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A group of school students preparing for a nationwide strike over climate change inaction have prompted the closure of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's electorate office.
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- Title
- Young climate protesters thwarted by security at Shorten's office
- Published
- Nov 23 2018
- Word count
- 754 words
Statistically irrelevant potential mitigation of anthropogenic climate change even if Australia disappeared from the face of Earth tomorrow morning 9am.
And, so because nothing we do would have a large impact, we should give up and do nothing?
There's also the ability to leverage Australia's actions on climate change to convince other countries to do more.
But no. It's better to do nothing, because no improvement is better than a small improvement.
One could (mind, I am not; I am only playing Devil's Advocate) make a case for that, on the basis that such "small" improvements might be hailed as "worldsaving" by the same people that actually have an interest (financially) in their own behavior not changing and the means to direct public conversation on this topic (media consolidation), thus leading to less activity in the field of combating climate change overall. The alternative would be to actively work towards affecting these "big fish" polluters, rather than trying to tackle climate change with "insect bites". Especially since we have only a decade or less until we reach the 2° barrier, after which a whole lot of our prospects for preserving the climate are gone forever.
(again, keep in mind that I am playing Devil's Advocate here)
I'm reminded of what happened when the Greens voted against the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme back in 2009. We've spent the last decade with absolutely no progress on pricing carbon because the Greens let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They wouldn't accept half measures, so we got nothing. Nothing at all. For ten years. Nothing. Ten Years. Nada. Decade.
We could have had a carbon pricing scheme a decade ago, which could have been revised and updated to increase the carbon reduction targets over time, but we got nothing because a small group of people decided no improvement was better than a small improvement.
I know you're only playing Advocatus Diaboli, but it's a very weak argument to support.
No snowflake ever feels responsible for an avalanche. Individually all of us have a virtually non existent impact and look where that has got us thinking like that.
Per person Australia has a much higher greenhouse gas emissions than other countries.