On Saturday night was Earth Hour, where squillions of people all around the world turned the lights off. We didn’t bother.
Earth Hour is feel good tokenism. And that is about all most people seem prepared to do to tackle climate change – they say climate change is a major concern but when it comes to action, don’t want to actually do anything that costs money.
Witness the politicking over the Rudd government’s failed efforts to introduce its emissions trading scheme. Now I’m not saying such a scheme is the best way to address climate change – I really don’t know. Nor would I say the government did a good job getting people on board with it – the selling of the policy was appallingly bungled. However, the bottom line was people were mostly bothered by it because it would cause extra costs for industry, and for consumers.
Well, duh, isn’t the point of an emissions trading scheme to price emissions in a way such that the generators of emissions and the consumers of their products are given signals in the form of higher costs that should encourage them to produce less emissions, and consume less of products that generate them. Historically the costs of carbon emissions have not been borne by those producers and consumers – everyone, especially the environment, has paid while the producers and consumers get a free ride. Electricity bills will be higher, jobs will be lost, the opponents of action on emissions argue. Yes thats right, and the reason is that those bills have been artificially subsidised by not reflecting the full costs of electricity production, and those jobs were sustained artificially for the same reasons. Just because thats been the case historically doesn’t mean its right or should be continued.
But no that’s too hard for everyone! Lets just make ourselves feel good by having Earth Hours and the like – show support for the cause without having to change anything or god forbid, spend any money.
