https://news.yahoo.com/australia-faces-extinction-leaders-still-163851215.html
If we continue to elect leaders like this, and like Trump, does our species deserve to continue to exist?
Clive Irving
,The Daily Beast•January 2, 2020
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As the apocalypse closed in on Mallacoota the prime minister, Scott Morrison, was AWOL: At first his office denied he was on holiday in Hawaii but when a picture emerged of him there, drinking beer with tourists on a beach, he was forced to head back home.
In New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, nine million acres have been burned up since November, and 900 homes destroyed.
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Australia’s politicians seem to have no learning curve. Morrison, declaring that this was no time to discuss climate policy, said “We have been through these terrible disasters before, and we have come through the other side.”
Deputy prime minister Michael McCormack said climate concerns were being stoked by “raving inner-city lefties.”
Australia remains heavily committed to coal-fired power stations and has one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas emission rates.
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At the same time, Australia is actually planning increases in fossil fuel production that would mean that by 2030 Australia, with 0.3 percent of the global population, will be responsible for 13 percent of the globally generated greenhouse gases.
One of the people pushing this program is Gina Rinehart, the 65 year old chairman of a mining and extraction conglomerate with a net worth of $14.8 billion.
With her coal mines producing more than 60 million tons a year, Rinehart has opposed carbon pollution taxes and has sponsored trips to Australia by climate change denier Christopher Monckton, a right wing British politician who is also an advocate for quack cures for multiple sclerosis, herpes and flu.
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Nonetheless it would be an act of gross hypocrisy to see their behavior only as an Australian aberration. The country’s obtuse political leaders set an example that other reactionary regimes in countries as varied as Brazil and Poland, are all too ready to emulate as they, too, protect their fossil fuel interests.
And then, of course, there is us. Our continent has far greater ecological resilience than Australia, but our stewardship of it is just as careless as theirs. Under Trump’s calculated demolition of science-based regulations America is on the same path to the apocalypse. It’s simply happening a lot more slowly.
1 comment:
May sound archaic and too simple, but....God told Noah after the flood receded, "Won't be water, but fire next time." Perhaps God could be interpreted as Nature which is my thinking. We have insulted and dramatically injured Nature and all it holds,i.e. animals, green growth, stupid people.
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