the fault always lies elsewhere
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006Victorian blogger Ariel went to work this morning under a red moon. Only it wasn’t the moon; it was the sun smothered in smoke haze from bushfires. February’s bushfires in early December - and the promise of worse to come. Who’s causing this climate change? It couldn’t be us!
Cartoon by Stephanie MacMillan
- Mrs Fitz was in China in September and October 2006. Every time I spoke to her on the phone, she had a hacking smoker’s cough - for several weeks. She doesn’t smoke. It was the air pollution. She travelled extensively in China and the only place she saw clear sky was in Tibet. Others have posted photos of the pollution in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong.
- An acquaintance who lives in the next suburb (our sons went to the same primary school) has relocated his furniture manufacturing operations from Australia to China. He boasts about the cheap labour and lack of environmental regulation. (And he expects me to be impressed. Dickhead!)
Put these facts together, and it’s clearly we Western consumers who can make a difference to our planet.
Have we won or lost the battle to save our planet’s lungs, the Amazon basin? It won’t matter soon, if we don’t stop contributing to China’s unfettered development.
Would my dickhead acquaintance bother manufacturing in China if he had to pay a carbon tax on the Australian coal burned to provide his cheap Chinese power?
