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From overly sheltered baby boomers to millennials too fatigued with the state of the world to care, the reality of climate change can be a lot to handle. Here's a snapshot of the people living with their heads in the sand, employing tactics including pessimism, cognitive dissonance and deflections to stay where they are.
In addressing these issues as priorities, I would argue for not focusing on big ideological statements or on a one-size fits all climate policy, but rather invest in the resilience and adaptability of a capitalist/consumer system to meet our environmental concerns.
There's a lot to say about the election, and much nonsense doing the rounds. Here's a summary of what went wrong and some ideas for communicating climate change over the next three years. The first thing to note is that the election probably wasn't won or lost on climate.
By setting the boundaries of what is considered politically acceptable, Tony Abbott has influenced the level of ambition in every party's climate policy, and has even caused environment groups to shift their positions. How has he manage to wield so much influence for so long? There are three reasons he cut through when Labor didn't.
We've witnessed this confluence of economic opportunity with aid and development in Indonesia, where our support of local eco-tourism has revived communities with self-sustaining employment opportunities while preserving local rainforests from being felled for wood.
We are already suffering from the effects of global warming and the intensification of extreme weather events, and things are going to get worse. The question now is what we do to both limit the damage and adapt to the inevitable. Fortunately many of the actions that we must take will actually make our lives better.
In light of the evidence, a national energy policy prioritising renewables should be uncontroversial. But is seems ideology is impermeable to evidence. Instead, we have the government continuing to try to pressure AGL into keeping the Liddell coal-fired power plant open despite clear-cut economic and environmental reasons for its closure.
Researchers from Oxford concluded that consumers have significant power to 'deliver environmental benefits on a scale not achievable by producers' by excluding animal products from their diets. Interestingly, this report comes at a time when the uptake of veganism is growing significantly, both globally and in Australia.
This is Australia's looming inequality issue. Those who can take advantage of the energy revolution will have lower bills and more comfortable living conditions during the frequent extreme weather events we'll experience with climate change. Those who can't will be left reliant on a dirty, aging and increasingly expensive electricity grid.
With every passing year the government is siloing its building and expansion funding from the money needed to prevent the environmental consequences. In this budget, we see an environmental agenda hijacked to reinforce ideas of growth, using environmental buzz words which convince constituents it's for the earth.
Every time the self-appointed Ambassador for the Little Black Rock fronts up to the cameras he reinforces the message that coal power is the technology of a bygone era. The Coalition old guard's thinking hasn't changed since Abbott's 'carbon tax' sloganeering of 2012 and 2013. But the landscape has changed considerably.
The complexity of environmental policy in SA echoes a broader trend in environment issues: climate change has monopolised the debate, squeezing out local conservation concerns. The upshot is a Left-leaning government can be progressive on clean energy, while holding a regressive stance on less prominent topics.
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