Real action needed on climate and water
Newcastle Greens
2 February 2007
Greens call for real action on water and the climate crisis
The Greens candidate for Newcastle, Councillor Michael Osborne, has called on the Premier, Mr Iemma to stop playing politics with the climate crisis and with water.
"Since forming in the early 1990s, The Greens have pushed for political recognition of this major policy challenge, and for the kind of political leadership needed to fund serious research and development of renewable energy and to reduce energy consumption – which the market alone has failed to do," Councillor Osborne said.
Ahead of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment, which is due out about 8pm our time, the CSIRO has released a report which says if we continue doing ‘business as usual’ it would likely lead to a 88 centimetre sea level rise by 2100 above 1990 levels.
"The Sydney Labor government is stuck in the ‘business as usual’ scenario – they seem to lack the courage to develop the necessary policies that we need to deal with the climate crisis. The lacklustre Debnam opposition is no better, seeming to develop policies on the run.
"As an environmental engineer with a special expertise in water, I know how urgent the problem is and the need to make the right decisions now. We need to set in place real policies for the climate crisis and real policies for water. Solutions are set out in my book Talking Water and in the policies of The Greens.
"We need to set a renewable energy target of 50% by 2020, a water recycling target of 50% by 2020 and we need more rainwater tanks.
"The Sydney Labor government is panicking as they face election. The Greens on the other hand have been urging action for the last decade and have policies in place which could begin to solve the problems we face," Councillor Michael Osborne said.
Michael Osborne is co-author of Talking Water: An Australian Guidebook for the 21st Century, published by the Farmhand Foundation in 2004 which was recently listed by the new Federal Minister for Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, as one of his top 5 books on the subject. See The Australian.
