Toni and I both attended a forum run by the Conservation Council of WA and co-sponsored by the Australian Conservation Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and the Wilderness Society.

To kick things off, representatives from the peak environmental groups had an opportunity to talk about what they saw as being the most critical environmental issues in this election campaign.

It was then the turn of representatives from each of the major political parties to talk about the approach of their respective parties to these issues and to answer questions from the almost 100 people in the audience.

Sadly, the Liberal Party did not deem the event important enough to send along the shadow environment minister and sent along Ray Halligan, MLC for the North Metropolitan region. Mr Halligan admitted to not being fully briefed on the environmental policy of his party, and drew gasps from the audience when he admitted that he thought that the jury was still out on the cause of climate change.

Minister for the Environment, David Templeman did a considerably better job and showed that he was well informed on most of the issues. He was unable however to justify the continued construction of new coal-fired power stations.

The Labor party has made a number of significant environmental announcements during this election campaign, which appear to be impressive at face value.

For example, discounts on the third party insurance for low emissions vehicles, free insulation for 20,000 low income households and a gross feed-in tariff of $0.60/kWH for households installing solar panels on their roofs. These are all excellent initiatives, and I support them whole-heartedly. Combined, they will have the impact of removing more than 50,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year.

However it is worth putting them into perspective. One coal-fired power station produces almost 3,000,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year. There are two new coal-fired power stations under construction, and more in the pipeline.

So, just one of these new power stations will completely offset the benefits of three of Labor’s biggest green election announcements with less than one weeks worth of production!!

And don’t think that the Liberal Party is any different. It isn’t.

Both Liberal and Labor are committed to continuing our reliance on coal as a source of electricity. This is simply unacceptable.  

The state Labor government has been spending a great deal of money on climate change advertising in recent months, asking you and I to act now to reduce our emissions. You might think that the Labor Party must be serious about addressing climate change.

You’d be wrong.

There are a range of excellent initiatives underway across Western Australia that are either reducing greenhouse gas emissions or sequestering carbon.

For example, Western Power is planting 240,000 trees this year, removing the equivalent of 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The new rail cars for the metropolitan rail system feature regenerative brakes, similar to those on hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius, which reduce the electricity required to run the trains, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions by an impressive 3 million tonnes per year.

The Five Star Plus building codes and the phase-out of incandescent lights in favour of low energy fluorescent and LED lamps are other initiatives that are helping to reduce our climate change impacts.

However, these efforts are all completely negated by just three months production of one new coal-fired power station. There are currently two such power stations under construction near Collie and there are plans for more in the pipeline.

Just think about it for a moment. If every single Western Australian were to change out all their old incandescent light bulbs and replace them with compact fluorescent light bulbs, the benefit from this effort would be wiped out with just four days production from just one of these new coal-fired power plants.

With abundant gas reserves, and ready access to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and wave, it is simply unacceptable for us to be building new coal-fired power stations.

Coal is the single dirtiest way of producing electricity. It produces twice the greenhouse emissions of gas. And yet Alan Carpenter has come out recently and said that coal is the future of electricity generation within Western Australia.

If you think that a vote for the Labor Party in the upcoming election is a vote for strong action on climate change then think again. Labor’s efforts on climate change amount to little more than window dressing.

Only The Greens are committed to weaning Western Australia off its addiction to coal and to transforming Australia’s economy into one that is based on clean, renewable energy. Make your vote count on election day September 6.

There has been a noticeable increase in the number of stories from so-called climate change skeptics in the media in recent weeks.

Last Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a story featuring David Evans, a climate change sceptic, claiming that there were thousands of scientists who are skeptical about the link between climate change and human activity.

What the story failed to mention is that, virtually without exception, these scientists do not include current, practicing climate change scientists.

In an article on the ABC website, Professor David Karoly, IPCC contributing author and advisor to Victorian Premier John Brumby, made the point that, while there has been an increase in the number of opinion pieces in the media from climate change skeptics, there has been no corresponding increase in peer-reviewed scientific papers questioning the linkage between climate change and human activities.

On the contrary the overwhelming majority of papers strengthen the conclusion that humanity is primarily responsible for climate change.

Click here to view Professor Karoly's article on the ABC website. 

In particular the proposal to provide free permits for the biggest polluters reduces the effectiveness of the scheme, and penalizes those industries that are less polluting, resulting in “what about me” calls such as what we saw from LNG producers like Woodside this week.

It is interesting that the Labor Party in promoting the scheme has been justifying the free permits by saying that it is striking a balance between the Greens on the left who are calling for a tougher scheme and the Liberal Party on the right.

However this distorts the real truth of the matter. It is not just the Greens calling for a tougher scheme. The vast majority of climate scientists are demanding more urgent action, and the government's own climate change advisor Ross Garnaut said in his recently released report "The world has squandered the time that it did have in the 1990s to experiment with various approaches to mitigation...an effective response to the challenge (of climate change) must be put in place over the next few years".

The Australian Conservation Foundation said "The more compensation that goes to big polluters, the bigger the financial burden on the poor, the most vulnerable and rural Australians". Read the ACF's resonse to the green paper here.

Greens Senator Christine Milne challenged the Federal Government to rethink its policy and to "inspire Australians to embrace this challenge to rebuild, upgrade and retool for a zero emissions future." Read her complete comments here.

Clive Hamilton called the green paper "Shameless Political Capitlation". Read his article on Crikey here.

For the average Australia household, electricity represens almost 20% of total household greenhouse gas emissions. For households with air conditioning, multiple refrigerators and TVs ths figure may be significantly higher.

Yet television shows like Carbon Cops and Eco Change show that reductions of electricity usage of in excess of %50 are possible for most households without making significant sacrifices.

In order to know where to start in reducing your electricity consumption, it is first important to undertake an electricity audit to determine where you are using the most electricity.

A few years ago you would have had to organise an electrician to do this work for you. Last year, Toni and I bought a meter that we could use to test the consumption of our appliances ourselves. This cost about $300.

I was delighted to find a similar power meter available over the internet for just $40.00.

The unit is know as the "Monitor My Power Meter" and is available from latestbuy.com.au

You just plug the unit into the outlet, and plug your appliance into the meter to get real time power monitoring.

Enter your local electricity rates and the unit will tell you exactly how much the appliance is costing you to run! It also tracks the electricity used to show you exactly how much power you're using now and the peak levels that have been drawn. And it features backup batteries so you won't lose your information in a blackout or when you move it to a new socket.

If you know of a cheaper option available in the market place, then please let me know.