David Lovejoy, Echo founder
Something has changed in the climate crisis argument.
Those who think nothing can be done, those who think nothing should be done, and those who deny there is any reason to do anything at all now have to make those arguments against the background of raging fires in the Amazon and northern boreal forests.
There is nowhere to hide if your preferred position is to continue business as usual. It means admitting a cold-blooded disregard for the consequences.
So the strategy now is not to deny, it is to glory in the destruction we are wreaking on the world. A kind of insanity has taken over the leaders of Australian parties and mining corporations. They don’t know how to run a world where the organising principle isn’t exploitation, so they have stopped trying to mitigate the problem of runaway ecological collapse and intend to aggravate it instead.
They are like those warped people who hold dinners where only endangered species are on the menu, and whose ambition is to eat the last specimen of an animal that has been driven extinct.
Those in power refuse to even consider planning the changes that need to happen quickly if we are to avoid planetary disaster; instead they are planning how to suppress public protest at their lack of action, how to evoke increasingly vicious law and order campaigns to maintain their position, and no doubt how to sneak away to prepared doomsday bunkers when the time comes.
It is impossible to trust any mainstream politician. Both major parties are supporting massive increases in coal mining, the coalition because it is owned by the fossil-fuel industry and the ALP because it has cravenly submitted to what it thinks is electoral realism. The Labor government in Queensland has even embraced the Joh Bjelke-Petersen model of lies and propaganda to demonise those who protest against its support for Adani.
We have already seen greedy and malevolent males with a sense of entitlement, control of the media, and the levers of power sneering at school children when they protest against the destruction of their future. It will get worse now the gloves are off.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
