by Celine Lai
Australia & the National Party of New Zealand believe that if we can meet our targets without changing our lives we should. But it is neither logical or possible to keep to business as usual if Australia is to meet the Climate Change Authority’s target of a reduction in emissions of 45% by 2030 (below 2005 levels).
On 2nd December 2020, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern committed the government and the public sector to going carbon-neutral by 2025, as she declared a climate emergency.
“The public sector needs to be and will be an exemplar that sets the standard we all need to achieve by 2050,” Ardern said.
The programme also includes an immediate focus on phasing out the largest and most active coal boilers, a requirement for government agencies to purchase electric vehicles and reduce the size of their car fleet, and for a green standard for public sector buildings.
“It’s also a call to action for the private sector and it’s great to see so many examples of businesses taking steps to reduce their emissions,” Ardern said.
Source: RNZ News online
Meanwhile in Australia we have the Federal Government:
- Being quiet on the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action’s“Australian Bushfire & Climate Action Plan” which points out that reducing greenhouse gases rapidly, is critical.
- Telling reporters that they accept all recommendations of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, known as the Bushfire Royal Commission; but to date there has been not one recommendation implemented in full.
- Ignoring climate scientists, environmental scientists, the community, world leaders, research, and local and indigenous knowledge, and logic; and blaming mismanagement of reducing green fuel as the “be-all” of fire causes.
- Running Australia on an out-dated National Electricity Objective that needs to change, to mandate the research and development and implementation, Australia-wide, of renewable energy sources, carbon emissions reductions, and energy-saving in all sectors and States.
- Omitting to acknowledge in their Technology Investment Roadmap that liquefied natural gas emits greenhouse gases. Also, the Government has not provided a timeline and a concrete plan for implementation of helpful facets of the Roadmap. And the Roadmap does not not support fuel emission standards or do enough to concretely support Electric Vehicles.
The Climate Council says:
This roadmap sidelines the solutions that work and instead focuses its attention on keeping fossil fuels on life-support
Stuart Smith of the Nationals said about Jacinta Arden’s declaration of a climate emergency:
Declaring a climate emergency was nothing more than “virtue signalling”.
We need to drive our emissions down. A climate emergency won’t change our approach to this. Smith said it was possible to reduce emissions without telling New Zealanders how to live their lives. “National believes that if we can meet our targets without changing our lives we should. And we can, if we are prepared to do what works to lower emissions.”
Not changing our lives sounds eerily close to what the Australian Government has demonstrated.
Trying to lower emissions by not doing what is required to achieve this, is a contradiction.
Reducing greenhouse gases requires massive and achievable changes over the next ten years, let alone by 2050. How can we truly lower emissions without getting big businesses to stop massively polluting and warming up the Earth with fossil fuels?
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has argued hazard reduction burning is action “to take account of the climate we’re living in”. But this is not enough.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Morrison said hazard reduction was as “important as emissions reduction and I think many would argue even more so because it has an even more direct, practical impact on the safety of a person going into a bushfire season”.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
A Hollow Gesture ?
What the Prime Minister is saying, on paper, is that he prioritizes one factor for mitigating fires, being prescribed burning to reduce fuel. But prescribed burning is designed to make it easier to suppress fires, not to prevent them.
Do you agree that it is time for our government to put an end to the posturing and to walk their talk?
We need smart energy policies and plans without fossil fuels, from the Australian Government, not short-term possibly easier tangible activities with ineffectual long term results.
We need a government who stops supporting a fossil fuel industry that props them up.
It’s time for people to rise up and declare that we’ve had enough tokenism and wrongly claiming that Australia cannot recover without gas, shored up by Rupert Murdoch’s media.
The Takeaway
Declare that you have had enough of the Australian Government’s hollow gestures.
Go to all the links in this article and read the web-pages, and share the links with others.
Sign up with 350 Perth and 350 Australia and others to receive emails, so you can take action.
Sign up with 350 Perth’s “Captured State” campaign, to campaign to make the relationships between the gas lobby and the W.A. government more transparent.
On 15th December, download the report showing the Australian Government’s participation in the 12th December 2020 “Climate Ambition Summit”. See: Sydney Morning Herald article
Follow our government’s in-action through the websites below
Thank you!