Dear Mr. Prime Minister, and all those it may concern,
When your bathtub is overflowing, you turn off the taps. You don’t get a bucket and dump the water into someone else’s bathtub. You don’t build a pipe from tub through someone else’s house. You don’t explain to everyone how and when and with which hand you are going to turn off the taps. No. You just turn them off because it’s over flowing and is becoming a huge mess and if you don’t act quickly there could be permanent water damage to your home. And the longer you wait the more damage it will cause.
When you discover greenhouse gases are causing environmental breakdown, you stop producing them. You don’t divert the blame to bigger emitters. You don’t continue to build infostructure around greenhouse gasses on Indigenous land. You don’t delay action for as long as possible. No. You stop greenhouse gases because the longer you wait, the more damage is done to our planet.
Cutting our economy away from oil is going to be hard; no one is debating that. But plenty of necessary things are hard. The longer we wait for dramatic action, the more dramatic that action must be. In the year 2000 a 3% annual fall in the world’s carbon emissions would have been enough to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. By 2019, studies showed we would need a 15% annual fall in emissions if we want to stay below 1.5. If we continue on with this minimal action, and this tiny carbon tax, we will soon be in a position where the amount of emissions we need to cut in a year is impossible.
I hope you are having a wonderful day!
Amelia Penney-Crocker