CLIMATE CHANGE World needs more doers, not talkers
HOW refreshing to hear her majesty, Queen Elizabeth, being overheard saying at the opening of the Welsh parliament that she was irritated by people “when they talk but they don’t do”, while discussing attempts to tackle climate change (Mercury, October 16).
This seemingly small but important message by the monarch has enormous implications for what politicians can actually achieve by choosing “actions over words” and accepting their accountability to make decisions in the international interest at Glasgow’s climate conference.
And at our national level, should not Parliamentary Question Time be renamed Parliamentary Discussion Time? The regular failure of politicians to appropriately answer questions when they can be answered, including at the state and local government levels and in many other forums Australiawide, and instead spin a diverting message ultimately retarding, for example, economic and social progress, is surely a collective national skill.
Peter Edwards
White Beach
ENERGY EMBARRASSMENT
I DON’T know about anyone else, but I’m starting to get cranky with the Liberals’ Angus Taylor announcing, whenever he gets the chance, that sticking to coal and gas for decades to come is what the majority of Australians in fact want.
Am I wrong in thinking that the majority of Australians want to start winding back on gas and coal as quickly as it is possible to do so, for the sake of the planet?
Sticking to coal and gas, as Taylor is suggesting, will risk isolating Australia from other developed counties of the world, and it may start to look more like a mendicant, failed or rogue country along with others, including North Korea and Myanmar.
Most Australians, I genuinely believe, are embarrassed by the fact that Australia has taken so long to come up with anything like a sustainable energy plan.
And it looks like they are going to be embarrassed for a whole lot longer, if Angus Taylor’s views are any sort of guide to the way most Liberal politicians are thinking.
Michael McCall Primrose Sands
FUTURE CONCERNS
WHAT divine right do the Nationals have to deny my children and grandchildren a better future by their climate change inactions? Go back to the bush and out of politics.
STEADY ON, BARNABY
Max Wells Sorell
CLIMATE change policy and net zero targets are above political scoring. They are necessary so the next generation
have something to work with and their children have a planet starting to repair itself from us!
Holding a gun to the government’s head, just because you can, is not in the global interest, Barnaby!
Wayne Bell South Hobart
QUESTION OF MANAGEMENT
PORTRAYING climate change as the cause of more frequent bushfires (Peter Boyer, October 19) creates a misconception that we can solve our fire problem by simply reducing carbon emissions, while simultaneously obscuring the major reasons why fires are growing larger and more damaging.
Australia has had a bushfire problem since European settlement disrupted traditional Aboriginal burning.
The lack of regular landscape burning has created extensive tracts of heavily overgrown public forests that will now only burn with unnatural ferocity. The apocalyptic views of a “former fire chief’’ with no background in public forests are suggestive of an under-appreciation of the central fuel management problem, and an unawareness of the decline of forest firefighting effectiveness wrought by societal changes (such as risk-averse work protocols) and political decisions (such as broadscale forest “lock-up’’).
Since the mid-1990s, forest firefighting has to varying degrees lost its determined urgency, calculated risk-taking, localised command, pre-season hazard reduction, forestry access networks, and bush-experienced machinery operators, which all formerly enabled ground-based crews to contain most forest fires to a small size.
Attempts to compensate for this with huge expenditure on waterbombing aircraft has not reduced the extent of forest fire.
Collectively in southern and eastern Australia, these shortcomings have led to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of hectares being unnecessarily incinerated, despite circumstances that would formerly have enabled quick control.
Victoria’s 2019-20 East Gippsland fires and Tasmania’s 2019 Geeveston fire are recent examples.
The reality is that large forest fires say more about hamstrung forest and fire management than climate change. Mark Poynter
Sandy Bay
DON’T RAISE YOUR HOPES
READER Fred Groenier asks whether the PM’s conversion to net zero can be regarded as a miracle (Quick Views, October 19).
If I were Mr Groenier, I’d urge caution, and wait until the thimble and pea trick achieves miracle status, before he gets his hopes up any further. Stephen Jeffery
Sandy Bay