A REGULAR greenhouse gas emissions report!

“You must know extent of a problem to improve on it – Victorians are the first in world with a weekly report” – Robert Posner, Australian director of The Climate Group.

Every Monday The Age newspaper, along with The Climate Group, are now providing Victorians a weekly indicator of their greenhouse gas emissions.

It will cover their leading sources of emissions – coal-fired electricity, natural gas and petroleum products – that collectively account for some 85 per cent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Surprisingly, information like this is not provided on a weekly basis anywhere else in the world. Here in Australia, as in other countries, the Federal Government releases an annual report that comes out a couple of years after the emissions. While comprehensive and critical for policy planning and scientific assessment, this is too slow for a realistic response to tackle the problem.

Victorians can respond to this info from the weekly indicator by:

• buying Government accredited GreenPower ‘eliminating’ the emissions produced from electricity. (The state’s biggest source of greenhouse gas is coal-fired electricity.)
• Driving cars more efficiently, walking or cycling more often, or catching public transport, or purchasing a more fuel-efficient car, can help slash our petroleum emissions.
• Cutting the impact on greenhouse emissions from natural gas by better insulating homes or adjusting the temperature on heating systems.

It’s hoped regular reporting of what is actually occurring – hopefully taken up by brekky and talkback shows – will encourage people to take action to reduce emissions.

To me, Rupert Posner is SO right….you can’t make effective decisions without KNOWING what’s going on. In so many ‘public-private’ efforts, large and small, I believe the end result could be vastly improved if stakeholders – right down to the grassroots – had regular access to progress reports to see how projects are tracking and then, with info in the public arena, ‘strategic adjustments’ necessary would be obvious and could be carried out before things get out of hand and cost taxpayers heaps…..Sir Humphrey, where are you? Am I being hopelessly naive??