Socialist Alliance national co-convener Dick Nichols interviewed two climate action summit participants, Paul Petit from the South Australian Climate Emergency Action Network (CLEAN) and Giovanni Ebono from the New South Wales North Coast Climate Action Network.
How have you found the summit?
Paul Petit: It's been very exciting — so many different people from so many different organisations. I didn't realise there were so many different climate action groups. It has been great.
What does that show about the state of the climate action movement?
PP: It's just growing at the grassroots level. People are coming together across Australia to form organisations where they didn't exist, where the existing structures didn't allow for that kind of growth.
What are the main problems, and how has the summit handled them?
PP: Obviously, there's still the challenge to develop a coordinated and unified approach that will put pressure on the major parties and the whole power system. However, that coordination is difficult to achieve, with all of us new to the movement, and many people new to political organising. So it has inevitably been a slow process, but we're getting there.
What would you say about the major demands adopted at the summit (no to the Rudd government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, atmospheric carbon target of 300 parts per million and 100% renewables in 10 years), taken even against the opinion of a highly respected expert in sustainable energy like Mark Diesendorf?
PP:The decisions reflect the sort of grassroots spirit of a "that's what's necessary, we can go there" kind of attitude, rather than one of starting with what seems politically realistic, and [which] is disposed to compromise.
In one way you might say it's dreaming, but it's a necessary approach because this movement has to break with the spirit of disappointment and compromise that mainly marks the existing environmental organisations.
There's a very interesting mix of people at the summit, but I would have liked to have seen more young people. What's your impression?
PP: Sure, there's a fairly large proportion of people who aren't as young as they used to be, but many of them are new to politics. That's impressive. I'm certain that as the opportunity for young people to join an expanding movement grows, they will join, even though there has been a culture of young people not joining organisations in recent years.
Giovanni, what is your assessment of the summit?
Giovanni Ebono: I think it's amazing to have gotten over 500 people together and made the number of decisions we have. It's been incredibly exciting.
How do you think this summit will affect your work in Byron Bay?
GE: We have a network of people we can communicate and share resources with. That will empower us [in] a numbers of ways. It will give us a number of things we can do in our local community, and it will mean we can coordinate campaigns across the nation.
How do you see the network of local climate action groups developing from here, especially in regional NSW?
GE: Regional Australia has different characteristics to the cities. People still want meetings, but don't want to drive a long way to meetings. Towns and villages are smaller and it's difficult to get the critical mass if you don't have a larger area to cover.
In far northern NSW, we'll probably see a number of climate action groups emerging in the larger towns, like Tweed Heads and Lismore, and we'll probably see a lot of work being done through email rather than meetings, and then we'll see actions where people converge on one area.
You're from an area that used to be a stronghold of the National Party, although it now gets the sixth-strongest vote in the country for the Greens. What reaction have you had to the whole global warming message? Are you being treated as ratbags, especially by the more conservative parts of society, or is there a more differentiated response?
GE: It is variegated and contrasting. Global warming is a polarising issue and the conservatives are climate change deniers. The candidates that the National Party has put up at federal, state and local level have been actively rubbishing claims of climate change, and they have a definite following for that point of view.
However, the fact that we live in a coastal area with a lot of low-lying land where it rains a great deal means that people are very conscious of the high king tides that we have had in the last two months, which put water across the streets of Ballina.
People are beginning to realise that this is not theoretical nonsense that is being said to try to get votes, but that the world is actually changing. So, the ground is shifting and it becomes increasingly difficult for the denialists to sustain their case.
One of the main focuses of our climate action network has been to link up with farmers, who are, after all, the people who care for the land. While there's always been a strong difference about social values and even economic forms of organisation, there really are a lot of connections between the conservatives and the conservationists.
Land care is a good model for that. We are using that connection to try to build links into that community, and not make it a polarising but a unifying issue.
You and I worked together in the network development stream at the summit, which could only, after three days of pretty intense work, come up with four different options for structuring a national network. None of these got clear majority support from the final plenary session, which meant the different conceptions in the subgroup reflected the whole summit. Where do we go from here in developing a broadly agreed network structure?
GE: I think that the working group within that stream that worked on the issue is now fully cognisant of the difficulties. We've now developed a good working relationship and we know where the trouble spots are. I'm sure we'll start to narrow down the range of options and develop a draft structure that incorporates the best aspects of the competing models.