As a drought takes hold, what is the best plan for Australia's farms?

“The sky, a great flaming oven. Grass withered; water gone; famine-stricken, blear-eyed bullocks, staggering pathetically ... Skeletons and bones everywhere.”

Bill Hannah in one of the four empty dams on his property
in Gundy, in the Hunter region of NSW. Much of Australia is
 - yet again - in the grip of drought.

So reads a tale of the terrible drought that scorched western Queensland in June 1902.  Earlier that year, Sydneysiders held a day of “humility and prayer” amid mounting concerns about the city’s water supplies. Victoria and Queensland would soon follow suit as the Federation Drought tightened its grip, according to Joelle Gergis’ new book, Sunburnt Country: The History And Future Of Climate Change In Australia.

The wheat crop that year was “all but lost”, sheep numbers halved and cattle would drop by 40 per cent by the end of the drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902, Gergis writes.

Read story from The Age by Jessica Irvine and Peter Hannam - “As a drought takes hold, what is the best plan for Australia's farms?”

Trump’s attempt to pull the USA out of the Paris Agreement: a personal reaction from Solaraid.

by Jeremy Leggett.

I was barely listening as he delivered his speech. I had heard most of his mantras already. I also knew that he would be unable to complete a US pullout, legally, until his second term. And he surely can’t aspire to one of those now, with all the skeletons that are rattling in his closet. I was thinking instead about what people can do in the face of madness such as this.

Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.

One of the options is to focus on projects that demonstrate, in a way that is impossible to ignore, that he is wrong. And more, that the belief system he is a symptom of is wrong: rottenly, suicidally, wrong.

I stared at the little solar light on my desk as the President pursed his lips and blustered his distortions and lies. Nothing that I know of shows how wrong Trump is on energy than that light. It captures the perversity of his world view in perfect miniature.

Read Jeremy Leggett’s thoughts - “Trump’s attempt to pull the USA out of the Paris Agreement: a personal reaction from Solaraid.”