The Australian government is to pay 1,000 farmers $150,000 or more to leave the land, at a time when more than half of all farming land is covered by government “drought” subsidies. It is not yet possible to say definitively that this is “global warming in action”, but it certainly looks awfully like it, even given that much of Australian farming has never been environmentally viable anyway.

The Australian farmers are just lucky they are in a First World money with cash to give away.

The National Farmers Federation is valiantly proclaiming that the land won’t be left “empty” – of course it won’t, the roos and emus are already there, and will be finding their own balance.

Yes, I know, I’m on holiday and am supposed to be cheerful, but I was walking around the bay this evening, in the light of a very nearly full moon, thinking there is, here, and in a lot of other places, an awful lot of very expensive real estate only just above the Med’s level – wonder if you could build a “Med barrier” to hold back the tide, about where the Greeks used to think the world ended?

But the really depressing bit comes from the news that penguins are suffering particularly badly from climate change. Yes, I know the fact they are cute and easily anthropomorphised shouldn’t be a factor, but it is….

Still, it is good to know that art inspired by climate change is getting a play – I’m still waiting for the great climate change novel, however.

There’s nothing like a good old political spat. In the New Statesman:

Sian Berry comments on the Tory “green” policy, announced amidst much fanfare.

Zac Goldsmith takes the criticism personally.

Then Sian comes back.

Possibly to be continued…

(Of course it is all serious really – I fear lots of people are thinking that the Tories are gonig green, helped by the patent “ungreeness” of the current governemnt – but you need some entertainment occasionally. If you keep contemplating the seriousness of it all, all of the time, it just becomes too depressing – it took me a fortnight to recover from reading The Revenge of Gaia.)

It is easy to think of America as the land of Hummer-driving, ginormous burger-eating environmental vandals, but of course there are good green things happening there. The Economist this week has two interesting accounts:

* the first big concentrating solar power plant since the 80s (who says solar isn’t a “mature technology”?) has just been opened in Nevada.

* there’s apparently (by the Economist’s judgement anyway) a boom in green building. What that it were the same in Britain – whenever I catch the train those hideous quasi-Georgian brick boxes packed on the outskirts of towns and villages make me despair.