There have been enough social media disasters of late to make one thing clear: manipulating sentiment through social networks is next to impossible.

The McDonald’s #McDStories campaign in January was supposed to allow the public to share fond memories of eating at McDonald’s. Instead, responses quickly became abusive and negative.

Qantas famously made the same mistake with their ill-fated #QantasLuxury campaign in November of last year.

Kony2012 seemed to be everywhere, but attention has now turned to the makers of the video.
Reyhan Dhuny

At first glance, the Kony 2012 film seemed an undeniable social media success. Purporting to raise awareness about the use of children in the Lord’s Resistance Army guerilla group, the film agitated for the hunting-down and arrest of the group’s leader, Joseph Kony.

The film and its director, Jason Russell, were blatant in their intention to use social media to propel the campaign. Analysis of Twitter and YouTube traffic showed how Invisible Children, the charity behind the Kony 2012 video, used its existing social networks to initiate and drive the viral growth of attention to the video.

The obsession of media and marketing with “virality” is something Arianna Huffington – co-founder of the Huffington Post – has commented on. While not mentioning the Kony video explicitly, Huffington suggested that when something attains “viral” status, this can signify a positive or negative outcome. But more often than not, it signifies both.

This is exactly what happened in the case of the Kony 2012 video.

For every celebrity that endorsed the film there seemed to be someone publishing criticism. These criticisms have been unpacked elsewhere, including on The Conversation.

Criticism of the campaign would have been alright but the campaign did as much to turn the spotlight on Invisible Children as it did on the problem of the children in Uganda. The charity and director were forced to defend not only the film but their operations and past record.

Most damning of all were the criticisms of Invisible Children being made by Ugandans and by former “invisible children” themselves.

Kony 2012 bracelets and T-shirts became the signifiers of a US Christian organisation that didn’t even have the support of the people they were allegedly trying to help. Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi even created his own video to refute allegations made in the Kony 2012 video.

In the video Mbabazi invited the celebrities who promoted the Kony 2012 video – including Rihanna, Bill Gates and Kim Kardashian – to come to Uganda and see the situation for themselves.

All of this would have been bad enough … but it got worse.

Uncommon Fritillary

Late last week Kony 2012 director Jason Russell was arrested in San Diego after police received reports of a man running through the streets and traffic naked, vandalising cars and “masturbating”.

Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey issued a statement claiming Russell had been admitted to hospital suffering from exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition. Unfortunately, a video has been released seemingly showing Russell in the midst of a psychotic episode of some sort.

Although there have been statements of compassion about Russell’s condition, members of the twittersphere have not been as kind. A new hashtag, #Horny2012, was created with tweets ridiculing him, Invisible Children and the film.

The tragedy of all this is what started out as a probably well-intentioned plan has ended with:

• the central message of the film getting lost
• a charity losing its credibility, and
• a man suffering a breakdown and having a personal incident “go viral”.

Worse still, Russell made his five-year-old son, Gavin Danger, the centrepiece of the film. Ironically, in a pale reflection of the Invisible Children themselves, Danger was made to take part in something he would have had no say in; something he will now have to deal with for the rest of his life.

This whole debacle serves to remind us we are still barely coming to terms with the nature of what it means to be massively connected on a global scale.

As we saw in attempts to spread the Kony 2012 film, grossly oversimplifying the way social networks function is always going to lead to unpredictable results; results that are often damaging.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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Whenever the press covers a story about hackers, a great deal of the discussion concerns the nature of online identity, the cohesiveness of hacking groups, and the individuals that identify with these groups. This is particularly the case with discussion of hackers that consider themselves part of the hacktivist group Anonymous.

This is due, in part, to the apparently co-operative manner in which Anonymous operates, and the oft-quoted Anonymous mantra (“we are Anonymous, we are legion”) that de-emphasises the individual and promotes the idea of the “group”.

Reckon you know a lot about your online friends? Are you sure?
Stian Eikeland

This lack of emphasis on the individual is slightly ironic given most of the news about Anonymous in the past year – including the most notable hacks of 2011 – centred on individual hackers whose identities are known.

But issues of identity and group dynamics have been brought to a head by recent stories about the unmasking by US authorities of FBI informant Hector Xavier Monsegur. Monsegur is also known online as Sabu, and is purportedly the leader of LulzSec (an offshoot of Anonymous).

According to court reports unsealed last week, Monsegur had been helping the FBI build cases against fellow hackers soon after he was arrested and released on bail back in June 2011.

Sabu’s story says a lot about what we actually know about people with whom we only interact online. In the case of Sabu, it turns out, we didn’t know very much. His online persona was very different from his real-life self.

This perhaps shouldn’t be very surprising given people generally have multiple and varied personas online – which often, if not always, differ from their real-life personas.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung described the persona as the mask that people wear to hide their true selves from society. On the internet, the effect of a persona is more pronounced because we lose other cues – such as how people talk, where they work and how they interact with others – that could potentially reveal how close the persona is to someone’s “true self”.

raincoaster

Much of the coverage of Sabu’s unmasking focused on the nature of his online persona. The discussion ranged from his role within Anonymous and LulzSec, to his dominating and opinionated presence on Twitter. Other commentators have even claimed he was just a second- or third-tier hacker within Anonymous, even though he was involved with most of the prominent hacking activity that took place under the Anonymous name last year.

Sabu himself gave interviews with private internet relay chat (IRC) sessions and more detailed question-and-answer sessions on Reddit.

It took the unmasking of Sabu to reveal something approaching the truth about Monsegur as a person. The New York Times featured a story describing 28-year-old Hector Monsegur as a Puerto Rican “party boy of the projects”, who cared for his sister’s two children. Monsegur was also revealed as a petty criminal and general neighbourhood nuisance, but someone who actually did care about the social issues he believed he was fighting for.

As mentioned, the unmasking of Sabu makes it clear that it’s very difficult to know the truth about someone from the persona they present online. This is especially true when that persona is being pieced together from fragments of tweets or even chat logs.

Commentary on individuals, relationships and organisational structures within Anonymous is also almost impossible. One should ultimately be wary of anyone making claims on these subjects without appropriate disclaimers.

But it’s the reactions to Sabu’s “betrayal” of his fellow hackers that’s potentially the most interesting aspect of this whole story. Other members of Anonymous were apparently left “emotionally devastated” and “shocked” by the news Monsegur was an FBI informant.

It seems strange anyone would be surprised that Sabu’s first loyalty was to himself and his family. It speaks volumes about the unrealistic view that people have of online relationships.

Our online ties are influenced by how well we know people in real life. If we don’t know the person in real life, or have met them only casually, it can be argued that our ties with them online could only ever be weak.

This is, in part, because of the principle discussed earlier – it is difficult to really know anything about people online because their personas will differ from their real-life selves. You can never be sure who you are interacting with.

This means loyalty between members of a group who only associate with each other online is, by necessity, going to be fragile. Or to put it another way, most, if not all, online social ties are weak.

The responses to Sabu’s “betrayal” are even more curious given the turning of hackers into informants is actually quite common. This phenomenon is described well in Kevin Poulsen’s book Kingpin about credit card fraudsters who regularly turned on each other to save themselves.

The story of Sabu is probably not over yet. He has gone into hiding but it seems unlikely we’ve heard the last from him. Perhaps the most prescient comment on this whole saga to date was made by Sabu himself during his Reddit Q&A:

“Stick to yourselves. If you are in a crew – keep your opsec up 24/7. Friends will try to take you down if they have to.”

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From July 1 2012, Australians will be able to register for their own Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). At least this was what Rosemary Huxtable, deputy secretary of the department of health and ageing has reaffirmed to a parliamentary senate committee. At that point, $467m will have been spent on the project.

The health of the personally-controlled electronic health records may itself be in doubt.
jfcherry

To say that the project has its doubters and critics would be an understatement. The Medical Software Industry of Australia (MSIA), the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Consumers e-health Alliance are among the many groups that spoke to the senate committee about their concerns regarding the implementation of the PCEHR. Their complaints are varied and range from privacy, to governance and liability, through to doubts about whether anyone would actually use the system.

Interestingly, advocates and critics both agree on the potential usefulness of electronic health records to improve patient outcomes and increase the potential efficiency of health services – even though evidence is scant that electronic health records, in and of themselves, improve the quality of care.

Leaving aside the question of the actual likelihood of the system being operational by July 1 2012, the question is, what exactly will we have and will it bring about significant improvements in the Australian health system?

What is a PCEHR?

The PCEHR will potentially allow consumers to have access to a summary of their medical information including medications, medical history, information about allergies and adverse drug reactions and letters and documents. This information is supposed to come from a range of health providers, such as GPs, specialists and hospitals.

The promise of a person having access to their health information held by others is alluring. The fact that we can’t look up when we, or a child, had a vaccination or were given a medication or had an X-ray is a reflection of how far behind technology the health industry is than say, banking. Of course, some health-care organisations, such as Kaiser Permanante in the United States have done exactly this, providing not only an electronic record; they have gone further by allowing customers to interact with their doctors using secure messaging and to make appointments electronically.

If you build it, they will come

The difficulty with summary records, such as the PCEHR, comes with trying to use the information as anything other than a precis, especially in the case of shared care. Professor Enrico Coiera of the University of New South Wales has argued that summary records have little clinical value.

The experience of summary records in the United Kingdom showed low levels of adoption. Like Australia’s PCEHR, it was an “opt-in” system requiring an arduous verification process to sign up.

Opt-in systems are always going to struggle with adoption. Psychologists Johnson and Goldstein have showed that consent rates for organ donation in countries such as Germany, where the system requires people to opt-in, were 12% compared with Austria, which has an opt-out system, where rates are 99.98%.

And with low adoption comes low use. The UK’s personal electronic health record, HealthSpace showed that between 2007 and 2010, only 172,950 people opened a basic account, and 2,913 people opened an advanced account. Patients perceived HealthSpace as neither useful nor easy to use.

Google recently shut down its personal electronic health record Google Health. The company found it difficult to engage people beyond the small group of technologically savvy patients and fitness fanatics.

The reasons why users will end up using any information technology system are varied and complicated but research has shown that the benefits of the system are a key driver. If the benefits are there, they will outweigh even privacy concerns. With a summary record, the benefits are so few that issues such as privacy, governance and liability become disincentives to using the system.

A single, shared electronic health record

In contrast to a summary record like the PCEHR, the Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services Council (KAMSC), in collaboration with The University of Western Australia, is using a web-based electronic health record called MMEx for 22,000 mostly Aboriginal people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

With a patient’s consent, the record can be shared with the hospitals, visiting specialists and allied and mental health professionals. All care plans, medications and communications concerning the patient are electronic.

The difference between this approach and the PCEHR is that everyone is working off the same record. Practitioners have to work collaboratively, because their changes are immediately seen by everyone involved in the care of the patient. Combined with telehealth services, this means that care can be provided consistently through the Department of Health WA, KAMSC and the private sector.

This project was unique enough for the OECD to include it in a review of global e-health projects.

PCEHR – the benefits

It is possible that the PCEHR will be operational in some form by July 1 2012. The companies building the customer-facing component (Accenture, Oracle and Orion Health) were involved in delivering a more extensive e-health record project in Singapore last year.

Of more importance however is that Australia will be left with major portions of legislation and infrastructure that will benefit all e-health projects. This includes a system that provides a unique health-care identifier for each patient and health-care provider. It also includes standards that specify how different systems will talk to each other and a way for all people accessing these systems to be authenticated.

It is very unlikely that the PCEHR will revolutionise health care in Australia any more than its equivalent did in the United Kingdom. From an e-health perspective, this will only come from a single shared electronic health record with clinical protocols and governance that allow health providers to collaborate with a patient in managing their health and wellbeing. But, hopefully, the steps taken in the PCEHR project will accelerate that process in Australia.

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I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves.

When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories are quietly confident the waves are within our grasp.

If we are right, the gravity wave search will have taken 100 years from the date of Einstein’s prediction.

In 100 years’ time the discovery of Einstein’s gravity waves will be one of the landmarks in the history of science. It will stand out like the discovery of electromagnetic waves in 1886, a quarter of a century after these waves were predicted by physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

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The problem of talking about gravity waves is that you can’t explain them without explaining Einstein’s idea of gravity. Recently I began to ask why it is so difficult to explain gravity, why the concept is met with glazed eyes and baffled looks. Eventually I came up with a theory I call the Tragedy of the Euclidean Time Warp.

Discarding Euclidean ideas

My theory starts 2,300 years ago with the Greek mathematician Euclid’s book of geometry called Elements – the most influential book in the history of science.

Elements has been in print for more than 2,000 years and published in more than 1,000 editions. It was a basic school text for Galileo, Isaac Newton, Einstein and every educated person up to the baby-boomer generation. I still have the plain, slim edition that I used when I was in year eight.

Euclid’s Elements in Latin, venice 1482. Joe King

The basic concepts from Elements are still taught in all primary schools and high schools throughout the world every day. We all know those concepts – parallel lines never meet, the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180º, the Theorem of Pythagoras and the perimeter formula for a circle (P = 2πr).

For centuries Euclidean geometry has moulded the way we think and today we all have an intuitive conception of space that is defined by Euclidean geometry.

The problem with Euclid’s book is that it cements a false idea about space. It is a shock to think that it is wrong but even so, gravity cannot be explained without discarding Euclidean geometry.

The link to General Relativity

The possibility of a flaw in Euclid’s book was first raised by the mathematician Carl Gauss in the 1820s. He published a theorem that said you could measure the shape of space by measuring angles and distances. He even tried to measure the shape of space on Earth by measuring the sum of the angles of a triangle between three mountain tops.

Some 90 years later, Einstein published his beautiful Theory of General Relativity, which gave us our current explanation for gravity. His theory is conceptually simple, but mathematically complex. Matter curves space and time, and gravity arises because of the way matter floats in this deformed space.

Spacetime curvature near Earth. Johnstone

One of the key observations that confirmed the theory of curved space was made in Australia in 1922. The Wallal expedition obtained photos during a solar eclipse, from which the bending of the light as it passed by the sun were measured.

I think is rather shocking that today, 90 years later, we still teach geometry as if space were flat.

The reason our culture has not assimilated curved space is that we were all indoctrinated with Euclidean geometry during childhood. By the time we are adults it takes a painful re-think to adapt to a new way of thinking.

Euclid, Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Mark A Wilson

Trainee school teachers are rarely exposed to general relativity, so the teaching profession remains entirely free from Einstein’s beautiful theory. Generation after generation, this cycle continues. We are trapped in this Euclidean time warp. This is a tragedy not only because truth is important, but because students are disengaged by the stale teaching of obsolete 19th century physics.

A primary school experiment

Last year I tried to catch 11-year-olds before they were indoctrinated. Rosalie Primary School, in suburban Perth, agreed to host me, and I began six, weekly sessions with 30 primary school kids. Here is how we learnt that the force we call gravity arises because time is warped by matter.

First we talked about straight lines. How do we tell if lines are straight? Can you draw straight lines on balloons or the surface of the earth? What do surveyors do when they are building a straight fence? They always use sight lines, and when it comes down to it, straightness is always measured with light.

Then we considered drawing triangles on the earth. Suppose you start at the North Pole, travel south to the equator, turn left and travel 90º of longitude eastwards before taking another right turn to head back to the pole. We could all see that this triangle would have 90º + 90º + 90º – a total of 270º and definitely not what Euclid said.

Einstein said we should think about space and time together – what we call spacetime. But spacetime has four dimensions and we all agreed that our brains just don’t work properly for four dimensions.

So instead we agreed we could use just distance and time to keep it simple. We could then draw the spacetime diagram for the journey to school or for a water balloon falling from the Leaning Tower of Gingin, a full size steel replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, at an upcoming excursion.

Everyone could draw a spacetime diagram for their journey to school and point to the places where distance was not increasing but time was passing – waiting at the lights – and the steep bits when they were speeding down the freeway.

The next step in explaining Einstein’s theory of gravity is to think about the length of a trajectory in spacetime. Einstein said things in free-fall always have the shortest trajectory in spacetime. At first sight this is a weird idea. How can you measure a trajectory when one axis is distance and the other axis is time?

The journey-to-school diagram looks completely different if you change your units from seconds to minutes or meters to miles and the idea of the length of trajectory is pretty meaningless when both axes have different units.

The only sensible way to measure spacetime is to use a speed to enable us to measure time in space units. Using lightspeed as the conversion factor we can convert any time to the number of meters travelled by light in that time.

If you drop a water balloon from the Gingin Tower it takes almost three seconds to hit the ground. A spacetime diagram of its trajectory is a parabola that starts 45 meters above the ground, and hits the x-axis (time axis) three seconds later. But three seconds in time is 3 x 300,000km, or nine million meters.

The balloon travelled 900m meters in time. To full-scale the graph would stretch twice as far as the moon. The spacetime diagram is extremely elongated!

So now we can plot spacetime trajectories using meters for both distance and time, and I can now imagine using a tape measure to measure the length of any trajectory in meters.

Floating and falling in space

Now we come back to Einstein’s theory. It says that if you allow something to float freely in space, or fall from a tower, its trajectory in spacetime will always be the shortest.

Since a shortest line normally means a “straight line” Einstein is saying that free-floating trajectories are “straight lines” in spacetime (technically they are called geodesics).

Anything you do to prevent free-floating (like holding on to the water balloon on top of the tower rather than releasing it) will make the trajectory longer.

Gingin Tower, Western Australia. Author

Now comes the Eureka moment. For the water balloon on the tower I want you to retort indignantly: “This is nonsense. It is obvious that the not-falling spacetime trajectory is always shorter than the falling trajectory!”

In one case the balloon fell down 45 meters, while in the other it did not even move in space, although it kept on going in time just as before. One trajectory was roughly diagonal on the spacetime graph but the other just moved parallel to the x-axis. This is like saying the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is shorter than its sides.

I reply: it is not nonsense! Einstein is correct because time depends on height above the earth. Time is warped. Time on the top of the tower is running 4 parts in one million billion times faster than it is on the ground.

Another way of saying this is that a clock on the top of the tower runs faster by four femtoseconds for every second. This is enough to stretch the time axis by just enough that not falling is actually longer than falling.

And there is yet another way of saying this. Gravity is the force you have to apply to objects to prevent them from freely floating in space. You do not feel gravity while you are falling because there is no force. You are just following the shortest path in spacetime.

What we call gravity is the result of the warping of time by the mass of the earth. Gravity is a force exerted by the earth to stop you from falling.

We all have a destination in spacetime that is called old age. Nature tries to make things get to this destination quickest.

An astronaut becomes an old astronaut quickest if he is floating around in the space station. The astronaut is higher above the surface of the earth than the top of the Gingin Tower. Time on the space station runs even faster than on top of the tower. Therefore the astronaut ages quicker there than on the earth’s surface or at the top of the tower. It takes forces to delay the progress of time.

We have a good planet that reliably provides continuous forces to us to prevent us free floating (i.e. falling) to the centre of the earth. So our planet is a time machine that delays our ageing (but just by a millisecond in a lifetime!).

The most astonishing thing about my program with Rosalie Primary School was that the kids were not astonished. My colleagues Grady Venville and Marina Pitts and I measured their learning and asked them if they thought they were too young to learn this stuff. By a large majority they thought they were not too young and they thought it was really interesting.

Physicists and astronomers deal with curved space every day, and even our GPS navigators have to correct for the warped spacetime around the earth. In May 2011, NASA’s Gravity Probe B spacecraft found that the perimeter of an orbit around the Earth failed to match its Euclidean value by 28 millimeters – not a large discrepancy but just the value predicted by Einstein.

Gravity probe B. NASA/MSFC

Not too difficult to teach

In spite of modern science, the general belief among educators is that Einstein’s physics is too difficult to teach in school. As a result, science students enter university indoctrinated with 2,300-year-old Euclidean geometry and 300-year-old Newtonian physics.

Very few go on to discover the Einsteinian reality of curved space and warped time. The lucky few who get to study Einsteinian physics have difficulties because the fundamental concepts contradict all their past learning.

Most students who go on to become school teachers maintain the Newtonian mindset and so education remains in a Euclidean timewarp! The drastic decline in science at school and university could in part be due to our failure to challenge young people with modern ideas such as these.

If we start young enough, everyone can easily learn that the world is non-Euclidean, and then appreciate that the geometrical formulae we learn at school, such as Newton’s Law of Gravitation, are convenient approximations for everyday life.

See more Explainer articles on The Conversation.

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Aviation is a growing source of emissions. Emissions from aviation are increasing against a background of decreasing emissions from many other industry sectors. Airlines – with their international reach – are facing a confusing welter of regulation that makes emissions reduction difficult.

Some jurisdictions are pushing for aviation emissions controls, but an international agreement seems far away.
Cardiff Friends of the Earth

Worldwide, there are piecemeal moves to address the problem. Yet the UN has, since 1994, failed to reach any kind of consensus on a comprehensive approach to aviation and climate change.

The failure is all the greater when one considers that, based on IPCC calculations, aviation’s contribution to total emissions, estimated at 3%, could be as low as 2% or as high as 8%.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed-state parties to it (including Australia) “shall pursue limitation or reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases … from aviation … working through the International Civil Aviation Organization” (ICAO).

In other words, aviation is excluded from the world’s primary climate change instrument. It leaves the aviation emissions problem up to ICAO, a UN agency.

Given aviation’s absence from Kyoto, and the UN’s failure to address the aviation emissions problem, individual states and coalitions of states are taking action. Such action, however, has resulted in threatened lawsuits, legal action, and the possibility of a trade war.

Aviation has an emissions problem.

Under Directive 2008/101/EC on the inclusion of aviation in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), all flights (EU and non-EU) landing at or taking off from any airport within an EU member state from 1 January 2012 must surrender emissions allowances equal to the emissions created from the entire flight. Most of these allowances (85%) will be allocated to the airlines for free.

The EU ETS includes Australian airlines landing at or taking off from such airports.

International airlines, led by those in the US and China, vigorously oppose the inclusion of aviation in the EU ETS. They have challenged its legality in the European Court of Justice (the ECJ). The ECJ’s Advocate General, however, recommended that the ECJ find the scheme legal. And, in a 21 December, 2011 decision, the ECJ did just that.

It is possible that this dispute could result in a trade war between the EU and non-EU states. In late October, 2011, the US House of Representatives passed legislation that would make it illegal for US airlines to comply with the EU law. It’s unlikely that the US Senate will do the same. But if the legislation does pass the Senate, as James Kantor has noted, airlines would be unable to fly to and from Europe without breaking either a federal US law or an EU law.

In November 2011, ICAO endorsed – remember, this is the UN body responsible for reducing aviation emissions – a working paper approved by 26 states (including the US, China, Russia, and India) calling on the EU to exclude non-EU carriers from the EU ETS. And the Chinese government this week barred its airlines from joining the EU ETS.

It is not possible to make all of this up.

Against this background, Australia is the least problematic (emissions-wise) of all jurisdictions.

Rather than paying a carbon price through amendments to fuel tax credit and excise schemes, domestic Australian airlines may choose to participate in the Commonwealth’s ETS from mid-2013 through an “opt-in” scheme. (The legislation for this is Part 3, Division 7 of the Clean Energy Act).

For airlines, the rationale for participation is clear. As one commentator has noted:

“[a] tax is cumbersome and a blunt weapon – both airlines are used to managing massive price hedges for fuel. Qantas faced a bill of more than $110 million on its domestic operations, and Virgin a bill of around $40 million – both feel certain that the carbon cost will be far lower under a market mechanism.”

Opting-in offers airlines an opportunity to source abatement measures at least cost. Put another way, airline participation in the ETS enables carriers to manage both their fuel and carbon-cost liability more effectively.

Ticket surcharges to cover the costs of carbon pricing have recently been announced by Qantas. Flights to Europe (to and from London and Frankfurt) will cost an additional $3.50 each way per passenger and per applicable sector. From 1 July 2011 – the start date for carbon pricing in Australia – domestic carbon costs start at $1.82 one way per passenger for a flight of up to 700 km and increase to $6.86 one way per passenger for flights of 1,901 km or more.

These costs, of course, are additional to any charges which Qantas and other airlines will levy as a result of increases in the cost of jet fuel. Jet fuel is often the biggest operational cost for airlines.

It should be noted that Qantas is not participating in any legal challenge to the validity of the EU ETS. It should also be noted that Qantas may be subject to three different emissions trading schemes – those of Australia, New Zealand and the EU.

I have previously argued that, given the lack of success of international climate change negotiations under the auspices of the UNFCCC, we need an alternative approach. One solution may be to break the climate change problem up into different pieces and sectors, and address the pieces in more specialised fora – a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” approach.

However, the current international aviation emissions dispute augurs nothing good for such an approach. As the Deputy Director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University has said:

“… countries are retrenching to protectionism when faced with the EU’s attempt to seriously address one major emitting source in an equitable manner, [which] suggests little hope that these same countries might soon take bold stances in committing to the long-term, deep emissions reductions necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

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