This week, Sir Nicholas Stern released his report which stated, if we tackle global warming NOW, it will cost about 1% global GDP, but if we leave it will cost us between 5 and 20% of GDP per year. This is really like any unserviced debt, if you let it build up, and don't try to pay it back, it will eventually bury you. In this report industry was identified as one of the major contributors to global warming, however their responses can be understood through simple economics. Producing large amounts of CO2 doesn't cost them anything, so they do it. We need to put a price on CO2 if we expect industry to respond. Hence the need for a carbon trading scheme. One of the most famous carbon trading schemes is the Kyoto protocol.

We could continue lobbying the federal government to ratify Kyoto, but largely we would be wasting our time, but we could just as easily adopt Kyoto at the state levels. They are all Labor governments, and the federal Labor government has stated it will sign Kyoto, so we should call on the State Labor governments of Australia, to implement Federal Labor policy, and sign Kyoto.

This weekend in cities all around Australia people will be Walking Against Warming,  and demanding political change to tackle the issue of global warming, and calling on the Federal Government to ratify Kyoto. We just need to make sure we persue alternative avenues and not get hung up on, or put off by the failures of Federal Government.