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Emissions Trading Scheme
The more I hear about this so-called method of reducing pollution of our atmosphere the more I believe it is just a giant HOAX to legalise another way for the wealthy to make an extra dollar without doing anything productive at all.
I have questions for those proposing such a scheme, and for those supporting such a scheme.
1. Precisely and accurately, what is the percentage of carbon in the so-called green house belt supposedly surrounding our planet and thus causing it to heat up?
2. In what specific way will “Carbon Credits” actually reduce this pollution? So far all I have heard is the additional costs that will be incurred and passed on to the little people like me who are already scratching to make ends meet anyway.
3. Why is it deemed necessary for “carbon Credits” to be tradeable? If a company or business is a big polluter why not just tax them harder until they stop polluting?
4. Lastly why worry about the so called carbon pollution anyway? Mother Nature has made adjustments to our planets climate for millions of years and has managed to do it quite well without having to bother with greedy humans trying to feather their nests. She will continue to do so, regardless of what we puny humans do, or do not do.
Look carefully at the ends results of the once much vaunted Water Trading Scheme. When it started we had a healthy river system in NSW. Now we have about 25 rivers without water in them.
I would suggest we all be very wary of this new scheme designed to separate the poor people of the country from a little more of their hard earned income.
Yours sincerely
Bob
As I get closer to my grave I think often of other times in other places. Memory being what it is, I remember the good times best, not the misery and heartbreak that happened along the way. And so it is that we all have the 'Good old days'.
As a child I remember the freedom I took for granted and the relaxed and friendly attitude of the law enforcement people when I got caught out in some of my nefarious activities. Not criminal in any way, just illegal, and often dangerous to me and to my friends. This fact did not stop the adventures, merely changed their direction, and made me more careful. I knew, and accepted the fact, that I had to wear the consequences of my acts of adventure and defiance and did so with as much good grace as I could muster.
Tresspass was not such a crime then as it is today and I often ventured where I was not supposed to be. Near my home town was an Air Force Training centre for budding pilots and when the war moved away from our shores this became a storage facility and a rubbish dump for surplus war materials, spare parts and excess or obsolete radio and communication equipment. A treasure trove for adventurous kids, like me, for instance. for a while my little group of kids had the most wonderful billy cart with wheels from the tail end a Wacket trainer planes. There truck loads of these wheels dumped in a massive pit ready for burning. Nice rubber tyres and tubes, right size holes for axels on our carts etc. The law saw things differently and one day we were caught at the tip by Air Force Police. The rotten sods sneaked up on us and poked their rifles in our faces and generally frightened the daylights out of us. We then spent about four hours in the Air Force jail as we were held until the law could question us individually. We lost those nice wheels from our billy cart, but somehow retained the home made radios we all had. Such is life for a kid.
Another time I was involved with a service club and we wanted to organise and run a Family Fun day on a nearby copra plantation which had a little sea cove as a boundary. We needed a big bar-b-que plate to cook on as we expected a few hundred people to be there on the day. No gas barby, just wood fire for cooking. Being in Madang PNG at the time we thought that the shipwrecks might provide us with a piece of steel we could use.
And so it proved to be. Eight foot by four foot from the thinner part of the hull of a wreck in Madang Harbour. It took eight of us to lift it. We set it up well ahead the day and several of us tried it out. Absolutely magnificent, once it was hot. We did find that this took about an hour so made some adjustments to the plans for the big day. We cooked for 1200 people on the day which was fine and warm and trouble free. A wonderful time was had by all.
I wonder could it be done today with the same sharing of joy and excitement between different cultures as we had that day.
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September 27th 2009 03:51
it's September 2009, and the state of New South Wales in Australia is covered in dust, literally. The experts say it is the worst dust storm in nearly seventy years.
Why?
Why now and not last year, or next year, and why at all?
No doubt that the lack of rainfall in the inland has a lot to do with it, but this is the driest continent on the planet. Why has there not been more dust storms in the intervening years, between the early 40's and now? What is different?
Perhaps the wet years in the middle 50's convinced the money makers that irrigation was the answer to a greedy man's prayer and much money was spent setting up ways and means of using every drop of water from the inland river systems to grow grain crops in otherwise unsuitable areas of the rural part of the state.
Mother Nature is always changing things to suit her plans, not ours, and there has been a succession of very dry years when the expected rainfall never came. The rivers are now dry, the irrigation systems are idle, but the old native grasses which have held the land together for thousands of years, are gone.
Dry, bare ground, powders with the action of feet walking to and from water sources, millions of feet. Cattle, sheep, wild horses and camels, to name the most common owners of those feet. Then, when conditions are just right, the winds come, 60 kilometres an hour or more windspeed lifts the powdered soil and it becomes airborne. Those same winds now carry that dust over a thousand kilometres from the dry inland to the coast, to the City of Sydney. Sydney airport is closed due to minimal visibility, the harbour ferries can't run, and many people with asthma or other breathing related complaints suffer.
What do we do to prevent it happening again? I don't know, I am just an old man who has seen it all before. After the big dust storms of the 40's, I believe a ban was placed on ploughing land west of a certain line so that the natural grasses could hold back the powdering of large areas of bare ground. I can't comment on how successful that was, but it all changed when the 50's were very wet years with numerous communities being flooded.
Irrigation was seen as the answer to the inland's problems.
No one, at that time, seems to have considered that the dry years of the 40's would return again. Those dry came back with a vengeance. The cycle is now complete. What will happen now?
In the 40's there was little irrigation and when the rains did come the rivers soon filled again. Now there enough irrigation pumps lying unused, to pump the flooding rivers dry again if they were all started up at the same time.
I am no expert, just an old man, and I can see no answer unless Mother nature becomes very generous with rainfall over a period of a few years.
Vampires, real or imaginery.
If such a creature were to exist in our time he, it would probably be a he, would simply go to the meat works and buy his requirements from the killing chains and devise some way of storing it so he could have it as TV dinners with the minimum of preparation. [Like weight watchers pre-prepared meals] [Now there's a thought, some enterprising business man could prepackage the blood for them
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An afternoon like any other, quiet peaceful and pleasant, balmy tropical climate, scent of frangipanni everywhere, hibiscus flowers bright in the sun. We were enjoying a drink with our neighbors on the lawn, stubbie bottle with foam protector so the brown liquid didn't get hot too quick, bottle of wine in an esky for the ladies, kids and dogs playing around, perfect harmony.1
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In February 2009 bush fires raged in Victoria causing millions of dollars worth of damage. Now comes the analysis of what went wrong. A Royal Commission, no less, is investigating the circumstances of the fires, why they did so much damage, took so many lives and what could have been done better
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Of course we are free, just like many others countries, we are free to do as we wish, with the proviso that we do not break the law, of the land. Now there's thing, what is the 'Law of the Land'? How would I know, I only live here, and I find it very confusing.
Our Nation started as a place where England could send its unwanted sons and daughters to empty the jails in the mother country and thus avoid the cost of feeding or burying its criminals
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Throughout the world the demands for electricity is continually growing. Power for homes, factories and communications networks. There is a push from Govts to reduce the pollution given off when power is produced, which I agree with, ostensibly to alleviate the global warming we are all being warned about. However, no one seems to be concerned about how much its costs to distribute this power to the consumers, nor how much of what is generated is wasted in the power lines.
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I know there is plenty of water on our planet, so does everyone else. But it is either salty or in the wrong place. We are running out of usable water. We are human and our bodies are 65% water, to maintain life we need water.
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Comment by Robert Bruce
on Shake Like A Jelly
Australian Storyteller
Storyteller - prose and poetry
Bushwriter
Thanks to you both for your comments and may we all be free of major shakes.
Cheers
Bob