Al Gore Slams Tony Abbott On Climage Change: “History Will Not Be Kind To Those Who Looked Away”
Abbott is in America this week. Let the games begin.
A bit of background first. On Monday last week, President Obama’s administration unveiled new regulations which required the power sector to cut emissions by 30% on 2005 levels, by 2030 — one of the strongest commitments the United States has made to combat climate change.
On Monday this week, Obama continued the campaign, promising to “go off” against climate change deniers in Congress, and calling for a price on carbon. “You can’t keep dumping it out in the atmosphere and making everybody else pay for it,” he said in an interview on Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously. “So if there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions.”
“The baseline fact of climate change is not something we can afford to deny,” Obama continued. “And if you profess leadership in this country at this moment in our history, then you’ve got to recognise this is going to be one of the most significant long-term challenges, if not the most significant long-term challenge, that this country faces and that the planet faces.”
A leader was showing leadership on a crucial issue. The mood was changing. China was getting involved. Progress seemed to be being made.
Until one day later, when our own Tony Abbott was out and about undermining the whole thing. In Ottawa, Canada as part of his ill-fated world tour, Abbott signaled that he hoped to form an alliance with other “centre-right” governments of the Commonwealth — Canad(i)a, Britain, India and New Zealand — to dismantle global moves towards carbon pricing.
So his next stop in America was going to be interesting.
On Wednesday this week, a senior US Democrat, Henry Waxman, told ABC’s 7.30 that repealing Australian carbon pricing only two years in would be a mistake. “As I understand it, Australia will go from being one of the great leaders in the world in tackling this problem, to one of the great laggers in addressing efforts to reducing the pollution that is threatening the planet that we’re living on,” he said. He called Abbott and his conservative Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “behind-the-scenes laggers — they’re going in the wrong direction.”
And this morning, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore has echoed Waxman’s sentiments in an interview with Fairfax Media. “I am not a citizen of Australia and I don’t feel I have the privilege of entering your political debate,” he said. “But we have had deniers of the climate crisis in office in the US as well. History will not be kind to those who looked away, much less those who sought to prevent [action on climate change].”
“I don’t pretend to know what the basis of [Abbot’s] thinking is, but Mother Nature has a louder voice.” he continued.
Al Gore, whose climate change activism met the mainstream with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, is due in Australia later this month to train environmental leaders through his Climate Reality Project.
Tony Abbott. meanwhile, is due to meet with President Obama later today. Safe to assume the topic will come up.
