Ten years ago, on 29th September 2014, I was arrested outside Whitehaven’s Tarrawonga mine near Boggabri. The following day my granddaughter Neve was born.
I decided to make a stand against Whitehaven because the previous week, on 23rd September, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, had called for concerted global climate action “to put our house in order to make it liveable for future generations”.
Today in Australia that vision has gone out the window. The Albanese Labor Government has given up on Neve’s generation. In a moment I will describe conditions in Australia in 75 years’ time, at the end of this century, when Neve will be only a little older than I am now.
Instead of stopping any further fossil fuel expansions as the current UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, says we must, the Albanese government has approved three new coal mines this year and has waved through as a “modification” Idemitsu’s dangerously deep and destructive expansion called Modification 8. Whitehaven has three huge coal developments on the table – Blackwater South, Winchester South and Vickery.
Tanya Plibersek spruiks Australia’s “strong” environmental laws to keep the world safe from the emissions burden imposed on the world by Whitehaven and other fossil fuel companies.
Whitehaven flouts those laws constantly. They have just been convicted in the Land and Environment Court for their latest crime, a massive opencut blast that went badly wrong. Not so long ago they were convicted and prosecuted for unlawfully capturing a billion litres of water during the 2016-19 drought. A further eight blast prosecutions are before the Court.
The Knitting Nannas, of which I am a member, have recently been poring over this very alarming essay called ‘Highway to Hell – Climate Change and Australia’s future’ by Joelle Gergis, a lead author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. She says, “most Australians aren’t aware of how bad things are and how much worse they will get”.
Joelle points out that even if nations make good on their Paris Agreement net zero promises – which is a big if – there is a 90% chance that the world is still facing 2.4 degrees of global warming. If they don’t, and current climate policies continue as they are, the best estimate of global warming is 3.5 degrees by the end of the century.
Global emissions need to fall by 43% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees at the end of the century, or to fall by 28% to stay around 2 degrees.
Neve has just turned 10. She spends much of her time upside down – doing cartwheels on the lawn, or aerobatics on the trampoline. Her level of energy would be expected to set her up for a long and healthy life.
She is also thoughtful about society – but will any sort of society that we would recognise even exist in 2099 at the end of this century, when she is 85, which is not that much older than I am today?
The latest UN reports say there are “hard limits” to what people can adapt to beyond 2 degrees. 3.5 is unthinkable, causing unsurvivable heat, ecosystem collapse, sea level rises inundating most of Australia’s important infrastructure and causing our beloved beaches to disappear. Shrinkage of arable land through drought. Famine and wars over scarce resources. Disasters like fire, storms and floods will occur back to back, not allowing time for recovery in between. This is the world of 2099. I am enraged beyond measure that this government is willing to throw Neve’s generation to the wolves for ephemeral political gain.
Faced with such grim reality, you would expect a government to do everything in its power to make greenhouse gas emissions fall. But Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are not falling, they are rising. There are currently plans for 100 new coal and gas projects in Australia. The government subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of $11.1 billion a year. They also subsidise gas infrastructure with about $2 billion.
Ironically, if the government decided it didn’t have to spend this money and had the courage to introduce a carbon tax, there would be plenty to accelerate the clean energy revolution and transform Australia into a clean energy superpower.
And activists, myself included, would be only too happy to spend our time supporting nature in ways other than breaking the increasingly draconian laws. Just after Neve’s 10th birthday, despairing at the lack of action to protect our vital native forest from industrial logging, I locked myself onto a logging machine. I am very anxiously awaiting trial for a newly-created offence which may carry a jail term.