Several Climate Action Merri-bek members joined the Melbourne rally outside Sarah Witty MP’s office on Monday (22/9). WIth protesters donning pyjamas and dressing gowns, the theme was ‘Labor sleeping on climate’ – focussing on the government’s alliance with and support of fossil fuel companies while having no phase out plan.

The speeches from AYCC and Solutions for Climate reps were rousing and pointed, as was this one from Mitzi Tuke from Nillumbik Climate Action Team who gave us permission to reproduce it here:

“We are appalled by the government’s announcement of its inexcusably low climate targets for 2035. This is straight after the release of a climate risk assessment report, which gives us an insight into the near future of the sea level rise, heat, environmental destruction and socio-economic chaos that we can expect from a 1.5, 2, and 3 degree rise of average global temperature. It’s as if the government is playing into this future and doing what it can to fulfill this destiny.

How did we get this dangerously low emissions reduction target? This is a weak decision by a timid prime minister. It is the culmination of a long road where governments have been joined at the hip to the fossil fuel industry. Economic considerations have always been given priority over environmental protections, even when we started to realise that greenhouse gases were destroying the balance of climate systems. When we should have been phasing out fossil fuels, we went hell for leather in the opposite direction. We accelerated our addiction to fossil fuels and went by the fossil fuel playbook. Now we are paying the consequences with the effects of accelerating and intensifying extreme weather events – floods, fires, droughts, storms, all of this driven by the rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This physical fact seems to be a point to which our decision makers and their advisers give little credence. With Albanese asleep on climate, and the government ultimately having profane disregard for climate science, this is a completely irresponsible failure of leadership. 

What would we like to see? We need a carbon price so that money starts flowing away from fossil fuels. We need a climate trigger in the environment protection laws. We need a fast and fair phase out of fossil fuels and environment protection laws that actually do their job. We need to look at multiple safe means of climate restoration to reduce the carbon that has already been baked into the atmosphere. We need a whole-of-government response to uncompromisingly address climate action. We need so much more than the half-hearted, luke-warm effort we are seeing.

So what do we, the people who are concerned, and passionate, and who care; we, who fluctuate between despair and resolve, what do we do? In the face of the despair that we feel, we support each other and we keep on pushing, because this is the grit that we are made of. We must continue to hold the big polluters and the climate wreckers to account. We will keep on demanding strong environment protection laws. We will be there at every turn and we will keep on supporting the climate scientists and those law makers who genuinely want to see reforms and solutions. We will be there because this is the thing that we must and want to do. 

^1”Let’s be clear-eyed about the challenges, realistic about the threats and as optimistic as we can be about the future.”

¹(Luke Kemp is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge)