Our final session for the year was held during the time of the bushfire emergencies in NSW and Queensland, and so the link between climate change and bushfires was a major topic of discussion. There was also much disappointment, and frustration, with the federal government's refusal to acknowledge the connection between a warming world and more frequent bush fires.
We read an article by Greg Mullins, a former Fire & Rescue NSW commissioner who has 47 years of experience in fighting fires. He said these fires are unprecedented and are burning in places and at intensities never before experienced - rainforests in norther NSW and tropical Queensland, and the formerly wet old-growth forests in Tasmania. This drought which has been made worse by climate change is more intense than the Millennium Drought, with higher levels of evaporation due to higher temperatures. This has dried out the bush and made it easier for fires to start, easier for them to spread quickly, and enabling spot fires to start twice as far ahead of the main fires as we would normally expect.

For most of this year the news about climate change has been very depressing with very little good news and so I decided that we would finish the year looking at some positive developments. An obvious place to start was to look at the developments with renewable energy. Rooftop solar installations set a new record during October and there are now more than 2.2 million homes and businesses in Australia with small scale rooftop solar installations.

We also learnt that the output of wind and solar generation was greater than the output from brown coal for the entire September quarter. This was the first time that had happened for the whole quarter.

More good news was that renewables, solar, wind and hydro, combined to deliver more than half the power into the National Electricity Market for ten minutes on Wednesday 6th November.  The continuous rollout of rooftop solar (mentioned above) was a key driver in reaching this achievement.

We also heard about the potential for hydrogen to be a game-changing technology in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Hydrogen is a versatile fuel capable of powering everything from household appliances to transport to industrial processes, and can be stored in our gas pipelines or shipped overseas.
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John Lloyd

We started our first session in October with reports from people who had attended 'School Strike 4 Climate' rallies in Shepparton and Wangaratta. The general feeling was that the rallies were worth attending.

We then spent some time discussing the "Greta Thunberg phenomenon" and watched a video of her address to the UN summit on climate change - which our Prime Minister did not attend!
We also watched the recent Foreign Correspondent program about three young women leaders of climate action in Germany, USA and Australia. These young women, teenagers or early 20's, were most impressive with what they had done to organise large climate movements in their home countries.

One of the articles discussed was by Tim Flannery, Climate Councillor and well known climate activist, who said that climate deniers are a threat to our children, and that the lack of climate action by our government leads him to believe that his 20 years of climate activism has been a colossal failure.

In the week leading up to our second session in October there had been lots of climate protests by the Extinction Rebellion groups causing quite a lot of disruption to people in our capital cities. There was much discussion about how annoying these protest were and if they would achieve their goal of more action on climate change.

This lead to discussion about how civil disobedience, or non-violent resistance, had resulted in significant achievements in the past such as the civil rights movement in the USA and Gandhi in India, and even our own 'anti-Vietnam War' marches.
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One of the articles we read summed up the situation as follows. "Whatever your views on civil disobedience, the climate emergency would be far less serious if governments had taken action decades ago. Further inaction will only lead to more numerous and active social movements, driven by the same mixture of love and rage that provoked Extinction'.

John Lloyd