Is Bush Leading Australia Up The Garden Path On Greenhouse Gases ?  

Today's Crikey has a snippet from Michael Pascoe of the Eureka Report on the danger for Australia of following the Bush Administration down a blind alley on (trying to avoid) global warming mitigation.

Ex-BHP CEO Paul Anderson thinks carbon taxes are both necessary and inevitable - and we should be preparing for their introduction.

Slavishly following American policy on greenhouse gases could leave Australia feeling very lonely after the next presidential election if Paul Anderson is right about where the US is heading on reducing carbon emissions. The man who turned BHP around and has now done the same thing for one of the world's biggest power companies, Duke Energy, believes global warming will be one of the key areas of debate for the next election.

“There's a groundswell of concern about global warming almost every place except the (US) federal level,” Anderson says in an interview for today's edition of Eureka Report. “In the meantime you've got the rest of the world very intensely focussing on the issue and it's starting to swell up in the American population."

Anderson is pushing for the introduction of a carbon tax in the US as a “no regrets” way of reducing emissions. Six states have already introduced carbon emissions laws – a patchwork outcome that he views as the worst solution. “The debate is starting at the federal level,” he says. “Sometime within the next 3 or 4 years we will see some sort of Federal umbrella over this. “I would imagine it will be a central part of the debate for the next presidential election. It will be one of those pivotal issues people will debate.”

On a non-energy related note, Crikey's "psephologist and philosopher" Charles Richardson also comments on the value of Wikipedia - noting the value of a decentralised, cooperative information accumulation exercise compared to centralised, hierarchically organised competitors (sound familiar ?).

I've been following with great interest the discussion by Crikey readers about the suitability of Wikipedia as a source. I use it all the time; sure, it has to be used with care, but so does any source. There's simply no such thing as 100% reliability; a source is only as good as the person interpreting it.

I would never use Wikipedia as my sole source for important facts, but most research isn't like that anyway: you're looking for a starting point, or corroboration of things you already know or half-remember, or a simple explanation you can refer readers to for things that otherwise would have to come from a bunch of different sources. For something like Crikey, which depends so much on hyperlinks, Wikipedia can come in very handy: Britannica or Encarta may be more trustworthy, but they're not as up-to-date or as comprehensive, and we can't link directly to them.

A good example is the story I wrote a week ago on the UK Conservative Party leadership contest, where I linked to Wikipedia's article to explain the process. I already knew the key facts from other sources, and certainly knew enough to spot deliberate vandalism, but I thought readers would appreciate having the information all in one place.

Another example was these constituency-level maps that I referred readers to for the Japanese election. I don't know for certain that they're right, but realistically, who's going to bother uploading a set of fake Japanese electoral maps? It's no more likely than that the editors of Britannica will go off on a wild frolic of their own.

It shouldn't be surprising that Wikipedia works as well as it does. Most social activity happens by voluntary co-operation: if we had to rely on hierarchical authority all the time, we wouldn't survive past lunchtime. People who have an interest in things working properly vastly outnumber those who want to screw them up.

For those who haven't used it, I would strongly recommend having a browse through Wikipedia and getting your own sense of what it can do. If nothing else, the experience of being able to correct typos when you find them is extraordinarily liberating.