Auto-Destruct - George Monbiot

It’s the last straw. Parked outside the hospital doors is a minibus with the engine running. The driver is playing on his mobile phone. The fumes are blowing into the atrium. I step up to his window and ask him to turn the engine off. He does so, grumpily. Then I notice he’s wearing a health service uniform.

George Monbiot - "It is time to drive the car out of our lives".

I walk through the atrium, down a corridor and into the cancer department (not for cancer this time, but to talk about reconstructive surgery). I look around the huge waiting-room and wonder how many of the people sitting here might be ill as a result of air pollution. I think of people in other departments: children with asthma attacks, patients being treated for road injuries, or suffering from a lifetime of inactivity, as wheels replaced their feet. And I’m struck by the amazing variety of ways in which cars have ruined our lives.

Let’s abandon this disastrous experiment. Let’s recognise that this 19th Century technology is now doing more harm than good, and plan our way out of it. Let’s set a target to cut the use of cars by 90% over the next ten years.

Read the column from The Guardian by George Monbiot - “Auto-destruct”.

Insurance companies have a role to play in equipping us for challenges of climate change

Lloyd's of London will no longer allow their trading platform to be used for investing in coal, because this fuel is the main driver of climate change. Given the global insurance industry has been harking on for decades about the increasing risks of extreme weather to property, one would have thought they might have arrived at that conclusion a little sooner.

A resident in the flooded streets of Rockhampton
during the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie in April 2017.

During their 25 years of inaction on this front, the insurance industry, through investments and cover, has facilitated massive coal use around the world, locking emissions and unavoidable warming into the atmosphere. As a result, we now have a large number of property owners around Australia who are going to feel the heat of surging insurance prices to cover worsening weather extremes. The industry has an obligation to respond.

Read Karl Mallon’s comment in today’s Melbourne Age - “Insurance companies have a role to play in equipping us for challenges of climate change.”

Corporations claim they are 'green', but the world is acutally getting greener

M

any corporations claim they are “green”, but research has shown that the world is actually getting greener.

The research, published in Nature Climate Change, is explored in article on The Conversation entitled: “Despite decades of deforestation, the Earth is getting greener”.

The Nature article shows that the world has actually got greener over the past decade and this is, The Conversation reports: “Despite ongoing deforestation in South America and Southeast Asia, we found that the decline in these regions has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and Australia”.

Pointing out that more plants may mean more absorption of carbon dioxide.” If so, this will slow but not stop climate change,” The Conversation points out.