Australian environment minister Greg Hunt has been accused of going silent on climate change as the cause of dying coral in the Great Barrier Reef after a bleaching alert was raised to its highest level.
While some senators scored well on the report's -100 to +100 scale, most were middle-of-the-pack, and several scored near zero or negatively, meaning they either stayed silent on climate change or actively supported policies that exacerbate it.
All of the money announced for the reef was focusing on water quality on the reef, with the budget remaining silent on climate change, which the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has said is the most serious risk facing the reef and which is causing the current bleaching crisis.
Yet, somehow, most of our elected officials continue to remain silent on climate change.
But on the national scene, politicians remain deafeningly silent about climate change.
Contrast that with, say, Barack Obama who was mostly silent about climate change his whole first term, and managed to make it all the way through the 2012 campaign without discussing it.
I say implicit approval because even the "Current Events" curriculum materials at the BRI website are entirely silent about the climate crisis.
But mountaineers, and a growing movement of citizens affected by strip mining, coal mining, coal ash and slurry ponds and leaks, coal-fired plant pollution, black lung, contaminated watersheds, and the silent tsunami of climate change induced by the release of C02 from coal-fired "sorta cleaner coal" plants, are fighting back.
And President Obama himself, while mapping out a plan to double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years, is still beholden to the chimera of "clean coal," its devastating extraction counterparts and dirty coal's underlining role in the silent tsunami of climate destabilization.
Giving climate change the silent treatment is apparently a tactical move.
