Antinuclear

Earth Hour: a reminder to re-activate Australia’s drive for action on Climate Change

Earth Hour matters in fight for Great Barrier Reef March 27, 2014  SMH, Anna Rose
On Saturday at 8.30pm, millions of Australians will join over a billion people in 154 countries to make a stand for our climate by turning off their lights for an hour.

It’s a small gesture. Given the scale of the crisis facing our climate, one hour of awareness certainly isn’t enough. But Earth Hour does prove that the citizens of the world can unite around the climate change cause – even if just for an hour.

This global movement has never been more needed, as we expect the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to make very clear when they release their much-anticipated report into climate impacts on Monday.

Earth Hour was founded in Australia, and support has remained strong. Volunteers will hold over a thousand Earth Hour events on Saturday, including at the Prime Minister’s favourite beach in Manly, to highlight the urgent threat our Great Barrier Reef faces from rising temperatures…….

modelling shows it’s extremely unlikely that the amount of funding put aside by the federal government to cover the costs of paying polluters will be enough to reach Australia’s emission reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020. If we can’t even reach a 5 per cent target, how are we going to reach the higher targets that scientists say are needed to protect the reef?

For these reasons, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation – the government financing body tasked with speeding up the transition to renewables, has been very cautious about “direct action”. Earlier this year, they warned ”direct action” would only have a chance of working if it was combined with other policies around renewable energy – policies that the Prime Minister has already signalled might be wound back.

Earth Hour was founded in Australia on the principle that no one can do everything but everyone can do something. It would be ironic if the country that started the biggest global movement on climate change in history was the first country to wind back effective climate change policies…….http://www.smh.com.au/comment/earth-hour-matters-in-fight-for-great-barrier-reef-20140327-zqnow.html

March 29, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News