Interesting piece today in The Saturday Paper by Rob Oakeshott. It is my view that it is actually biodiversity loss that is Australia’s greatest environmental challenge, yet trying to initiate any sort of discussion or programs in this regard has politicians now running that same country mile. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but if I were dropped back into 2010 and had the opportunity again, I would make biodiversity loss the top of the pyramid of what we were trying to address, instead of focusing on the science of an odourless and invisible gas. By doing so, community engagement on some simple facts, such as the high chance of the koala species collapse in our lifetime without behaviour change, would be an easier “pub” conversation than the more challenging discussion around gases and climate science. More importantly, the broader suite of tools required would have also been part of an easier discussion: the need for a national bio-banking scheme; national biodiversity corridors of scale and significance; the use of biomass and the role that trees can play in energy security and emissions trading; a serious, as opposed to piecemeal, crack at invasive species; and, importantly, a discussion of how urban planning can better embrace biodiversity gains. All things that we can see and feel. All things that are hard to deny are real. Doing some of this broader work could have lowered the temperature on carbon politics, and we would have had, and still could have, a much greater chance of getting a long-term ETS. It would have been a broader, more bipartisan conversation on a number of fronts, reducing the chance for all the concentrated hoopla of $100 lamb roasts and Whyalla wipeouts. But we didn’t have that. Short-term business interests won. The longer-term Australian interest lost. ...
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 05:50:56 +0000
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