Address to "Switch Off Hazelwood" Climate Protest at Hazelwood Power Station, in Morwell, Victoria, by Dr Merryn Redenbach

On Sunday 13th September, after an overnight climate camp in Morwell, Victoria, five hundred protesters gathered outside Hazelwood coal fired power station. Hazelwood is one of the developed world's most polluting power stations. Among the five speakers to the rally, Dr Merryn Redenbach, a paediatric doctor and one of the protest organizers, spoke about the impacts of climate change and why the protesters were willing to risk arrest for trespass to promote the transition to renewable energy and closing down coal fired power stations.

ADDRESS TO "SWITCH OFF HAZELWOOD"

We have come here today to Hazelwood Power Station in the La Trobe Valley to deliver our community decommission orders and to deliver a message.

Our message is that Hazelwood's license to produce electricity at the price of contributing to dangerous climate change has been revoked by the Victorian community. It is time for a swift and just transition to renewable energy.

Hazelwood was commisioned in 1964, and until the 1980's owned by the people of the state of Victoria through our SEC.

When Hazelwood was built, we thought as a community and through our Government we thought that generating electricity by burning coal was the best idea we had. We've used that energy to power our state and to improve our quality of life.

THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH

But now we know that the price of continuing to provide electricity by burning coal is too high.

Coal is a major contributor to climate change. Coal fired power stations are responsible for by far the majority of Victoria's GHG emission.

If we continue to burn coal, it will cost us our quality of life. The price will include the deaths and devastation of lives of hundreds of Victorians through bushfire, heat stroke and drought. As sea levels rise it will cost us our iconic Australian beaches.
It will cost us the viability of our farms and towns, like my own hometown of Red Cliffs near Mildura. It will cost our economy and it will cost our jobs.

Beyond that, it will cost the lives of literally hundreds of millions, even billions of people world wide.

It is already costing the glaciers and rivers of Tibet and the Himalayas which regulate water flow for over a billion people who will suffer from flood followed by water shortages. Those glaciers are predicted to be gone in the next fifty years. At least 250 million children live in the drainage basin supplied by the Tibetan and Himalayan glaciers. As a doctor, I know that the death of one child is a tragedy that marks people forever. The scale of the tragedy of two hundred and fifty million children facing water shortages, food shortages and possible death is utterly inconprehensible

Climate change will cost the health and lives of millions of people across the globe including Australia as diseases like malaria and dengue fever increase their spread.

And the price will include the extinction of hundred of thousands of species that have evolved on this earth over millions of years in the space of just a few centuries.

We have come to Hazelwood to say that devastating climate change is too high a price to pay for our electricity.

WE HAVE ALSO COME WITH A MESSAGE OF HOPE.

We know there are solutions, and those solutions will enhance and enrich our lives.

We have the human, financial and natural resources we need to supply our energy through today's commercially available clean energy technology including solar thermal, solar and wind power. We can keep our houses warm, cook our food, get to work and communicate with each other without destroying our future.

We are demanding that our electricity generation be safe and be clean.

Building renewable energy will create jobs – jobs in manufacturing glass and steel for solar thermal plants, jobs in manufacturing wind turbine, jobs in installing and maintaining energy systems.

We're demanding a just transition so that the people who work in the coal industry have access to appropriate jobs and training to support themselves and their families – because they deserve work that is reliable, meaningful and safe for both them and our future.

We demanding that the government fulfill the responsibilty that is invested in them in a democratic society: we have elected them to protect out for the best interests of the whole population, and not just look to their re-election, and the industry lobbies that give them money.

And as the voters, as the community, in a democratic societywe have a right to demand that the people we have elected organize that our electricity is generated in a way that is safe for us and safe for our children and safe for our planet and creates meaningful work for our fellow Australians.

WE ARE STANDING TOGETHER

On a windy and wet weekend we've left our homes and travelled to Morwell to create change.

But we are not standing here alone.

Coming here we are standing together with a great and growing global movement to save our planet, save our ourselves and remake our future.

This movement includes young and old and from all walks of life and all levels of wealth and poverty. It includes people from the countries most reponsible for climate change and those who will suffer most from it's impacts.

We are standing together with the thousands people who attended climate camp in Blackheath, England, two weeks ago.

We're standing with the people who've attended climate camps in Canada, France and Belgium and here in Australia.

We're standing with the leaders of the Association of Small Island States who's countries are currently under real and immediate threat from rising sea levels.

We're standing with the leaders of African nations who recently called for atmospheric CO2 to be brought below 350 parts per million.

We're standing with people in 110 countries throughout the world who are taking part in a global co-ordinated movement in the 350 day of action on October 24th to ask governments to commit to bringing atmospheric CO2 below 350 parts per million.

We're standing with the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who recently spoke out for the 350 target.

We're standing with Dr James Hansen, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science, who after years of climate research, writing scientific papers and running a peak global institute was arrested when he walked in protest on to a mountain top removal coal mine earlier this year.

We are standing here is solidarity with thousands more of our community, friends and colleagues around Australia who also want to a safe future.

WHY ARE WE HERE?

We are here because we know that the lives of our children and grandchildren are at stake.

We are here because the world's best climate scientists are telling us that if we don't turn carbon emissions around in five years, we risk run away climate change that will kill billions and utterly change the face of our planet.

We are here because we have already written letters and articles, met with our politicians, we've changed our government and walked through the streets but our governments are stil not acting fast enough to protect us against what one of the world's most prominent, respected medical journals The Lancet has described as “the biggest threat to our health of the 21st Century”. Our governments are not protecting us from that threat.

We are here because we care about the fate of people who are children now. We care about children in the developing world who face starvation, thirst, poverty, forced migration and death because of climate change. We care about the future of our own children; we care about the children of the police who are here today; we care the children of coal workers; we care about the children of the politicians who aren't acting fast enough to stop run away climate change.

And we are here because we know and we believe that by acting together we can prevent runaway climate change from happening.

CALL TO ACTION

We will deliver our Community Decommission Orders and face the risk to our own personal well being of being arrested. It is an intimidating thing for each of us.

But when we compare this risks to the alternative – the loss of a future for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, the deaths of hundreds of millions of people world wide, the deaths of whole species - it is clearly a risk worth taking.

Being here at Hazelwood, delivering Community Decommission Orders, we are doing what is moral and what is ethical. We are doing what is required of us as citizens of our country and world to protect the interests not of ourselves, but the interests millions of others.

As we stand and act together today building this movement we can feel justifiably proud of ourselves of each other. I look forward to all of us continuing to work together as we build what needs to be the biggest, most unified, energetic, clever and brave movement the world has ever seen so that we can save the planet and reclaim our future.

Let's make haste towards a just transition: let's switch off Hazelwood, let's switch off coal, let's switch on renewables swiftly, fairly and justly and remake our future.