Shannon DeWitt
11/29/2010
Australia will decide in the year 2011 how to charge major polluters in the country for the carbon gases they emit. This will be in an attempt to curb the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Up until 2007, Australia and the United States were the only industrialized countries to refuse to accept the Kyoto targets on reducing their carbon emissions. Australia then delayed their deadline of declaring a plan for action until 2013, but a new Prime Minister Julia Gillard moved the deadline back to next year. According to the article “Australia is one of the world’s worst carbon polluters per capita because of its heavy reliance on abundant coal reserves for power generation.” Previous attempts to instill a plan of action to make polluters pay fines have been stopped in the Senate where the government does not hold a majority. The conservative opposition argued in the defense of the general population saying that it would end up being the people, not the companies, who would end up paying the fines.
Discovering that Australia has such a large contribution to the pollution in the world and that they are finally designing a plan of action to reduce their pollution brings some relief to me. In a time when our planet is clearly being affected by the pollution that the human race is producing it cannot be argued that any attempt at combating this serious global issue is not progress. Even if the attempts aren’t completely successful then simply attempting to do something about the pollution problem sets an example to the rest of the world that we are all in this together. Most of the government agencies across the world seem to be in a consensus that something needs to be done about the excessive pollution we are producing. More people are joining the fight each day. The more people we have who agree that pollution is a serious global issue then the more impact we can have combating the problem when we all take action to make more environmentally friendly changes.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131651450
3 comments:
I think this is great idea for Australian people that their government will place fine for companies that are responsible for pollution. Usually these types of actions have lot of opponent and do not pass by the government. This is a big achievement.
I believe that this policy should should enforced in a lot of major countries like India and China. But realistically they probably can't afford something like that since they pollute so much. Unfortunately the United States failed to pass such laws.
I believe that this is a great idea that Australia is doing. I also believe that more places around the world should also take part in this. Unfortunately governments are not trying to take part in this so this is a big step of Australia.
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