Scott Morrison can't afford to waste the bushfire crisis when Australia urgently needs its own green new deal

How much of our country has to burn, how many lives have to be lost, homes destroyed before we resolve as a nation to act on climate change?

The Dunn Road fire in Mount Adrah. Former prime
minister Malcolm Turnbull says Australia must
substantially enhance its firefighting resources

Have we now reached the point where at last our response to global warming will be driven by engineering and economics rather than ideology and idiocy?

Our priority this decade should be our own green new deal in which we generate, as soon as possible, all of our electricity from zero emission sources. If we do, Australia will become a leader in the fight against global warming. And we can do it.

The cheapest new generation is from wind and solar. And every year they are getting cheaper. That is a fact. But they depend on the wind blowing or the sun shining. That’s why it is called variable renewable energy.

So we have to plan to store the energy when it is abundant so that supply is maintained when it is not.

Malcolm Turnbull writes in The Guardian - “Scott Morrison can't afford to waste the bushfire crisis when Australia urgently needs its own green new deal.”

'Lionrock' pounds area in Japan hit by 2011 earthquake and tsunami

Waves crash against the coast in Ishinomaki,
 Miyagi prefecture, northeastern Japan on Tuesday.

Tokyo: At least 10 people have died in northern Japan after a powerful typhoon pounded the region.

Typhoon Lionrock made landfall in Japan's Tohoku, the area devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, on Tuesday evening becoming the first typhoon to come onshore in the region since records began in 1951.

On Wednesday, citing police, local broadcaster NHK reported nine people were found dead at an elderly care home in Iwate prefecture, while a woman was killed in Kuji City.

The storm came onshore near Ofunato in Iwate prefecture, a city where 340 people were killed and almost 3000 homes destroyed in the 2011 disasters. The cyclone took a boomerang-like route away from Japan before turning back over the past week and is expected to move faster over the northern part of the Japanese archipelago and into the Sea of Japan by Wednesday, where it will weaken into an extratropical cyclone.

Read Shin Shoji’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Typhoon Lionrock pounds Japan's northeast causing death.”