Photo credit: Photo Mojo

John McCain, the Republican Presidential candidate, who failed to mention climate change in his acceptance speech, who picked a climate change denier as his running mate, who won’t regulate greenhouse gases, whose energy plan is mainly about offshore drilling and nuclear energy is continuing on his failed environmental and energy trail.

While campaigning in coal-rich Pennsylvania, the Washington Post reports, McCain promised he is a “coal booster” and that he would encourage the export of coal to other countries. He also claimed that coal will “create hundreds of thousands of jobs”.

“My friends, you know what Senator Obama said about a year ago, he said he had not been a, quote, coal booster,” he said, as the crowd booed. “My friends, I’ve been a coal booster and it’s going to create jobs, and we’re going to export coal to other countries and we are going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That’s going to help restore the economy of the great state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

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I belong to a Melbourne-based Climate Action Group called the Yarra Valley Climate Action Group (YVCAG) which is very active in public education through public meetings, participation in public demonstrations and by providing a series of very well-referenced Climate Emergency Fact Sheets on its website. Thus people confused by the vehement and dishonest denial by climate sceptics can use the YVCAG resource and discover what top climate scientists and top scientific bodies think about the accelerating global warming crisis by consulting “Climate Emergency: what top world scientific experts say“.

Our local Climate Action Group is variously linked to scores of like-minded Climate Action Groups around the Continent and Commonwealth of Australia through two umbrella organizations, namely the Climate Emergency Network and the Climate Movement. However our efforts at public education are negated by the Power of Money. Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter with coal exports currently worth A$55 billion per annum; about 92% of Australia’s electric power comes from fossil fuel burning; and the Australian coal industry is worth in total about A$100 billion annually – with the coincident reality that Australia resolutely ignores the disproportionate impact it is having on the Earth’s environment through its world-leading annual per capita Domestic and Exported fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution.

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Only a few weeks after the release of the Draft Report of the seriously flawed, pro-coal, Australian Garnaut Climate Change Review (4 July, 2008; see my critique on Green Blog, “Pro-Coal, Australian Garnaut Climate Review Damns Coral, Australia & World”), the Australian Federal Government has released a so-called “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” Green Paper (16 July, 2008).

Unfortunately the Australian Federal Government Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) Green Paper is FATALLY FLAWED and if adopted globally would be a DEATH SENTENCE for the planet’s biosphere.

Australia is referred to as “Downunder” by people in the Northern Hemisphere but in so many things Australian mainstream media and politicians turn the truth upside-down as well - and this is outrageously so in relation to man-made climate change. The Liberal-National Party Coalition State and Federal Oppositions and the Labor Party State and Federal Governments (these major parties being referred to collectively as the Lib-Labs) pay public lip-service to the problem of global warming but their de facto policies support Australia’s world-leading coal exports and Australia’s 92% fossil fuel-based power generation.

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Top British climate scientist Professor James Lovelock FRS has warned that over 6 billion people will die this century due to unaddressed climate change. Already 16 million people die avoidably in the world each year due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see: “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007). It is already clear from declining agricultural production due to drought and massive storm surge disasters in India, Bangladesh, Burma and the US that global warming is already impacting on global avoidable mortality.

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