Friends,

We have just had the highest ever recorded temperatures in South Eastern Australia and
now the worst ever loss of life from bushfires in Australia's recorded history, with a confirmed death toll of 181.

This local tragedy in my home state just reinforces the pattern of devastation around the
world already being caused by global warming. In other places the death toll from floods and
failures of food production has dwarfed our local tragedy.

I think we can no longer talk about trying to avoid dangerous climate change. Instead I think
we need to take emergency action to restore, at emergency speed, a truly safe climate i.e. the
climate conditions of the preindustrial holocene. It is clear that there is already too much
CO2 in the air and the Earth is already too hot.

Just days before the bushfire tragedy we had a massive national grass roots climate summit
in the national capital Canberra. The Summit agreed with huge majorities (all over 75%) that:

- the goal of the Australian grassroots climate movement is to restore a safe climate
- that the best scientific estimate (currently) of a safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 300
ppm (the level required to be sure that the Arctic sea ice can be restored)
- that we should work to achieve 100% renewable energy supply by 2020
- that we should work to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions at emergency speed
- that we must close down the fossil fuel industry.

These are huge goals (specially for the largest coal exporting nation on earth). Nobody at the
summit was under any illusion that the goals would be easy to achieve. But we decided that
at last we should throw off our reticence and just go for what is needed, rather than
continuing to compromise and allow dangerous climate conditions to intensify.

Best wishes,

Philip

Philip Sutton
Convener, Greenleap Strategic Institute
Director, Strategy, Green Innovations Inc.
Co-author of Climate Code Red http://climatecodered.net