Yurts for the Masses Political Fix

In the wake of a massive backlash against the effective shelving of the former Howard Governments plan to bankrupt the country by putting a photovoltaic cell on every middle class home in Australia and the worst housing affordability crisis since the white man came and as a means of showing solidarity with the Tibetan People, the Rudd Government has made a multi million dollar purchase of Yurts.

Yurt and Land Packages, to be sold in an affordable price bracket in the outer suburbs of major metropolitan areas, will be offered on means tested basis for families earning less than $250,000, to assist striving Australians to get into the housing market. To demonstrate their green credentials, a free Yak, and trailer to provide of cheap environmentally sustainable transportation, a yak poo cooker and power generation system have been thrown in along with a wind up computer and free fibre to the yurt broadband.

"We just want to give these guys a leg up before the next election. We are worried that they could be picked off by a rejuventated uber Green Coalition at the next election" said a spokesman.

Australian Business Not So Green

Australian businesses are significantly behind the eight ball in adjusting to an eco friendly future of carbon trading, emissions management and environmental controls. If you cannot measure your impacts, you cannot manage them or trade emissions.

A recently published report finds that most companies are struggling to measure greenhouse gases that come from a variety of sources, from factory emissions to waste and vehicle exhausts.

This is a problem because companies emitting large amounts of carbon-dioxide equivalent annually are required to begin reporting next year and for the rest, it will be phased over the following two years. And they're not ready yet!

Add to that another study, reported here, which has found that New Zealand businesses are almost five times greener than their Australian counterparts. The study found that more than half of Australian businesses surveyed don't monitor energy improvement targets.

Working in this field I can agree with this. There is a very large divide between these requirements and the awareness and preparation of business to comply. This is true across a wide range of environmental programmes related to business.

Blog Action Day - The Environment

Sue Blimey put me on to this. She has an excellent informative post on the environment and things that we can do or learn about to make a difference. I work in the environmental management field, advising clients how to do the right thing. I get just as much satisfaction working with kids, planting trees, designing water conservation measures and overall environmental awareness through my work at my kids school.

Listening to Tim Flannery I liked his approach of doing something to make a difference. We can all collectively make a big difference by doing a little such as conserving power, water and other resources, not driving so much, taking public transport.

Here in South Australia, where Tim used to be Head of the SA Museum and had a big impact on the State Government in terms of practical implementation of energy saving, water conserving and solar power technologies, the drought is very real and we are living with the dramatic consequences of changing climate.

We are all obliged to do something or absolutely nothing. Now that would make a difference if we all did nothing for a few days.



Sue also has this commercial from the UK, that I liked. Not too preachy and fairly practical.