Greenpeace warns against fatalism
January 5, 2006
Calls for Australia to accept climate change refugees should be backed up with
efforts to reduce global warming, says Greenpeace.
Labor is releasing a Pacific climate change strategy aimed at planning for mass
relocations of people living on vulnerable islands in the South Pacific.
It follows Bureau of Meteorology figures showing 2005 was Australia’s
hottest-ever year on record.
But Greenpeace is warning against a culture of fatalism.
Plans to accept environmental refugees, although welcome, should not come at
the expense of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Greenpeace says.
Australia and the world’s reliance on polluting coal needs to be reduced, the
group’s campaigns manager Danny Kennedy says.
“We’re pleased that they’re taking seriously the fate of the Pacific islands,”
he told AAP.
“They’re accepting the science and the facts and the impacts, but they’re not
addressing the actual cause.”
Australia’s biggest contribution to climate change was through the burning of
fossil fuels – coal – to produce energy, he said.
The inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and
Climate, which includes the US, Japan, China, India and South Korea, is
scheduled to take place in Sydney next week.
The meeting, with some of the world’s biggest polluters, is focussed on finding
and sharing technological solutions to damaging greenhouse gas emissions that
lead to global warming.
Environmental groups have dubbed the partnership the “coal pact”, arguing it is
aimed at boosting uranium and coal exports from Australia and the US.
Australia, along with the United States, is the only developed nation to have
refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on countries to cut greenhouse
emissions by 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
© 2006 AAP
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