Articles

This article was written by Rising Tide member Steve Phillips in the wake of the election of a new Labor Government for Australia, for the New York independent media newspaper The Indypendent.

Coal trains have begun to creep slowly back into the port of Newcastle, after the Hunter Region's world-beating export coal chain was crippled by freak weather. It is a good time for us all to be asking some questions: did coal exports contribute to the storm in the first place, and if so, haven't they done enough damage?

This is a speech given by RT member Steve Phillips to a forum at the University of Sydney on March 2nd 2007, put on by the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. The day-long conference was divided into four sections: "Political Economy Perspectives", "Geopolitical Perspectives", "Policy Perspectives", and "Community Perpectives". Steve spoke in the last section. Speakers included academics, business professionals, unionists, politicians, paid and unpaid activists. The conference asked the following questions:

A slightly edited version of this article was originally published in the Newcastle Herald.

I am a Newcastle climate change activist, campaigning full-time against the expansion of the world's biggest coal port. I believe that climate change is the most urgent and important problem facing humankind, and that here in the Hunter Valley, we have a moral duty to begin the move away from coal and into sustainable alternatives, starting now. But neither I, nor any other activist or environment group, has ever laid the blame for climate change at the feet of coal mine workers.