7
votes
Hotter, drier summers in Australia mean longer fire seasons – and urban sprawl into bushland is putting more people at risk
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- Title
- Sydney's bushfire season starts in winter: 'We may have to rethink how we live'
- Authors
- Lisa Cox
- Published
- Aug 15 2018
- Word count
- 1448 words
What's the feeling on global warming down under? Obviously you all are seeing effects already, but I know the mining industry is big.
The general feeling about global warming Down Under doesn't really matter: it's all down to a literal handful of Members of Parliament.
Most Australians acknowledge that:
global warming is happening;
it's caused by human activity;
we need to do something about it.
We're ready to do something about it. We've been ready for more than a decade.
However, there is a tiny group of MPs which disagrees. Either they don't believe in climate change, or they don't believe humans are causing it, or, even if they believe these things, they believe that it is not the government's place to do anything that might constrain the free market. And, due to long and complicated political reasons, this handful of MPs hold a lot of leverage, so, in one way or another, they have managed to prevent Australia from taking any clear action on carbon emissions for the past decade. One of them is a former Prime Minister who revoked a carbon pricing scheme - making Australia the only country in the world (at the time, pre-Trump) to reverse its progress on climate change.
Even right now, there's a scheme on the table which has been widely described as the fourth-best scheme we've come up with (after the first-, second-, and third-best schemes all got blocked or revoked over the past decade). This scheme is the product of long and delicate negotiations between the federal government, the state governments, and various stakeholders (including the mining industry). It's the closest we've got to doing something for a few years.
3 MPs in the federal government are against this scheme so strongly that they're threatening to vote against their own government - and that might be enough to stop this fourth-best scheme from ever happening. Meanwhile, the rest of Australia wants something to be done about carbon emissions. We're being held hostage by a literal handful of climate skeptic MPs.
...
I see you're familiar with the American model of dealing with global warming.
The MPs themselves get voted for by people in their electorates. They happen to come from conservative electorates.
As for staying in power, they happen to be members of the government party. If they were in Opposition, they wouldn't have anywhere near as much leverage.
Not only what @Algernon_Asimov has illustrated, our agricultural and developmental land clearing rates are some of the highest in the world.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-01/fact-check-queensland-land-clearing-brazilian-rainforest/9183596
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/04/clearing-of-native-vegetation-in-nsw-jumps-800-in-three-years
This will exacerbate droughts, potentially damage the Great Barrier Reef (in QLD), and lose a lot of topsoil when we can least afford it. Whether or not people think land clearing is an issue who knows, but for an anecdotal experience, I work in the environment industry and several members of our team do not 'believe' or acknowledge climate change is a thing. It beggars belief, but there it is. If one can extrapolate that information across society, the actual amount of people that don't think climate change is a real threat is quite probably unreasonably high.