quote:
Originally posted by mnztr:
BTW the US, Canada and Australia are the biggest per capita pollutors in the world. Canada is somewhat understandable since it's bloody cold and heating is a big source of emissions. I wonder why the US and esp. Australia are so bad??
mnztr,
not to try to overly justify Oz's greenhouse performance.
We've got a relatively small population, spread over a fairly extensive area. There is no public transport to speak of outside of the metropolitan areas, so we have to travel by car for just about everything. Families tend to be spread across the country for work, further exaccerbating this. So our personal CO2 emmissions are pretty high.
The Government has gone to great lengths to move freight on road rather than rail. If it's on rail, they have to pay track maintenance. If it's on the road, they pick up fuel excises, on about 10 times more fuel than if it was rail.
Power Generation.....we are stuck with very old power stations, the best of which are knocking on 40% efficient, and the majority of which are low 30s. We allow the burning of brown coal for power generation. With the depressed electricity market (currently operating on the California system), there is no incentive to build new efficient plant. The only plant being built is simple cycle GT peaking plant at 27% efficiency.
Then, a LOT of this inefficiently generated electricity is used to make aluminium, which is then exported.
An interesting take on aluminium was that the Government mounted a position that the recieving country should be credited with the emissions of their consumption of aluminium, steel and the like. The Europeans weren't too happy with that, so we get to keep the emissions, but they get to use the aluminium.
We've also got a large meat industry (in comparison to our population sze), the greenhouse emissions of these also stay with us, while the rest of the world eats the meat.
We could still be doing a lot better, and people are starting to wake up a bit on what they as individuals are doing.
