A columnist for The Guardian, Australia, Greg Jericho, looks at the election campaign waged by prime minister, Scott Morrison, and what is said and not said. It's pretty much what I expect will be dished up here by Scheer and Trudeau this autumn.
Just seven months ago the United Nations told the world that we have 12 years to limit the climate change catastrophe. It means that to keep global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels we need to cut carbon pollution by 45% by 2030 and down to zero by 2050. Twelve years. Actually scratch that – now it is 11 years.
Now ask yourself how often that has been raised during this election campaign?
At the start of the 2019 federal election campaign Scott Morrison put out a video where he was all dewy-eyed about the future, saying “the next 10 years are important to everybody at every stage of life”.
And yet not once – NOT ONCE – did he mention that the UN has given us 11 years to do something about a global catastrophe.
No, instead it’s all standard of living and nothingness statements that would get shot down by any decent advertising firm in the first meeting.
He did say one thing that is correct. He noted that “the decisions you make in one term of government last for a decade or more”. And in no area is this more true than with climate change. Every year we do less than enough, the ability to limit damage becomes less and the cost of doing so becomes larger.
I’ve written in the past how climate change has destroyed the minds of conservatives. But it has also destroyed the media model that seemed to work so well for holding politicians to account: the model of balance and impartiality, where journalists strive to be seen to take no sides and have no bias.
...But over the past 30 years the conservative side has become hostage to cranks and charlatans. And as the conservatives lurched ever more towards lunacy the media has for the most part followed.Mr. Jericho writes that we can't let our parties dodge the issue. When they produce their budgets and projections their figures are worse than meaningless, dangerously deceptive, if they don't accurately incorporate the costs we face from failing to meet these climate change challenges. Those costs are going to be huge and the less our governments to the greater the burden that will befall our nation and our people.
It has led us to a position where the Liberal party’s utterly pathetic climate change policy is given credence. And where the big issue about the ALP’s less-worse policy is the cost, not from the point of view that it could be achieved with a more efficient price on carbon but that it costs more than does the LNP’s nothing policy.
It is a position where editors give front-page space to modelling so redolent with bias that you can practically smell the coal dust on its pages.
It has meant those wishing to actually do something about climate change have to not just argue their policy is better, but that the need for the policy is there.
We deserve so much better than we're going to get from either Justin Trudeau or Andrew Scheer. If only we had a "reset" button.
3 comments:
So! Who cares? That's the attitude here as well isn't it? Anyong
I have no idea, none, what you're getting at, Anyong.
I’ll admit that this one didn’t click until recently when discussing other issues with an acquaintance who has given himself over to pursuit of the rabbit.
“… the UN has given us 11 years to do something about a global catastrophe.”
Complaints about the UN that I had heard previously from this guy had been focussed exclusively on the Migration Compact. He hadn’t even heard of the climate change report, but when it came up it was dismissed out of hand as soon as the UN was mentioned. All things having to do with the UN are part of the globalist plot.
Trust that if there’s a subject over which the uninformed can become misinformed, the libertarians will put it to use it. Buddy’s brain has dropped anchor in the land of climate change denial and he’ll never know how or why. He just doesn’t want his taxes to pay for any more refugees. And he’ll never investigate the climate question any further or be open to a discussion that could possibly cause him to change his mind, because he’s the kind of guy who always takes a rabid view toward everything and will never admit that he’s been wrong about anything. He’s the target audience of the manipulators of alt-right populism and he’s sitting in two out of every three seats at every lunch table in the Etch Test.
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