Gidday all,

I've put a new post up on our blog -
http://climateactionbrisbane.blogspot.com/2008/02/govt-wont-extend-emissions-cut\
s-wong.html.


Govt won't extend emissions cuts: Wong
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/21/2169260.htm>


No this is right, despite the Federal Labor Party's commissioned report
on how Australia should set its policies to tackle climate change, Penny
Wong, the minister of Climate Change, has said that the party will *NOT*
adopt one of the key recommendations. That is that Australia needs to
play a lead role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by going beyond
its stated target of a 60 per cent cut by 2050.

Labor expected an economists report from the Economist Garnaut, and
instead they got the truth and it doesn't fit in with their economic
policies. So they've decided to take less interest in what he says. The
prior Australian Federal Government, the Liberals, were heavily
criticised for their role in ignoring climate change. The Labor party
got elected partly on the basis that they are going to do something
about the problem. Labor didn't want to read in the report that to make
the best of a bad situation, Australia needs to drastically change the
way it operates. Garnaut's recommendations are supported.

/Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Council Don
Henry,/ says it accepts the need for deep carbon emission cuts.

"Here's a leading economist saying that we need strong targets, that
we've got to get cracking and he's saying it's bad for our economy
if we don't act and good for our economy if we do," he said.

"I mean this a really important call for the whole of the Australian
community, business, government and all of us at home, that we've
got to get cracking on climate change.



/Greens leader Bob Brown/ says the Government had previously put a
lot of emphasis on Professor Garnaut's research, but now appears to
be backing away.

"Penny Wong has reduced Ross Garnaut to input," he said.

"There are huge vested interests at play here - the coal industry,
the aluminium industry, the forest logging industry - and it's up to
the Rudd Government to put this country ahead of those vested
interests."


Read the story <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/21/2169260.htm>.

Read the story on Garnaut's report
<http://climateactionbrisbane.blogspot.com/2008/02/govt-wont-extend-emissions-cu\
ts-wong.html>
(Aust 'most vulnerable' to climate change: Garnaut).




Read the Climate Code Red Report <http://www.climatecodered.net/> on the
state of global warming from David Spratt of Carbon Equity and Philip
Sutton from Greenleap Strategic Institute. Very sober reading. Here's
the overview:


The extensive melting of Arctic sea-ice in the northern summer of 2007
starkly demonstrated that serious climate-change impacts are already
happening, both more rapidly and at lower global temperature increases
than projected. Human activity has already pushed the planet's climate
past several critical "tipping points", including the initiation of
major ice sheet loss.

The loss in summer of all eight million square kilometres of Arctic
sea-ice now seems inevitable, and may occur as early as 2010, a century
ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections.
There is already enough carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere to
initiate ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and
to ensure that sea levels will rise metres in coming decades.

The projected speed of change, with temperature increases greater than
0.3°C per decade and the consequent rapid shifting of climatic zones
will, if maintained, likely result in most ecosystems failing to adapt,
causing the extinction of many animal and plant species. The oceans will
become more acidic, endangering much marine life.

The Earth's passage into an era of dangerous climate change accelerates
as each of these tipping points is passed. If this acceleration becomes
too great, humanity will no longer have the power to reverse the
processes we have set in motion.

We stand at a time where we still have the power to make a choice. Only
by dealing with the full scale and urgency of the problem can we create
a realistic path back to a safe-climate world. Targets should be chosen
and actions taken that can actually solve the problem in a timely
manner. A temperature cap of 2--2.4°C, as proposed within the United
Nations framework, would take the planet's climate beyond the
temperature range of the last million years and into catastrophe.

The loss of the Arctic sea-ice unambiguously represents dangerous
climate change. As the tipping point for this event was around two
decades ago when temperatures were about 0.3°C lower than at present, we
propose a long-term precautionary warming cap of 0.5°C and equilibrium
atmospheric greenhouse gas level of not more than 320 parts per million
(ppm) carbon dioxide.

The USA's leading climate scientist, James Hansen, stated recently that
we should set an atmospheric carbon dioxide target that is low enough to
avoid "the point of no return". To achieve this, he says, we must not
only eliminate current greenhouse gas emissions but also remove excess
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and take urgent steps to "cool the
planet".

These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the "realities" of
"politics as usual" and "business as usual". Our conventional mode of
politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep,
quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the
necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental
modification of the business-as-usual model.

There is an urgent need to reconceive the issue we face as a
sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of
failure-inducing compromise. The feasibility of rapid transitions is
well established historically. We now need to "think the unthinkable",
because the sustainability emergency is now not so much a radical idea
as simply an indispensable course of action if we are to return to a
safe-climate planet.
----
Its imperitive that we do ALL WE CAN NOW. Please start by joining a
local climate action group (LCAG) and writing to your local politician.
Please start at http://www.thebigswitch.org.au.

With hope,

Brooke


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