Not so green
One of Kevin Rudd’s ambitious promises was to run his government on “clean energy”, showing his enviro-friendly credentials and at the same time pandering to the Greens, who were essential for Labor’s preferences in the 2007 election. Only trouble is, as he has discovered, it isn’t as easy as all that.
DESPITE repeatedly brandishing its green credentials, the Rudd Government has reneged on its election promise to run Parliament House and MPs’ electoral offices on clean energy.
It has also failed to deliver on a promise to upgrade all government office buildings to minimum five-star greenhouse ratings.
The promise to use renewable energy was made in a speech by Kevin Rudd in the lead-up to the 2007 election, but so far little or no progress has been made.
The Government has also failed to follow through with a requirement that all government agencies with more than 100 staff undertake energy and water audits and introduce energy efficiency improvement plans.
The election commitments were bolstered to mark Earth Hour in March 2008. In a joint press release, Mr Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett promised to set up an ”interdepartmental committee on government leadership in sustainability’‘ to investigate using the government car fleet to ”drive the market for low emissions cars”.
So far the committee – which was scheduled to report to Mr Rudd by June 2008 on progress – has been silent, with no subsequent announcements or recommendations.
The Sunday Age was unable to confirm whether the committee has even been established.
Unfortunately, this is just another in a long line of examples demonstrating that using green power is expensive and impractical. If green power can’t even run Parliament House, how on earth does the Rudd government expect it to run Australia, when the ETS has pushed up the cost of regular power beyond reach?
Yet more spin, and no substance.
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
..and this would be a surprise because ??
krudd and k.d. wong are far, far too busy these days to be involved in anything practical like this. Don’t you understand that there are conferences to be attended, a planet to be saved, essays to be written – the list is endless. No – far too many important things to be done that get in the way of actually doing anything useful.