John Schubert, the former chairman and managing director of Esso Australia, says, Australia has reached a ‘tipping point’ on climate change.
The Commonwealth Bank chairman credits the drought, extreme weather disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in the US and Cyclone Larry in northern Queensland, record global temperatures in 2005 and former US President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth with dispelling any remaining doubts on the threat of climate change.
“I have to say that the Australian community reached a tipping point about September-October, over about a six-week period, when it was just extremely clear that the Australian community bought in that climate change was a real problem,” he told The Australian.
“If there is one piece of fact that I was shown it was probably the ice-core data that shows 650,000 years of both temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and there’s just a hugely close correlation between them and it’s pretty hard not to come to the conclusion that the carbon dioxide levels are due to fossil fuel burning, largely,” he said.
The respected company director, who sits on the board of mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton, has now joined calls for Australia to implement a carbon-trading scheme. His push comes just one day after BHP’s great rival, Rio Tinto, said the federal Government should move ahead with emissions trading even if major polluters such as China and the US refused to be involved.
With more and more corporations and company executives acknowledging climate change due to fossil fuels, the time has come for the government to supply the required policy.
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Fossil fuels… Greening…. but how can an humaing being help, since climate change is not his fault?
Hi jestering
I strongly oppose that climate change is not our fault. I see you are not seeing the big picture here. It is one of the mankinds biggest blunder and it evident that blunders have to corrected by one who made them. So the ball is in our court, lets pull up the socks and acts accordingly.
cheers
Jag
Jestering:
There are enough sources and understanding that climate change is man-made. I will not make any attempt to explain that to you.
Even without that debate, lets look at your question.
If climate change is an issue due to its effects on us, the various species on earth, the environment; irrespective of who is responsible; then as one of the most successful species on the planet we need to work towards solving the problem.
Earthquakes are not created by us however, do we not try to create solutions towards its effects. Do we not fight bushfires even though we may not create them?
If Climate Change is a problem to our planet we need to do everything we can to solve it.
Cheers,
Suhit