Bob Brown Speaks In Byron Bay
Australia can lead on climate change
Australia can be a world leader in addressing climate change almost overnight, Senator Bob Brown told an audience in Byron Bay on Saturday. Australia exports over 233 million tonnes of coal each year. That alone accounts for more than 1.5 percent of the world's carbon emissions.
The Stern report, named after the British knight Sir Nicholas Stern, identified the destruction of old growth forests as responsible for more carbon emissions than the transport sector for the entire globe. Old growth forests are the largest living carbon banks on the planet.
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Bob Brown pointed out to a crowd of 700 people that the woodchipping industry in Tasmania blows up old growth trees using ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel as an explosive, removes a fraction of the timber to be sent as woodchips to Asia, and then firebombs the rest. “We are destroying the world's largest carbon bank to sell at $10 per tonne. Once carbon trading is introduced its value as a carbon sink will be up to $200 per tonne,” Brown said.
The parliamentary leader of the Greens has also challenged the major parties to develop a twenty-year plan to phase out the coal industry. “If they cannot develop such a plan within the next three year parliamentary term, then people should not vote for them,” Brown said. The Greens have always been climate change activists.
Now that the Greens position is popular the major parties struggle to catch up. “It is only window dressing,” Brown said. “Coal mining was not mentioned once in the debate between Turnbull and Garret on the 7.30 Report last week. Both parties are clinging to the industrial ideologies of the nineteenth century. For the sake of the planet, we have to move on.”
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