Climate change a burning issue (again) in voters' minds

This piece of backroom intelligence shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the summer we are all still enduring. Record high temperatures, the hottest January on record; storms; floods in some places, droughts in others; mass fish kills in ailing rivers.

 ‘Climate change is not only a hot-button issue on its
own terms. Some of the research suggests it has
also become a proxy for political dysfunction.’ 

Climate change is back as a vote-changing issue – top of mind for many Australian voters. Private polling conducted for the environment movement and for the major parties suggests community concern about climate change is currently sitting at levels not seen since the federal election cycle in 2007.

If you can remember the events of 2007, you’ll recall that John Howard was forced into a significant about-face on the issue. Within sight of the election that swept Kevin Rudd into power, Howard signed the Liberal party up to emissions trading, a “world’s best-practice” cap and trade scheme, and declared Australia must prepare for a “low-carbon future”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Katharine Murphy - “Climate change a burning issue (again) in voters' minds.”

Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey

When the history books talk about Hurricane Harvey, the devastating storm that dropped more than 120 centimetres of water on south-east Texas, they'll call it a natural disaster. When the insurance companies – the ones that don't go bankrupt – categorise claims from the storm, they file them under "acts of God”.

In the past three years, Houston has experienced three 500-year floods. 

But though the trillions of gallons of water dropped from the sky – rainfall so immense that meteorologists had to add new colours to their maps, just as Australian meteorologists had to add new colours to capture record high temperatures in the country – the devastation the storm wrought was as much a result of choices made on the ground.

From urban sprawl to housing policy to climate legislation, the city of Houston's fate was shaped in state houses and on Capitol Hill, determined not only by policymakers' actions but by their inactions. And the solutions to the growing threat of storms like Harvey reside there as well.

Read Nicole Hemmer’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey.”