A mission to change

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4261319a1865.html

Sunday, 4 November 2007

A mission to change

Most people feel hopeless about climate change. Any action they could take seems so utterly inconsequential.

Why bother to do your bit when the Chinese start up a new coal-fired electricity plant each week? And it's just as depressing at home.

Most business lobby groups are gleefully seizing on fishooks in the government's proposed emissions trading scheme as an excuse for delaying action rather than working enthusiastically on solutions.

Yet, if we leave climate change to mandated government actions such as treaties, caps, emissions trading and standards we will never achieve the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions needed to stabilise the global climate, argues Michael Molitor of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Australian practice.

Even if you take all the existing mandatory national and international programmes in place and add in something of similar scope for the US on the assumption that the next president will act, "you do not get a reduction in timing and scale of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020," he told a Victoria University Institute of Policy Studies seminar last week. "So, you have to engage everybody."

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