[Sir John Houghton, a former chairman of scientific assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the UN] told the BBC: “It is very surprising that the White House is still seemingly listening to misinformation from vested interest lobby groups, rather than to their own leading scientists, and indeed to this shouting from all the world’s leading scientists that they have got to do something.”
It's hard to know what to say. I wish I had hope that Bush will wake up on this issue. But I don't.
I'd like to recommend John Perkin's "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". It follows that we aren't and can't be represented by the current administration, as they are guided only by their greed.
ReplyDeleteIf you think the situation in the US is bad, look at what we have in Australia.
ReplyDeleteDespite a near-record drought with no rain in Melbourne in the last twenty days - and none coming - and Australia's greenhouse gas emissions being incredibly high even compared with those of the US, both State and Federal governments still pursues policies of continuing with road building and more coal-fired power stations. It is not even that it would be costly to stop building roads - for the cost of CityLink Melbourne could have the best public transport in the world.
It is that Australia's politicians are not influenced by vested interests in the coal and car industries. Rather, both major parties are owned by a alliance of vested interests in the mining, energy and automotive sectors who actually write Australia's policies to ensure no policies that would counter rapid climate change can ever be put in place. If either major party did, say, transfer a relatively minor part of the roads budget to improve public transport, it would face at best a repeat of the Whitlam coup in 1975 and more likely being overthrown in a military coup d'etat.
Only direct action (unfortunately, unlikely) by the masses of Australians has any hope of freeing Australia's politicians from vested interests and allowing an improvement in our appalling environmental policies.