City of Sydney set to vote on ‘climate emergency’
The City of Sydney Council is expected to declare a “climate emergency”, with one independent councillor aligned with Lord Mayor Clover Moore saying she was inspired by students who walked out of class to protest earlier this year.
NSW
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The City of Sydney Council is expected to declare a “climate emergency”, with one independent councillor aligned with Lord Mayor Clover Moore saying she was inspired by students who walked out of class to protest earlier this year.
The council will meet on Monday night to consider voting for the motion, declaring climate change “poses a serious risk to the people of Sydney”.
In an opinion piece published by The Daily Telegraph online, Councillor Jess Miller, a member of Ms Moore’s Independent Team, dismissed critics of stunts such as the school climate strike.
“You might not agree with tactics like kids missing school and that’s OK, we can agree to disagree — but it’s hard to disagree with the three very simple things at the heart of the climate emergency movement: they are asking that governments tell us the truth, act now, and go beyond politics,” she said.
“Telling the truth means measuring and understanding the cost of the climate emergency and sharing this with the community.”
She said she was in part inspired by the striking students and the Extinction Rebellion, an activist outfit which has staged protests all over the world, including one in which 70 people were arrested outside the New York Times office last week.
“Tonight I will be voting to declare a climate emergency. Thanks to the Extinction Rebellion and Student Strikers, cities, states or — in the case of Canada and the UK — countries all over the world are declaring ‘climate emergencies’,” Ms Miller wrote.
“Declaring a climate emergency is not just an effort to save our ecological systems, but an opportunity to have a conversation about how much it will cost and who will pay.”
If passed, the declaration would follow similar motions by more than 20 local governments across the country in recent weeks.
Ms Miller said she would support the emergency declaration because it would force a conversation about how much climate change would cost and “who would pay”.
“A climate emergency is meaningless if we aren’t trying to answer this question,” she said. “In Sydney alone, 24 hours of disruption to transport networks due to weather events can reduce GDP by $30 million — a figure not covered by insurance.”
City of Sydney is expected to pass the declaration.
Ms Moore said increased anxiety among the community about climate change inaction and the frequency of natural disasters and heatwaves were a significant concern.
“Heatwaves on our continent are now five times more likely,” she said.