Boyd Kellner, Newrybar
Global Climate Strike 20 September, was spearheaded by students determined to highlight the urgent need for concrete political action to halt the rising trajectory of CO2 levels rising further.
Australia, as the largest per capita emitter of CO2,continues to obfuscate by blame-shifting to larger industrialised nations, disingenuously arguing it is fulfilling its duty to reduce emissions. Young people have run out of patience as they watch in horror the unfolding environmental destruction and crisis: deforestation, species extinction, forest fires, rising sea levels, and droughts as a result of increasingly radical weather bringing further uncertainty and anxiety for many.
Richard Hil’s article Echo 18 September, provides a poignant reminder and compelling case for immediate political action on the increasing climate emergency, by holding those responsible to account. Likewise Jason van Tol’s letter, Echo 18 September; historical analogy provides an accurate analysis of the material conditions ripe for transitional change from the old order, to a new.
We need nothing less than a complete reorganisation of Western political economy –goods produced to industrial methods, global supply chains, resource extraction, energy production and use production, agriculture, housing and building design and organisation of employment.
‘Green New Deal’ US Democratic Socialists and UK Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn signal the tentative beginning of positive political change.
Despondency and nihilistic thinking, a product of a highly individualistic society, contrasts the student-inspired Global Strike, collectively demonstrating that people power movements can and will overcome this crisis.
Mainstream politics is not an option any more, self organised mass mobilisation with key demands and achievable transitional goals is critical to heading off this developing crisis.
The focus must now be on political solutions, by the people, not the institutions of establishment power and privilege.
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. 
