Earthsign: What would you like for Christmas?

Friday, December 16, 2011

What would you like for Christmas?

What would you like for Christmas? The Quit Coal Collective, a Melbourne-based collective affiliated with Friends of the Earth would like an end to expansion of the coal industry in Victoria. This is important because building new coal infrastructure locks in decades of dirty, old technology, when we should be moving towards clean, renewable energy. I have previously blogged about the Baillieu State government's disgraceful, irresponsible support for the growth of Victoria's (brown) coal industry.

Bacchus Action, September 19 2011 from Quit Coal on Vimeo.

The Quit Coal collective has already initiated many effective anti-coal actions and needs and deserves our support. Go to their website and get involved.

The 100% Renewables Campaign would like you to send an e-card to your local pollie to say thanks (or less thanks!) for their efforts this year and to tell them that 2012 needs to be the year of big solar. 2012 is going to be a big year for the 100% Renewables campaign so kick it off with this small easy action. Go to their website and do it. You'll feel better!

For Christmas I would like some feedback. After two years of posting more than once weekly on average the numbers of page views have crept up to between 50 and 60 per day. Modest growth but encouraging – even allowing for the numbers who have arrived on the blog as a result of an unrelated web search. However most of the recent rapid growth in interest has been from the United States. Currently 90% of page views originate in the US. In the last week of about 360 page views 293 were from the United States and only 28 originated in Australia. Thankful as I am that anyone reads my ramblings I am at a loss to know why interest is so high off shore given the strong local bias of the content. Anyone got any comments on this?

Finally Merry Christmas to anyone reading this. Hardened campaigners, nervous fringe dwellers, resistant politicians, delusional deniers and paid up deliverers of misinformation from industry funded astro-turf groups; we all live on this tiny fragile rock in the endless cosmos. Our futures are inextricably bound together and at this time of Good-will to all I wish you all the best.

Doug Evans

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What this blog is about

This blog is a vehicle for communicating my thoughts on the environmental crisis confronting us and our shift to a clean green future. It is also a means for spreading the word on community actions and information sources supporting this shift.

The science monitoring the atmospheric changes in train and their climatic and environmental impact is increasingly dire. The measures required to avoid runaway global warming are increasingly stringent and the time frame for undertaking these measures becomes tighter and tighter. The political and economic forces opposing necessary change are powerful, determined and deeply embedded.

The possibility of cultural change may be slight but we either do what we can to promote the necessary changes or become complicit with our unheeding politicians and the blind self interest of the industry lobbyists in the extreme degradation-of, perhaps the destruction of our collective future.There is hope. As Margaret Mead said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."