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Any whale species that is endangered should be protected after the excessive hunting of the last few centuries. But the minkie whale was not much hunted until recently, and several other species have greatly recovered in numbers. It is true that the Japanese whalers' method of killing whales inflicts great pain and may not be very quick, and many people might object to whaling on this ground. I have little doubt that there are worse examples of animal cruelty that our government could be targeting if they were inclined, the Chinese practice of farming sun bears for their bile is one example. And is killing a whale for food any more unethical than killing a pig?

I wonder what the Australian Government's motive is in taking up the fight to protect the whale? As one of, if not the, worst greenhouse polluter on the planet, and one of the greatest destroyers of native vegetation and old-growth forests, what environmental credentials does Australia have? Leading the fight to protect the whales costs very little compared to cleaning up our carbon dioxide emissions. There are no Australian jobs to loose as there would be if we were to stop destroying old-growth forests. Is this a cheap way of getting some environmental capital as far as the Howard Government is concerned?

In the resumption of whaling as the Japanese would have it, there is at worst an arguable question about which species are threatened, the degree of that threat, and the animal cruelty point. In greenhouse the extinction of thousands of species and deaths of billions of people is threatened.

Olympic dam tailings dam

The Australian Government Department of Environment and Heritage state that 85% of the radioactivity of the material taken from the mine is in the tailings that go into the dam. In financial year 2003-04 3993 tonnes of uranium oxide were mined from the Olympic dam mine.

Yet while the SA Government remains opposed to the waste dump it is strongly pushing a doubling in the size of the Olympic Dam mine.

The two most recent South Australian Governments have refused to take the obvious action and cull the koalas; it's not politically desirable. A relatively large sum of money has been spent on capturing and sterilizing a number of the female koalas. Not surprisingly it has failed to decrease koala numbers on Kangaroo Island; money down the drain.

Sometimes it is necessary to take the hard, but right, decision.

The Government has placed solar panels on the state museum and art gallery, Parliament House in Adelaide and is well into a Solar Schools project in which schools get a photovoltaic system of 1 to 1.5 kW.

Considering the very large capital cost of solar photovoltaic panels, can this really be justified? Couldn't the money be spent on the environment, but spent better? Changing the laws to encourage the construction of wind farms could result in adding anything up to 2000MW to the sustainable electricity capacity of the state; this is thousands of times the amount of electricity that will be generated by Rann's photovoltaic panels on public buildings. I would think that increasing the grant for installation of solar water heaters would also be a more productive way of spending the same money. Solar water heaters are very cost-effective in the South Australian climate, solar photovoltaics are much more questionable from an economic point of view. Investment in a solar water heater in South Australia will certainly pay off, solar photovoltaic systems are very unlikely to pay for themselves.

Peacock notes that capital costs per installed kilowatt of the Museum and Art Gallery 'power stations' was $10 000 compared to around $1500/kW for wind power. Isn't this just 'feel good' environmentalism?

Premier Rann has also added mini wind turbines to public building to try and improve his government's greenhouse image at minimal cost. I have written about this at greater length in Failings of SA governments.

I suspect that uranium is an emotive issue at any time, and 'pumping acid into the ground', to a layman, seems risky. I have no doubt that environmentalists could use their time more productively elsewhere.