Finding foothold as a wave of climatic counter-logic hits our parliaments

Commentary, Petition

Some January 2017 notes with links and contemplations as we enter a new year and are confronted with governments’ increasingly absurd lack of response to the dangerous climate change disruption – the Great Turning, collapse, catastrophe, apocalypse or whatever you want to call it – which temperature graphs and science reports show is approaching with full speed.

Just a few weeks after we entered 2017, I experienced something which could probably be classified as a ‘nervous breakdown’ over the new year’s counter-logical steps in the American, Australian, British and Danish governments, which all want to increase the air pollution, rather than reduce it as they promised when they signed the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

We were on the last stretch of what had been a wonderful and totally offline family holiday, having spent two weeks in the Tasmanian wilderness. Then we got back to “civilisation” – which in our case was a camping site with free wifi. Those news headlines my iPhone welcomed me with instantly made me grumpy. More than that, they kept me awake that night, mixed into my dreams, and when I woke up the following morning my mood was even gloomier.

Some stories were prompted by the findings by NASA, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organisation, the UK MET Office and other bureaus of meteorology that 2016 was the hottest year on record, marking the third consecutive year this record was smashed. The UK Met Office produced this short video which shows the rise in global temperatures:



Adrian Whitehead, a Campaign Coordinator for the Australian Save the Planet party, put it straight forward in a newsletter when he wrote:

“Wow what a shitty 2016 and a sad start to 2017. War, terrorists, climate deniers running the political agenda in both Australia and the United States, old entertainers dying on mass, another hottest year on record, Trump, psychos in cars and no major environmental groups, social justice NGOs or even the Greens promoting real safe climate policies; policies we need to have any chance of reversing global warming and avoiding a climate catastrophe.”


Another newsletter from The Tree summarised that in the US, the 15 most destructive extreme weather events of 2016 cost a total of $46 billion and caused 138 deaths.

In a normal and logical world, you’d assume that a $46 billion ‘bill’ for climate inaction – along the many many other news about destruction and devastation caused by man-made climate change – would be the cause for immediate emergency response and action.

But as we are learning, humanity has somehow moved beyond logic and common sense now. The election of a climate denier to US Presidency has had climate activists shaking their heads in disbelief and made school kids talk about the coming of a Third World War. The American writer and co-founder for 350.org, Bill McKibben, wrote:

“Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. It beggars belief that in 2016 an outright climate change denier could rise to the highest office in the US, dragging with him a Republican controlled Congress hungry to revive the old glory days of coal, gas and oil, not to mention a Secretary of State that until last month ran the biggest oil company on earth.”

» Sydney Morning Herald – 17 January 2017:
Australia joining US in openly trashing global climate efforts

Madness in the US



“U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.
“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters.”

» Reuters – 25 January 2017:
Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources

Check the website before it disappears:
www.epa.gov/climatechange


Madness in Australia

The Australian government isn’t much better. It’s push to develop the Adani Carmichael mega-coal mine, after earmarking a $1 billion loan to support it, and then announcing that it will support the coal industry with no less than 100 billion dollars of public funding – as reported in The Australian: “Coalition Backs 100bn Growth Plan for Coal Industry” – follows Trump’s lead in denying climate change and delaying the global transition to renewables.

Melbourne-based barrister Andrew Laird commented on Facebook: “Our Federal Government is out of control. It effectively acts as the political wing of the fossil fuel industry and its hypocrisy is breathtaking.” In another post he wrote: “It’s almost as if our federal government lives in a parallel universe where you can pollute without consequences. Unfortunately the rest of us and our kids and grandkids have to live in the real world.”

“Australia’s conservative government fiddles on climate policy while the country burns,” was Lenore Taylor’s way of saying it, in The Guardian on 20 January 2017.

30 years from now, Victorians stand to loose $378 million every year to bushfires – a figure which is not even including increased rates, insurance, etc –
according to a new report from the Climate Council.

Climate scientists stated that false news and deliberate misinformation has made it more difficult for them than ever to come across to politicians, the media and the general population with their warnings about the impact of our collective air pollution.

As a consequence, counter-action on climate change is now politically legitimate. Both in the US and Australia, the intensifying climate change impacts are being dismissed because they don’t fit a political agenda defined by the fossil fuel industry. Political forces with an ideological resistance to climate action are on the rise in many European countries as well, and in Russia.

Meanwhile, the climate scientists and the meteorological bureaus continue to remind us that global warming is unmoved by fake news or bigotry. During 2016, unprecedented heatwaves hit South Africa, Thailand, Kuwait and India. The warming oceans caused massive coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. By 2050, it is estimated there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans. Six million people die every year from air pollution. The ice poles and gletchers are melting faster than scientists had predicted.

“This could be what a global warming tipping point looks like”
~ Joe Romm


» ThinkProgress – 6 January 2017:
The unprecedented drop in global sea ice, in one terrifying gif

“We are no longer fighting to stop climate change, but fighting to stop a runaway catastrophe.”
~ Michael Slezak



“The Government has been accused of trying to bury a major report about the potential dangers of global warming to Britain – including the doubling of the deaths during heatwaves, a “significant risk” to supplies of food and the prospect of infrastructure damage from flooding. The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment Report, which by law has to be produced every five years, was published with little fanfare on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) website on 18 January.”

» The Independent – 23 January 2017:
Government ‘tried to bury’ its own frightening report on climate change


One journalist’s awakening
Then I read in The Guardian – a newspaper which really is making a positive difference in the world today – that I wasn’t alone as a journalist struggling with getting miserable and losing hope. Michael Slezak wrote a piece entitled: “Writing about climate change: my professional detachment has finally turned to panic” and talked about “awakening” which had hit him during 2016. He noted:

“The ability for humans to not react emotionally to climate change is undoubtedly one of the things that is making this collective form of species-level suicide possible.”


In particular if you are a journalist or climate communicator, I can recommend reading his piece.


And Polly Toynbee absolutely nailed it when she wrote, on the same day, in The Guardian:

“Serve up too much doom, and people despair, shrug and just hope nothing too terrible happens in their own lifetimes.”


» The Guardian – 19 January 2017:
Climate change will affect all of us. So why the lack of urgency?


When you think about it – as I had plenty of time to do, as I was sitting there with my Tasmanian beer at a camping site surrounded by diesel-driven SUVs and caravan-campers and families cheerfully frying red meat on camp fires and BBQ gas grills, right next to a busy highway – we, humans on planet Earth, truly and genuinely are playing with fire.

We don’t know what will happen to our planet in the decades and centuries to come as a result of a our burning of fossil fuels, and even with all the data in front of us about what is currently happening – with ice melting at the poles, while heat waves, forest fires, flooding and mega-storms ravage and kills people, as we see it happening more and more frequently, we keep pretending that as long as our leaders don’t act on the problem, we don’t need to care about it either. We shrug and just hope nothing too terrible happens in our own lifetime. We live in denial about the consequences of our unwillingness to change, and about what kind of crime we are committing to our very own kids.

From casual conversations I had with people I met during my holidays in Tasmania I sense that many of us are actually fully aware that our own governments are run by fossil fuel interests and that these vested interests threaten our future prosperity and security. But regardless, even so, for some reason we choose to go on with our lives as if nothing was happening – probably most of all because no one yet has been able to come up with that credible solution we can all believe in which will stop our emissions of 36 gigatonnes of carbon we currently pollute the atmosphere with every year.

I write that as a person who has been eagerly part of the Australian Climate Emergency Declaration petition, which specifically has that aim: to take action at the level which is necessary now. As the federal political scene looks in 2017, can we have any hopes that the Australian government will listen to the call of this petition when it is handed over, even if signed by hundreds of thousands of Australians?

No. Politicians who are ready to blow $100 billion dollars into a dying coal industry obviously won’t listen to our demands about stopping all fossil fuel projects. It will take a year-long battle and at least an election or two, before we can hope for any kind of sensible change and a response to our petition’s call. Who says Australia won’t go in Trump’s direction at the next election?

Though unsuccessful, Bernie Sanders at least gave it the climate emergency action a good shot in the US presidential candidate debate. Currently Australia doesn’t even have a politician who resembles Bernie Sanders when it comes to demanding real climate change action.

So who are we kidding but ourselves? Should we just give up, mind our own business and start getting ready for the next wave of economic crisis and insecurity? Start focusing on establishing energy and food security for our own families, at least, while the world around us warms up and the sea level rises.

The way deadly jellyfish now are moving south and soon could be on Queensland’s popular Sunshine Coast beaches appears to me to be an indication of how changes will be coming in ways we have not even foreseen at this stage.

» ABC – 30 December 2016:
Irukandji jellyfish on the move down Queensland’s coast, expert says; four people stung off Fraser Island


“Europe and northern hemisphere are warming at faster pace than the global average and ‘multiple climatic hazards’ are expected, says study”

» The Guardian – 25 January 2017:
Europe faces droughts, floods and storms as climate change accelerates


The kind of climate change disruption we are in for in the coming years will not just be manifested with ruthless storms, bush fires and flooding. Climate scientists have long warned that insect infestations will be greater on a warmer planet, for instance. We saw the zika virus thing in Brazil. Now it is apparently happening in South France, my sister, who lives there, just told me the other day that some climate related fungus is killing the trees all over the place there, now also becoming a serious threat to the French people’s health.

In our family, on the first day of 2017, we woke up to the new year at 05am to the sound of one of our children vomiting all over the floor and walls, apparently with a very infectious gastro virus – and when we woke again some few hours later, we found out that our totally full fridge and freezer had been turned off all night.

You can probably imagine the kind of “domestic panic” that caused in the little family. Everything in the freezer had melted. Litres of ice cream. When your freezer and fridge suddenly stop working, and when male drug addicts are breaking into your property in the middle of the day to run away with your stuff – something which occurred twice at our house between Christmas and New Year – you realise how vulnerable our lifestyle actually is. It doesn’t take much to remove the feeling of comfort, innosence and safety. We are so used to that certain things in our lives just work.

Not sure why my iPhone wanted me to see this, but as I was sitting there all gloomy and upset about the general news of the day, I was suddenly made aware of these maps where National Geographic showed in 2013 what the world would look like if all the ice melted. “London: A memory. Venice: Reclaimed by the Adriatic Sea. Most of Denmark gone too,” they wrote.

Denmark, my home country. Gone:

Gone not because of a natural disaster. But because of the idiots who run our governments and didn’t see it coming. Or didn’t care. Here are some more recent stories about the sea level issue:

» Climate Code Red – 23 January 2017:
Antarctic tipping points for a multi-metre sea level rise

» The Independent / Times of India – 21 January 2017:
Global warming: Sea levels ‘could rise higher than a three-storey building due to climate change’

» International Business Times, UK Edition – 20 January 2017:
Sea levels are set to rise by at least six meters – inundating all our coastal cities
“Ocean temperatures are similar to those in the last interglacial period, when sea levels were much higher.”

» The Christian Science Monitor – 20 January 2017:
125,000 years of ocean warming in 50 years: What does it mean for sea levels?
“The last time the Earth’s oceans were this warm, the water level was two to three stories higher than it is today, according to a new research paper”


Browsing randomly through the news headlines and graphs made me think: what a pathetic failure our climate action movement has been til now. The nightmare of ‘The Road’ is waiting for us just around the corner now. The graphs and statistics show absolutely no sign that climate activism has had any effect, and now look what we’ve got ahead of us.

During the last three years in our radio show The Sustainable Hour, we have talked a lot about resilience and sustainability, and about hope and optimism. About rolling our sleeves up and getting started with the carbon-slashing. But who have rolled up their sleeves so far, when you look around yourself? How well do we think are we doing ourselves?

At that moment in Tasmania, all our climate campaigning appeared to me to have been a failure. With all the petition signing, Facebook-sharing, meeting-gathering, radio talk… how much have we changed? People are not listening. people don’t want to listen, because they don’t want to change. In particular the older generation is happily enjoying their privileges. They just want to get the most out of it before disaster hits. It is as simple as that.

So then what?


“We have entered a political vacuum. The systems built around the old beliefs have failed, but new alternatives have yet to be articulated. The longer the power elite and the liberal class speak in words that no longer correspond to reality, the more an embittered and betrayed population loses faith in traditional systems of government and power. The inability of liberals and the power elite to address our reality leaves the disenfranchised open to manipulation by the demagogues. The moral nihilism Dostoyevsky feared with the collapse of the liberal class inevitably leads to social chaos.”
~ Chris Hedges, ‘Death of the Liberal Class’, 2009

Bill McKibben: “One possibility is, we’ve lost. It’s a real possibility, and we should consider it carefully instead of ignoring it because it’s emotionally unpalatable.”

These were the kind of thoughts going through my head that night.

The following morning, one of my sons asked me: “Are you feeling better now, dad?” – and I replied something like that “Why should I? Nothing has changed!”

I was letting the steam out on my innocent family. Disengaged in the normal morning camping activities, I sneaked off to a quiet place and continued browsing the news headlines and emails.


Displacing anxiety on to others

Chris Mackey, a well respected principal psychologist at Chris Mackey and Associates in Geelong, and a fellow of The Australian Psychological Society, wrote a piece about the same anxiety I had been feeling – in Geelong Advertiser on 24 January 2017, under the headline ‘Planet needs people power’ (online) and ‘Act now to create climate of change’ (on print):

“It seems to me that people’s reactions to concerning information about climate change now relate more to psychology than climate science evidence,” he wrote.

“I believe there’s another psychological complication that can distort our response to climate change evidence — the phenomenon of learned helplessness. This occurs when we recognise that we are potentially in a dire situation, but for whatever reason believe that we can’t do anything about it.

The best way of countering learned helplessness is to take action — including symbolic action — that represents a genuine attempt to improve the situation. This can be done individually as well as collectively.

It would include any active attempt to reduce our use of fossil fuels. It certainly includes acknowledging our concerns openly — especially to our political representatives.

If people who are responsible for addressing a serious problem don’t allow themselves to be sufficiently anxious about the problem, this inevitably displaces anxiety on to others.

Current generations, including our current political leaders, have seemingly not been anxious enough about climate change. I believe we are displacing that anxiety on to current younger generations and future generations who are not yet in a position to address the problem.

I once read of an indigenous warrior’s goal to depart this world leaving no footprints. Unfortunately, current older generations will inevitably have left global footprints including warmer temperature, higher sea levels and increased coastal erosion. The issue is what sacrifices we are prepared to make now to contain the ongoing and future risk, including risk to the mental health of future generations.”

» Geelong Advertiser – 24 January 2017:
Planet needs people power (subscription only)


Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, wrote:
“Among climate scientists, there is a consensus that swift action is vital, and with it the target remains, at least, possible. With the amount of carbon burned by humans, we have now created a climate not experienced on Earth since the Pliocene era, 2m-5m years ago. We are daily rolling the climate dice with the odds stacked against us. But we are also clever, quick and innovative when we want to be. Now that we understand the game better, the question we face is whether we will choose to change it, fast and enough, so that we can all have better lives.”

» The Guardian – 19 January 2017:
‘A cat in hell’s chance’ – why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2C
“A global rise in temperature of just 2C would be enough to threaten life as we know it. But leading climate scientists think even this universally agreed target will be missed. Could dramatic action help?”


“As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas, or, They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.”
U Thant, United Nations Secretary-General in 1962-71, speaking in 1971


“The fossil fuel era now has an expiry date”

“Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil… unless we choose a fundamentally different path.”
~ Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Article by Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed who has recently published the book ‘Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence’ (Springer, 2017) which is a scientific study of how climate, energy, food and economic crises are driving state failures around the world:

» Medium – 6 January 2017:
Brace for the oil, food and financial crash of 2018
“80% of the world’s oil has peaked, and the resulting oil crunch will flatten the economy.”


Phil Baulch recommended:
“Energy systems, food systems, economic systems, and geopolitics are today inseparable, and a profound underlying shift in the quality and cost of our top energy source — i.e., petroleum — cannot help but have consequences that ripple through entire societies. A must read article if you want an understanding of likely future scenarios for our communities:”

» Resilience – 11 January 2017:
The Peak Oil President?




Stranded assets

Former coal executive Ian Dunlop wrote:
“The real impediment to our future prosperity is the scientific and technologically illiterate policy emanating from the Federal Government, spurred on by continuing misinformation from Ministers Frydenberg, Canavan, Turnbull and camp followers, attempting to shore up the fossil fuel industry.

The subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels are vastly higher than anything ever enjoyed by renewables. Despite that, renewables are rapidly becoming cheaper across the spectrum. Real energy security does not come from investing in coal and gas projects that will rapidly become stranded assets.

Federal Government policy is based on the continuing belief that climate change is not happening. Hence the dysfunctional lip service of anachronisms such as Direct Action and Adani.

It seems that our “conservatives” have little understanding of what conservatism means when confronted by the real risks and opportunities of climate change:”

» RenewEconomy – 19 January 2017:
Turnbull Government is wrong to pretend we can burn our way to climate safety


The Guardian: “Reasons to be cheerful”

In comes my friend The Guardian and tells me that there are “reasons to be cheerful”. Similar to what we were saying ourselves in The Sustainable Hour a year ago, when we compiled Over 60 pieces of good news about climate action – many of which still holds. The Guardian stated:

“Even as the political environment has darkened, the reasons have strengthened for believing that a complete transition to low-carbon energy is practical and affordable within one generation. Andrew Simms is right that global temperatures will probably overshoot the 2°C target. But that makes the urgency of an energy transition even clearer. Despair is no excuse for inaction.”

» The Guardian – 19 January 2017:
Reasons to be cheerful: a full switch to low-carbon energy is in sight
“Climate change optimism is justified – a complete transition from carbon to solar and wind power looks practical and affordable within a generation”


Businesses move forward quickly

The Climate Group has produced a great three-minute video about why clean energy makes sense to businesses:

IKEA, Hewlett Packard, Google, Apple and many other major companies are committed to powering their operations using 100% renewable energy.

» See it on Facebook and on YouTube

» Read more on www.theclimategroup.org


Citi: Clean energy will be free

Global investment bank Citi is predicting that the combination of near zero-variable cost energy sources such as solar and wind, along with smart analytics and “big data”, may deliver what the nuclear industry promised nearly half a century ago – free energy.

“The notion of free energy came to prominence in the 1960s, as nuclear fusion was touted as a way to provide free energy,” Citi writes in the latest of its “Disrutive Innovations” series, in a section focusing on Big Data and the energy industry.

When those claims were made about nuclear fusion, the technology was in the embryonic stage, and it turned out nuclear energy wasn’t free at all, but incredibly expensive, and getting more so by the year. But wind and solar, along with demand and storage optimisation, may finally deliver on that promise, Citi says.

“Big Data and advanced analytics are developing rapidly to improve forecasting, automation, customisation, and the democratisation of energy,” it says in its reports. “The end result is that we are producing more energy with fewer resources ….. the goal of dramatically lowering energy costs for all, with the possibility of free energy in some corners, may finally come to fruition.”

Australian renewables increased
The Clean Energy Australia Report 2015 includes a comprehensive round-up of renewable energy projects, investment, employment and electricity generation. It is the only analysis that includes the National Electricity Market, the Western Australian electricity grid and other major regional grids across the country in areas such as the Northern Territory. The main findings from the report are as follows:

• Renewable energy provided 14.6 per cent of Australia’s electricity in 2015, enough to provide power for the equivalent of approximately 6.7 million average homes. This was up on the 13.5 per cent of electricity delivered by renewables the year before.
 
• Power generation from Australia’s hydro plants was down due to low rainfall, but wind and solar generation each increased by just over 20 per cent to more than compensate for the drop in hydro power.

» See more at: www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au


Kinetic energy batteries around the corner

This innovative Frenchman cheered me up a bit too, because he is an example of how technological solutions constantly are in the process of being invented, improved and set in production. André Gennesseaux gave this interesting presentation at a TEDx event in France in November 2015. You can watch his presentation with English subtitles on youtube.com, or read the transcript in the Facebook post above.


It is also good to see more and more artists get involved. Just before Christmas we had a good talk with Australian singer Missy Higgins about it in The Sustainable Hour on 94.7 The Pulse. And now this:

Prominent DJs resolve to fight Trump’s anti-climate agenda

With the beginning of the Trump years upon us, there have been calls to action from every corner of the globe to continue human progress in the face of a man who many consider to be a direct obstacle to it. One of the issues which will undoubtedly directly affect future generations, is the developing humanitarian crisis that is climate change. But with heavy investments from the oil and gas industry in Trump’s campaign, it’s no surprise that in the first days of his presidency he’s begun making

» Read the full story on www.youredm.com



“It’s a matter of faith”

Piyush Goyal, the Indian Energy Minister, actually made plain common sense when he talked about faith in this way:
“India doesn’t interfere in any other country’s elections and we respect the fact that America has chosen its leader. However, clean energy is not something that we are working on because somebody else wants us to do it. It’s a matter of faith and the faith of the leadership in India. Nothing on Earth is going to stop us from doing that.”


Steve Posselt

Speak up…

What eventually got me out of my grumpy mood and ‘back on the horse’ was to see how one single person can make such a difference. In this case, it was Steve Posselt who gave me back hope and new strength. He is just one single person, but he is currently kayaking 1,200 kilometres to raise awareness about the Climate Emergency Declaration petition – and he is leaving a tail of newspaper articles, video interviews and mayor commitments behind him in each little town he visits on the way.

Steve Posselt with a group from Climate Change Australia

…and take action

As things stand, more than ever and by the end of the day, there is no other way around it: it is up to us as individuals to speak up and take action. “The fight won’t end until we win,” wrote Andrew Laird . Leonardo diCaprio reached that same conclusion in his film ‘Before the Flood’. And so does Michael Slezak. He wrote in The Guardian:

“Governments must step up and take action. But in the meantime, we must all do what we can. We’ve heard people fighting climate change all around the world give their advice for what individuals can do, and most of them said similar things: become active on the issue, make your views known to politicians, and become a climate voter.”
~ Michael Slezak, in The Guardian on 19 January 2017


Big problems require big solutions

What’s really encouraging is to see that more than 40 Australian climate and sustainability groups have joined together now around this petition with the simple message that big problems require big solutions.

Collaboration and coordination is not exactly something the diverse climate action movement has excelled in until now, so it gives reasons to be cheerful when you see, for instance, how 350 Melbourne recently decided to step in and now fully supports and promotes the petition:

» See more supporters here

“You know what inspires me? People who are willing to put their own comfort aside and go to extraordinary lengths because they believe in their power for change. Steve Posselt is one of these amazing people. Google him. Then, please sign this: www.climateemergencydeclaration.org/sign   then, once you are also in awe of The Determinator, please consider taking a snap of you and your letter of thanks to Steve. Don’t forget #Kayak4Earth Thanks for all you do Steve!”
~ Jodi Magi

Sign the petition
Sign the petition

» Sign the Climate Emergency Declaration petition

“While I can’t say with confidence that bringing a child into the world we are creating is the right thing to do, I maintain a hope that those children will find a way to undo what we have imposed on them. And if nothing else, it has given me a renewed passion for to do my part in fighting for a just world for future generations.”
~ Michael Slezak, in The Guardian on 20 January 2017


“It’s time to stop bitching and start a revolution again.”

» The Huffington Post – 26 April 2012:
You Can Cut Your Carbon Emissions 20 Percent Over the Next Year


“Great article. The fight won’t end until we win. The only question is how much damage will be done in the interim?”
Andrew Laird


Bill Nye’s climate call to action

Thank you, Bill Nye The Science Guy! As far as I’m concerned, this is it: This is where we are at.

Please watch this three-minute video. And consider sharing it with your friends via YouTube or Facebook.


“What is needed is leadership, preferably bi-partisan, in the longer-term national interest. At the political level, this will require somebody to stand up, step outside the 24-hour media game, and be prepared to lead, to delineate an evidence-based response and to take on the short-term dissent from the public or their party. Nothing can get done in government unless some person or group owns the issue and is prepared to explain and defend it.”
~ John Hewson


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» The Australian Marine Conservation Society:
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