TOM MANN
Federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten slammed Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s attitude to climate change at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane today.
The Labor frontman said Mr Abbott is putting domestic politics front and centre at the G20 and the world’s leaders are ‘scratching their heads’ at Australia’s reluctance to talk climate change.
“The rest of the world recognises that climate change is a major economic issue, a major security issue and a major environment issue,” Mr Shorten said.
“But here we have Tony Abbott more interested and complaining about the fact that Australian politics won’t endorse his broken promises like his new taxes on the sick in Australia.”
“Tony Abbott is in denial about being in climate change denial.”
He said Prime Minister Abbott was using G20 as a tool to promote national agendas.
“He seems to determined to run a peculiarly Australian domestic political partisan fight.”
“Now is the time for Tony Abbott to move from opposition brawler to international statesman.”
Mr Shorten said he hopes the G20 summit and the media focus it draws will encourage leaders to make real progress on climate change solutions.
“It would be a real shame to have this calibre and weight of world power, influence and leadership and us not to,” he said.
“It’s been given fantastic momentum by the leadership of the President of the United States and the President of China, and the world has decided again to have genuine multilateral, international work on climate change.
“President Obama’s speech this morning I think has been very well received in Australia and hopefully beyond Australia and it contrasts to the lack of vision being articulated by Australia’s own national leader on climate change.”
With 60+ BILLION food animals on the planet our best chance to mitigate climate change is to severely reduce consumption of animal foods. More than 1/3 of human induced warming is attributable to animal agriculture. Methane is 24 times more potent than CO2 but takes only 7 years to cycle out of the atmosphere. CO2 takes around 100 years to come out. Human pursuit of animal protein is the leading cause of methane release and a primary cause of CO2 concentrating in the atmosphere. Check the facts and act!
“As environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.” Worldwatch Institute, “Is Meat Sustainable?”
“If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains… the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.” Environmental Defense Fund
“A 1% reduction in world-wide meat intake has the same benefit as a three trillion-dollar investment in solar energy.” ~ Chris Mentzel, CEO of Clean Energy