Last month John Quiggin wrote a post on the potential for greenhouse gas emission reductions focussing on the air travel market. He argues that it would be relatively easy to get a 75% reduction on emissions (well emission intensity to be precise). His estimate is driven by two main factors, a more efficient fleet of planes, and reduced frequency of overseas holidays.

In booking my recent Xmas holiday, I had an experience which tends to back up his view. Virgin Blue offer carbon offsets for flights. The price of offsetting my Melbourne-Queensland flight was under $3. While the emission reduction technology is obviously different (assumably some tree planting process) the cost seems to be quite low.

Into the Wild is directed by Sean Penn and follows the tales and adventures of a young man who abandons the crass consumerism of the modern world for travels in the wide expanse of the American wilderness.

But it is so much more.

The movie follows Chris, in a non-linear sequence, as he graduates from university with the prospect of attending Yale Law School. While celebrating the graduation at a local restaurant, his father offers him a new car as a gift, a gift that Chris rejects, and in this we can start to see exposed the issues and forces in his life. Chris doesn?t want or need another ?thing?, his father is offended, his mother tries to mediate, Chris want his parents to understand who he is and where he is coming from, his sister sits and watches and can see it all.

In this we can see the start of a man who decides to leave all of it behind and become a tramp, backpacking and travels across the wilderness: Arizona?s deserts, the Colorado river, Mexico and ending up in Alaska. Along the way he meets and befriends a rang of people all of whom he has an emotional impact on.

This movie is beautifully filmed and hand crafted, every thing is shot location (and in the credits there are dozens of sites) and the harsh beauty of the American outback is superbly portrayed.

This film is much more than just the physical journey, it is also an exploration of a man?s soul and what drives him, the connections between people, the choices they make and how that influences the trajectory of their lives, the relationship between people and their environment, how people are controlled by the things they possess and how they understand themselves and their place in the world.

Chris reads Tolstoy on his travels and there is something of the movie that has the massive sweep and depth of a Russian novel. Margaret and David gave this movie four and a half and five stars and Margaret says it is close to being a masterpiece. Margaret is wrong – it is a masterpiece. It has its flaws, it drags at times, it jumps around a little to much, but is a beautiful story, with magnificent imagery, great stories and characters and so many layers of depth I find it hard to think that a better movie has been made. Ever.

Death at a Funeral is a light-hearted comedy of manners centered around the misshapes and misadventures at a funeral one fine day in merry England. The movie has the array of odd types, the son who is doing the eulogy but is hurt that everyone thinks his brother the writer should be doing it. The brother, a faux rich New York type who is disconnected from his family. The neurotic mother and the friend who is a pharmacy student but also sidelines in psychotropic drugs.

Margaret and David both thought it was gorgeous and I think Margaret gives you some sense of the movie when she says she has not laughed as must since The 40 Year Old Virgin. I can kind of see where they are coming from, it is a finely written and filmed movie, but ultimately never rises above the slapstick. Yes, it is amusing to see a guest accidentally under the influence of a mind altering drug, the conflict between family members and the deep family secret at risk of being revealed. But the film never does anything more than these (fairly obvious) slapstick mechanisms and in the end I found the movie to be a pretty bland experience overall.

I would recommend that instead you go and hire a DVD of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Flickr the photo blog is a an interesting site, full of often wonderful photos. One way I found is to check the Flickr blog. These are a couple of photos I found on there.

Link. Photo by Flickr user Phil H used under a Creative Commons license

Link. Photo by Flickr user Froots used under a Creative Commons license

If you go to a toy store today it is full, from floor to ceiling with plastic toys, and 99.9 precent of those toys were made in China. The electronic store down the street? Full of electronic goods from China. The clothes at Target? China. David Jones? China

The western worlds consumption is being driven by production in China. In the first industrial revolution, Asia provided the raw goods for production in England and Europe, in this one China is producing goods directly for the west, and vast quantities of them.

In some ways this is a one off event. When China becomes as rich as the rest of the Western world, there may not be anyone to replace them, we may have to produce goods for ourselves again, at the high salaries we pay ourselves.

It may be that these cheap plastic toys are a once is a life time experience. We a living in a unique period with a billion people living on our doorstep willing to make our goods for a dollar a day. It may not come again.

I have been following the US elections with a reasonably keen eye, in the democratic primaries my hopes are on Barack Obama winning. Why Obama? It is not just the intoxicating idea of a black US President and all that would say, both to America and to the world, but also the uplifting demeanor he brings to the campaign. A rational and measured person as President is very appealing. Why not Hilary Clinton? She has always struck me as a competent and capable person, but with little passion and personality. More fundamentally she comes across as a semi-supporter of the Iraq war, and as candidate her high negatives (the proportion of people in polls who have a negative opinion of her) make her a hard case to sell in an election campaign. I think Mathew Yglesias sums it up well:

Let me just fall back to what I’ve said before: I don’t envision core domestic policy issues unfolding incredibly differently in a Clinton or in an Obama administration. I think Barack Obama has given us more indication, both in his record and his proposals, that he’ll pursue the kind of foreign policy we need to get the country on track. I’ll buy that Obama doesn’t have a ton of experience, but the reality is that Clinton doesn’t have a ton either. And while Hillary Clinton can probably win in the general election, I think that the bulk of the evidence supports the idea that Obama would have an easier time — in particular would have an easier time of generating the sort of big win that would be necessary to pass ambitious legislation. Ultimately, that’s what the campaign is about. I won’t even pretend to be appalled by Clinton’s cynicism — the disenfranchisementgambit and all the rest — because, frankly, the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my view, probably the most appealing thing about her. At the end of the day, though, while I think she’d be okay it’s always seemed to me that with other viable options in the field it’s made more sense to go with “other options” and now that it’s a clear two-person race, I think Obama is clearly the better option.

The BBC is reporting that the new Rudd Government has changed the Australian Government policy on selling uranium to India. The previous Howard Government had agreed to sell uranium to India, however India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and international treaty to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. As India will not sign the treaty, Australia will not export uranium to them.

This is another good move by the Rudd Government. I am beginning to loose some of the cynicism about Rudd that I developed during the election campaign, as they continue to make a number of small but significant policy changes, such as closing down the ?Pacific Solution? and signing the Kyoto Protocol. Lets hope there are more of them.

Blogging has been light (well non existent) over the last month, but I intend to rectify that with a whirlwind of posts, and a hitherto unseen posting consistency.

I have used various image editing programs over the years, but found myself without a way to do simple image manipulation for this blog.

And then I came across this free online image editor – Picnik. It does everything you need, brighten, sharpen, crop, rotate, resize, and allows you to save in multiple formats back to your computer or on to flickr or other websites (see below for screen shot).

Give it a try, it is free and easy.

Two great bloggers in the US are Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat who are both staff writers for the Atlantic Monthly Magazine (a magazine I recommend that you read, you can get it at most good newsagents, the only problem is the cost. I would subscribe, but am already over budget on magazine subscriptions). Matt is the nominal lefty and Ross the nominal Righty. They both recently participated in a roundtable at the Atlantic, and I cannot decide which one looks more professional, attractive and.or authoritative. What do you think?