been a long time coming...
so it's been a while. about 2 months to be precise. guess i have to keep more on top of these things. (like my filing - just finished about 8 months worth of credit card bills, payslips, bank statements...)
went to Syriana tonight - v good, can tell it's by the same guy that wrote Traffic. Interesting how typically the US govt is accused of interfering in foriegn politics (case in point: the now-fallen oppressive Afghani regime) yet in this movie it is in fact big bad (US) oil companies who are doing the meddling. With a touch of the govt.
Raises questions which are of course already being debated - like how safe is it to rely on such unstable territories for the bulk of our oil supply? Indeed, given the current hot topic of climate change, should we not be focusing more on greener sources? Somehow though the idea of a movie about corruption in the wind power industry just isn't as grabbing.
I had a very interesting debate with a colleague earlier this week as to whether or not the EU emissions trading scheme is actually reducing emissions. She put forward the opinion that some utilities are arguing that the money being spent on buying additional allowances could otherwise have been spent on investing in green technology. Fair enough, but then I argued that it is not as if this scheme suddenly came out of nowhere; the companies had ample time to prepare themselves. At the end of the day, global warming is not a 'new' issue; indeed I was learning about 20 years ago (goddamn, when did I get old?!) at school. But it only seems now to have fully entered the realm of global politics.
At the end of the day though, all the international measures will amount to nowt if the US still adamantly refuses to join any scheme. Why should the rest of the world work on cutting ghg emissions when one of the world's largest emitters won't acknowledge an international treaty?
Roll on 2009...
went to Syriana tonight - v good, can tell it's by the same guy that wrote Traffic. Interesting how typically the US govt is accused of interfering in foriegn politics (case in point: the now-fallen oppressive Afghani regime) yet in this movie it is in fact big bad (US) oil companies who are doing the meddling. With a touch of the govt.
Raises questions which are of course already being debated - like how safe is it to rely on such unstable territories for the bulk of our oil supply? Indeed, given the current hot topic of climate change, should we not be focusing more on greener sources? Somehow though the idea of a movie about corruption in the wind power industry just isn't as grabbing.
I had a very interesting debate with a colleague earlier this week as to whether or not the EU emissions trading scheme is actually reducing emissions. She put forward the opinion that some utilities are arguing that the money being spent on buying additional allowances could otherwise have been spent on investing in green technology. Fair enough, but then I argued that it is not as if this scheme suddenly came out of nowhere; the companies had ample time to prepare themselves. At the end of the day, global warming is not a 'new' issue; indeed I was learning about 20 years ago (goddamn, when did I get old?!) at school. But it only seems now to have fully entered the realm of global politics.
At the end of the day though, all the international measures will amount to nowt if the US still adamantly refuses to join any scheme. Why should the rest of the world work on cutting ghg emissions when one of the world's largest emitters won't acknowledge an international treaty?
Roll on 2009...
posted by koochan @ 9:40 pm
1 comments
