Here's an idea: if all new cars met the international standard, then fuel costs for owners would drop by 50 per cent. However, this obvious improvement has been considered since 2015 by a Ministerial Forum led by the Hons Barnaby Joyce, Sussan Ley and Angus Taylor. One has to wonder who benefits from the sale of extra fuel and who is influencing the Ministers - it's definitely not Australian car drivers.

Re The Goulburn Post April 5 letter from Tony Morrison ("A question on climate change"):

While it's true that "Earth's climate is and has been changing constantly throughout billions of years", the first mammals only appeared about 200 million years ago, when climatic conditions were more favourable.

The first human appeared only about two million years ago and modern humans (homo sapiens) only about 200,000 years ago. Humans have thrived in a narrow temperature range for the past 10,000 years but now the temperature is rising so fast that we are moving outside that safe range.

Anyone who takes a look at the NASA online graph at climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ will see how rapidly the greenhouse gas CO2 has risen since the industrial revolution compared to the past 800,000 years. It seems Tony distrusts all this scientific data and thinks that those who believe it are the "green left". I had no idea that the green left was such a big group.

Towards building a sustainable Goulburn Mulwaree means what?

Recent and increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as the Black Summer Bushfires and now the repeated flooding of towns and villages, Lismore being the most prominent, are ignored at our peril. Ditto the impact of the war in Ukraine and the impacts of COVID on global and local food supplies.

Closer to home, the proposed building of the totally inappropriately named Waste To Energy plant in Tarago, casts a toxic shadow over Goulburn Mulwaree, including its farms and those who capture water from their roofs.

Whereas resident feedback, as part of the council's current update of the Community Strategic Plan under the title of Towards 2042, confirmed its vision:

"To build and maintain sustainable communities while retaining the region's natural beauty", taking action on the climate rated low down the list of required actions.

The new plan appears to have no specific initiatives to safeguard the sustainability of our food or of our biodiversity indicating a limited understanding within our community, and the council of what is important to secure our future. This is not the case with the NSW State Government, which has announced grants of $128m to support low carbon farming.

The grants will hopefully provide a boost to the action already in train through Landcare Goulburn Mulwaree to improve food sustainability and carbon sequestration. A recent study of the annual carbon sequestration potential of Goulburn Mulwaree agricultural land found that it is a third of our total emissions.