The Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, said the APEC Leaders Sydney Declaration on climate change represents a major breakthrough that heralds a new era of cooperation for international efforts to address climate change.
There has been a varied reaction to this in the media with many saying it was a green-wash because no set targets were defined.

Personally I think it is a huge step in the right direction and I am a great believer in steps rather than leaps because steps are more sustainable.

I cannot see how set targets for every country can work and I think that the Kyoto Protocol demonstrates this. I also cannot see that developing countries can be left out. They need to be able to raise the standard of living of their people because there is no social equity at present but everyone needs to develop with climate change in mind.

Every country has different issues and the big this is that every country publicly and honestly acknowledges that there is a problem and that they then go on and make a public commitment to do something about it that is suitable to their situation but so that overall goals are met. Some nations may well be able to do a lot more in some areas than others and we need to balance this out.

In particular I like Australia’s commitment to a $100 million agreement between the governments of Australia and Indonesia to an Indonesian forests partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This will cut Greenhouse gas emissions by around 700 million tonnes over 30 years.

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In South Australia we have severe water restrictions because we obtain 40% of our water from the River Murray. We allow more water than this to run to waste as storm water because planners and regulators decided that the engineering solution of building a huge pipeline was much “better” than the previous practice of householders retaining rain water in tanks was not wanted and they also decided not to bother with any efforts to retain and cleanup storm-water.

Rain water is seen as a health hazard (regular tank and gutter cleaning would prevent this), tanks were not aesthetically pleasing etc. I had a small and well maintained rain water tank at my last house and one visitor was horrified – “I won’t drink that” he said, “birds might shit on the roof”. Wow! When I think about all the cows, towns, houseboats and varied agricultural activities that discharge (and shit) into the Murray, there is a reason why my rainwater looked, smelt and tasted better than the Murray water!

The crowning idiocy, in my opinion is the pricing policy. Water is grossly under priced removing all incentives to save water and water restrictions rely instead on absurd rules about using buckets for watering when drippers are actually more efficient and on neighbours “dobbing each other in”. The real absurdity here is that there is no way anyone monitors internal household or minor industrial use and regulators are apparently happy to see large established trees dying from lack of water which prevents them from removing CO₂ from the air.

People should be able to decide to use more or less water in their house or garden and pay large excess fees for overuse. There should be a formula that considers the number of residents and the land size and there must be a regular (at least monthly) billing of water use so people get regular feedback to allow them to monitor their water use and bill size.

Does any of this make sense? Apparently not!

The next engineering solution proposed is to build a huge desalination plant. No one seems concerned about the extra energy that will take because the water supply and energy infrastructure and greenhouse offices are all different government departments with different Ministers.

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