It's priceless being green

This law of the jungle works every day in the free market; if a company's product is superseded by another, newer, better one, then that company must innovate quickly or perish. Nobody saw Sony on the world stage asking that people please keep buying mini-disk players when the Ipod came out, “to protect jobs”.

Society is constantly evolving, new industries are always emerging, and if industries such as wood chipping, the automotive industry or logging cannot meet the increasingly important agenda of environmental responsibility then they should perish along with the other dinosaurs. I'd happily see my taxes cover the costs of supporting a logger's family while he re-skilled into a more beneficial industry. Surely such a cost would still be less than the mitigation bill the government faces in years to come from climate change.

Unfortunately the current design behind the Emissions Trading Scheme encourages these flatulent conservative industries in failing to evolve. The scheme works on the principle of rewarding newer cleaner industries by giving them the ability to sell credits to dirtier, older industry; essentially making money by behaving in a way they should anyway. And it saves dirty industry money and effort through their ability to purchase “credits” which enable them to continue to pollute. Of course, if it was cheaper to innovate, old industry would, rationally speaking, do that instead. It's an economic strategy that saves everybody money, and results in little to no significant reduction in emissions.

So there we have it. Business talks green. Government talks green. We, as individuals, talk green. But consumption levels and emission rates have never been higher. When it comes to actual change we all look nervous and change the subject. If the Garnaut report's projections are right, and the Great Barrier Reef and other great Aussie icons are dead within the next 15 years we'll be left wondering why our green bags, energy saver light bulbs, water saver shower heads didn't save it. Perhaps we should be a little more critical when someone tries to sell us ecological redemption with glossy packaging.