KEEP TURNING UP – as the climate bill arrives

The year the climate bill

arrived.

After more than a decade of talk about it, it seems like this is the year with national emergencies and heat lockdowns and 2 million people in China evacuated from flooding and everything we can see happening around the world.

I mean, I can just look out of the window at my backyard.

The plants and flowers out there are confused.

They seem to think it's spring already.

And I know that the farmers and the winemakers can see it on their fields.

The world is warming.

And the bill for all our climate pollution is arriving.

Crops failure.

This heatwave in Europe has cut an estimated 10 million tons from European grain forecasts.

That's the same as a loss of 2 billion euros.

The same as 3.2 billion Australian dollars.

In the United Kingdom alone, just one week of heatwave meant 24 million working hours were lost.

because of extreme heat.

These economic losses, that's the climate bill.

And at the same time, because of what I would call the Trump effect, over the past year, 45 different governments have made decisions to delay action on climate, to weaken their regulations, to abandon the targets that they have, and to give fossil fuel industries even more room to expand.

At exactly the time when you would think the climate crisis is becoming impossible to ignore, we have these politicians now.

They can look out their windows outside their parliament buildings and see the effects that the heat has on their societies, the fires and the floods and the losses.

And yet they choose to step backwards.

And the media is looking the other way too.

According to the Media and Climate Change Observatory, global news coverage of climate change in the first five months of this year was 35% lower than the same period last year.

So we have a crisis that's going more and more dangerous.

We have politicians who are going the wrong way, making our laws weaker.

And we have the media talking about it less.