Mood:
hug meTopic: big media
Sue Dunlevy is a thinker. She's a real survivor too having written about some serious troubles in her time. She hangs with the Canberra press gallery if memory serves.
So she asks in the last line of her somewhat flippant sledge of environmentalists "Will I still be facing an eternity in environmental purgatory ..." or will camping and giving the modern appliances/energy guzzlers a rest for a week be sufficient penance?:
Cold showers atone for my green sins
Sue Dunlevy - Thursday, January 01, 09 (08:51 pm)
ENVIRONMENTAL puritanism almost killed Christmas in my suburb this year when green crusaders objected to neighbours who wanted to put up a Christmas light display.
I've commented on her blog as follows:
I've accepted your request for penance formula in your last sentence. It's on my micro news blog - you can find it no doubt.
As for front page of sister paper The Australian yesterday with their dubious headline about a cooling planet. It took till the spill out on p3 to concede via Don White of Weatherwatch "If the same temperatures [in 2008] had occurred in the early 1990s it would have been the warmest ever."
Sooo as always it's the trend that counts. Also the dodos above might like to consider all the soot from China and India which just ... went kaput in the GFC. Less particulates, less dimming, more global warming in 09 ... you read it here first.
Well Sue, and we know it's taboo to hold a conversation with bloggers (unless of course they are on your corporate blog) being an environmentalist, science graduate in zoology mainly, lawyer, lapsed Catholic and community media practitioner here is my penance for you:
One column about the virtues of gross feed in tariff for photo volatic solar power to jump start an Australian alternative energy industry that can mix it with king coal and actually close those dinosaur power stations down.
If we get gross feed in tariff for PV you can show those Christmas lights to your heart's content. Won't that be fun?
Oh, and part of the penance is to research what "gross feed in tariff" really means. Here's a clue - solar panels have to be big enough to exceed daily usage to feed back into the grid. Here's another clue - Prof Mark Diesendorf of University of New South Wales.
Otherwise champ, you have a happy and safe new year and watch out for the Araneomorphae - they bite their prey with highly effective downward pointing fangs.... including reptiles. There's more around this year apparently known in the trade as funnel web spiders.
