Guests in The Sustainable Hour on 27 June 2018 in order of appearance:

• Colin Mockett’s global outlook

• Josh Meadows, media and communication officer, Environmental Justice Australia, about the Beyond Coal and Gas Jamboree

• Dr Chris Atmore, lawyer, author of Environmental Justice Australia’s report ‘Raising a Stink’

• Carol Ride, president of Psychology for a Safe Climate

• Dan Cowdell from Geelong Sustainability and Councillor Margot Smith in a clip from Surf Coast Energy Group’s video about community solar and about Surf Coast Shire’s 25%-renewables-by-2020 target.

• We also play two songs: Andy Paine’s ‘I’m carbon neutral baby’ and Baba Brinkman’s ‘I.P.C.C.’

A headline like this… – and then what?

 #STORYCHANGE: 

$5 billion more to coal and gas

More and more Australians are getting sick and tired of the parliamentarians’ inability to create policies that can protect us from unhealthy, toxic air pollution and the costly devastation from extreme weather events and other climate change related issues.

Polling released this month showed that 84 per cent of Australians want a future powered by clean, climate-safe renewables. But something has gone insanely wrong with our elected representatives. Just like Trump in America, the Federal Government in Australia continues its fight for dirty coal and gas. The other day we heard Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull once again tell the Parliament to get ready for coal to be a part of our energy mix… “forever.”

GetUp delivered more details on the recent moves in parliament: “One Nation and the Coalition teamed up to try and pass a Senate motion demanding we build new coal-burning power stations. It came within two votes of passing. Then the Nationals handed their new demands to Turnbull. At the top of the list: a $5 billion fleet of dirty coal and gas power stations.”

Coal and gas make no sense any longer, not even economically. These statements and calls for public investments and subsidies are so absurd that it’d be hilarious if we didn’t know that the government is gambling with an issue that will impact us all.

As our guests in The Sustainable Hour remind us on a weekly basis, the explanation for the seemingly irrational behaviour among our elected representatives is that many of them are in the pocket of Big Energy. The fact that it is free to pollute and destroy our environment makes fossil fuels profitable, and those who benefit from that profit are fiercely protecting their vested interests.

As scientists predict this shortsighted selfishness will have tragic consequences for life on this planet, the Australian government has lost its legitimacy to govern.