What are people in Australia willing to do to fight global warming?

Last month there was very interesting poll conducted in Australia to check environmental attitudes, especially regarding climate change problem. While Australians think of the global warming as the most important problem very few of them are ready to do something about it. As in many other countries people in Australia believe that there should be some global agreement against global warming but yet fail to start their own fight on individual level.

According to this poll 6 % of Australians had bothered to reduce their car use for environmental reasons in a way both serious and sustained, with a further 15 % claiming to have cut back on their car use ''often''. About 35 % said they had not bothered at all, and 34 % said they cut back on their car use ''sometimes''. But what is even more worrying is the fact that money is much more important than environment as only 10 % people would be really willing to pay higher taxes to protect the environment.

Australia is one of the countries with constant rise in energy demand but unfortunately gets negligible amount of required energy from renewable energy sources. Most dominant fuel in Australia is coal so it is really no surprise that Australia is among top five CO2 emitters in the world. And with the current financial crisis it is very likely that Australia (like many other countries) will stick to coal despite its tremendous negative effect on environment, because this is the cheapest fuel.

Unfortunately Australians are not the only ones in the world with well known scheme "yes there is a problem but why should I solve it?", this is the opinion of many other people worldwide. People are hoping that global warming problem can be solved without their intervention, and money is definitely still more important than our environment. Money talks but it very rarely says kind words to environment.