Climate change
Lachlan Malloch reviewed Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in GLW #683, concluding: "The film's suggestion of individual and largely apolitical actions, mute what could have been a clarion call for radical global change."
Citizens Climate Campaign is definitely a call for political action on global warming and a clarion call for radical change in Australian government policy. While we recognise the need for individuals to curb their consumption and lifestyle, the campaign is based on sending a large number of regular messages to government asking for immediate and positive policies to reduce emissions, increase the mandatory renewable energy target and action with other nations to combat global warming.
The campaign began in the Blue Mountains of NSW in March 2006 and now has over 500 people on the email list. The aim of Citizens Climate Campaign is to make climate change an urgent priority on the political agenda. It plans to do this by encouraging thousands of ordinary Australians to send a Message a Month, by letter or email, to our elected representatives, to let our government know that climate change is an issue of major concern to the voting public. If enough people do this, and keep doing it, in time government policies can be changed.
The concept behind the campaign is brilliantly simple. Interested people register by sending an email saying "Yes!" to << AA HREF="mailto:HREF="mailto:climatez@aapt.net.au"">><HREF="mailto:climatez@aapt.net.au"><climatez@aapt.net.au>. It is a facilitated letter writing campaign which makes it really quick and easy to write a message.
Lachlan Malloch is right when he writes: "An Inconvenient Truth is a terrific information tool. It is up to us to use the information to bring about change in our own country."
Rosemary Lathouris
Postering
Newcastle city council has clamped down on postering by local bands, threatening fines of up to $600 per illegal bill poster. King Street Hotel has been fined $1800 and many other bands threatened.
Local activist groups like Resistance, the Socialist Alliance and Rising Tide use posters as a campaigning tool and, like musicians, should be confident to do so in a responsible manner without fear of being fined.
Postering is one of the most effective and only ways for local bands to advertise their gigs. Newcastle has a large population of musical artists, many of whom are working class and invest a fair effort into operating and advertising for their band outside of working hours. This creative culture is a distinctive feature of Newcastle and already has to compete with poker machines and clubs that play crass generic dance music rather than paying local bands to play. Moves to ban postering would further stifle this positive and socially enriching cultural tradition and as such socialists strongly oppose any crackdown on postering by local authorities.
Zane Alcorn
Carbon trading
There is useful comment in Zoe Kenny's article "Carbon trading scheme a sop to King Coal" (GLW #684) charging that the Labor premiers' paper on carbon-trading is a sop to the coal industry. However, ultimately her message must be confusing to the GLW reader.
She rightly extols Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and joins in his excoriation of Australia's failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. She then describes Kyoto as "includ(ing) a 'cap and trade' system that imposes national caps on the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions but seeks to promote reductions of emissions through the capitalist market by creating 'carbon-trading' schemes".
Some ambivalence about Kyoto and like schemes seems to be implicit in that word "capitalist", but leave that issue aside for now. The main point is that it is precisely because Howard is King Coal's lapdog that his government opposes any notion of applying monetary penalties to greenhouse gas emissions, whether in the form of carbon taxes or as internationally tradable emission certificates.
As Kenny points out in her critique of the premiers' plan, the level of the cap is also important. However, the critical reason why Howard opposes Kyoto does not have to do with the precise level of the cap as it applies to Australia.
Rather, Howard is not just a "hold-out" from Kyoto and future tougher international agreements that will have to follow. It is much worse than this. Alone with the nauseating Bush administration, it is the Australian government's purpose to sabotage such global agreements. This is because the global adoption of such agreements would diminish the profits of Australia's export coal industry.
No wonder it is "convenient" for Howard to be a "climate change sceptic"! The point is argued in greater detail in my article on the New Matilda website (September 15).
Barry Naughten
Aslyum seekers
On September 23, I met the two guys who survived a month in a ship hold with 15 days' supply worth of water and the two dead bodies of their friends. Four desperate young men swam out one night across a bay in Morocco, so desperate they were willing to risk just throwing themselves blindly into a hold filled with phosphate, and hoped that their meagre water supply would last till their expected arrival somewhere in Europe. A month later, half way around the world, in the calmer seas just off Perth, Western Australia, the crew finally heard the weak taps of the one guy left conscious.
You might have heard of these guys when the media first broke their story. Bit bigger that a mere week down a mine, isn't it? But Eddie McGuire can't get to them yet. They've been in detention over a year now.
The immigration department (DIMIA) checked to see if the men were in any danger in Morocco, and the Moroccan authorities said, no, not all. DIMIA officials took their word for it, over the testimony and evidence of the young men who risked everything to escape ill treatment at the hands of the Moroccan military.
Their claim for asylum was rejected, and they rot in detention along with every other poor, unfortunate, innocent and with no release date, doped up with the standard psych meds issued by Global Solutions Limited.
After the publicity of their discovery in the tragic circumstances of the ship hold, their lives are even more in danger from angry military authoritarians in Morocco. The Minister for Immigration could grant them asylum now, especially given the bizarre circumstances escalating their tragic situation.
Their names are Moubarak Ait Elmir and Hammou (Mohammad) El Hamdhoui. Call somebody. Do something.
Norrie May-Welby