Advocacy

Initiatives

• Petitioned the European Parliament to adopt tariffs against climate pariah nations that were cynically exporting fossil fuels in great quantity or continuing out beyond the Paris zero emissions date of 2050 – this includes Australia. Although the petition attracted few names, it was commended by the Spanish EP Chair of the petitions committee and circulated to relevant committees.  Europe now has a carbon border adjustment mechanism that achieves the same outcome – perhaps the petition helped!
• Drafted a “Duty of Care” bill for the Australian Federal Government in an attempt to impose on our environment ministers their obvious moral responsibilities towards future generations and hence to stop the approvals of new fossil fuel extractions and stop the exports that quadruple Australia’s true climate liability. Meanwhile Senator David Pocock was already drafting a “Duty of Care” bill which was introduced in 2023 but rejected by a Senate review despite almost unanimous public support.  Nigel forwarded his draft to Senator Pocock.
• Advocates for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby Carbon Fee and Dividend policy to replace the “Safeguard Mechanism” as Australia’s principal climate policy.  The “Safeguard Mechanism” relies on the fundamentally flawed idea of carbon trading and offsets, which essentially allow a polluter to buy the right to pretend to not pollute from say a forester who must then pretend that their trees contain no carbon (because they’ve already sold it).
• Advocates for bi-directional charging for electric vehicles in homes. This is extremely strategic for optimising the uptake of both rooftop solar and electric vehicles and enabling the grid to transition to 100% renewables by effectively putting a vast amount of distributed car battery storage on the grid and overcoming the problem of renewables intermittency and giving all Australians and businesses access to marginally free electricity and transport.
• Led a campaign to get Net Zero emissions mandated within the National Construction Code V2 for housing. Although the campaign failed in September 2022, he continues to advocate for it within NSW, to be implemented through BASIX.  If NSW made this change it would make all new houses immediately more affordable (the energy cost savings are up to 8 times greater than the additional mortgage payments), put rooftop solar on every new house and accelerate emissions reduction from housing 4 times faster.  It’s a no-brainer, but Australia has to date not adopted it.  If successful in NSW, it’s likely that SA, ACT, Victoria and Queensland would also adopt Net Zero quickly.
• Frustrated at mankind’s inability to see beyond economic factors and consider the survivability implications of climate change, Nigel has worked with Prof Peter Newman (Curtin WA) to research the deaths caused by climate change. Their paper is currently subject to peer review.  If approved for publication, it will reveal that recent coal mine approvals by Minister Plibersek will cause over 2 million climate related deaths from starvation, conflict, epidemics, air pollution and a wide range of climate disasters – flooding, bushfire etc.  The objective of this paper is to enable activists to hold politicians, corporate executives and investors to account for the deaths they will cause from their decisions.  Longer term it might be used in court cases for damages caused.