Climate change - When will we take this crisis seriously?

YESTERDAY Environment Minister John Gormley said he believed climate change is the most fundamental and far-reaching challenge facing humanity.

He warned that this is a national and an international problem and that it threatens everything we have achieved or might achieve.

Because our dominant political parties have not engaged with this crisis it has been left to the Greens to drive the agenda. This brought the Greens prominence they might not otherwise have enjoyed, but it consigned this do-or-die issue to the fringes of political discourse. This marginalisation is a tacit downgrading of the issue, a downgrading we will all come to regret.