I have been wearing a “Show Your Stripes” badge (image above) for some months based on the Ed Hawkins design, and made and sold in Bairnsdale by the East Gippsland Climate Action Network. Hawkins, from the University of Reading, explained that the colour stripes design was to create conversation on global warming by illustrating the movement of temperatures below or above the average over 200 years at a particular place or country. The darker the red colour the warmer the year. It is now the eighth year of ‘Show Your Stripes Day’, held on the northern summer solstice, whose publicity states “No words, no numbers, no graphs. Just a series of vertical colours…” See youtube video here.
The badge has been on display in Traralgon in the heart of brown coal country where I have been assisting my wife while she has been receiving radiotherapy at the Latrobe Regional Hospital. This meant long periods of occupation in the waiting room with other carers/companions on a daily basis. On one occasion a carer came up to me and stated “I’m your enemy” and indicated my badge. I replied that this was not so, and asked a few polite questions. It turned out that he was a shift worker at Loy Yang and that his previous experience with climate activists was negative and argumentative, hence his introductory comment. Unfortunately this was a short conversation. I did not have the opportunity to mention the “just transition” and I did not see him again.
I have been a strong advocate of a “just transition” for workers and other dependants in the power industry for many years and have discussed it or at least mentioned it on ten pages of my blog – about seventy articles. See my “Jobs, the Just Transition and Electricity Generation” here as an example. As well I have published a series of articles on the same subject by retired CSIRO scientist Michael Borgas (see here and here). Finally I republished local resident Lorraine Bull’s letter in the Latrobe Valley Express of November 2016 on the need to start the Just Transition. Some small steps have been made to answer Lorraine’s request but mainly we are still waiting.