Hamilton Spectator
Tuesday 1/5/2007 Page: 3
MEMBERS of the Lake Bolac community have urged local, state and federal politicians to look at renewable energy solutions to help with global warming issues.
The Lake Bolac Eel Festival committee has sent a communique to the Minister for Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, outlining their concerns and stating they did not believe the current policies on energy generation effectively address global warming. This move was prompted after a green energy activist, Howard Morrison, spoke at festival about renewable energy and helped develop the communique with people from the forum.
It has been sent to Australian of the Year and environmentalist, Tim Flannery, Shadow Minister for climate change and environment, Peter Garrett, as well as international sustainability leaders like the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Canadian environmental scientist, David Suzuki, and former US Vice President, Al Gore.
The communique, directed to Mr Turnbull, said: "We seek that you articulate an energy generation policy for the Federal election that clearly shows how you will effect change from combustion based power generation to renewables being the primary source of electricity for Australia. "We further seek that you commit funding to effect this transition." Festival committee chairman, David Allen, said the event was basically a music festival with a strong environmental influence.
As a farmer he has seen the effects of the drought and global warming first hand and he said upmost in his mind were the decrease in rain and the increase in temperatures they'd seen recently. "The lake's empty and the eels are dead," Mr Allen said. "That's the most visual affect for us that something's wrong with the drought and it may also be global warming."
He said there were many benefits to adopting renewable energy solutions, including that they were more regionalised, with such technologies as solar panels, geothermal and wind turbines able to be adopted. "One of the things is wave energy. This is new and proven and could be used right around Australia," Mr Allen said.
He said in the short term they wanted to get people talking about renewable energy so they would know about it, as there were some technologies he didn't know about until recently. "There's a number of options (out) there and getting people talking about it, especially the Government, (is their aim)," Mr Allen said. "Hopefully the Government can develop strategies ahead of the election to help slow down the process of global warming."
Mr Allen said they had received a letter stating that Governor Schwarzenegger had gotten the communique but there was no response yet. They forwarded it to him because he's leading America in renewable energy projects and a lot of Australian technologists, especially in the solar field, were going over there.
Some of the aims of the Lake Bolac Eel Festival include promoting the restoration of Lake Bolac and surrounding streams to an ecologically sustainable state, to promote ecologically sustainable rural practices, provide a gathering place for people who care about the environment and respect Aboriginal cultural heritage and to provide a low cost public event.
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