Even more shocking truths about Waltzing Matilda.

> The swagman (hobo) gets busted for stealing a sheep.

> In preference to being taken in for his crime he commits suicide by drowning himself in a billabong (deep river pool).

The way our inland rivers are going, these days the swagman might have trouble finding a billabong deep enough to drown himself in.

And no carbon tax either I'm presuming.  Subsidy diversion maybe?  It's the only plan touted by politicians.

What say you to this challenge pico? Is there a progressive green movement in Australia that could act in time?

Here's a question for progressive green australians:  Will you take hold of the opportunity to go green with solar, wave, and wind power over a renewable smart grid and restore water supplies with conservation, waste water recycling, and renewably powered desalination?

Will you become manufacturing leaders in these technologies?  Or will you wait and watch and deny and delay until it's too late?  Nature has given you the lead on this whole conversion from the old GHG- intensive energy economy to the new renewable smart grid economy.

What will you do?  If you go green tech, capital will be attracted to your efforts.  If you remain with the status quo, capital will flee for safety.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

To be honest amazngdrx, I'm not hopeful about any meaningful efforts from Australian politicians to bring down our emissions any time soon. Both the major parties are pandering to coal and other big emitters. The national Labour party (currently in power) is proposing a pathetic carbon reduction target and the opposition party is calling for it to be watered down. Incentives for installing renewable energy generation so far are aimed at winning votes rather than maximising CO2 reductions.

State governments are even more pathetic. Growth in spite of all costs is the mantra and there is a lot of money being spent on infrastructure to pipe around dwindling water resources, build desalination plants and such.

Australia has given up any pretence at playing a leadership role in addressing emissions. As a nation we seem intent accepting the role of climate victim while making as much money as we can exporting rocks, coal and gas.

Much of the populace desperately hopes the situation will change, and there is agitation from activists, but at the moment we seem to have hit a wall. As a nation we are just too economically conservative and consumption driven to hold our leaders to account over this.

In the mean time we wilt in the heat. Tonight's news here in Victoria was dominated by stories about how vegetable and fruit crops have been devastated by last week's heat wave and by fears of what will happen when Saturdays predicted extreme high temperatures and gales fan expected fire outbreaks.

No substance on renewable energy and conservation coming from politicians.  Only a few weeks into this new administration so we can still hope, but it looks fruitless.

(Obama at National Prayer Breakfast now speaking live on teevee.)

One would think that solar panels powering air conditing would ring some sort of bell..at least?  Especially in regions where the utility transformers melt in summer from grid overload due to air conditioning and heat waves.

Peak solar energy and heat waves do ocurr simultaneously, but no bulb lights up in the political mind?  

The grim reality is that once the election is over and our side wins, nothing sunstantial will change anyway, things will only get worse slower than they do when the opposition is in charge.  In a way, this is more depressing than the flagrant wing nut depravity of a kidnapping, torturing, murdering regime like duuuhbya presided over.

Oh well, any talk of renewable desalination there?  Solar powered desalination seems obvious too.  The US southwest is in the same shape as Australia as far as drought, desertification and fire storms.  No talk of solar powered desalination or air conditioning there.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Cripes, are you giving up on Obama already?! At least we gave Kevin Rudd about six months before we sadly concluded he's a dud.

The response to the heatwave by Melbourne politicians was telling. They all clamoured to claim "full responsibility" for the rail network and electricity grid caving in, while defiantly pointing out that it was all due to an unprecedented weather event that no one could possibly have predicted. This was in spite of the fact that we had a similarly severe event about the same time last year, everyone talks about climate change non stop and it keeps getting hotter every bloody year.

No talk whatsover that I have noticed about how solar electricity could have averted Melbourne and Adelaide having to go through suburb by suburb periodic blackouts due to air conditioning demands. A friend of mine in Mebourne has 8 panels on his roof. He was immune to the blackouts, but learned that during those periods his excess power generations was dumped to earth because the grid can't use it during a blackout!

The Rudd government's big renewable energy policy is to offer every home owner earning under $100,000 per year an $8,000 rebate for solar panels. What this means is that people are installing the minimum number of panels that they can get for the money. It's a dumb policy. Offering (say) a 50% rebate to everyone regardless would have enticed people to put their own money into it, would have encouraged rich people who could afford big systems to participate, and would have encouraged businesses to get involved. Who care how much the investor earns. Everyone's electrons are equally useful. We should be giving every individual and every business incentives to get in on the act.

There has been lots of talk in the media lately about how all the solar campanies are avoiding, or exiting Australia because our policies discourage investment.

They're talking about making our new Victorian desal plant renewable powered (mostly wind I think), but it will jack up water prices, lock us into buying the water from a private company, and is being done instead of the cheaper alternative, which is to recycle Melbourne's storm-water.

I am in a confidence free fall, when it comes to the strategies that have been used in this society in pushing us towards some climate sanity. I listen to the confident predictions of people like Joe's friend at the NWF, and the equally confident predictions of Congressional leadership and the Obama administration, and I just can't make the leap of faith.

In the mean time, the Republicans and what I call the Triple D crowd (deny, delay, dither)are almost euphoric they are so confident that they are going to kill climate legislation and that they are about to win (like winning a nuclear war?) the issue. They are either blatantly delusional, or they know something that we don't know. Namely that our strategy sucks, is headed nowhere, and that they can just grind things to a halt as they always have.  

I always believe in trying everything that even stands a remote chance of working. However, I think we have to start thinking about scrapping all our illusions, retiring our pet strategies, and do some real hard thinking on how to proceed in the immediate future. My guts tell me that our current dog, just won't hunt.

Randy Cunningham
Cleveland. OH

Randy Cunningham