Wow, this is interesting.

I hope this is paranoia, because if it’s not then it is a pretty scary world we are heading towards.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24817536-15306,00.html

Hey, I found this map which shows surplus and deficit budgets around the world.

http://www.up2maps.net/report/TSoprano/World/world_account_balance.html

Not really any surprises, but interesting nonetheless!

It is so typical that Telstra wants special treatment for their bid for the national broadband network.

I have to say that Mr. Rudd continues to impress me with the way he is going about things.

I really think that the best thing that could possibly happen to telecommunications in Australia would be for Telstra to get chopped up into little bits and fed to their competitors. :)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/15/2446644.htm

The real tipping point our world needs to get over in order to make us a green society is the point where clean energy actually becomes cheaper than dirty energy.

As long as renewable energy is significantly more expensive that current energy sources, I think that we are really still living in a land of lip-service and political gestures. Besides, how is anybody (including governments, consumers) supposed to afford to use anything but the cheapest energy when they are already broke due to this economic downturn we find ourselves in?

So how do we get to the point that clean energy is cheaper than dirty energy?

I feel as though the main strategy I keep hearing about is make dirty energy more expensive. Trying to impose regulation on industry to make ‘dirty energy’ more expensive is just not going to work. I think we need to come from the opposite angle and make ‘clean energy’ cheaper.

Why won’t making dirty energy more expensive work? Because I don’t think that we are ever going to be able to, as a world, agree to all impose regulation on industry in consistent and co-ordinated way.

What if the EU, for example, does manage to agree upon a regulatory regime that will really reduce carbon emissions?

In today’s global economy, what is to stop the dirty industries that are no longer profitable in the EU moving to another country/region which doesn’t care about emissions? Countries that harbour dirty industries will (and are) being rewarded by becoming the industrial and economic powerhouses of the world.

At the moment, there are already renewable technologies that are rapidly decreasing in cost per unit output, due to advances in technology made by a plethora of small startups all over the world.

I think the best action the EU could take at this time against climate change would be to invest heavily in these technologies.

It wouldn’t take much to pass the hat around the 27 EU countries to establish or expand research centres of excellence in this field and really accelerate our path towards that tipping point. I dare say that it would be easier than trying to get 27 different countries to agree on regulation that is inevitably going to cost all of them jobs. I would have thought an easier sell would be, ‘pitch in to a co-operative research effort and you will stand to gain the greatest economic benefit as these technologies begin to move into the mainstream worldwide’.

I think that it is a real shame that companies like Exxon recognise the economic value of research, and have received great returns from their investments in this area, while world governments are spending time and money on new ways to regulate that they could be using to get smart and get us closer to that tipping point.