by Tokie Laotan

Created on: September 27, 2008

For the past 10 years, we have been driving a hard bargain over the Kyoto agreement. The world has gashed out more than 50 Giga-tonnes of carbon into it's atmosphere causing the environment to get about 20 per cent worse. Some additional carbon would still have entered the atmosphere even if Kyoto was accepted worldwide. The weak Kyoto has affected the fate of the world because of this massive pollution plume.

In his book Scorcher:The dirty politics of climate change, Clive Hamilton outlines a hypothesis that describes how the Howard government has been actively working to destroy the Kyoto Protocol. As his evidence, Hamilton describes Australia's paradoxial desperation to continue to participate in negotiations, in spite of the fact that Australia rejected the treaty outright. The reason, simply being that Clive Hamilton believes that this was done to protect the coal-export industry of Australia, thus acting as underminers. Eighty per cent of the steaming coal goes to countries that have emission reduction obligations under Kyoto, the tougher Kyoto becomes less valuable than the coal exportation to those countries.
Hamilton developed his argument stating that it was Australia rather than the US that was a major stumbling block to a more effective Kyoto Protocol. He goes on to state that Australia encourages the US to stay out of the Protocol, this turns current perception on it's head, many believe that US is the genesis of the problem, but as Hamilton suggests, it's save to conclude that since Australia has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol it will be obligatory to meet the Kyoto agreement, thereby forgoing the many benefits that ratification brings.
Hamilton also believes that the Australian federal government relies on beauraucrats closely aligned to fossil fuel industries and their close personal relationships with coal,oil and aluminum smelting, Chief executives that has led to the government protecting them. This protection in turn, has caused a great deal of confusion tn the general public view about the seriousness of the environmental threat posed by climate change. Renewable industries and government scientists have been duly affected.
The media has not helped much to elevated the problem, Hamilton states in his book that the media has failed to report climate change.
In conclusion Hamilton states that the Australian government has managed to deceive it's people on the effects of climate change, that it costs more to tackle the problem, thus ignoring that there is a problem with the climate.

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