Good day and happy new year, Mark Pesci here to wish you a happy perihilia. Okay, what's perihilia? Let's start a year ago because a year ago Australia was on fire. Not just a little fire, it was a continental wide fire. Everything from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and in between was catching fire. No one had ever seen anything like it. It concentrated minds and it concentrated my mind and I realized that we needed to establish a different way to be able to talk about the climate, about our role in it, about what we could do with it so that we can escape the loops that we're all caught in. And so I came up with this idea that's based on astronomy. In fact, January the second, third, depending on the year last year it was January, third, this year it's January, second is perihilion. It is the day that the sun and the earth are closest together. See, the orbit of the earth around the sun isn't a perfect circle. We're just a little bit closer. We're about 5 million kilometers closer now in January than we are at the beginning of July, at the beginning of July, at the beginning of July. And so when we are at peak summer in Australia, it's just a little bit warmer. It's just a little bit more solar energy hitting every square meter of the earth's surface. And so perihilia is a great holiday to talk about global warming because it is literally the moment when the sun is doing its most to warm us up. And so I got this idea. I thought, okay, let's create a holiday and let's not just make it a single day holiday. Australians love a good multi day holiday. Look at Easter weekend. I said, let's have a special three day holiday. And we'll break the three day holiday down to each day of the holiday, celebrate something different. Day one, we will look back. We will take stock feralously at what we've done right and what we've done wrong over the last year. The second day is when we can celebrate the people who have offered us leadership and guidance as we make the tough decisions that we will need to around climate. And then finally on the third day, we can make resolutions and promises for the next year and the years ahead that we can then on the first day of perihilia in the next year reflect upon our progress. So that's the idea. So with that spirit in mind, let's take a look at perihilia 2021. All right. So let's take a look at the biggest thing that happened this year. In fact, for the climate 2021 was actually a good or 2020 was actually a good year, but the reason was bad. The coronavirus came along and caused a massive shutdown all around the world in April and May and June. Everyone was staying home in the developed world. No one was working. No one was flying. Still a lot of people aren't flying. Hardly anyone is flying here in Australia. And so in fact, what we saw as a result of this is that there was a massive drop in the output of emissions, particularly carbon dioxide emissions that was commensurate with the economic collapse that happened around the forced economic shutdowns that went with lockdowns that went with public health requirements. So you actually got a look into a future where the skies were clear, where the planet wasn't actually drowning in the pollutive gases that we ourselves are making. And you got in favor for a different kind of lifestyle, a lifestyle that wasn't necessarily centered around doing the next thing or flying to the next place or buying the next toy, but was actually a lot more inward focused. And you found people having different kinds of ways of dealing with this, but all of us got a sense that things could be different. And that's actually perhaps the biggest gift of all the horror of the pandemic. The thing has shown us is that things could be different. And as we come out of the pandemic in 2021, we want to take that going forward. But there's another lesson from the pandemic. And we're going to have to be very careful about this one. People have learned that if you pull back from economic growth, then a lot of people do very badly. A lot of people actually starve or get evicted. And now inside of us, there's this real sense that if we don't keep the engines going, going, going, going, then we're all going to starve. And if we come out of the pandemic with that, we will come out with exactly the wrong attitude because we will have pitted ourselves against the planet rather than deciding to lean into what we should be doing around planetary sustainability and find ways to create economic growth in that. If we just go back to the way we were before and pit our own economic growth against the health of the planet, well, we already know because we're already on that path. We already know where that path goes. All right. Let's take a look at the people who are real leaders. And I would like to see something like an OACM, an Australian Order of Climate Merit. I'd like to see something like that award every year, just the same way we were awards OEMs on Australia Day, on Parahelio Week, an award people who are leaders in thinking about and helping us to manage climate. My nomination this year is for Victor Stephenson. Victor Stephenson is an Indigenous man who has been rapidly teaching Australia all about the practice of cultural burning. This is the extremely old, probably 50, 60,000 year old practice of using fire to manage country, to manage the country, the plants, the undergrowth so that when fire is common, fires will always come in Australia. Those fires burn cool. Those fires burn safely. Those fires do not take out billions of animals. They do not take out lots of buildings. They do not kill hundreds of people because the fires are being managed. And the simplest idea that allows you to get your head around the difference between cultural burning and the way we do burning now is that a cultural burning works from the inside out and whereas a prescribed burn works from the outside in. When you work from the inside out, you give all the animals a chance to escape the burn. It's just as simple as that. Now there's an organization called Firesticks which Victor has been spearheading which is a grassroots organization spread throughout Australia that's trying to teach people, particularly in Bushland Australia, how to read the landscape and how they can use cultural burning practices to manage their landscape and manage the threat of bushfires. All of this is in Victor Stephenson's book Fire Country which is an amazing book. You really ought to buy a copy. You really ought to read it. For all of this work that he's done and he continues to do, Victor Stephenson is my candidate for the first Australian Climate Award of Merit. Okay, let's look forward. What are we going to do next year? What is going to happen? We need to think about the resolutions because really we've just done the honest assessment. We've known that the pandemic gave us a lot of things that maybe we don't want but maybe we need to take a hard look at. We've taken a look at the failures and successes. We've celebrated the great people. Now we need to turn the lens on ourselves as individuals. We can ask what we can do as individuals and you can ask what we can do as communities. We can ask what we can do as a nation so that when next year on the first day of perihilia when we assess ourselves and we ask ourselves how have we done? We can look ourselves in the eye with pride. We can look ourselves in the eye at a job well done. A job that actually will last long past the span of our natural lives, probably long past the span of our children's lives, perhaps even their children's. But always remembering that we can do things today to make their world better tomorrow. And remember what Mary Poppin said, well begun is half done. So it's within our power to begin well today. So I'm going to ask myself, what can I do? Right now, right here, how does that look in a year's time? How can I grade myself when I want to do that honestly? Now we all know what to do. We all do just know what to do. It's come to us from every direction. The question before us is will we do what needs to be done? And next year will we be able to look at ourselves and feel the peace inside of that job well done? Or will we feel instead the hot breath of the wolf of the climate on our next? And the choice there, that choice is ours. Happy Perihilia.