Letters: Taking a first step towards a better future

Corporations in the US and Australia aren't waiting for politicians to act on climate change and are developing their own strategies to address the issue.

David Bennett (September 2) points out that the US, China and Australia are huge emitters of CO2 and do not look like changing any time soon.

What he fails to state - maybe he is unaware - is that corporations in both the US and Australia have decided against waiting for politicians to act. Some have developed, while others are developing, their own strategies to address the issue.

Interesting that his response to Rattenbury's "considered column" (August 31), motivated him to write some time over the weekend.

My attempt (August 24) to gather information as to what facts, those that scientists have used to base their urgent action declarations on, that he disagrees with remains unanswered.

This call for clarification resulted from a statement David wrote of not being convinced of the role CO2 is playing in climate change.

When Pacific Helmets was conceived. it would have gone nowhere if a naysayer attitude had been adopted. By the same token, the international success it enjoys today, I am sure, has been the result of incremental steps taken throughout its 36-year history.

None of us know how events will unfold over the next several decades, but somewhere down the track people will be asking what did you do when the scientific community was issuing warnings and demanding action.

Among the many answers that will be uttered, some will say I sat back and waited for others to act. Others will say they acted on their hope for the future, of the world they wanted to hand on to following generations.

Some incremental steps seem insignificant and yet they all contribute to the building of the momentum required for change to occur.

MAX WARBURTON
Whanganui

Parliamentary practice

Between the editorial and FG Rose's letter in Tuesday's paper, the reader could be fooled into thinking that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II have been throwing their weight around and denying democracy to the people of Britain by proroguing Parliament.

This "closing down" of Parliament is standard practice to begin a new Parliament, and was overdue by a year or more. It is not some terrible wielding of tyrannical power or some unusual act.

The cries, that the closing of Parliament is denying MPs the chance to talk about the upcoming Brexit or to take action against it, are absurd.

They can talk all they like during this period, while the closure only affects four days that Parliament would have been sitting anyway.

There is plenty of time after the opening of Parliament for MPs to talk and act.
Perhaps the funniest part of all is the fact that the democratic vote for Brexit was a clear mandate for the British Government to take Britain out of the EU, yet those complaining the most about the proroguing of Parliament as an assault on democracy are those working the hardest to deny or overturn the clear democratic result of the referendum.

The scaremongering about the terrible things that might happen in the case of a no-deal Brexit is just another attempt to deny the British people what they voted for in an unprecedented turnout of voters.

The vote was made, the people spoke, now the representatives of the people need to get the job done.

K A BENFELL
Gonville

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