GetUp Time Capsule Letter To My Great Great Grandchildren
About Australia And Climate Genocide
By Dr Gideon Polya
02 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Educated, science-informed people know that the world is facing a climate emergency but is simply utterly failing to tackle man-made climate change. Thus as reported by the US Mauna Loa Observatory, the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is remorselessly climbing, has now reached 394 parts per million (ppm) and is currently increasing at about 2.4 ppm per year (see: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ). However politicians – most notoriously in the huge polluters Australia and the US - feel obliged to pretend that they are taking action while in reality backing Business As Usual (BAU).
Australia is a world leader in annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution but its Labor Government has secured passage of a Carbon Price-based “Clean Energy Bill” through Parliament which it claims will secure a “Clean Energy Future” but which in harsh reality is a cynical, spin-based scheme for climate change inaction. Unfortunately, most of the climate action movement (including the excellent Greens) have been seduced into supporting Labor's Carbon Price scheme on the basis that it represents a “first step” to tacking climate change – ignoring the horrible reality that this fraudulent plan will quadruple Australia 's domestic plus exported GHG pollution by 2050 relative to that in 2000.
The excellent Australian social advocacy group GetUp has also been deceived and has asked for contributions to a time capsule: “Next Tuesday the [Australian] Senate is slated to pass the Clean Energy Bill, a moment in history that will see billions invested in clean energy and our biggest polluters finally asked to pay for their emissions. We've been waiting for this for decades, through changes in government and countless news stories, speeches, rallies, conversations and individual actions. So to mark the occasion we've built a time capsule that will be stored for decades into the future. Can you leave your message in it before we unveil the capsule next week? … You're welcome to write anything - maybe it's a message to the grandchildren you haven't met yet, or maybe it's a message to their children … This Tuesday, the Senate is slated to pass the Clean Energy Bill, ending the long process of putting a price on pollution into Australian law. We've been through a lot to get here, so we're taking a moment to step back and reflect on what this means for future generations. To commemorate this historic event, we're giving you the chance to be part of history by adding your message to a time capsule to be gifted to the Museum of Democracy and opened in 2050” (to place your message see: http://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/climate-action-now/time-capsule/be-a-part-of-history?t=dXNlcmlkPTE3ODM3LGVtYWlsaWQ9NDM3 ).
Below is what I have written and submitted to the GetUp time capsule about climate criminal Australian Labor Government's fraudulent “Clean Energy Bill” and climate change inaction. As suggested by GetUp, my time capsule contribution takes the form of a letter to my descendants.
Letter to my grandchildren's grandchildren.
Hi kids!
Australia in 2011 remains a world leader in annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution. Thus “annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution” in units of “tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year” (2005-2008 data) is 0.9 (Bangladesh), 0.9 (Pakistan), 2.2 (India), less than 3 (many African and Island countries), 3.2 (the Developing World), 5.5 (China), 6.7 (the World), 11 (Europe), 16 (the Developed World), 27 (the US) and 30 (Australia; or 54 if Australia's huge Exported CO2 pollution is included, 64 as of 2011).
Climate criminal, war criminal, politically correct racist (PC racist) Apartheid Australia is steadfastly committed, on a bipartisan, Lib-Lab basis, to Gadarene population increase, derisory reductions in domestic GHG pollution (5% off 2000 GHG pollution by 2020) and unlimited expansion of its huge coal and liquid natural gas (LNG) exports.
Indeed the "historic" Labor Government Carbon Tax-ETS "Clean Energy Bill" of 2011 is a fraud - while touted to provide a "Clean Energy Future" it is actually a dishonest recipe for Business As Usual (BAU) and climate change inaction. Treasury modelling in its key report "Strong Growth, Low Pollution) and ABARE data show that under the "Clean Energy Bill" Australia's domestic plus exported GHG pollution will roughly double by 2020 and quadruple by 2050 relative to that in 2000.
In 2009 the WBGU (the expert body that advises the German Government on climate change) estimated that for a 75% chance of avoiding a disastrous 2 degree Centigrade temperature rise (would you board a plane if there were a 25% chance of it crashing?) the World must emit no more than 600 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2010 and zero emissions in 2050. Australia as a world leading annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) polluter has ALREADY by mid-2011 used up its "fair share" of this terminal GHG pollution budget and is now stealing the entitlement of other countries, including impoverished, climate change-threatened countries such as Somalia, Bangladesh and Kiribati
Both Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that only about 0.5 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming. Noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050 (UN Population Division) , these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including roughly twice the present population of particular mainly non-European groups, specifically 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2 billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis.
One hopes that in the coming years the World will take action for climate justice against greedy, racist, climate criminal Apartheid Australia by Sanctions, Boycotts, Sporting Boycotts, Green Tariffs, International Court of Justice litigations and International Criminal Court prosecutions.
I endlessly write around the World urging action on man-made climate change. I have made formal complaint about Australia 's involvement in climate genocide to the International Criminal Court. Science tells us what the problem is and "How to solve it" (the title of a brilliant book by my mathematician Great Uncle George Polya). The climate catastrophe does not have to happen - we know what we have to do (return the atmospheric CO2 concentration to about 300 parts per million) and how to do it (100% renewable energy, biochar, re-afforestation and cessation of population growth, deforestation and of industrial and agricultural GHG pollution). However, as in the Don McLean song "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)" "They would not listen / They're not listening still / Perhaps they never will."
Lots of love,
Dr Gideon Polya, your Great Great Grandfather, 2 November 2011.
Of course while Australia is a leading climate criminal country it is not the only notorious culprit in the worsening Climate Genocide (see: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ). What would you say in 2011 to your descendants in 2050 about how we wrecked the Planet?
Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .
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