The following letter was written by ParraCAN Executive Member Phil Bradley and published this week in the NSW Teachers Federation’s “Education” journal, that goes to about 60,000 NSW teachers.
ParraCAN hopes that a lot of teachers will read it, absorb it and take more action!
Dear Editor,
As respected members of our communities, teachers have a special responsibility to educate ourselves and the public about the science which shows we need to massively cut Australia’s excessive contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
The urgency and enormity of our task is only just starting to dawn on us! Australia needs to cut our carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020 like Germany and UK are, to avoid runaway climate change. The Federal government’s recent carbon price package with its proposed 5% cut by 2020, is a positive start but not good enough in this critical decade, as it was recently labelled by the independent Climate Commission for preventing the global climate being irreversibly altered to the detriment of our children and grandchildren.
Australia is not only one of the worst few greenhouse gas polluters per capita in the world, but also the fifteen highest emitting nation and we stand to suffer much more from global warming than most other countries due to our geography. If we fail to significantly cut our emissions, we will also give about one hundred and seventy other countries with lower emissions an excuse for also not taking action. If Australia were to reduce its annual emissions to its global safe fair share of about 2.2 tonnes of CO2 per person (United Nations scientists say this is necessary to avoid a global temperature increase of more than 2°C and “irreversible and dangerous climate change”), we would be talking about a 90% cut in emissions by 2020 NOT just 5% as in the carbon price package.
The key to reducing our emissions is to properly fund large scale clean renewable solar thermal and wind energy projects like that at www.beyondzeroemissions.org and to keep these in public ownership. To fund this, the government should divert much of the $10 billion per year it currently subsidises the polluting fossil fuel industry. Sadly, the government package’s proposed “clean energy” finance corporation’s $10 billion over 5 years from 2013 is largely for loans for commercial energy projects and half of this funding can be for hybrid energy including dirty, non-renewable gas. Recent peer reviewed research suggests when allowing for fugitive emissions during extraction, that gas could be just as climate damaging as coal.
Yours sincerely,
Phil Bradley
Teacher of Civil Engineering
Sydney TAFE
