Over the next little while you are probably going to be hearing a lot from me about climate change and in particularly 350.org. Over the past couple of months I have been working hard to help organise Bill McKibben’s tour, in particular his events in Brisbane last weekend. I was also lucky enough to join Bill, and Greens Senator Larissa Waters, on a fly-over of the Gladstone coal ports development on Monday.
Now, in a couple of weeks time I am heading to Turkey for Global Power Shift; an international conference held by 350 to help build a global movement to fight climate change. I’m hoping to be able to blog some of my experiences from Turkey, so I thought it was worth talking about why this in particular has become important to me.
I have been concerned about climate change ever since I was in school. When I was in high school I enrolled in outdoor education. I needed something a bit lighter from the usual maths and english and it suited my adventorous streak. As I got travelling around Australia though I could see destruction all around me – the worst being the bleaching of Great Barrier Reef. It was awful. Slowly I built up an environmentalist mind, and eventually I became aware of global warming.
For years I have searched for a way to deal with the issue. I get stressed about it at times. Thinking about it can keep me awake at night. I have stopped reading about climate science because it stresses me out – a coping mechanism I guess. I have always figured that the best way was to take action, but I was never really satisifed with what was on offer. We either had campaigns on individual action – you know, changing lightbulbs, driving less, not traveling – the sort of stuff that makes people guilty. Or we were campaigning for complex trading systems and international negotiations – the things I couldn’t really connect with even if they were important. I just have never felt as though those approaches worked.
And that is where I guess I see of 350 being different. It is not perfect, but it is different.
There is one clear message we need to get across today. We are on course for catastrophic climate change and there is one group of people taking us there; the fossil fuel industry. They are of course helped by Governments, banks, and the finance industry, but in the end it is fossil fuel companies who are taking us down a path of destruction.
These companies are not innocent actors who are just stuck in a bad system and are doing the best they can. They don’t really believe (and I don’t think they do) that renewable energy can never play a major role in our energy system. No, they are actively working to destroy our climate for the sake of profits.
I write about climate change a lot, and will continue to do so on this blog and in other arenas.
But after spending years of thinking about how we can make a different, about how we fix this problem, about can convince Governments to make a change, I hope to take a more active role in the future. This week starts a real journey for me as part of the fossil fuel resistance movement. This job is important. There is almost nothing more important.