The Sydney Morning Herald now wants to campaign for action on climate change. Unfortunately it reinforces the notion that Darren Goodsir is a moron.
Human-induced climate change is real. The risks of inaction are real and mounting.
The Herald today offers an opportunity to be part of something special - the climate for change. Our aim is to help Australians reconnect with the urgency of acting, by seeing how our nation is contributing more than our fair share to the problem but also how our best minds and businesses are hunting for solutions.
We can all support them and do our bit. But fine intentions will mean nothing if our leaders do not do more. And that, ultimately, is up to us all.
The time is 2015 - not 2009 when the world split over how to tackle global warming; when the then prime minister Kevin Rudd was caught out and retreated; and when climate sceptic Tony Abbott swooped to defeat Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal leadership.
It's not 2012 or 2013 when Labor's shenanigans and the carbon tax made it impossible to have a reasoned climate debate; when the climate sceptics capitalised and gained disproportionate sway with their boutique views.
It is 2015. The overwhelming evidence is that the Earth is warming and will heat further without concerted action. The Australian Alps, the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait Islands will be affected regardless of adaption strategies. Rising sea levels will threaten some of your homes and contribute to more extreme weather events. Higher carbon dioxide levels will even reduce proteins in wheat and change the sort of bread you eat.If they were going to get so worried about the climate, why in the nine hells of stupidities would they back Tony Abbott at the last election? Seems utterly self-defeating to me. As for this business of 2009, well, more on that in a moment.
If you want picture on what the world might look like food wise, here's something really scary from Lloyds.
The ability of the global food system to achieve food security is under significant pressure.
Global demand for food is on the rise, driven by unprecedented growth in the world’s population and widespread shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand.1 As this chronic pressure increases, the food system is becoming increasingly vulnerable to acute shocks.
There is a pressing need to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the impacts of an extreme shock to the food supply.
Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability
to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability.
Lloyd’s commissioned the development of a scenario of extreme shock to global food production in order to explore the implications for insurance and risk.
Experts in the field of food security and the economics of sustainable development were asked
to develop a scenario describing a plausible, relatively severe production shock affecting multiple agricultural commodities and regions, and to describe the cascade of events that could result.
The systemic production shock to the world’s staple food crops described in the scenario generates widespread economic, political and social impacts.
There are uncertainties in the scenario, arising from the difficulty of obtaining key data, the applicability of historical data to modern food trade networks,
and the uncertainty surrounding future impacts of climate change. However, the scenario provides a robust tool to allow these uncertainties to be explored, and to begin to think about the possible implications of a global food shock for the insurance industry.
Climate Change Retribution
According to 'the Killing Season' episode 2, Kevin Rudd was there the earliest and was the last to leave in Copenhagen 2009, working and hoping for a climate change deal. It never happened. In that moment in history, the Prime Minister of Australia was the most progressive leader in the world, trying to get a deal done. The failure to do so led to his demise; and in the subsequent flip-flopping and backstabbing and argy-bargy, led to a Carbon Tax which was then repealed by our current idiot-in-chief Prime Minister.
It strikes me as odd that we are in this situation where we've gone from the most progressive to the most regressive, but what annoys me more is when other countries get self-righteous about this situation. Tony Abbott is known as the wrecker of the climate according to our Nobel laureate Peter Doherty. Yes it does reflect badly upon us.
Nonetheless if there is something that needs to be said, it is this: the country that expended the most political capital in trying to reduce emissions was Australia, and the politician who gave their political life to that cause was Kevin Rudd. Dare I say, the progressives of Australia lost out big in Copenhagen in 2009.
If the world thinks so highly of itself and its engagement with the issue, why wasn't there a deal in 2009? If the world reviles Tony Abbott now, well, frankly they got what they deserved. I take delight in their suffering. If they're discovering only now just how much was riding on an agreement in 2009, well, I say stiff shit. It's too late now. Sometimes too late is just too late.
Because As Mrs. Gump Said, Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Peter Hartcher is now pleading with Tony Abbott to do something about climate change.
Abbott and his ministers are being guided by two opposing influences.
One is international movement. This is accelerating rapidly in the direction of solving the problem.
Illustration: John Shakespeare
In just a few months, the global debate has gone from cutting carbon emissions to "decarbonising" altogether, as the Group of Seven rich democracies illustrated with its June 8 communique.
Australian public opinion has been moving in the same direction, as the Lowy Institute poll last week revealed.
The other is the right wing of Abbott's party. This refuses, still, to admit that there is a problem to be solved.
Abbott himself mightn't hold deep personal conviction on this. In opposition, he said that he was a "weathervane" on climate change.
But, as Malcolm Turnbull said after losing the leadership to Abbott: "The fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming."
Most of them have not gone away; many were promoted into Abbott's cabinet.Thus Tony Abbott will do as little as possible.
'Storytelling In The Digital Age'
I went to this forum chaired by none other than my favourite whipping post Darren Goodsir. He was up on stage with some other luminaries of the SMH, but did most of the speaking. It struck me that these people were way too much in awe of themselves. They wear a nice suit, but gee, that was a really shallow talk.
The audience was predominantly white with greying hair, if they had hair at all. A lot of rhetorical questions were asked and in response got largely mundane answers. Nothing controversial was uttered all night long. I wanted to ask Darren Goodsir whether the NBN was an asset to the digital storytelling, and if so, why did he support the worse candidate with the worse NBN offering? Of course, I never got the damn microphone.
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