A few months ago, I left my home in Adelaide and travelled up to Maules Creek, New South Wales. I’ve never been much of a wanderer, but when I heard that Whitehaven was working on the largest coal mine currently under construction in Australia in the middle of the Leard State Forest, I realised that things were pretty serious.
Australia’s Treasurer has wielded the hockey stick with great enthusiasm and inflicted many blows, but missed the goal of a stable and prosperous economy. However on an objective analysis I have to agree with him on the following: “We need to live within our means”, “We need to be sustainable”, “We don’t want to squander our children’s future” and there is a “moral dimension”.
He is not quite right about “the age of entitlement is over”. It isn’t; but it’s fair to at least head in that direction.
Once in a lifetime a truly game-changing event reshapes global society. Think back to 1833 when the British Parliament finally bowed to public pressure and the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. Now in our lifetime Polly Higgins is campaigning tirelessly to do for Earth Rights what the abolitionists did for Human Rights. And the goal is in sight.
I spoke to Polly Higgins this week for an update.
Coal has played a pivotal role in modernising the global economy. But if we had a second shot at the industrial revolution, would coal be at the centre? Would we design an economy that viewed Australia – as a senior politician recently described – as “an island of coal, floating upon a sea of gas”? Or would we put human ingenuity to the test and generate a sustainable economy powered by the sun and the wind?
In October 2012 I reported for this blog on Adelaide’s Rally for Solar, a remarkable day of climate action that saw 80 activists complete a two-week, 322-kilometre walk that had begun in Port Augusta. It was, and is, hoped that the South Australian town will one day host a solar thermal power station in lieu of the ageing brown coal-fired plants which have been at the heart of Port Augusta’s electricity generation since the 1950s.
Thank you all so much for coming. I’d like to add my acknowledgement to the Kaurna people and acknowledge their sovereignty was never ceded.
Three years ago I attended the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. It was there standing alongside people from places like Fiji and Nepal – whose homes were already being impacted by climate change and hearing how they were organizing to fight for theirs and our future – that I learnt how important it is that our movement listens to the people being most impacted by climate change and the burning of fossil fuels, whether it’s rising sea levels, extreme weather events or the high rates of cancer that plague coal communities.
It was this lesson that led me to dedicate myself to working alongside the Port Augusta community to campaign for a replacement of the ageing coal stations on the edge of their town with Australia’s first concentrated solar thermal plants with storage.
On our first HCI day, Shilshila Acharya gave us a briefing on the Hamri Bahini (our little sisters) Green Angel project. She’s been intimately involved since the project’s beginning – astoundingly only seven months ago, in February 2013!
By linking the solutions to two intractable problems – the plight of Nepali women working overseas and significant plastic bag pollution in the Kathmandu Valley – the Himalayan Climate Initiative (HCI) has created a great project.
We have all been looking forward to this day with the Himalayan Climate Initiative (HCI), our chance to do some hands-on volunteering with the HCI’s Green Angel project.
First, however, we were taken out to Kirtipur on the hilly outskirts of Kathmandu to meet a most remarkable man and learn how his compassionate love is changing the world for the better, one child at a time.
We had an intense, intellectually stimulating day at the Himalayan Climate Initiative (HCI) headquarters in Baluwatar, a neat and functional 3-storey establishment in an orderly suburb near the embassy quarter.
We were up at first light and soon after 6am made our way along the now silent main street to Lukla airport to catch the first flight out to Kathmandu. Continue reading