I was recently invited to give a talk for an Environment Week assembly at Katoomba High School in the Blue Mountains. I’m kind of proud of this speech, so here it is:
“Thank you Luke and Ainsley for inviting me to speak today, and I hope you don’t regret it at the end.
I acknowledge that we meet on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra land, and pay my respects to Dharug and Gundungurra elders past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations adults and students here today.
To all you students, I’m sorry.
I’m deeply deeply sorry for what my generation, and my parents’ generation – your grandparents – have done to this planet, for the existential climate crisis that we have created and which we are leaving for you to live in and deal with.
I don’t think adults say that enough, or acknowledge that enough. We don’t hear it from politicians, we don’t hear it from the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires whose bottomless greed is one of the reasons we’re in this mess. We don’t hear it from the CEOs of industries that have burrowed under and scraped the skin of this beautiful planet to extract and burn everything they could find a dollar in.
I don’t say it enough. Because I might be standing up here preaching to you at this environment assembly, but I’m just as much part of the problem as anyone. I’m just as guilty of buying things I didn’t really need, of driving when I could have walked, of flying when I could have not, of wasting when I should have been more careful, of living such a life of privilege that if everyone on earth lived like I do, we would need three Earths just to provide the resources for that lifestyle.
I’m also sorry that at many critical junctions in our political history, we as a nation elected politicians who denied the science of climate change, who actively worked to undo any efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, to reduce our incredibly high deforestation rate, or to tackle our growing biodiversity crisis and extinction rate.
Fun fact: Australia had one of the first carbon emissions trading schemes in the world. This was a system that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard introduced, that was designed to put a cap – a limit – on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that businesses and industries were legally allowed to release each year. If they wanted to put out more emissions than the cap allowed, they would have to pay a lot extra. But if they reduced their carbon emissions, they could sell those extra allowances for credit.
These schemes now exist around the world, and they’re considered one of the most important ways to reduce carbon emissions because they make the biggest polluters pay the most.
And that scheme worked. In the two years that it ran, from 2012 to 2014, Australia’s carbon emissions dropped a lot. Then Tony Abbott got elected, and immediately cancelled the scheme. Our emissions went back up. We remain one of few nations to have cancelled a successful emissions trading scheme. We – the Australian voting public – failed you then.
I’m sorry especially to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to First Nations people in colonised lands around the world. We call it human-induced climate change, but really it’s colonisation-induced climate change. Because we know that Aboriginal people have been living on this continent for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, and they cared for this country. They didn’t cause a system-wide climatic catastrophe.
That came with European colonisation of resource-rich continents like Australia and Africa, and the exploitation of their natural, mineral and human resources. It came with a colonial mindset that brought capitalism and quick disposable convenience and an obsession with economic growth and personal wealth at any cost.
And finally, I’m sorry that we adults have told you that it was up to you to fix this. That we had ‘hope’ in you, the next generation, that we have put that responsibility on you to save us from this catastrophe that we have caused.
‘Cos it’s pretty scary. I’m scared and anxious about climate change. There’s even a diagnosis for that now – eco-anxiety. I’ve experienced that. I don’t think there’s many people who aren’t worried about what the future holds for this planet and our place in it.
It’s ok to be anxious and scared. It’s going to be a pretty rough time for all of us. We up here in the Blue Mountains experienced a tiny taste of what’s in store in 2019/2020 with the bushfires, and I’m sure many of you remember that time.
Here in the mountains, we’re going to be dealing with a lot more bushfires and heatwaves and droughts, bigger and more extreme storms. On the coast they’re going to face heatwaves and droughts and also floods and sea-level rise. There is literally nowhere in Australia that won’t face serious, life-threatening extreme weather events on a regular basis.
Globally, we’re going to see shortages in food and water, we’re going to see mass migrations of climate refugees not just between countries but within them. We’re going to see parts of our own country become unliveable and people will have to move because of that. We will become climate refugees in our own nations.
Do you think we’re doomed?
The fossil fuel industry want you to believe that we’re doomed. They want us to accept that this problem is simply too big, too hard to fix. Because that serves their interests very well indeed.
If we believe the lie that climate change is too big and too hard to solve, then we give up, and we keep doing what we’ve always done, which is burn fossil fuels, consume and waste, and keep kicking this existential can down the road to future generations and to 3C, 4C, 5C, extinction.
The fossil fuel industry and the people that profit from it really don’t care. They just want to keep making big bonuses for their executives, and the shareholders are happy for them to keep doing that because it means they also get more money.
They want you to feel powerless.
Fun fact: the idea of the carbon footprint – the measure of our personal impact on climate change – was invented by an advertising firm that worked for BP, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, in the early 2000s.
Why? Because they wanted you – the individual – to take the blame and responsibility for their greed and their destruction. They wanted us spending all our time and energy making relatively low-impact changes to our daily lives, instead of spending our time and energy on collective mass actions that would drive the kind of political and economic changes that would seriously threaten their business model.
So if you want to start being mad, start there, with that mass manipulation and guilt-trip we’ve all been suffering from for twenty years.
Just be clear: we do need to make changes to our daily lives to combat and prepare for climate change. But those changes are not enough to save us.
Yesterday was the start of COP30. COP is short for Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – bit of a mouthful. It’s happening in Brazil for the next two weeks. It’s a global gathering of representatives from every nation to try to work out how to deal with climate change.
The first COP was in Berlin in 1995 – 30 years ago. That’s how long we’ve been seriously trying to get to grips with climate change at a global level. COP3 in Japan in 1997 led to what’s called the Kyoto Protocol, which was the first real conversation and goal-setting about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. COP21 in Paris in 2015 led to the Paris agreement, which was a much more urgent ‘oh my god we really need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’.
These conferences, for all their failings, give me hope. Because all these people are trying to do something, they’re accepting the science, they’re making – or at least promising to make – big changes. They’re looking at how wealthier countries can support less wealthy countries to make changes.
So there are a whole lot of reasons for hope.
Fun facts:
In the first six months of this year, wind and solar generated more electricity than coal globally. Marks the first time that renewables have overtaken coal. Solar electricity is now the world’s cheapest form of electricity, and the cost of solar panels has dropped by 90% over the past 15 years. Australia has one of the highest rates of rooftop solar panels in the world. We have so much renewable electricity that the government is going to give every household on the east coast three free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, starting next year.
We have ALL the technological solutions to solve climate change. We’ve had them for decades. We’ve known about climate change for half a century. This has never been because we couldn’t fix it. It’s because we wouldn’t fix it.
Fact: The ACT – the seat of federal government – is powered by 100% renewable electricity.
Another fact: on 28 May, a German court delivered a bombshell ruling for climate justice. It ruled that major greenhouse-gas emitters could be held liable for costs of damage in the future, on the basis of their proportional contribution to global emissions. It means that the big polluters driving climate change can finally be held legally responsible for the harm they have caused. It means we can grab ‘em by the profits. We can legally kick them where it really really hurts.
Another fun fact: giant pandas are no longer listed as endangered. They’re still vulnerable, but they’re back from the brink of extinction.
Fun fact: Tony Abbott, who cancelled our emissions trading scheme and set climate change action back by a decade, lost his seat to an independent female candidate who promised to act on climate change. Since then, Australia has elected more and more independent and ‘teal’ candidates with strong climate change policies.
These are not small things. And they all happened because of collective power – of consumers, of voters, of governments, of activists, of climate lawyers, and of individuals who stood up and said ‘not on my watch’.
I’m going to quote Greta Thunberg because she is the leader we need to listen to: “Hope is not passive. Hope is not ‘blah blah blah’. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.”
Hope is taking action. Hope lies in finding out that you are not powerless.
So here is my advice to you: now, and at every stage of your life, find your power and use it. As teenagers, you can’t yet vote, so you might feel like there’s nothing you can do but you have so much power.
Power doesn’t mean the ability to make big changes and fix big problems. It means the ability to change even small things,
You live in families and communities that you can talk to about climate change. You have power in how, where and why you spend your money, and you can influence your parents and grandparents in how they use their consumer and investor power. You have the power to protest – big and small. Protest is going to become more and more vital, as a way of showing governments and businesses that we want change.
You can’t yet vote but you can write, call, email, speak to your political representatives – Trish Doyle and Susan Templeman – and tell them that you want them to do more, to do better. You have that right, even as young people.
And when you can vote, vote hard.
In every stage of your life, find your power, and use it. And know that the more privileged you are, the more power you have. And as Uncle Ben said, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’.
I interviewed a wonderful scientist recently – Professor Emma Johnston, who’s a marine ecologist. She talks about how ecosystems deal with huge upheavals and disturbances, and one of the most important things that makes an ecosystem like a coral reef more resilient is connections between its inhabitants.
For us, that’s community. It’s helping each other.
I was at the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival on the weekend, and one of the authors – James Bradley, who writes a lot about climate change – said something that really stuck with me.
He said that in all the disaster and apocalypse movies that come out of Hollywood, it’s all about people turning on each other and going all disaster-preppers and looting and people shooting each other to protect their own little hoard of stuff.
But in all the many disasters we’ve experienced in Australia, that’s not what happens. When we have bushfires and floods and storms and droughts, what we see is people helping each other, working together, collective action, and bringing change through that.
That is hope.”
Bianca Nogrady 