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In The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a town tries to buy a cheap solution to a terrible problem, and their children pay the price. In light of Garnaut's latest, coservative climate change recommendations, it seems we may need a Class 5 tropical cyclone slamming into Brisbane to jolt us into decisive action.
This week's ABC TV Australian Story featured property magnate Bill McHarg, who walked away from his job to fight John Howard's inaction on climate change. Research suggests he is a rarity, with most white males with good education and high income downplaying the risk of climate change.
The Government's Green Paper has heated debate about climate change. The debate requires a moral framework that emphasises solidarity and responsibility. We must measure our response by the needs of allhuman beings and of the world.
Prepare for a lot of powerfully funded special interest lobbying against the Garnaut Report when it is issued next week, particularly from the coal industry. Those inconvenienced by change will always shout louder than the majority who stand to benefit from it.
In working through the maze of economic and scientific dilemmas at the UN climate change meeting, looking at the faces of the world's poor is not a bad way to start. In the past, solutions to ecological problems have often been directed to needs other than those of the people most directly affected.
It seemed a last minute reprieve for tropical forests could emerge at the UN climate change meeting in Bali. Because 20% of greenhouse emissions are due to forest destruction, stablising greenhouse gas emissions requires reduction in the rate of deforestation.
We have Dr Tim Flannery and others to thank for alerting us to the reality of the changing climate. But the hardline strategies he advocates have too many sad and chilling precedents.
So many of the goods you see in shop windows will soon be waste, mostly landfill. Cutting waste is the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions and cope with other crises of climate change.
Last week the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Emissions Trading released its report. Given that even Malcom Turnbull has described climate change as “the great economic challenge of our times”, the Report’s 200-plus pages are decidedly thin on substance.
Those of us who played school or local footy in our youth remember bitterly cold days, ankle-deep mud and finding it difficult to tell team mates from opposition through the layers of mud caked on jumpers. My twelve year old has already played for more than five years, but has not experienced one of those afternoons.
It came to light at the Vatican's recent Climate Change Seminar that powerful and vested interests are confusing farmers in developing countries. They are saying that technology will solve their agricultural problems, and that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is good and willed by God.
Symbolic gestures, whether at personal or at national level, are effective, even though they will have a barely measurable effect on water supply or global warming. Our world becomes different, and our sense of what has priority in it also changes.
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