How many more lives must be lost?
How many homes must be destroyed?
How many more farmers will need to be helped to leave an unproductive farm?
What more will it take for the Coalition government and Labor to realise that ‘Paris’ is not enough?
Reaching the Paris target was never aspirational – it was a bare minimum.
To be actually meeting that target has not been achieved because of government actions. It has been because the States and Territories are taking action, independently of the federal government, to develop renewable energy sources.
But even that is not enough.
Australia is inherently a dry country and has always been subject to droughts.
European farming methods are turning it into a desert.
If farmers want to abandon their farms, help them to do so and return the land to trees on a massive scale.
Ban growing water-hungry crops like cotton.
Stop seeing farming as a source of profit and accept that growing food for survival is more important.
We need policies which are proactive and aimed at survival, not reactive where greed is the main driver.
Stop thinking about the economy and start thinking about the well-being of living creatures – all species, not just mankind.
If we ever live long enough for the history if this period to be written, Coalition governments will be recorded as being responsible for doing too little, too late!
Other countries are making great strides. More are coming aboard as reality sinks in.
Those with dollar signs for eyes will destroy the lives of those that follow us if we do not act – now!
Governments must stop being blind and deaf to reality and recognise that we are facing the worst threat to existence that has ever been!
But don’t panic!
Act!
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Agreed!! But how will we “encourage” the unelected political hacks who control pre-selection to give up political donations that keep them in the manner to which they wish to remain accustomed?
RosemaryJ36,
In NSW where the western slopes of the Great Divide flow down into the Darling River basin, there are places where rapacious coal mines and CSG wells are nabbing an unfair part of the surface water before it even reaches the gluttonous cotton fields.
cb: water is the universal essential which is squandered rapacious by those for whom wealth and power dominate their lives.
Yep, but not going to happen under the current fascist regime
NEC – The UK had a National government during WWII while Australia had a non-partisan war advisory body, I believe. And we now need to be on a wartime footing, although the ‘war’ is an existential one. We cannot afford partisan bickering – we need to work to a common goal – and the current PM is ill-equipped to lead such a body.
We need to recruit some elder statesmen to fulfill such a role, backed up by a military council. Not to maintain the peace but for their logistical skills. Party politics need to go out the window as we work – for a change – for the common good.
The millions in the UK who lived through shortages and rationing actually learned to respect the need to go without for the benefit of all!
I for one learned to appreciate a treat because such luxuries were few and far between! A mandarin orange or a pomegranate in the Christmas stocking was breathtakingly unexpected! And we were not poor but money could not buy goods which were not available.
cb: correction to my grammar – rapaciously! The post disappeared and it was too late to edit when it surfaced again!
Rapacious is a very apt word to describe past and current attitudes towards natural recourses.
‘Unsustainable’ has precipitated ‘unprecedented’,
thus laying the foundations for ‘catastrophic’,
a predicted buzzword for the very near future.
Meanwhile, rapacitiously exploitative and exploitatively rapacious
remain preferentially interchangable descriptors.
Rapacious.
In NSW, Whitehaven Coal used their political influence to bypass environmental legislation in order to open an open cut mine (export thermal coal)through the middle of Maules Creek/Leards State forest, despite the fact that this headwater forest in the Namoi catchment area comprised over 90% of the remnant of an endangered ecotype (white box with grassy understory) and the fact that the footprint of the mine would eliminate nearly 50% of the existant remnant, and completely fragment what remained.
To top that off, now it seems that the Whitehaven mine at Leards has been misappropriating large volumes of water, despite their already generous allocations and all the dire needs of the downstream Darling River.
Quothe the current NSW deputy premier; ‘if a few frogs have to die’ (shrugs).
Why mention only water-hungry crops like cotton when almonds that are grown downstream in huge numbers use a lot more water than cotton does, that’s not to say we should grow cotton, it’s to say we should look at everything that is grown in the MDB to workout just what sort of crops the MDBS can support in an ongoing basis.
Unlike other crops, almonds always require a lot of water—even during drought. Annual crops like cotton, alfalfa, and veggies are flexible—farmers can fallow them in dry years. That’s not so for nuts, which need to be watered every year, drought or no, or the trees die, wiping out farmers’ investments.
https://newrepublic.com/article/125450/heres-real-problem-almonds?fbclid=IwAR2vca21YlLbd41wG4VeFnlB9bBYJL2bdJQfb4suBIwNOtEsa5c_Ijykj7E
Tough nut to crack: the almond boom and its drain on the Murray-Darling…
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/26/tough-nut-to-crack-the-almond-boom-and-its-drain-on-the-murray-darling?fbclid=IwAR09qOKnR2zUvEqTz0qBjZXXzUUiRAdh0lhNhVhSmaRQRyBxyariuSdvjv4
Neil Hogan,
Myself, the reason that I concentrated on cotton rather than almonds is that I live closer to cotton country (upper Darling) than almond country (Murray-Darling confluence complex), thus the effect is much more immediately apparent.
Ps, my point re the first big slurp taken by mining remains unaddressed.
My piece about cotton was a comment on the article by RosemaryJ36 not your comments corvus boreus, however your comments on the amount of water mining uses should definitely be addressed because in my mind it’s criminal.
Not just cotton growing but almonds too must all be banned in this country.
all good ideas but first we have to overthrow capitalism with its market as god obsession……..capital owns, or very soon will own everything – it accumulates though accelerating dispossession. Thatcher wanted Britain to believe that there was no other way and her lie has spread globally to become a statement of fact to the indoctrinated mind.
Climate crisis is one product of the capitalist system and other global crises like homelessness, poverty, economic inequality, ecological destruction, ocean acidification, forest destruction, pollution, soil fertility decline et al cannot be solved by tinkering around with aspects of capitalism – the beast will remain the beast – it has to be slain.
Overthrowing capitalism is possible and it will happen when a sufficient proportion of the global population reject the lie that there is no other way.
Thinking too of the pollution in former communist states, eg the vast coal fired factories and the nuclear plants in the USSR and its satellites, witness today the filthy air in Delhi, Beijing, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris and London, the dirty lignite mines in the GDR, modernised in United Germany though they are. Not only capitalism, then, but any regime that mines or uses coal , trashes forests, ie most.
The expanding human population gobbles land and water for mining and unsuitable crops, scratching for the last drop and the last bit of soil until at last the sea floods all but the mountains. That is the problem. Greed or desperation, state tyranny or rampant corporations, either way millions on the move and wars over water and land, already in train.