As the Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, the Shepparton based MLC for Northern Victoria, Wendy Lovell, has a critical role to play in understanding and preparing Victoria’s response to human-induced climate change, subsequently this letter went to her office today (March 30, 2012) – Robert McLean.
Dear Wendy,
 |
The Minister for Housing
and Minister for Children
and Early Childhood Development,
the Shepparton based MLC
for Northern Victoria, Wendy Lovell |
I am unsure of your personal beliefs about climate change/global warming (call it what you prefer), but as a member of a Victorian Government that has absolute disregard for human contributions to the difficulty and so our behaviour, it is clear where you stand professionally.
As the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development it is something in which you should be critically interested in the impacts of climate change as it is our children, and particularly our grand-children, who will feel the effects of a changing climate that will produce circumstances far different from what has existed for the past 10 000 years and in the modern era, the last 200 years or so.
Those effects, despite the verbose claims of the many doubters and skeptics, will bring droughts, higher temperatures and rainfall that will be dumped on the state, including your electorate, in torrential downpours that will produce flash flooding causing soil erosion and the washing away of the state’s rich top soils.
Combine droughts, those higher temperatures and erratic rainfall and we have a situation in which lives for people of all ages will become increasingly difficult.
The Baillieu Government’s (your government!) intentions to abandon the already trifling carbon dioxide targets is socially irresponsible in the extreme and along with that we have the idea that the Premier echoes federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's fatuous views, in pointing out that the recent state budget set aside funds for ''direct action'' with a $40 million clean energy fund as well as the replacement of street lights and tree planting to help cut emissions.
Wendy, I urge to seriously look at and do your best to understand the science of climatology (it’s hugely complex) for unless we respond positively, we are doomed to an increasingly difficult future.
Being a senior member of a conservative political party, I suspect you also stand with those who have decided reservations about the causation of climate change and so view what is happening as natural and cyclical.
Having read extensively for five or six years about the earth’s climate and listened to a host of speakers, from vastly experienced climatologists to some of the world’s greatest skeptics, I am absolutely convinced that emerging changes to our climate are without question the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.
The threat to the world, Australia and your electorate are so great that the need for a considered response exceeds, in importance, any other measured calculations presently before parliament.
Maybe that seems alarmist and apocalyptical, but sadly unless we attend to our behaviour, and within that work to build a resilient state in which profit and growth are relegated well down our list of priorities, then climate change and its implications will do just that – and unleash force so great that an unprepared community will be decimated.
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| James Hansen |
It was in the early 1980s that the head of the New York City based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, James Hansen, and his colleagues warned the world of the damage by us (humans) to earth’s atmosphere.
Extensive research illustrated, beyond question, that our world could continue to operate successfully if we acted to limit the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
Interestingly, when the Industrial Revolution began about 200 years ago the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was about 270ppm, in the 1960s it was nearly 320ppm and today it is almost 400ppm.
Ted Baillieu argues, in handing responsibility for our CO2 emissions to the Federal Government, he is acting responsibly, economically and every other way, for the state, but the reality arising from “business as usual” , we will, within a decade or so, see Victoria as a “State of Disarray”.
Wendy, I urge you to put the welfare of your electorate, along with that of Victoria, Australians and people of the earth generally, ahead of your professional aspirations, step aside from your government’s beliefs and policies and commit to helping Victoria, your home and my home, to be a place that will do what it can to ease climate change.
Although you may lose your role, it would be wonderful that if future historians noted that it was Wendy Lovell as the Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development and the MLC for Northern Victoria played a key role in building Victoria’s resilience and helped prepare the state for the undeniable rigours arising from a warming globe.
Through your portfolio as Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, I urge you to have your staff and anyone else you can influence throughout the Government, be they politicians or public servants, to consider how our State can best maintain a reasonable quality of life and equity for all as it engages with processes that will bring a stop to the present trajectory of carbon dioxide and return it to the 350ppm figure as suggested by Hansen.
I am convinced (and this is a truly difficult pill to swallow) that the richness and complexity of our society is that way because of our frivolous use of cheap energy and so it is absolutely critical that we make society poorer and so slow, appreciably, its consumptive behaviour; a behaviour that is depleting the world’s finite resources, seriously changing the world’s climate and dramatically endangering the quality of a world we will bequeath to those who follow.
Wendy, it is remarkably difficult to escape from the “business as usual” paradigm, but should we adhere to that template, society will unquestionably unravel.
Should you wish to talk more about this, I can visit at your office, meet for coffee, talk on the phone (5822 1766) or you can contact me via email at robed@sheppnews.com.au.
I do hope you will seriously consider this, decide on a course of action and then act.
Thank-you.
