choose the future!
Dear Malcolm, (Dear Annastacia)
It is beyond my belief that the federal government and the Queensland government are determined to allow or even support the Adani coal mine.
I’m sure that most politicians in these governments know, even if they won’t say publicly, that the world can’t keep burning coal and other fossil fuels without severely disrupting our climate – that is a well-established fact for anyone with the slightest understanding of science. Since almost the beginning of Earth's existence over four-and-a-half billion years ago, life have been taking carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon as biomass, carbonates, coal, gas, and mineral oil, which has created our current biosphere. Over the last one-hundred-and-fifty years humanity has been taking the carbon from these deposits and putting it back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, changing the atmosphere and damaging the biosphere.
I realise that coal mining produces short- and medium-term economic activity; however, it is social, economic, and environmental irresponsibility to base the future of our economy on increased coal mining. While coal mining may support our economy in the short term, in the long term it will weaken and destroy much that is valuable to the quality of human existence.
There is something else that most politicians know but won’t admit to knowing, that is the simple reality that economic activity, with its attendant consumption of finite resources, land use, and waste production, cannot keep growing for ever. Endless economic growth is obviously not possible without infinite resources to use and infinite space to grow into – living on a finite planet, we don’t have these things. Continuing to ignore this is going to lead to either an economic collapse or an environmental collapse. As economic growth is exponential, not linear, this will happen much sooner than a casual consideration would indicate.
Our current economic system must always grow, must always have more, or it will fail and collapse. This is due to its dysfunctional structure (that mostly results from the way that we create money). Our fear of the consequences of it collapsing demands that we allow it to dominate every other aspect of our existence, so that all other aspect of our lives must be considered secondary to the economy.
We need to stop doing these things as soon as possible. If our economy is dependent on mining and selling coal, and dangerous growth, then we need to redesign our economy; we don’t need to ignore the facts. The job of our governments is not to ignore these issues: our governments’ job is to facilitate that redesign to find better ways to run our economy and society. Please: get on with this and stop destroying the future.
Regards,