Greens MPs

This post was first published at ABC's Unleashed site:

With the global financial meltdown meeting the climate meltdown head on, the potential to deal with both crises using the same solutions has been gaining support.

Last month, the United Nations Environment Program joined with Deutsche Bank and others to promote a 'Green New Deal' based on investing billions of dollars in the four pillars of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and ecosystem protection, reducing greenhouse emissions, building infrastructure and creating millions of new jobs. World leaders such as US President-elect Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon have publicly embraced the proposal, with Obama listing a $150 billion clean energy plan as his top priority.

The 'Green New Deal', taking its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'New Deal' to build the USA out of the Great Depression, is only the most recent embodiment of strategies put forward from Hobart to London over the last few decades, recognising that investing in protecting the environment is the only sensible economic plan.

So the day after tomorrow (ah that hoary old Hollywood chestnut...), Penny Wong will finally release the government's Green Paper, to which Professor Garnaut is one of many 'inputs'. Most of the others being big business.

While it won't be anything like final design, and it won't include any emissions targets or trajectories, the paper should give us a much better idea of what the government's thinking is on emissions trading. We'll have more of an idea of whether it'll be something The Greens can support with amendments. The signs thus far are that it should be supportable, but there is still the chance that it'll be so full of holes that we'd be better off without it.

Here's some notes we've put together on some of the key issues with emissions trading that we'll be looking out for.

I think Liberal Backbencher Chris Pearce may have done us all a big favour by taking the petrol price populism just that little bit too far this morning.

He went out on a limb calling for his own party to double its ridiculous 5c fuel excise cut to 10c and promptly got smacked down by members of his own party as well as others.

Do the test.
A worthwhile use of a minute of your time to watch and forward.

Particularly if, like me, you're a cyclist using our roads.

Excellent picture from Muenster, Germany, demonstrating the amount of space needed to transport the same number of people by car, bus or bike.