Climate Change - Government - Federal
      The November 2007 election of the Rudd Government signalled great hope for some action on climate change. After the initial flurry of signing the Kyoto agreement there has been precious little policy or action from Rudd or his two “key” Ministers – Garrett & Wong.  Garrett has clearly failed to follow his former principles and continues to approve large scale projects that will continue the downward spiral of biodiversity loss and the upward spiral of growing greenhouse emissions. Wong has managed to “spin” her way into a Emissions Trading Policy that started out with pre-election 25% Greenhouse Gas Emissions Cut to a policy that will produce less than a 5% cut and re-jigged the solar rebate scheme that will allow industry to offset increased emissions from domestic solar installations.
    The financial collapse brought about by greed and never ending growth and consumption is being addressed by Rudd (and most other world governments) by encouraging more spending and consumption.
      Instead of seeing the financial collapse as an opportunity to re-structure the way we do business and address climate change and the many environmental and social issues, it seems that government can only see a return to business as usual and growth as the way forward.

Climate Change – Government – State
The Brumby government forges ahead on a path of never ending growth:
One million additional people for Melbourne:
• A pipeline from the Murray Darling Basin to supply Melbourne that has precious little water in it;
• A desalination plant for Wonthaggi that will impose an additional 1,500,000 tonnes plus of greenhouse gas emissions on the environment;
• A desalination plant that will impact on our marine environment;
• Deepening of Port Philip Bay shipping channel to allow bigger
   ships to bring more “stuff” in for consumption;
• Proposed deepening of Western Port Bay shipping channel to allow bigger ships to bring even more “stuff” in for consumption.

     
While this is going on there are yearly cuts to Natural Resource Management (NRM) budgets across the state that has reached the point where funding for the environment has become tokenism (Funding from the Federal Government is has also been cut since the election of Rudd). In early 2008 the Brumby government produced a ‘Land & Biodiversity Green Paper at a time of Climate Change’. The Green Paper put forward a positive way forward to address some of the issues of climate change, agriculture and loss of biodiversity. After considerable community input the government has so far failed to produce the White Paper that then becomes policy.

At a recent meeting with advisors to the Minister for Environment and DSE,   DSE indicated the White Paper is to be released shortly but is unlikely to be resources with adequate funding that will make a difference.

Climate Change – A Global Emergency

      Clearly sea level rise, longer, hotter, drought and increasingly frequent and extreme weather events (the tragic events of February 7, 2009), loss of biodiversity and population growth, crop losses and resultant downward food production and depletion of water resources are not enough to trigger alarm bells in our bureaucrats and politicians.

      We all need to climb out of our compliancy, comfortable consumptive lifestyles and insist that governments around the planet treat climate change, loss of biodiversity, increasing poverty, decreasing equity in available food and water are treated as a global emergency and must be acted on.    Failure to do so guarantees an impoverished future for our children and their children.

      The only faint sign of global leadership that has undertaken to address some of these issues is the election of the Obama Government in the United States – Time will tell?