Page 3813 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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believe your children and their children, if they get to have that freedom to do so, will not thank you for.
The Greens did not need Al Gore or the Stern report to suddenly get alert to the dangers of human-induced climate change. Many of the scientists who made the first frightening models of its potential impact wanted to call it “climate catastrophe”—before their language was moderated by the spin doctors. Since the film An Inconvenient Truth brought the message to mainstream Australians with its unbearable images of polar bears struggling to hang on to ever-diminishing fragments of ice melting in the oceans, the term “climate catastrophe” has become mainstream in the discourse.
The spin doctors were right: it is a scary term and it has the power to do what many of the world’s richest capitalists and their corporations and their clients, their shareholders and others who profit from the most carbon dioxide-producing industries and the mining of their raw materials feared. The term “climate catastrophe” has the power to cause people to change those aspects of their behaviour that contribute to the problem, out of love for their children and for other people’s children, for the rivers, for the woodlands, for the grasslands and the forests, for our towns and cities, for our relatively peaceful societies and for the many species who share this wonderful, unique earth with us.
We have to remember that, as the only species with the power to affect every other species on the planet and the ability to know this, we have the moral responsibility to act, to do everything we can, to avert the climate chaos that many scientists have been trying to warn us about since the early 1990s. They would have preferred that we did not have to see and experience the impacts of our greenhouse-gas-producing behaviour before we would raise our eyes from our comfortable, well-heeled lives—most of us, never forgetting the 10 to 12 per cent who live in a very different Canberra. The message was diluted, refuted and otherwise diverted from any media where it could be understood and lodged in people’s minds. This allowed the fossil-fuelled industries to continue pulling profits from the earth, squandering our precious water, polluting the air, depleting and poisoning our soils and, unknown to many of us, spoiling the atmosphere and changing the climate.
Enough! It has to be, or the generations that come will not thank us. I do not believe that even the most ardent opponents of the science of climate change want to destroy our children’s world.
This is one area where we have to act locally to avert and adapt to a global problem. As an Assembly, the half plus one, and sometimes two, can rail at the federal government for, in this case, not ratifying and introducing a climate change strategy in which perhaps only the seven on my right could have any faith. We can also ask our government to do everything in its power to take the ACT people on a journey towards sustainable lifestyles in a city-territory with detailed, long-term plans and intermediate targets to reduce our energy use sourced from fossil fuels.
Indeed, as Mr Gentleman pointed out, the Canberra public are educated about climate change. They know the action needed and they expect their governments to take it. It is time to move past the recognition of climate change and to work together to begin
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