Action stations!

Mr S sent me a link to the Big Switch campaign website the other day. It's an initiative of Greenpeace with support from quite a number of conservation groups and a couple of business organisations. It aims to promote grass-roots community action on climate change and use that as leverage to pressure individual federal politicians into ratifying Kyoto, committing to significant emissions reductions by 2020, committing to significant renewable energy production by 2020 and establishing a national emissions trading scheme.

I gave it some thought and decided to participate. My details are registered and I've sent an email to my local member of parliament. But I was most interested in the community group aspect of the campaign.

My electorate (called "Petrie" even though it does not include the actual suburb of the same name) is bizarrely-shaped with the northern and southern halves having almost nothing to do with each other. Through the Big Switch site I discovered that there's a Redcliffe Climate Action Group but I have no intention of driving all the way up there to be part of it.

Thankfully there's another group based in the adjacent electorate of Lilley, going by the (possibly temporary) name of the Brisbane North Climate Action Group. This looked like a much better fit.

So Mr S and I went along - car pooling - to a meeting of the BNCAG this evening. What a fascinating bunch of people they (we) are. A dozen in total, a handful of whom started getting together about two months ago. Highly informal, friendly, and motivated to actually do something about reducing our community's impact on the Earth, and in particular on the climate.

It's very early days. Almost embryonic, you might say. But I'm hoping that this might be the opportunity I've been looking for to get involved and make a meaningful contribution to the future of civilisation.

Next meeting in a fortnight. I'll keep you posted.