Cooking on gas is the one environmentally damaging thing I don’t want to give up, I’ll admit…
Could we please instead do something about the global shipping and trucking industries? Hell, even clothing production creates more CO2 emissions than shipping and trucking combined. I would gladly sacrifice more shitty clothes for the ability to cook a decent meal.
This screams “what are the low hanging fruits that are quick wins” approach that the gov probs got from some consulting firm.
Pretty sure this is a Greens initiative
https://greens.org.au/vic/gas-free
So even if you might not agree with how much it achieves, it’s from a party that if they could would also implement more stringent protections as well rather than a mindless think tank.
Victoria is running out of gas. There isn’t as much easily extracted gas left in Bass Strait. We also use more gas now, being more dependent on it for electricity generation than in the past. We’re now resorting to having gas shipped in from Western Australia, having to compete on price with China who also want the gas from WA. Gas is just going to keep becoming more expensive, but Melbourne and the rest of Victoria was built around the assumption that there will always be cheap and effectively unlimited gas flowing in from Bass Strait.
We need to do something about this now, before it gets to the point that there just isn’t enough gas and we have to resort to rationing. The environmental angle is nice and all, and makes people feel better about complying. But it needs to happen anyway, just for economic and practical reasons. And getting rid of gas appliances in homes is an easy win with the added benefit that you’re removing a source of combustion byproducts from homes, yielding health benefits.
The dairy processing industry in particular is very dependent on burning gas to generate heat for all their processes. They have facilities for using diesel in emergencies (which they had to use in the gas crisis near the end of the ’90s), but getting them off gas entirely is going to be a lot harder than switching to induction stoves and electric hot water. Gas-fired power plants are going to be here for a while, especially because they can throttle up and down relatively quickly which is important if you need to respond to drops in output from wind and solar.
You fail to understand just how big a large container ship is. If a shirt comes on a ship from China, the truck taking it from the warehouse to the shop emits more CO2 for that shirt than the ship did bringing it from to the port. In fact, if you walk for ten minutes to the shop and back, you have emitted more CO2 than the ship did to carry that shirt. A container ship emits a large total amount of CO2 because it’s very big, carrying a massive amount of cargo. But overall, shipping is one of the most efficient modes of transport we’ve invented.
