Last-minute gifts

One last post before I take a little break over Christmas!

I’m trying to get my last-minute Christmas shopping done, and although I find it easy to buy for my neices and nephew, it’s much more difficult to sort out the grown-ups in my life! Like me, they don’t really need much in the way of new things, but we all like giving and receiving gifts as a way to show our love for each other.

One way to deal with this is to give consumable gifts: things that people can eat, drink and be merry with, but don’t hang around the house gathering dust the way a trinket would. Here’s my favourites:

• organic, Fair Trade chocolates – can be sticky in the Aussie heat though!
• organic wine – white wine usually goes well in summer, when we want chilled drinks, but Tarrango (chilled red) or champagne for New Year’s Eve can be popular too
• homemade biscuits – good old Anzacs, or something more fancy if you like
• infused vodka – vanilla vodka, chilli vodka or something similar for the people in your life who enjoy interesting cocktails
• fresh veg from the garden – tie a ribbon around a punnet of tomatoes, green beans or a few ears of corn
• cheeses – wrap them with some nice crackers and a fruit paste (or homegrown fruit), skip the cheese knife or platter (since most people who like cheese already have these)
• flavoured olive oils and vineagars – local and organic is best!

What do you like to do in these situations?

Fresh green links

Copenhagen was in the news lots this week, although there didn’t seem to be much real action. The most interesting thing to me is that the smaller nations are not quietly sitting on the sidelines the way other leaders would like them to. With Tuvalu leading the way, they’re actively making demands and staging walkouts and giving it their best effort to convince the world that something serious needs to be done. Oh, and calling Kevin Rudd a liar, which seems reasonable if you compare his soaring rhetoric to his actual deeds.

George Monbiot has an excellent piece on his blog about Copenhagen – it’s not about carbon dioxide, This Is About Us. The human race is at the crossroads of history, and there’s a battle on for who will choose our next direction: the expanders, or the restrainers?

The ACT, South Australia and the Northern Territory have all announced ambitious plans to move to renewables, cut waste and generally be more eco-friendly.

The Walk Against Warming website has photos and videos of all the walks around Australia. A big thumbs up to the people in Darwin who braved some horrible-looking rainy, windy weather, and to all the people with me at Perth looking for shade in the 40 degree heat!

Picturing climate change – a photo essay of places around the world affected by climate change already, and the people who are part of the fossil fuel industries. This is really moving stuff, I highly recommend you take a look.

Review: Two Men in a Tinnie

While I’ve been on holidays, I finally caught up with all the episodes of the ABC TV series Two Men in a Tinnie. It’s the one where John Doyle (more famous from Triple J’s Roy and HG shows) and Professor Tim Flannery take a dinghy down the Murray and Darling Rivers, meeting the people who live and work and play there. I saw a bit of it on tv a few years ago, but have only just now rented the whole thing through Quickflix.

I really enjoyed the series, and recommend it to anyone interested in the fate of one of Australia’s most complex and important waterways. John and Tim are lovely presenters, chatty and informative, and you can tell they’re friends in real life. They’re able to draw out the people they interview by being polite and respectful of their views, even if they disagree. They also make sure to get scientific opinions on the various problems facing the Murray-Darling basin.

As we join them in their little quest, we get to see some truly beautiful parts of Australia, and find out bits of history and the characters who made it what it is today. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and makes me want to get my own tinnie, although the Swan is a much shorter river and I don’t think it’d be nearly as interesting a journey!

While John and Tim don’t present a definitive solution to our water problems, their preference for a national system becomes clear throughout the series. Each person they speak to is able to figure out their own issues very well, but the enormous size of the Murray-Darling means that no-one is taking responsibility for it’s health as a whole. It’s become a tragedy of the commons, and only a collective response will be able to fix it.

I hope that all the people interviewed got to see this engaging series, to see how their own lives fit into the vast patchwork of the rivers that supply the majority of Australia’s food. The series reminded me that in a place like Australia, with so little rain and such a harsh environment, we absolutely rely on the generosity of our fellow countrymen to pull us through the tough times.

Did you see the series when it was on tv, or afterwards? What did you think of it?

Fresh green links

Copenhagen is all over the news this week, which I’m glad of. Earlier this year I was worried it wouldn’t be noticed, but it seems like everyone is paying attention! For updates of events as they happen, check out the official COP15 news page.

Emissions cuts without a carbon price – doable but expensive – is a comment on Tony Abbott’s plan to solve the climate change problem he doesn’t believe in, without resorting to any policy held by the Rudd government.

Environment at ABC.net.au – Aunty has set up a page that collects all of their news and opinion and documentary pieces that relate to the environment. Lots of good stuff to dig through in your spare time!

How can I say no to gifts? – some good Christmas advice over at RecycleThis.co.uk for those of us who are happy with what we’ve already got, if we can just spend some time with family and friends.

Urban Chickens – photos from a guy in San Francisco who reckons more people should keep chickens. No great revelations here, just some cute pictures.

It’s official: the 00′s are the hottest decade on record – the World Meteorological Organisation has confirmed what many of us had figured out for ourselves. Incidentally, have we agreed on what to call this decade? I’m voting for the naught-ies, because I have to find my fun somewhere…

Walk Against Warming 09 – on Saturday morning, I’ll be at the Perth event, hanging out with the GetUp group. Come and find me and say hi if you’re there! It’s always fun to meet you all. For non-Perthies, check the website to find out where the nearest walk is to you. They’re open to everyone who cares about climate change and wants to show their support for real action from our politicians. Bring the kids or your dog, or ride your bike…

Is cap and trade right for us?

There’s an anti-cap-and-trade video by Annie Leonard doing the rounds. I was looking forward to seeing it, because I’d enjoyed her previous video “The Story of Stuff”.

But I was pretty disappointed by “The Story of Cap and Trade”. It had a lot of errors in it, which I trust weren’t deliberate, and didn’t offer any other solution to reducing our whole world’s dependence on polluting energy sources.

As David Roberts points out over at Grist, Leonard describes 4 basic problems with cap and trade:

1. Giving away carbon licenses is bad
2. Offsets are bad
3. Carbon markets are bad
4. Talking about cap and trade stops us from talking about other solutions

The first two are problems because of the fossil fuel lobby’s power to find or create loopholes in anything a government puts forward. Therefore, they’ll also be problems in any other solution we try – a carbon tax can be avoided by corporations in the same way they already avoid paying other taxes, regulation can be weakened and unenforced in the same way that corporations always try to avoid having anyone see what they’re doing.

The real fix for the first two problems is the same no matter what we do: we have to empower our politicians to do what the people want, not what the lobbyists want. We need to shine a light on corporate abuses of power. This isn’t going to be easy, but it’d have a great knock-on effect in more areas than just climate change.

The third problem is that Leonard thinks all markets are full of bankers doing horrible things. After the global financial crisis revealed the depths that financiers are happy to dive to, I can’t say I blame her. But markets aren’t inherently evil, they just need strong regulation to keep them in their place: a tool to be used when appropriate, and not the goal of everything we do. And there we end up back with the solution to the first two problems: we need to take back power from lobbyists who work to get corporate advantage at the expense of citizen’s rights.

Eric De Place, also at Grist.org, points out that we’ve already had success with pollution markets (Liberal party, take note: Rudd didn’t invent the idea, and no-one at Copenhagen would have been surprised by our CPRS). The ETS in Europe has been a great success after a shaky start – it started in 2005, and by 2007 14 countries had exceeded their Kyoto targets. And the USA has successful markets for controlling acid rain and smog, with annual sulfur emissions quickly reduced to well below the cap at a much cheaper price than had been predicted by the corporations involved.

As for the fourth point – well, if Annie Leonard has any good ideas then I’d love to hear them. Regulation and control of our pollution sources can easily reduce CO2 emissions very quickly – but how will we pay for that? A carbon tax would be simple, but only if we solved that pesky problem of fossil fuel lobbyists perverting the taxation system for their own gain, and I haven’t heard any bright ideas on that one. Our voluntary actions to green our homes are great, but as long as Australia gets 80% of it’s electricity from coal, they’re not going to help much.

The Rudd government’s CPRS is a terrible example of an emissions trading scheme – it gives away permits and cash to all our polluters and has the weakest cap in the world. But that’s because the Labor party has done it wrong, not because cap and trade is an inherently bad idea.

At any rate, I still think Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” is one of the best ways to get the overview of how consumerism is bad for our planet. I highly recommend it – just maybe give the sequel a miss!