• More energy needed to keep dog than a car
• Get pets to go vegetarian to save planet
• Go "green" with pets like fish and rabbits

Source: News.com.au

Carbon is carbon. Whether it is human induced or not.

"Camel herds emit a very small amount of greenhouse gas," Senator Wong’s spokeswoman said.

The Australian obtained two independent assessments of the mathematics of taking out the one million-strong feral camel herd: from the federal Parliamentary Library and also veterinary scientist George Wilson, an expert in animal greenhouse emissions.

Dr Wilson, who is head of consulting group Australian Wildlife Services, remains sceptical of the proposal to eradicate feral camels due to practical problems.

But he, like the library, maintained that the Coalition had its numbers right.

A spokeswoman for Senator Wong said the "500 cars" carbon analogy was appropriate because only emissions from tourist ride-type camels counted under Kyoto.

"The figures provided relate to anthropogenic emissions that count towards our national emissions target," the spokeswoman said. "This same principle applies elsewhere.

For example, we don’t include the emissions from bushfires or drought, because even though they impact on our emissions, they are not something in our direct control."

The absurdity of the UN carbon accounting systems was also highlighted by Mick Keogh, executive director of research group the Australian Farm Institute.

Mr Keogh noted that while emissions from a deliberately lit bushfire count under Kyoto, they did not if the fire was caused by lightning.

And it also varies depending on whether it razes privately owed land or a national park.

"When it’s burning in the park, none of those emissions officially count, but when it spreads back out of the park to private land on the other side, it starts to again contribute to greenhouse emissions as measured by the UN’s rules," he said.

THE Federal Government cannot guarantee that its controversial climate plan will cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at all.

Labor and the Liberals are fiercely arguing over whose climate change plan is the best.

Both plans aim to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.

The government says the opposition’s plan won’t work and could see emissions rise.

But the same argument could be levelled against the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Government data appears to show that under the ETS, Australia’s emissions would rise from 553 million tonnes in 2000 to 585 million tonnes by 2020.

The target to cut emissions by 5 per cent is only reached by paying other countries to reduce their emissions.

Source: Herald Sun

When the property prices in India are tough for people earning Rs 43,749 per month the times of india reports that the annual income on average for Indians is Rs 43,749. This is inequality of the highest level.

From the Times:

An Indian on an average is expected to earn Rs 43,749 in 2009-10, nine per cent more than what he would have received last fiscal if the national income were evenly

http://m.timesofindia.com/PDATOI/articleshow/5548821.cms

Quotes:

India forms new climate change body – Telegraph

• The Indian government’s move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr
  Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his
  most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the
  Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take
  more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear

· He announced the Indian government will established a separate National
Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change
on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate
science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for
climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC
doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just
take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had
goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only
on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive
Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with
international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added.

Read more »

( http://message.diigo.com/message/india-forms-new-climate-change-body-telegraph-745979 )

I started this blog many years ago on the idea of sustainability. This involved the issue of the resources we use on planet Earth, the effect on its living beings and what can business do. In the subsequent years the whole thing has revolved around climate change or global warming. It was about carbon credits, cap and trade, taxes by government and other things.

I have come to an understanding in the past year or so that there are more important things to worry about than climate change for the time being because of their impact on humans and the world like malaria or extinction of species.

However, the emails from East Anglia in the UK which are called Climategate now and the continuing work of many skeptics around the world on the works of Pachauri, the head of IPCC, the glaciergate issue of the Himalayas etc has proved that there is a bigger problem of deceit and data manipulation going on.

I will be going on February 4th (incidentally my wedding anniversary) to listen to Lord Monckton in Adelaide. He is a sharp eye who has done some great work around distilling the science and punching a whole in Al Gore’s work and others.

The tide is changing and I think I am not longer worried about climate change. There are many environmental issues to worry about and there are some great things to be achieved by business and technology.

This whole exercise has taught me many things about “so called experts”; politics; environmental groups; data manipulation; mass marketing…etc.

I am not sure where the focus of this blog will go in the coming weeks and months.

I want to leave with this graphic from a presentation by Burt Rutan. Rutan is the winner man behind SpaceshipOne which was the first private funded aircraft to go into space and come back twice within 2 weeks. His design is behind Virgin Galactic.

Charlie Munger in his speech on Wordly wisdom to Stanford students. He was explaining the importance of psychology and more importantly how more than one principle of psychology can interact and multiply and become a powerful force. The first thing that comes to my mind reading this is the corruption in India and how it continues.

It can’t be emphasized too much that issues of morality are deeply entwined with worldly wisdom considerations involving psychology. For example, take the issue of stealing. A very significant fraction of the people in the world will steal if (A) it’s very easy to do and (B) there’s practically no chance of being caught.

And once they start stealing, the consistency principle—which is a big part of human psychology—will soon combine with operant conditioning to make stealing habitual. So if you run a business where it’s easy to steal because of your methods, you’re working a great moral injury on the people who work for you.

Again, it’s obvious. It’s very, very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise, you’re running civilization because these big incentives will create incentive-caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behaviour is OK.

Then, if somebody else does it, now you’ve got at least two psychological principles: incentive0caused bias plus social proof. Not only that, but you get Serpico effects: If enough people are profiting in a general social climate of doing wrong, then they’ll turn on you and become dangerous if you try and blow the whistle.

It’s very dangerous to ignore these principles and let slop creep in. Powerful psychological forces are at work for evil.

[…]

You must stop slop early. It’s very hard to stop slop and moral failure if you let it run for a while.