E3G

Australian Media: National Climate Change Summit

By Quentin de Molliens

The keynote speech given by E3G Founder Tom Burke at the Australian Labor Party’s National Climate Change Summit in Canberra on 31st March 2007 has been prominently reported by Australian national and regional media.

The Herald Sun was the first to focus on the summit and Tom’s speech, quoting him as saying:

This is an issue, on which we cannot afford policy failure,
There is no rewind button on the climate change.

We can’t get it wrong and go back and say ‘oh dear that was a mistake. Let’s do it differently next time around’. There is very little scope for trial and error.”

The ABC news website and the Canberra times also reached for these similar quotes.

Further reports also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.

The Sydney newspaper referred to Tom’s speech as it highlighted the economic, social, and technological challenges of global warming:

World energy use was expected to grow 50 per cent by 2030 as India, China and other developing countries strove for economic growth, Professor Burke said. On present projections most of that energy would come from fossil fuels.

If that happened, he said, the climate would change rapidly, and soon. As a result, “the very social cohesion and political stability that we are burning the fossil fuels to maintain will itself be put at risk.”

Professor Burke said the continued rapid rate of fossil fuel use was possible only if so-called clean coal technology, which is still in the demonstration phase, could be used on a large commercial scale.”