Trump Leaks the Blueprints for the Climate Death Star

The fight against climate change is such a vast undertaking—crossing continents and decades—that it’s hard sometimes to know when you’re striking an effective blow. But last Wednesday Donald Trump helped clear the smoke of battle for a moment, issuing a pair of executive orders that let many of us know precisely where we’d done damage, and precisely where we should push even harder in the months and years ahead.

Students, staff, and faculty lie down dressed in black to create
a human oil spill to protest “continued inaction on fossil
fuel divestment” by the Whitman College administration in 2016.

The White House issued the two executive orders to help ram through pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure, even when the cities and states through which they pass oppose them, and to slow down the rush of pension funds now divesting their holdings from the fossil-fuel industry. These steps of course make a mockery of conservative claims to federalism and local decision-making—they are either one more sop to the most powerful industry on earth, or a nihilist effort to speed up climate change. Or both.

Read the story from The Nation by Bill McKibben - “Trump Leaks the Blueprints for the Climate Death Star.”

Hawkesbury students to strike for policy action on climate change

Up to one hundred Hawkesbury students from years 10, to 12 will be striking from school on Friday, March 15, demanding the government takes policy action on climate change.

Hawkesbury students ready to take strike action for the climate.

The Colo High School and Bede Polding College students, along with a group from Katoomba High, will catch public transport to the CBD to join students from schools around Sydney for the strike.

The School Strike 4 Climate Action website claimed tens of thousands of students from around the world would be participating in strikes.

William Potter (17), leader of the Go MAD Colo Student Action Group environmental initiative, said the strike would raise his generation’s concerns relating to climate change and the impact it poses on their futures.

Read the story from The Hawkesbury Gazette by Sarah Falson - “Hawkesbury students to strike for policy action on climate change.”

Young Americans will no longer be silent on climate change

American students will have the opportunity to join their counterparts around the world on March 15 by striking to demand action on climate change.

Young Americans have joined the movement started by Sweden's Greta Thunberg.

Greta Thunberg began what has now become a global protest movement when she sat down in front of the Swedish Parliament on Friday, Aug. 20, 2018. Almost every Friday since then, the remarkable 16-year-old has demonstrated with her placard to raise awareness of the threat climate change poses to her and other young people.

Read the story from The Hill by Bob Ward - “Young Americans will no longer be silent on climate change.”

Yes, Prime Minister, I'm striking from school: consider it a climate lesson

I am Veronica, 15 years old, from Scott Morrison’s electorate. Despite our Prime Minister’s calls for students not to strike from school on Friday, we’re choosing to no longer be powerless. We will be striking with thousands of other students, to show we will not stand for our government’s inaction on climate change.

Veronica Hester, a 15-year-old student from Sutherland
 Shire, who will be among young Australians striking
from school on Friday.

Mr Morrison has condemned the strike, saying he does not support our schools being turned into parliaments. “More learning and less activism,” he said. If he and our politicians listened to the climate science we have been taught, and took action like those of us in school, we wouldn’t have to resort to strike action.

In school, we have seen the raw truth of climate change: videos of our dead and dying Great Barrier Reef, increasingly shocking statistics, forecasts of a worrying future.

Seeing this, we students do not shout at each other across the classroom. We sit in a shocked silence. Afterwards, we shout, with our signs and our demands. Because how can an educated person know all we know, and do nothing?

Read the story by Veronica Hester from The Sydney Morning Herald - “Yes, Prime Minister, I'm striking from school: consider it a climate lesson.”

Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg says energy deal is close

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is confident of striking a deal with the states on a national plan to merge climate and energy policy, but remains adamant he won't yield to demands by some Labor states to raise emission reduction targets.

Josh Frydenberg, Minister for Environment and Energy.

The nation’s energy ministers will meet at a Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday to thrash out the future of the federal government’s national energy guarantee (NEG), and are expected to agree to move on to the final design stage of a deal.

Mr Frydenberg was the last of the COAG leaders to arrive for a pre-gathering dinner on Thursday night at Cecconi's, an up-market Italian restaurant on Melbourne's Flinders Lane.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story from The Age - “Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg says energy deal is close.”