Whatever official Liberal Party policy may be, it seems Tony Abbott’s recipe for ‘tackling’ climate change amounts to little more than ‘business as usual’. This finds favour with many voters who have given up trying to sort fact from fiction over climate change. They figure that winters seem as cold as ever, so all this talk of global warming is no big deal.
Look at it from a new angle: we are sitting in a big comfortable car speeding along a highway and paying little attention to the road ahead. We are heading for the brink of a very steep cliff, but everything appears normal – till we go over the edge. No doubt, on the way down, we’ll think “somebody must have known about this, why didn’t anyone warn us?”
Warnings have been issued for years by all the world’s peak scientific bodies such as NASA and our own CSIRO. They make clear that, far from maintaining the status quo, ‘business as usual’ is actually the most dangerous option to choose, likely to have dire consequences well within our children’s lifetimes.
Tony Abbott favours using taxpayers’ money to pay big polluters to lift their game; it is a minimalist policy unlikely to make any real difference. No long-term vision, no plans to support renewable energy. Business as usual.
In contrast, the current government has shown leadership in creating a long-term plan to shift Australia towards an economy based on clean renewable energy. They will use money raised from heavy polluters to fast-track development in renewable energy; this will create many new jobs, often in rural areas, and in the longer term is likely to actually bring electricity costs down. Moreover it will allow Australia to compete successfully in this century’s global economy as the world around us moves on from last century’s problematic fossil fuels.
Jo Leoni,
Armidale
