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Around 40 per cent of the world's carbon emissions are produced by countries with similar outputs to Australia. Collectively these countries can make a significant difference if each reduces their carbon emissions. While Australia can make a difference as part of a collective, our real ability to effect change actually lies elsewhere.
There are so many details about these unprecedented bushfires that I have no idea how to process. But nothing — including the ever-present shroud of acrid smoke that has blanketed my city since November — has brought home the scale of this tragedy quite like the estimation that one billion native animals have been killed.
Canberra has a reputation for being banal, bureaucratic and the 'bush capital'. But come 2020 it was in the news for being the city with the worst air quality in the world. What followed were four days of intense heat, sunless mornings, Blade Runner sky hues and warnings to stay indoors as much as possible. But movement is life.
Here is why the Morrison government was so slow off the mark: to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of these fires is to concede that there is something happening to the climate. The only way to downplay the reality of climate change, was to downplay the severity of the fires themselves.
The Liberals and Nationals have to find a way forward that balances the interests of their supporters with serving the national good. Old arguments and ideological stands need to be re-examined. The PM needs to enable a real debate.
Toxic air, dwindling water supplies, extreme heat: it's bleak stuff. And yet, on Sunday, COP25 finished with very little progress. Our planet will warm to +3C or higher, unless we also do something about the vested interests that continue to profit from our demise. And they aren't going to give up their power (or profits) just because we ask nicely.
As we pare back more and more, I have started to realise that there is a risk in taking things too far. The consumer orgy of the past may have been unsightly, but gift giving itself also serves a valuable social function, and we may be at risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
The Minister was delighted to announce that in Kimba the long awaited vote to host a permanent facility for national low level radiactive waste and storage for intermediate level radioactive waste had concluded. The result: 61.17 per cent voted in favour. Unsurprisingly, he failed to mention that voting rights in the poll were severely restricted.
Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.
Some have argued we shouldn't discuss climate change during this bushfire emergency. Yet when children previously tried to protest climate change they were told to 'stay in school'. The statement denies the evidence that our normal routines are already being disrupted by climate change.
As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.
Miners are not the enemy. In fact, those who once worked in mining are key to implementing change. After all, renewable energy isn't going to build and maintain itself. Our coal-fired power stations are starting to reach the end of their life cycle, and many countries are rapidly divesting from coal. We owe it to our nation’s workers to plan for the future.
61-72 out of 200 results.