Climate change is delivering unprecedented climate patterns across Australia. The use of fossil fuels is now directly proven to be a key driver in climate change and has resulted in a 1.5C temperature rise since the industrial revolution. To keep temperatures below 2C is a herculean task.

The transition to zero emission renewable energy is now finally occurring. This comes with its own challenges. Industrial scale renewable projects are sometimes in the wrong locations.

Since the early 2000s, FoE Australia has raised awareness about the impacts of climate change on the peoples of the Pacific Islands region. Our research, publications and events have highlighted the effects of more frequent and more extreme weather events, sea level rise and ocean warming and acidification - and the threat of displacement and forced migration.

With the influx of so many new people to Kuranda, this month we're revisiting wildlife friendly ways of living.

The Climate Crisis

In some respects, preventing climate breakdown is highly complicated. But in another, it’s really simple. We need to:

• leave fossil fuels in the ground,
• stop deforestation,
• eat a mainly plant based diet,
• live simpler lives and
• reduce the waste we produce.

 'At the UN climate summit in Glasgow last month, governments failed to set the world on a path to reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 in order to stabilise the climate close to 1.5 degrees but did close the gap to that trajectory.'  according to Cam Walker of Friends of the Earth (FoE)  Australia.'

Congratulations to FoE FNQ member Margie Pestorius who recently won the Local Agent for Peace Award from the Rotary Peace Centre of Queensland University. Here she writes about her peace work and how it relates to environmental protection.

Cause we are the champions of the world.

So here is the rub. The very way that we live has become the thing that threatens to destroy us. To understand and believe the science is to accept that over the last seventy years particularly we have lived well beyond our biological means and consequently our only support system is faltering.

Many of you will have spotted the articles in ABC News and the Guardian about all the frog deaths in the eastern and southern states. This tragedy follows on the heels of the carnage caused by the notorious bushfires of the 2019/2020 summer but the cause is likely to be the opposite situation: bitter cold!

Hope is strong.

If you’ve never written a letter to a politician, now is the time to start. The next federal election could be in November this year or latest May of next year. The most important action that you can take is to write to your local federal member, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition telling them that you will not vote for a representative or a party that does not commit to zero greenhouse gas emissions and no new coal-mines and coal power-stations by 2030. Here is why.

Home, home again, I like to be here when I can.

The universe came out of the big bang about 13.8 billion years ago. Our planet earth is about 4.5 billion years old.