What is a sane person to do when confronted with this?
Environment Minister Greg Hunt has condemned attempts to link the bushfires to the need for greater climate action as politicising a ''human tragedy''.
Amid concern among scientists and environment groups that the ferocious fires before the start of summer were part of a pattern of increasing extreme weather events, Mr Hunt's office dismissed questions about the need for a more ambitious climate policy.
After Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt provoked controversy by linking the risk of bushfires to Mr Abbott's plan to scrap the carbon tax, Mr Hunt said that nobody should politicise a tragedy. ''There has been a terrible tragedy in NSW and no one anywhere should seek to politicise any human tragedy, let alone a bushfire of this scale,'' he said.
Wasn't this the Environment Minster for the Party that just spent the last 3 years politicising Global Warming in the face of mounting evidence? I know that we have freedom of speech but sure that doesn't mean unlimited access to hypocrisy and stupidity, does it? Or are we so tolerant now of head-in-the-sand-Climate-Change-Denialism, that we just accept this kind of rhetorical positioning? It's clearly at odds with the narrative of the coalition that Global Warming and Climate Change are somehow in the category of maybe but when the evidence is glaring in your face, and not for the first time but on a daily basis for about a 5weeks since the election - and election day that happened on the warmest September day on record to boot - isn't it disingenuous to try and hose down the obvious debate to be had by saying we shouldn't politicise it? Weren't they the party that politicised it first in this term of government by shutting down the Climate Change Commission?
And that's being delicate about it. The fact is, they politicised it when they decided they didn't agree with the science, as if there were any rational ground for an argument about the nature of global warming.
There's a view going around that the Coaltion have no intention whatsoever of making any kind of serious dent in emission because they don't believe in the science; that the whole point of the Direct Action plan is that it's really not going to do much, and that should be the way business like things. It kinds of ignores that fact that agribusiness operates in the context of the environment and the last time we had a drought, it brought the Nationals to their senses briefly in endorsing an ETS under John Howard. What's worse, Greg Hunt devised it. Which is the same ETS the ALP set up because it was a market-based solution as opposed to a big tax on the emitting businesses like the Direct Action plan being proposed by Greg Hunt. You really have to wonder about a man who wrote a perfectly fine bit f policy, then didn't get to implement it; who then had to write a worse policy just to get elected and now must sell it against his better idea. As in, how does he sleep at nights?
You sort of wonder what you'd get if you interrogated him with truth serum and polygraph. What the hell can this man be thinking? Forget Howard who was by temperament a disbeliever, or Tony Abbott who is by ideological bent, a disbeliever. What sorry ass ground has Greg Hunto got to be standing on to be even saying we shouldn't be politicising this now. If not now, then when did we stop politicising the science of Global Warming, Mr Hunt? Did we conveniently decide upon this on the day your party won office?
Let's put things into to perspective. After the hottest September on record, we're having the kind of October that wouldn't be out of place as being a January when we normally have these big bushfires. We may have record breaking sequence of November through to February this year with a drought thrown in. All of it presumably from Global Warming caused by human activity, but at what point do we get to talk about it as apolitical issue without offending the fine, delicate, vulnerable sensibilities of Greg Hunt?
The truth is, Global Warming is the elephant in the room you are furiously trying to ignore, except the more you ignore it, the more it grows and the more it throws the weight around in the room. So, as environment minister it must be asked of Mr. Hunt: what the hell are you going to do about all this? Are you really going to dismantle the system you designed to incentivise the cutting of emissions? Are you really going to replace that system with a system that has far less scope of working? Is your choice really, doggedly to choose sleeping at the wheel?
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