Updated on Monday, June 30, 2008 at 11:12AM by stevem

Last week the US Senate debated a 500-page global warming bill known as the Warner-Lieberman Cap-and-Trade bill. The Democrats knew it would likely be vetoed by President George Bush, but they hoped to push it through the Senate anyway and in this way build further momentum for reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions. But they weren’t successful: some Democrats refused to support it on the basis that it would push up petrol prices. It was perhaps the worst possible time to introduce the legislation with oil prices doubling in the past 12 months and fear of a global fuel supply shortage. Emissions trading is based on the theory that, by forcing up the price of fossil fuel, alternatives will be found.

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Soaring commodity prices have had distorting effects across the global economy, driving up food prices and prompting fears of future energy shortages. But they have been an unanticipated boon to the coal producing regions of countries like Japan that had written off coal mining as a relic of the Industrial Revolution.

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Not long after he’d announced plans to dam it, Queensland’s ex-Premier Peter Beattie labeled the Mary River as “hardly pristine”. At a superficial glance, and in selected places, one would have to agree. Just on a century and a half of logging and farming have taken their toll, but surely the real test would have to lie in either the biodiversity or the uniqueness of today’s river, still the least developed in south-east Queensland.

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Nanoscale materials behave in unusual ways, combining with other materials like nothing else. In that uniqueness lies their potential for amazing new products worth trillions, and unknown environmental threats. Bunting and many experts worry about unexamined or unexpected hazards from nanoparticles when they come into direct contact with people and the environment. Researchers and government regulators say far more study is needed of the unique risk posed by these manmade, atom-sized materials capable of slipping through tissues and even living cells.

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The Brazilian government stands accused of selling off huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest - including its oldest protected national park - to unscrupulous logging companies, under the cover of a flawed sustainable development project. The Brazilian President, Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, won power in 2003 with a promise to settle 400,000 homeless families during his four-year term, an unrealistic target he is accused of reaching in last-minute deals prior to last year’s election. An eight-month investigation by Greenpeace into the land scam, revealed that the Brazilian land reform agency, INCRA, had set up large settlements in rainforest areas instead of placing them in already deforested areas, and settling urban families who promptly sold logging rights to major timber conpanies.

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Queensland has inherited from the Bjelke years a virulent growth and development culture, and while most of the civil liberties excesses of that regime are gone, the development ethos has not. Dissent and debate is carefully massaged by local party and bureaucratic powerbrokers, which explains why environmental impact statements come up with the result requested by the client – be it tunnel, bridge or 80 story apartment blocks. Where is the robust debate? There is plenty of name calling and duck shoving about water, and we’ve all tried to reduce our use, but nothing can mask the fact that the levels at Wivehoe Dam are still falling. And the powerstations are still taking water from the same dams that we draw our drinking water from. Of course the power is needed because 50 per cent of all new housing in Brisbane is air conditioned within a year of completion. At precisely that moment in time when both John Howard and Rupert Murdoch have belatedly acknowledged the impact of global warming, the ecological footprint of SEQ gets steadily worse.

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