For environmentalists across Australia, particularly
those who campaigned for climate change action, saying the election result was
a disappointment would be a massive understatement.
That disappointment is all the more poignant because
while a vast majority of Australians rated climate change as their greatest
concern, it seems that most are more interested in immediate threats to their
personal well-being.
While I was handing out how to vote leaflets, one lady
informed me she firmly believed climate change predictions were nonsense, and
the changes that are occurring were simply a 20 year weather cycle. That is the
level of denial we are facing, because our feuding political class refuses to
be up-front with the Australian people, and acknowledge the threats facing the
planet, and what needs to be done to limit their impact on our children and
grandchildren.
In the lead up to the election, neither major party
had any ambitious plan for action on climate change, beyond a few grandiose
uncosted statements from Labor. Those were negated by a series of conciliatory
promises to the mining industry that appeared to support an expansion of coal
mining and 'fracking' for unconventional gas, actions guaranteed to further
drive global warming.
Regrettably, mining industry backed scare campaigns,
and political stunts like waving lumps of coal around in parliament, have made
the whole climate change debate so toxic, that no-one in government is game to
act.
The consensus of scientific opinion agrees there is
now no way to save our iconic Great Barrier Reef, and the immediate extinction
of tens of thousands of the earth's species is now inevitable. The only hope
for the remainder, they say, is immediate and drastic action, something now put
on hold, in Australia at least, for another 3 years.
Only this week, research results by the respected
Pottsdam Institute were released showing that polar melting of ice caps is
accelerating at a much faster rate than expected, something that cannot be
reversed for thousands of years.
These are just some of the challenges the new
government faces. For our grand-children's sake, let us hope they are up to
that challenge.
- John Edwards
This article was originally published in the VOICES FOR THE EARTH column in The Daily Examiner on May 27, 2019
