Michael Green

Journalist, producer and oral historian

A case of police oversight

In Social justice on

“DO you believe the Footscray police has done their duty of care?” Getachew Seyoum asks. He is standing at the bar table, during the coronial inquest into the death of his son, Michael Atakelt, who was found dead in the Maribyrnong River in July 2011.

“I don’t think I could comment on that,” Acting Senior Sergeant Tatter-Rendlemann, from Williamstown police station, replies.

The exchange is translated into Tigrinya for the family and members of the Tigray community, of northern Ethiopia, who have been present throughout the inquest. But there it ends. He does not explain why he can’t comment. He just doesn’t, and no one asks again.

Tatter-Rendlemann is the detective investigating the case on behalf of the Coroner. His evidence is this: he has “absolutely no results or theories” about what happened from the time Atakelt was last seen until his body was recovered eleven days later.

The initial investigation was completed by Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, from Footscray police station, whose best guess was that Atakelt had entered the river several kilometres downstream from where the body was found.

But during the first stage of the inquest – in February 2013, more than a year and a half after Atakelt died – Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, said it was not possible for a body to move such a distance upstream. McKerracher had not investigated any upstream clues, and he hadn’t spoken to Dixon, or to the search and rescue squad, who retrieved the body and who have since provided similar evidence.

And so, with nothing to go on, the Coroner suspended the hearing. He directed the police to reinvestigate with a different detective in charge.

Tatter-Rendlemann took over, but was assisted by McKerracher. On the Coroner’s instructions, they followed up evidence that had never been collected. They sought CCTV footage and security information from several locations, but it was two years too late. Wherever there was footage or other records, they had long since been deleted. The detectives put out a media release and distributed posters asking for witnesses. No one replied. They sought further interviews, but couldn’t track everyone down. Those they did find offered no new clues.

***

Almost from the moment Atakelt’s body was found, community members have repeatedly requested an independent investigation, and that Footscray police not be involved.

At a public meeting in December 2011, Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana defended the decision to assign the case to Footscray, explaining that it was standard practice for the local crime investigators to handle such a case, and he would not deviate from that practice.

But he assured his audience that not only was an experienced investigator in charge, but also that his work had been closely overseen by the Homicide Squad, and monitored by both the Ethical Standards Department and the Office of Police Integrity. It was, he promised, “a very thorough investigation”.

Detective Senior Sergeant Sol Solomon was also there that day. Solomon, from Homicide, took the microphone and offered his sympathy to the family and community for their loss. He continued: “I can assure you that the investigation has been thorough and totally dedicated to finding out exactly what happened to Michael and why he lost his life in the river. I’ve seen the quality of the investigation myself and it is first class and you can be assured that all possible leads have been explored.”

Subsequently, in an interview with me on 29 December 2011, Fontana reiterated his comments at the forum. He explained that by “oversight”, he meant: “actively monitoring all stages of the investigation”.

Did that supervision occur? Were all levels of police oversight satisfied that the investigation of this young man’s death was “first class”? If so, who will hold them to account?

***

In February, Victoria Police settled a long running racial discrimination claim brought by several young African-Australian men. The young men say police regularly stopped them around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted them.

Victoria Police denies the allegations, but as part of the settlement, it agreed to hold public inquiries into its cross-cultural training and “field contacts” policy.

These inquiries are being conducted now. They are independent and open to public submissions. The final reports are due in December. Ken Lay, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, has made several strong public statements about the importance of these inquiries and the need to stamp out examples of racism in the force. “We need to have the public’s trust and confidence in what we do,” he said, announcing the public submission process.

One document released from the racial discrimination case – statistical evidence based on police data – shows that young African-Australian men in the area were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds.

But, as Michael Atakelt’s case demonstrates, overpolicing is only one part of the problem. “The flipside of overpolicing is underprotection,” explains Associate Professor Steve James, a criminologist from University of Melbourne. “You target certain groups and you overpolice them, but you don’t provide for them the same rigor of victim services.

“Police can do just as much damage to community relations by simply underpolicing as they can by overpolicing.”

***

After a six-month pause, the inquest into Atakelt’s death resumed last Monday. The Coroners Court is on the eleventh floor of an ordinary office building on Exhibition Street. Each day, about three-dozen members of the Tigray community attended. The presiding coroner, Ian Gray, was careful to ensure that everything was translated into Tigrinya and, also, that Seyoum, who is representing himself, has been able to ask whatever questions he would like.

For most of the week, evidence centred on the failed attempts by Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tella, to report her son missing. It took four separate visits and several phone calls over three days before a police officer lodged the report, by which time Tella – whose English is limited – had become very agitated.

In their evidence for the Coroner, all the police officers maintained they had made the correct decision: at that time, there was no reason for any concern or fear for Atakelt’s welfare – even when the report was finally lodged. The following day, however, he was found dead in the river.

For days, those police officers were questioned at great length about normal procedures and about their conversations with Tella. And so, for most of the week, Atakelt went missing from his own inquest.

He returned late on Friday afternoon, in the final piece of evidence before the hearing adjourned once more: the court was shown CCTV footage of his last known whereabouts.

At 7.07 pm on Sunday 26 June, 2011, Atakelt stepped off the train at Newmarket Station, in Flemington. On the screen, we watched him walking calmly among the crowd of exiting passengers, dressed in a dark jumper with a pale stripe across the chest. He slowed an instant as someone passed through the gates before him, and then, he too, exited the scene. We watched him leave the station as though he were an ordinary young man getting off a train.

The Coroner called a break. Afterwards, community members asked to watch the video again to verify its authenticity. People had noticed that the date and time had not appeared on-screen. How could they believe what they had seen?

Among Atakelt’s family and community members, the conduct of the investigation has produced a vast store of suspicion. And the curiosities continue. Detective McKerracher was overseas on holidays, unavailable to attend for the whole week.

Also missing were the senior police – Fontana, Solomon, and the responsible officers of the (then) Ethical Standards Department and Office of Police Integrity – who oversaw and vouched for the quality of the investigation.

At that public meeting in December 2011, Fontana said this: “We will ultimately be judged on the quality of this investigation by the Coroner and any of these oversight bodies. We’re very conscious of that and the members, in my view, have done a very thorough job.”

Given Ken Lay’s commitment elsewhere to establishing the trust of the community, he should be keenly interested in their explanations. But no one, not the Coroner, nor any of the parties – including the barrister representing the Chief of Police – has so far sought their evidence.

There are still three days remaining in the inquest, scheduled for late September. At the last moment, on a request from Seyoum, McKerracher has been listed as a witness. He may yet have to answer questions about the conduct of the investigation.

Read this article at the Overland Journal blog.

Read other articles I’ve written about this case (most recent first):

Police have no leads in delayed investigation

Changing a whole system : racialised policing in Melbourne

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

Watching a hearing

Between two oceans

Billions and billions

In Blog on

I’M on a winter search for the sun, a few weeks of warmth to help me through to spring. With my friend Roger, I set off north on a drizzly Friday afternoon. We drove to Tocumwal, on the Murray River, and camped in state forest on the Victorian side.

Roger has bad knees, so he can’t walk much. But what he lacks in mobility, he makes up for in curiosity. That’s why we bumped all the way to the end of the muddy track in the dark before deciding on a camp spot: he wanted to see what was round the next corner. I took the wheel next morning, windscreen still foggy, my attention on the conversation, and promptly got us bogged. We got bogged a second time that day, driving off-road to look at an interesting house we’d glimpsed from the freeway.

Our drive to Brisbane, on the Newell Highway – mostly – continued in this fashion: detours, pauses, slow circumnavigations of every town and back again. Ooh, look at that old building! Maps. More maps. A lazy morning spent on the sloping balcony at the Imperial Hotel in Coonabarabran. Fried food. Bains-marie. We got to Brisbane in five days.

Along the way, I finally began to learn about stars. (Here’s Leunig’s take, for the election.)

I’d never before understood the movement of the night sky. I like to look for the Southern Cross, but I’ve never been sure where it would be, or why. I remember reading a picture book called My Place in Space over and over again, and understanding the smallness of Earth had a profound effect on me. But on the whole, I didn’t pay much attention to what was overhead, besides special occasions – school camps, summer holidays at the beach, or travelling here and there.

I’m only partly to blame. Growing up in the suburbs and then living in the city, stars are the exception, not the rule. When Galileo was stargazing on a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way was bright enough to cast a shadow. It still is – but not where people are, not where lights crowd out the cosmos.

The Newell Highway is an observatory tour, of sorts. It passes the Dish, at Parkes; the big telescope near Coonabarabran and the radio telescope compact array near Narrabri.

We bypassed the Dish, but visited the second two. And in the evenings, when we stopped for camp, Roger looked up. He explained how to find south using the Southern Cross and its pointers, talked about the varying expansion rate of the universe, and sung the galaxy song from Monty Python. He also sung the praises of Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer, whose Cosmos television series he’d watched as a young man. “There have been others since with better graphics, but none with better politics,” Roger said.

At Roma, in western Queensland, Rog turned north for Carnarvon Gorge and eventually, Cairns. I hitched further west, to Charleville.

There’s a tourist site on the edge of town called the Cosmos Centre. I think it’s the best attraction I’ve visited. And there, I found the sun – but not in the way I’d bargained for.

I saw it through a telescope. I was in a group and each of us, in turn, peered, paused, and gasped. A rough looking man wearing tracksuit pants and thongs limped up and put his eye to the telescope. “I see it,” he said. “Oh, wow.”

Through the filter, the sun appeared molten red. I saw dark sunspots, only pinpricks on the lens but larger than Earth in reality; and huge solar flares on its edge, like wisps in the wind.

(The Sun: a photo on my phone through the eyepiece of the telescope – it’s nothing like what I saw, but you get the idea.)

I returned to the Cosmos Centre in the night time too, and saw Saturn and its rings through a telescope, and a globular cluster – stars as bright and close as a field of flowers – and the Swan Nebula, a great dust cloud from which stars are born. The guide pointed out a puff of white in the sky, the Small Magellenic Cloud, and suddenly I could see another galaxy 200,000 light years away with my naked eyes.

It is several days ago now, but it still feels like revelation.

The final episode in Sagan’s Cosmos was called ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ He despaired that it might be inevitable for technological civilizations to self-destruct. For humanity, he was alarmed about nuclear war, and later, about the hole in the ozone layer and about the greenhouse effect. He died in 1996.

But he did have hope: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet,” he said.

“One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the Earth, finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”

Shouting from the rooftops

In Greener Homes on

One million Australian households now produce solar electricity

IN March 2012, Sian Dart had solar panels installed on her roof in Footscray. But it was late May before the system was finally connected to the grid. In the meantime, she spent hours chasing paperwork between the installer, the electricity distributor and the retailer.

It took another four months before the last mix-up was resolved. “It was very frustrating, and I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken if we hadn’t followed up so doggedly,” she says.

Earlier this year, the 1 millionth Australian household – about one in nine across the country – installed solar photovoltaic panels. There are half a million with solar hot water services too.

The process doesn’t always go as expected, for reasons both practical and political: rebates and feed-in tariffs have been in flux in every state. But now there are so many systems on roofs, solar homeowners are gaining a stronger public voice.


Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Victoria, the electorate with the most solar households is Lalor, held by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, with just over 10,000 homes out of 80,000. Other solar strongholds include regional seats McEwen, Indi and McMillan. Altogether, Victorian homeowners have invested about $1.3 billion in solar electricity.

Those statistics have been gathered by advocacy group 100% Renewable Energy, which has prepared “solar scorecards” rating each member of parliament before the federal election. The organisation has also started Solar Citizens, a community project to transform the growing people-power into pressure for solar-friendly policies.

“As individual consumers, we’re isolated and relatively powerless compared to big energy companies who have enormous influence over governments,” says Geoff Evans, from Solar Citizens.

“We want to unite solar households, and people who like solar, to call on decision-makers to grow this technology that enables people to save money and produce clean energy.”

Dr Evans argues solar electricity is unfairly blamed for increasing power prices, and that solar owners must not be lumped with high fixed connection fees.

The Productivity Commission’s recent report on the electricity network, released in late June, supports his claim about price rises. It attributed most of the jump in bills in recent years to “spiralling network costs”, caused in part by poor regulation of the industry.

Regulators and utilities here have so far resisted the shift to distributed power generation, but in New Zealand there are signs of change. Vector, the electricity distributor for Auckland and surrounds, has begun a pilot programme offering a 3-kilowatt solar panel system together with battery storage. It costs $2000 up front, with a monthly fee of $70 for 12 years.

For an average household, that equates to about the same or less cost than normal bills. Participants remain connected to the grid, but the battery storage will help reduce the evening peak demand on the network.

In Footscray, with her panels in place, Ms Dart’s electricity bills have fallen by more than two-thirds. Unexpectedly, generating her own power has also made her more “militant” about avoiding unnecessary waste.

“Since we got the glitches sorted, it’s been drama-free – they’re sitting there doing their job,” she says. “If it’s sunny during the day, I feel good knowing we’re making a few dollars.”

To help avoid the trouble she had, you can prepare yourself with the Clean Energy Council’s guide to buying household solar panels, which includes a step-by-step installation checklist.

Read this article at The Age online

Seams of discontent

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Farmers, teachers and retirees are fighting controversial gas exploration plans in South Gippsland.

ON a rainy Saturday morning in early June, three-dozen men and women, nearly all middle-aged and wearing sensible shoes, sit in the council chambers at Leongatha, learning how to be activists. “The battle lines are drawn at Seaspray,” says Wendy, from Poowong, a dairy town in South Gippsland. “Something will happen, and we need to know how to conduct ourselves.”

Julie Boulton, a dairy farmer at Seaspray, a tiny town on Ninety-Mile Beach, explains that she’d been involved in a flash blockade a fortnight earlier, confronting the gas company Lakes Oil. “It was scary,” she says. “I want to learn heaps today and take it back to my community.”

Participants have arrived from all over Gippsland. Farmers, teachers, doctors and retirees, there to learn the basics of non-violent, direct action protesting. They hear about all manner of civil disobedience – blockading, locking-on, sitting-in – techniques employed successfully by residents in NSW’s northern rivers, where two coal seam gas companies recently suspended their operations.

South Gippsland is blanketed with more than a dozen licences for unconventional gas exploration – which uses controversial techniques to access hard-to-extract resources. For now, nothing is happening. In August 2012, the state government announced a moratorium on coal seam gas exploration and on the drilling method known as fracking, in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground at great pressure to fracture coal or rock, and release gas.

Even so, people are worried, fearful about risks to water supplies and local health, as well the price and productivity of their land. Poowong has declared itself “coal and coal seam gas free” and six other towns are likely to do the same before the year is out. The South Gippsland Landcare Network – which comprises 18 smaller groups – has publicly opposed the industry. “I’ve spoken to people who’ve never been against anything their life and they’re willing to go to jail over this,” says Mark Walters, the network’s vice president.

The training session in Leongatha is coordinated by the Lock the Gate Alliance and Quit Coal, a Melbourne group affiliated with Friends of the Earth. Julie Boulton listens intently, anxiously twirling her ponytail. For the last three months, she has been leading the campaign in Seaspray. When the facilitator from Quit Coal warns the Gippslanders that the police will probably keep track of them – as “activists and trouble-makers” – Julie turns to her daughter, who is a teacher, wide-eyed.

Ray, from the Strzelecki Ranges, has no such concerns: “If we stop ’em at Seaspray, we’ll stop ’em all over Victoria!”

Lakes Oil had been preparing to frack a well to the west of Seaspray, on land adjoining the Boultons’ dairy farm, in October 2012. The company wants to exploit an unconventional gas resource known as tight gas – which is held in sandstone, much deeper below ground than the coal seams – but the moratorium scuppered its plans.

Local angst has not abated. Over summer, Seaspray Primary School refused a cash donation from the company. In May, the board members – including former Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer and outspoken climate change denier Ian Plimer – visited the site to watch the flaring of a well, but were confronted with protestors instead.

Rob Annells, the CEO, is undeterred. He says he understands locals are worried, but believes their concerns are based on misinformation. “Wells all over the world are always drilled through water tables. Providing the regulations are good and adhered to, there’s no danger.”

“There is some disruption to the farmland at the time of drilling and fracking, but once it’s in place and the land is restored, you can hardly see where we’ve been.”

Annells is urging the government to lift the moratorium. He says the company could re-commence testing within six months, and if all goes according to plan, begin production within two or three years.

In late May, the Napthine government released its response to an inquiry into mineral exploration in Victoria. Its two-dozen recommendations are largely designed to secure resources, speed up approvals and reduce costs for miners.

The day before the meeting at Leongatha, energy ministers from around the country agreed on regulatory guidelines for the coal seam gas industry. In Gippsland, there’s growing apprehension that the moratorium will soon be lifted.

Ursula Alquier, from Warragul, is a coordinator with the Lock the Gate Alliance. She says the Minister for Energy and Resources, Nick Kotsiras, has refused to answer calls from Gippsland residents. “The main reason people are frustrated is because they’re being totally ignored,” she says.

Kotsiras, however, insists there will be “proper and thorough community consultation” before any decision is made about the moratorium. He says his department has begun identifying the changes necessary for Victorian rules to match the new national standards for coal seam gas, but it has no plans to assess tight gas.

Meanwhile, the federal government has funded new research, including a bioregional assessment of the Gippsland basin and a study of the chemicals used in fracking, but it will be about two years before they’re complete.  

Kotsiras says he will pay close attention to the science, but won’t promise to wait for those studies before deciding. The ban on fracking and coal seam gas is likely to remain in place until the end of the year. An announcement about community consultation is expected within weeks.

Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Peter Ryan is the member for South Gippsland. He maintains the government won’t “abandon those rolling green hills”.

“We are not going to risk our aquifers, or put farming in jeopardy – let alone our liveability – for the fact we may or may not have this resource underneath us,” he says. “This will be done very appropriately and in a timely manner.”

North east of Seaspray, Gregor McNaughton runs sheep on one of the largest farms in the area. He’s familiar with miners: they’ve been drilling on his property since the early 1980s and pipelines from Esso’s offshore oil and gas fields pass beside his paddocks.

For the last decade, he has received rent for ten gas wells on his land, which are now owned by a joint venture between Ignite Energy Resources and Exxon Mobil. As well as the income, he’s enticed by the prospect of new irrigation water, which would be created by the extraction process, should the companies go into production.

“We’ve never had any problems with mining companies here,” he says, as we bump over his paddocks towards the wells. “I’d be dead against them drilling on a small farm or close to town, but on broadacres like ours, I’ve got no objection. They’ve been very kind and they’ve kept up with their commitments.”

The wells haven’t yet produced anything. There’s a strong chance they never will, because Victoria’s resources are far from proven. Over the next two years, Ignite and Exxon plan to drill seven new wells in the area, continuing the search for coal seam gas.

Rick Wilkinson, from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, expects that onshore gas production here, from “whatever the rock – shale, coal or sandstone”, won’t occur for “another five to ten years at the earliest”.

All of Gippsland’s coal is brown. Wilkinson is not aware of brown coal seam gas having been produced anywhere in the world. “It would be particularly difficult and quite surprising if it actually comes to fruition,” he says.

Even if the gas flows, water may not. Most of the brown coal in Gippsland is subject to a groundwater cap, managed by Southern Rural Water. Producing gas is a thirsty business, and as it stands, miners will be forced to buy water rights from an existing user.

But the industry argues that exploiting unconventional gas is necessary to avoid shortages in coming years. Exxon Mobil spokesperson Chris Welberry says conventional gas fields in Bass Strait will diminish by mid next decade.

Critics of the industry, such as Mark Ogge, from the Australia Institute, say that any pressure on supply isn’t due to local demand, but rather, the lure of exporting gas to Asia at higher prices. “No one would consider drilling for gas in Seaspray if we weren’t about to begin exporting liquefied natural gas.”

Given our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he argues, it makes more sense to phase out gas in favour of renewable energy.

The Climate Commission last month released a report stating that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. “Why burn gas when renewable energy has no emissions, is often cheaper and getting even cheaper just as gas prices are about to skyrocket?” Ogge says.

At 66 years old, Gregor McNaughton remains a keen tennis player. He noticed recently that friends from the tennis club in Seaspray have put up Lock the Gate signs. The yellow triangles are appearing on more and more properties, bearing this warning: “Entry to this property is prohibited to coal and gas companies”.

“Something like this, it splits towns,” McNaughton laments. “People need to get educated about the facts.” But then again, he admits, others would say the same about him.

And whose facts, anyway? Last month, the Australian Water Association hosted a capital city tour on unconventional gas, featuring Dr Ian Duncan, a geologist from the University of Texas. In Melbourne, he told regulators and industry attendees that in the USA, where there are hundreds of thousands of shale gas wells, there was almost no evidence of adverse effects on groundwater or human health. The risks associated with coal seam gas, he suggested, were even fewer.

Wilkinson, from the petroleum association, ascribes worries about safety to “fear of the unknown”. “If half the so-called facts I’ve seen flying around were true, I would be worried about it as well,” he says.

But in a well-regarded report released last October, Dr John Williams, the former chief of CSIRO’s land and water division, concluded that the risks to water systems, agricultural land use and biodiversity were serious. Our piecemeal approach to regulation is leading us towards “degraded and collapsing landscapes”, he wrote.

Similarly, the National Water Commission has warned that coal seam gas poses significant risks to surface and groundwater systems. Recently, the commission’s chair, Karlene Maywald, said that while regulators had begun playing catch up on the science of coal seam gas, they were neglecting to prepare for tight gas.

In Queensland there are over 4500 coal seam gas wells – projected to increase 40,000 within two decades – which now provide a third of the gas used in eastern Australia.

Dr Gavin Mudd, a senior lecturer from Monash University’s engineering department, has been speaking about the risks at community meetings across Gippsland.

He says projects in Queensland have been approved without adequate background studies. “It’s absolute blindness to pretend there have been no impacts so far,” he says. “The problem is that evidence is often anecdotal, because the industry has been developed and regulated on the belief that there won’t be any impacts – so why waste money on monitoring?”

Down a dirt road out of town, Julie Boulton is showing me the spot where the locals blockaded the Lakes Oil board members, when a four-wheel drive comes the other way.

Bob Thompson, liaison officer for Lakes Oil, is taking a departmental inspector on a tour of the wells. “What’s your concern?” Bob asks, tersely.

“I’m concerned about our groundwater,” Julie replies quickly. “I’m concerned you’ll take a risk and damage our aquifer and we won’t be able to farm and live here anymore.”

“We don’t touch the aquifer,” Bob says. “There’s steel casing and concrete on the well.”

“But how long will that last?”

Bob brushes it off. He turns away and complains to the government man that she won’t believe him.

Afterwards, at her house, Julie and her husband David say Bob was right about one thing: “We don’t trust them. It’s too risky.”

On their table they have the results of a door-to-door survey conducted by local volunteers. All but a handful of residents agreed; they’ll to fight to keep Seaspray “gasfield free”.

GAS IN GIPPSLAND

Coal seam gas: Methane trapped in coal deposits.

Tight gas: Methane held deep underground in hard, impermeable rock, sandstone or limestone.

Fracking: A drilling technique used to extract gas by injecting a mix of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to fracture coal or rock. Fracking is always used to produce tight gas, but only sometimes for coal seam gas.

Read this article at The Age online

Bill McKibben

In Environment, Social justice on

Interview published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

Writer and activist Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change. Now he’s piloting the fastest growing social movement in the world: the campaign to sell out of fossil fuels. This is how he explains it:

IN the mid-1980s I was reading the early science about global warming and thinking about it. Then came the ungodly hot summer of 1988, among the worst in North American history to that date. Crops withered, barge traffic on the Mississippi ground to a halt. It wasn’t as bad as 2012, but at the time it seemed horrific. Suddenly the science felt very real.

The next year I published my first book, The End of Nature. In part, it was the first book-length piece of reporting about climate change, but it was also part philosophical essay about its meaning. I was interested in the way that suddenly no place on Earth was unaffected by human presence – that’s what the title meant. My dominant emotion was sadness, not fear. Over time I’ve come to have more practical reasons for working to slow climate change, but that sadness lingers.

For me, a new line of thinking opened up last year once I saw the numbers put out by an organisation called Carbon Tracker. I’ve followed this all closely, but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of the story was written. That unless we somehow change it, there is no room for speculation or wishful thinking. The fossil fuel industry has five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn.

Once you understand that, you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.

The other side is that – at least in American politics – the same companies whose business plan guarantees that the planet will tank are also the ones who are most efficient at corrupting our political system. They give the most money in campaign donations and spend the most money lobbying and advertising. They are the reason we never get anything changed.

So it seemed to me it was high time we went on offense against this industry, instead of forever playing defence.

In November we launched the Go Fossil Free campaign with a tour of the US, calling for universities to sell their shares in fossil fuels. We started the night after the presidential election. We sold out big concert halls every night, all across the country. That was exciting, but the most exciting thing was helping midwife an explosive movement. When we started there were a handful of campuses thinking about it, and now, there are more than 300.

So far six colleges have divested, but it’s early days. It’s actually happening faster than we thought. The City of Seattle divested its funds too. A number of religious denominations are thinking about it.

Divestment in this country has a real history – it’s a tool we use every once in a while. Most of the time when you have a problem with a business, it makes more sense to pass a shareholder resolution, hold a boycott, or run a petition, because it’s something the company can easily fix. If we’re mad at Apple for paying low wages to Chinese workers it’s not because we hate iPhones. But in this case, it’s not like there’s a flaw in the business plan; the flaw is the business plan.

But we’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon – a group of colleges selling their stock is not going to do that. We’re trying to take away their social licence, trying to reduce their power to dominate events, trying to make people understand that these guys are now outlaws against the laws of physics.

These are hard fights. It took Harvard seven or eight years before they partially divested during the campaign against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s. It won’t happen easily. All these students know that. But they also know this is their future.

One of the reasons that universities are such a powerful place is that it makes little sense to pay for people’s education with investments in companies that guarantee they won’t have a planet to carry out that education on.

The same goes for retirement funds. Unless your goal for retirement is to work in endless emergency response to fires and floods, you can make wiser choices about where to put your money.

The movement is getting bigger and it’s spreading around the world. There’s something on our side: public perception that climate change is real has shot through the roof.

In the US, more than three-quarters of us are worried about global warming. It’s hard to get three-quarters of Americans to agree on anything – half of America thinks Elvis is still alive. It demonstrates that there’s a limit to how much money the fossil fuel industry can spend and how much damage Rupert Murdoch can do. At a certain point, who are you going to believe: Fox News or your own lying eyes?

If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. In January, you guys broke every temperature record, day after day.

I’m visiting in June, listening to people talk about their experiences with the changing climate and showing the basic math that makes our predicament so difficult. If there’s one lesson I’ll try to draw, it’s this: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Literally. It’s time to stop digging up new coal deposits.

Read these related articles: Bursting the carbon bubble and Unburnable carbon