On Friday, Kevin Rudd announced over half a billion dollars in funding for the NSW coal industry. Today, he announced an emissions reduction target and an emissions trading scheme that will have virtually no impact on reducing emissions and will give billions in handouts to the big polluters. This is a climate action plan that won’t cut emissions. In other words – a placebo.
Rudd’s moral compass is out of whack – probably because he is too close to the steel and other polluting industries.
In the face of the economic meltdown, Kevin Rudd toured the world, holding crisis talks with global leaders to develop an urgent rescue package for the international banking system. In the face of the climate crisis, the best he seems capable of is a global suicide pact.
Climate change is an existential issue. It is a matter of survival. We can’t decide to ‘get the balance right’ between destroying the biosphere or not. The growing observations of the speed at which climate change is happening are downright frightening. Change is happening faster than even the worst-case predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Scientists can’t really predict what will happen to the biosphere if emissions continue to increase along the lines of Rudd’s vision. But it’s not looking good.
To sit on the fence is to fail. I’ve been trying to come up with metaphors to describe why you can’t ‘get the balance right’. None of them quite do it justice, but it’s like being in a burning building and instead of dialing 000, you just dial 0 and hope for the best. It’s like wearing half a condom. Or it’s like removing half of a cancerous tumour.
If the white paper becomes law, Australia will continue to build coal power stations and renewable energy companies will continue to pack up and head overseas. The big polluters will continue to pollute. Lawyers and accountants will get rich.
But worse than all of that, we’re sending a signal to the world that even a modern, brave and prosperous country like Australia is not willing to show leadership on climate change. And if we don’t, who will?
Australia is facing severe impacts from climate change already, Rudd is ahead in the polls and was elected with a mandate to act on the climate. And yet, he seems to think that taking serious action on climate change will result in electoral suicide. In other countries, it is the same. So nobody acts. And in so doing, we guarantee that we will commit collective suicide. It’s just that while political suicide is a social construct, climate change is real.
If the laws and decisions of government are leading us towards collective suicide, citizens of conscience have a responsibility to engage in civil disobedience to stand up for that they know to be right.
