The Labor government in Australia needs to stand firm on the new super profits tax on mining. Caving in to pressure from the big mining companies would set a most unfortunate precedent and have ramifications into the future.

The mining companies have millions to spend and are able to buy the support of the federal opposition as well as funding a couple of spurious political parties supposedly formed from the ‘grass roots’ to fight the new tax.

By Diana Massam, Secretary, Environmental Communicators’ Orgnanisation (UK)
In ‘Economics for a Round Earth’, Charles Pierce challenges previously accepted economic ideals and methods of management, as fundamentally flawed and outdated. He proposes drastic changes, but stresses that these can only be achieved as a series of progressive trends. Current economic models are shown as incapable of tackling the real demands which modern life poses on the world community and its resources. It is no longer possible to aim at economic growth in the form of rising consumption or and increase in the ‘throughput rate’ of wealth. Pierce sets out to define a new concept of economics which will mean that humans can be supported and sustained by world resources instead of aiming at ever increasing consumption and disposal of those resources. In referring to this concept as Round Earth economics, Pierce creates a symbol to represent his fundamental principle. Instead of Flat Earth economics, where the pool of world resources is seen as a bottomless pit, the reality of a Round Earth necessitates economic activity as a cyclical process, including renewal and conservation of resources.

In setting forth the ideas in the book ‘Economics for a Round Earth’ I did not expect that they would rapidly be taken up as policy and that the global economy would thus be set on a radically different, sustainable path, in time to avoid pain. There is simply too much momentum in the current world economic system, of indefinite linear expansion of population and consumption.

The predictable failure of the Copenhagen conference to produce an agreement on international action to slow or stop global warming, supports what I argued in an earlier post – global warming cannot be stopped. There is too much momentum behind the human component of its cause, and we lack the economic and political systems, and the international institutions, to get effective international action.

I argued in that earlier post that what we can do, and must do, is face global warming and cope with its effects.

In Australia, incandescent light globes are to be illegal from 2010 and it is already impossible to buy them in the shops. The compact fluorescent globes that are to replace them have been on the market for years but have not been popular. They certainly consume less energy to produce the same amount of light, but they have always been much more expensive, they don’t produce the amount of light that is claimed on the package, they don’t last as long as is claimed – often less time than an incandescent globe – and the light is an unpleasant cold pale shade.