Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Thursday December 10th
Marius - politics …
Surveys show that close to 80% of people now feel they don’t know enough about the Emissions Trading Scheme to make an informed decision about it.
This figure suggests that something like 20% of respondents are kidding themselves.
Climate change has been described by many as the hardest issue the political world has ever faced.
And it is the hardest on many levels.
Put aside those who think there is no problem with the planet warming and those who think no action can be enough or come soon enough.
Stay in the land of possible action and it still looks beyond hard.
The politics of trying to get nearly 200 sovereign States to gather in a Scandinavian conference hall and agree on anything is a task that beggars belief.
The preamble to any discussion in that room is an understanding of the science, a calculation of national self interest and an estimation of the competing lobby groups - the CO2 generators, the consumers who want power and want also to leave a planet that does not look like a charred chip.
So what do people do when faced with this universe of information that is beyond understanding?
They abandon reason in favour of emotion.
There is an instinctive reaction of some people to dislike “green” arguments and to be on the side of development. Nick Minchin spoke to that group when he told Four Corners the majority of Liberals did not believe in man-made climate change and that the climate change cause was energised by a leftist desire to de-industrialise the west.
On the other side, many people have an emotional attachment to green causes. A general sense is that the planet is being trashed and that it will be pretty much extinguished if a global population of 6.8 billion attempts to reach a first world level of material well being via the high-carbon path of industrial history.
In between those views is one most prominently - and to some most surprisingly - expressed by Rupert Murdoch, when he said whatever the details, on the evidence, the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.
You can see how people arrive at positions like the above.
But that doesn’t really involve an understanding of the talmudic complexities of an ETS.
It doesn’t equip you to answer questions like:
What should the price per tonne of carbon pollution be?
What about the off-sets?
How about the CMD’s?
How do you monitor a world-wide trade in carbon credits?
Has ‘cap and trade’ worked in the EU?
Something like 20,000 people are now debating these and other issues for two weeks and they will produce an outcome. Good luck understanding it.
The only certainty is that whatever agreement is produced in Copenhagen, the world will agree to disagree.
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Debbie - sport
Who would’ve thought I’d need a footnote* to yesterday’s piece about goalkeepers scoring in soccer so quickly?
As mentioned yesterday, after the Bayern Munich goalkeeper had scored from the penalty spot in his team’s European Champions League win over Juventus, the other situation where goalkeepers score occasionally is when it’s desperation time late in a game.
Well, that happened this morning in Belgium in another Champions League game when the home team Standard Liege were trailing 1-nil against AZ Alkmaar of the Netherlands.
They sent their goalkeeper, Sinan Bolat forward and he headed in for an equaliser FIVE minutes into added on time.
As it turned out, it wasn’t enough to get Liege into the last 16 of the Champions League, but it did earn them a place in the second tier competition, The Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup).
Surely it would be a first to have two goalies scoring in the same round of the Champions League?
Also yesterday, I linked to footage of the legendary Colombian keeper, Rene Higuita’s outrageous “scorpion kick” save.
Here’s some more footage of him scoring from the penalty spot for Atletico Nacional against River Plate.
(Well worth checking out for the commentary alone!)
* is “footnotes” quite the right term when writing about goalkeepers? Or should it be “handnotes”, or “glovenotes”?
