Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Election redux

Did you see that? Just below, Quolltracks scooped the world, although my informants were slightly out and it was Julia Gillard making the announcement with Penny Wong and Tony Burke in attendence, the north coast NSW location was a bit of a surprise as they'd been looking for somewhere in central western NSW.

And now the election has been run and, well... not won, what next? Certainly it will be good for a lot of regional areas that have been poorly represented by the Nationals for many years, but other than that?

Well, the next 10 months will be interesting either way with the Greens only getting control of the Senate after next June (the traditional changeover time for the Senate), till then the conservatives will have control, if Tony Abbott gets in with a minority government expect a rash of contentious legislation to be put up before then, if Gillard scrapes in? She's in a more tricky position having a hostile senate for the next 10 months and being reliant on conservative independents, to get anything remotely contentious through will mean some serious horse trading so will be forced to be fairly cautious till getting a friendlier senate. The problem is that even then the indepeendents will still be calling the shots.

Interesting times indeed.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

You read it here first

Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong and Agriculture Minister Tony Burke are expected make an announcement on soil carbon this Saturday. Soil carbon has been talked about as being the silver bullet for carbon sequestration but I've yet to see anything other than wishfull thinking to back this up, yes there is potential but the figures seem to me to be wildly optimistic. The Libs had latched onto it a while ago (no doubt trying to appeal to the rural vote), Labor looks set to do the same. We shall wait and see what they come up with.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Shameless bump

As there's an election on I figured I'd do my share of throwing shit (though it really wasn't me) and bump this earlier post.

Climate Change didn't all start with Al Gore

Seriously it didn't. I was doing a bit of websurfing last night and was directed to a document in the Nixon library from September 1969 discussing global warming, referring to a document from November 1965.

Seems Al Gore didn't invent it all, the conspiracy must go back even further!