Tuesday, December 07, 2010

GetUp Campaign Ideas

Helping to set the national agenda
GetUp members have the opportunity to help set the direction of upcoming GetUp campaigns through this page. You have ten votes to distribute and can allocate up to three of them for any one campaign idea (or suggest a new one). Ideas near the top of the list are more likely to be put into effect. So vote for things that matter and enlist the support of up to 400,000 Australian GetUp members to put or keep the issue on the national agenda.

I gave my votes to:
• Clean Energy
• Yes to Carbon Tax
• Transition Towns positive response to Climate Change and Peak Oil
• Wikileaks - urging the Australian Govt. to not bow to US pressure to criminalise the organisation.
I'm quite willing to be persuaded to reallocate them if someone wants to point out a campaign I might have missed (I didn't look at all of them closely).

One of the effects of this system is to give greater weight to issues that have been around for a while and have had a chance to gather votes. When an issue arises at short notice (such as WikiLeaks), it is at a disadvantage. I assume that this tool is not the only factor in the decisions of the GetUp campaign team.

I'm not a fan of quite a few of the suggestions. Unfortunately, it is not possible to vote down ideas that you don't like, only to reduce their chance of becoming a campaign by voting for alternatives. Of course, all GetUp campaigns are opt-in for GetUp members, so if you don't agree, don't participate (and you can also write to them to give more feedback, as I have done a number of times).

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

By 'clean energy' they mean intermittent, unreliable, non-baseload renewables like wind and solar.

Can I suggest that a vote for these forms of renewables is actually a vote to continue burning coal and gas? No coal fired power station has ever been shut off due to a wind farm. I wish it were otherwise.

byron smith said...

Dave - What did you think of the Zero Carbon Australia report?

byron smith said...

Concentrated Solar Thermal is baseload. The ZCA report modeled intermittency and claimed that biomass backup would occasionally be needed for an hour here or there, but that CST and wind can take the lion's share of the load in Oz.

byron smith said...

PS Dave - On what are you basing your first claim? How do you know what was meant by clean energy? All it says in the relevant description is: "More funding needs to go into researching and developing cleaner energy alternatives. Before we focus on the mechanisms that we can use to tackle climate change, we should first be looking at potential goals, for what exactly needs to be accomplished. GetUp could get involved with promoting and setting these benchmarks (for example, suggesting that Australia should be seeking to reduce its per capita output to global average per capita output)." No mention of nuclear or renewables.

Here is a GetUp blog post on nuclear, whose summary begins like this: "Many of the fears regarding nuclear power have often been overstated, creating an irrational level of concern in the population."

byron smith said...

"No coal fired power station has ever been shut off due to a wind farm."
Sorry Dave, that's not true.

Anonymous said...

Byron what about no asylum seeker processing centre in Timor Leste? That's where all my votes went! what a disaster it would be!


ps hi!

Rachel in TL

byron smith said...

Hi Rach! Yes, that is also an excellent one. Now that the Wiki campaign is underway, I'll reallocate some votes.