Trevor Scott, Castlemaine
Six years ago I was writing letters to this newspaper about climate change, and suggesting what we could do to turn it around. Fast forward to November 2022 and I find to my astonishment, that instead of decreasing, carbon emissions have actually increased, and we are in the worst climate crisis ever. If you watch the national news you’ll know that floods, fires and extreme weather events are not confined to Australia; they are everywhere in the world. United Nations has tried to address this; but now, 11 COP’s (Conferences of the Parties) after Paris in 2015, when world leaders agreed to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees C, a catastrophic 2-3 degrees rise is predicted.
Six years ago, I was a part of a huge campaign to stop the Adani coal mine. Today, although not yet actually producing any coal, this coal mine is going ahead in central Queensland.
The Northern Rivers area of NSW has had a one in a hundred year flood, not once, but five times this year and yet, almost unbelievably, one of the big four Australian banks has plans to lend billions of dollars to a big coal company so that it can embark on yet another huge coal mining project.
The big question for me is are we going to continue to act like lemmings, heading steadily towards the jumping off point, high on the clifftop; or are we going to step up and demand that our government puts an end to this nonsense?
