Change is possible: Australia needs a Green New Deal

When I dropped my kids off at childcare just a few weeks ago, the air was so dangerous that the warning on my phone showed someone in a gas mask.

Australians are angry and anxious because the government
clearly doesn’t have the climate emergency under control and
 has no plan to get it under control.’

As I stood on the burned-out property of Nick Hopkins in Malua Bay last month, he summed it up perfectly, feeling two parts shattered and three parts angry.

Australians are angry and anxious because the government clearly doesn’t have the climate emergency under control and has no plan to get it under control. But people are also angry and anxious because the basics of life are no longer guaranteed.

Study hard and do Tafe or university and you get underemployed in an insecure job with low pay. You get a job and then find you can’t afford a house because the government has rigged the housing market against you.

Read the opinion piece from The Guardian by Adam Brandt - “Change is possible: Australia needs a Green New Deal.” 

Extinction Rebellion: hitting a nerve at Australia's climate flashpoint

The Extinction Rebellion protesters think you should be angry. They want politicians and opinion columnists to be angry. The more people they upset stopping traffic in the Brisbane city centre – the louder the car horns, the more vicious the insults – the more certain it is they’ll be back.

Extinction Rebellion protesters block
the corner of Margaret and William
streets during a climate change
 protest in Brisbane.

“It’s not an enjoyable experience, we don’t take pleasure in doing it,” says Emma Dorge, an activist arrested in Brisbane on Tuesday, during a day of mass civil disobedience that shut down Australia’s third-largest city.

Extinction Rebellion, the decentralised global movement calling for aggressive action on the climate crisis, has engaged in similar disruption tactics in major cities on every continent. Those protests have been most effective when they are most polarising, like in Queensland, where talking and writing and screaming and marching about the climate emergency has not shifted public sentiment; a state home to the threatened Great Barrier Reef, and also the world’s most controversial coal project.

Read the story from The Guardian by Ben Smee - “Extinction Rebellion: hitting a nerve at Australia's climate flashpoint .”

Hot farmer anger as climate, drought trends ignored by politicians

Farmers are angry and perplexed by former Nationals federal leader Barnaby Joyce’s obsession with promoting coal-fired power stations and a deep-seated reluctance by some politicians to acknowledge Australia’s carbon emissions must be curtailed.

Farmers' anger over the Federal Government's inattention
 to climate change mitigation and so the present drought is
 equalled only by the Earth's rising temperatures.

As increasing climate variability threatens to cut our agricultural productivity 10 per cent in the next 20 years, farmers generally feel cheated and fed up with the political manoeuvring and denials of the need for practical policies on energy, climate change and drought says fast-growing national lobby group, Farmers for Climate Action (FCA).

While the rural sector was worried by soaring electricity prices, FCA argued most producers were just as fearful about by Canberra’s procrastinating and bitter internal conflicts over carbon pricing, emission issues and its indifference to renewable energy opportunities in regional Australia.

“I get calls every day from mainstream farmers outraged at how government has handled this issue,” said chief executive officer, Verity Morgan-Schmidt.

Read the story from Farmersonline by Andrew Marshall - “Hot farmer anger as climate, drought trends ignored by politicians.”

Future generations will be angry, and rightly so

From the Melbourne Age (May 31, 2018).

Surviving progress is both interesting and relevant

Beneath the Wisteria supporters should find this Sunday screening on the ABC of “Surviving Progress” both interesting and relevant.

The promo for the one hour and 26 minute show says: “As humanity basks in the glow of a century unprecedented progress in the early years of the 21^st Century, a growing number of scientists wonder if we’re really as well off as we imagine”.

Take the time to watch the show, if you didn’t see it on Sunday evening, and decide for yourself.

(Watching it made me angry, depressed, and sad; sad that a life form as intelligent as ours seems intent on soiling our nest to such an extreme that we can no longer use it – Robert).