It’s estimated that if we green our economy we’ll have 2.5 million to 3.5 million new jobs by the year 2025.
The government need to win over the Coalition or the Greens to move forward with the legislation. So who are the harder nuts to crack? Given how strongly an environmentally-based party like the Greens feel about this issue, are they better off cutting their losses and focusing on dealing with the Coalition?
In other news:
Chicago go for green. Chicago are promising the “greenest Summer Olympics ever” in their bid for to host the 2016 Games, reports MSNBC, including generating a fifth of their energy from wind, hydropower and biofuels. It will be interesting to see what the other cities in the running — Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Tokyo — propose in response (if anything).
140 nations agree to create treaty slashing mercury emissions. At a high-level UN meeting in Nairobi yesterday, 140 countries agreed to create a legally-binding treaty to cut mercury emissions, reports the Washington Post:
Formal negotiations will begin late this year, and U.N. officials hope to conclude the talks by 2013. The White House issued a statement saying a future treaty would use “a combination of legally binding and voluntary commitments” to cut mercury emissions from industrial processes as well as coal-fired power plants and small-scale mining.
…
A range of industrial activities, including the production of chlorine and the burning of coal, release mercury, which then falls to the earth and the sea in precipitation. The neurotoxin accumulates in fish and marine mammals in the form of methylmercury, which poses a threat to humans when consumed
