Yet another empty gesture

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

Australia announced plans to ban incandescent bulbs.

A story in The Age at...

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-glass-ceiling/2007/02/20/1171733766181.html

says...

"According to the Government, phasing out incandescent globes over the next
three years could save about 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a
year by 2012 and as much as 4 million tonnes in 2015."

But goes on to say...

"At best, that would be far less than a 1 per cent cut in Australia's
greenhouse emissions, which were 564.7 million tonnes at last count in 2004
and are forecast to keep growing rapidly."

The "far less than a 1 percent cut in Australia's greenhouse emissions"
agrees with my own analysis which I posted to another thread recently.

IMO it would make far more sense to concentrate on things that might
actually make a difference instead of all this posturing about CFLs by CFIs.
It will require massive changes in lifestyles, economies, societies and
governments worldwide to ameliorate the coming catastrophic effects of past
inaction and empty gestures.

Bill McKibben, in "Warning on Warming" which will appear in the March 15 New
York Review of Books says...

"The IPCC report doesn't call for particular reduction figures. It does,
however, make clear that reduction in emissions must be quick and deep.
There is no more optimistic alternative. Even if we do everything right,
we're still going to see serious increases in temperature, and all of the
physical changes (to one extent or another) predicted in the report.
However, there's reason to hope that if the US acts extremely aggressively
and quickly we might be able to avoid an increase of two degrees Celsius,
the rough threshold at which runaway polar melting might be stopped. This
means that any useful legislation will have to feature both a very rapid
start to reductions and a long and uncompromising mandate to continue them."

An advance copy of McKibben's article is at...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_022007M.shtml


http://davehouston.net
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/roZetta/
roZetta-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx