Climate change rallies held across Australia urge Tony Abbott to act now

Extract from The Guardian

Tens of thousands of people take part in the first leg of a global wave of protests ahead of the UN climate summit in New York

People’s climate march – liveblog

• Oliver Milman
• theguardian.com, Sunday 21 September 2014 16.34 AEST

Families, young people and the elderly were among the 10,000 estimated to have attended the People’s Climate March in Melbourne. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP

Tens of thousands of people have attended climate change rallies across Australia, in the first leg of a global wave of protests calling for tougher action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the UN climate summit in New York next week.
The main People’s Climate March rally was held in Melbourne on Sunday, with Victoria police estimating at least 10,000 attended. Organisers put the figure closer to 20,000, with families, young people and the elderly making the most of the sunshine to urge the prime minister, Tony Abbott, to do more to tackle climate change.
There were also marches in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Newcastle and Darwin. The rallies, along with gatherings in cities across south-east Asia and Europe, are a prelude to what is expected to be a 100,000-strong climate march in New York.
Protesters at the Australian rallies, organised by 350.org and activist group GetUp, denounced the Coalition government’s axing of the carbon price. There was also vocal support for the renewable energy target, currently under review, and the protection of ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef. 

Beyond coal and gas: attendees at the Sydney rally form a human sign.

A one-day summit will be held by the UN next week to galvanise political support for a new international treaty to cut greenhouses gases beyond 2020. The final stages of the agreement will be hammered out at a UN meeting in Paris in 2015.
Leaders from more than 120 countries will attend the summit, although this number does not include Abbott, who will be in New York the following day for a UN meeting on security issues.
The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, will represent Australia at the climate conference, although she will reportedly not reveal what Australia’s emissions reduction target beyond 2020 will be. Australia currently has a goal of a 5% cut in emissions by 2020, based on 2000 levels.
Mark Butler, Labor’s environment spokesman, told journalists before the Melbourne climate rally that Abbott should have attended the UN climate meeting. But Butler would not specify what Labor’s position was on post-2020 emissions cuts.
“Both major parties had strong commitments to carbon pollution reduction based on a range of conditions,” he said.
“It’s not clear whether those conditions have been satisfied. We haven’t got a position [on post-2020] yet. That’s the serious work Australia should be doing now, but instead the Abbott government is busy dismantling the good work we’ve done to date.”
Greens leader Christine Milne told the rally Australia should be net carbon zero by 2020, adding: “The reign of fossil fuels is over. What we now have to do is end the reign of the fossil fools who keep it going.
“We want no more delays. Climate change is real, it is accelerating, we are on a trajectory for four degrees of warming which is an unlivable planet and we won’t stand for it. That is what we have to convey to Tony Abbott and leaders around the world.”

The rallying cry at the Melbourne march: ‘What do we want? Climate action. When do we want it? Ten years ago.’ Photograph: GetUp!

The Melbourne rally was brimming with personal antipathy towards Abbott, with a giant puppet of the prime minister paraded throughout the crowd and verbally abused. One placard depicted Abbott as a wolf.
But the mood was generally good-natured, and perhaps even a little downbeat compared to a previous climate rally in November, which took place before the carbon price was repealed.
Chants of “What do we want? Climate action. When do we want it?” were met with the odd call of “10 years ago” rather than the planned “now.” It felt like a crowd weary of fighting this battle.
Melbourne woman Victoria Marshall-Cerins was there with her daughter Anna.
“I’m deeply concerned about my children’s future, they are the ones who will have to clean it up,” she told Guardian Australia. “Australia is now dragging its heels. From one of the world’s leaders, we’re now going backwards. We’re embarrassing.”
Marshall-Cerins said she didn’t like to talk about the ramifications of climate change in front of Anna.
“She gets quite anxious,” she said. “It’s hard to articulate in front of her. It’s the single greatest threat to our way of life since the 1940s.”
Jeremy Lawrence, who had donned a papier-mâché shark as a hat, said he was marching as an “economic rationalist and libertarian”.
“We have a lot of old coal-fired power stations ending their useful life,” he told Guardian Australia. “They have to be phased out in a rational way.
“The cheapest way of supplying electricity to the whole of the country is distributed solar. I just don’t understand what the problem is for the Liberal party, which is meant to be the economic rationalist party, to support that.”
The Climate Institute said it hoped to see Australia’s timeline for setting post-2020 emissions reduction goals in New York.
“We will be looking for a recommitment to the international goal of avoiding 2C warming and an independent, transparent process and timeline for new post-2020 targets, which Australia is due to indicate to other countries next year,” said John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute.
“Now is the time for Australia to come clean on its commitments. Is the government going to be fair dinkum about these climate negotiations, or will they be playing poker with the planet’s wellbeing?”