Keeping coal in the ground, where it belongs

So how does the news media respond to this devastating assertion that we need to leave coal in the ground and to divest from fossil fuel investments? As Bill McKibben points out It makes no sense investing in a retirement pension that supports an industry that ensures that you will have no planet to retire on. This is devastating news, yet the front pages of the main stream media are clogged with trivial political pursuits. We are reading about the next coal boom, which will be the great export stage, and agonising over how to save the out dated car industry. Jobs are important but is it not madness to prop up the industries of the past century, when clean energy is the path to all our survival? Transition and change may be difficult. But as climate deniers are fond of saying, change has always happened. Indeed unless we change we are doomed to have a very changed planet. This is happening not in the distant future but already in our own lifetimes.

The Climate Commission is the messenger. It makes sense of the top science available including the IPCC. [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the peer reviewed research of top scientists. There is no debate left about the fact that the climate is changing dangerously and that human induced green house gas emissions are the cause.

ABC Interviewer Virginia Triolli appeared rattled and nervous, when asking the Climate Commission Report's co author Professor Will Steffen, the following question. "The report says that we have to leave coal in the ground. You can't accept that this is going to happen. We are going to continue to use coal and gas. Do you seriously think that all these reserves will stay in the ground?" Professor Steffen responded, that the world has a clear budget. It's down to numbers.

We can only afford to put 600 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, from now to 2020. [Bill McKibben contends that it is 500 billion tons].

That is about 20 per cent of known reserves of fossil fuels. The Government and the Opposition have both responded to theReport with the usual reasons for going on with business as usual. After all the coal is there, we can and need to make money out of it, As a fringe benefit it could even alleviate poverty for millions in India and China and anyway an agreement from the rest of the world has to be reached first. This is patent nonsense. What ever coal benefits accrue to the poor are vastly neutralised by immense poverty caused by climate change. But these are all the usual kinds of dumb excuses learnt in childhood, to avoid doing homework or a share of the domestic chores. The ultimate chorus being; if they don't do it why should we ?

Tony Abbott has vowed to remove the carbon price on pollution and to abolish the Climate Commission. He is a warrior against the dissemination of truth.

This is classic shooting of the messenger, because Abbott doesn't want to hear the message. It is a pathetic ruse to supress reality. But there are many other messengers where the undeniable truth is involved.

The truth is: carbon is costing us the earth.

We have to break up with fossil fuels. It is an unhealthy dangerous relationship. Clean energy is the only way forward

In the end, climate change and the planet will have the last word, if we fail to heed it the message to us all.