This year has brought clearer vision to Australians. For now, our air and skies are cleaner, and our communities more peaceful - a hopeful glimpse of what we can achieve in the future. We are spending record amounts, including on taxpayer-guzzling, dangerous gas. We were once told the cost of addressing climate change was "too high", but now we see the real problem was never a lack of money - but a lack of will.
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Here on the Darling Downs, where we have some of the best agricultural land in the world, we are embracing clean energy opportunities, but still can't yet shake the threats from coal and gas. Take Acland, a quiet town on the Northern Downs, that's at the centre of a decade-long fight. District farming families produce around 10 million litres of fresh milk and have been producing food and fibre for about 150 years.
Yet, the future of our farming families hangs in the balance with a pending decision with the High Court.
The court will decide whether the Queensland Land Court's earlier decision - that the impacts of the proposed expansion of the New Acland coal mine would be too severe - stands.
At the centre of this issue is water, because if this expansion proceeds it's predicted that groundwater levels available to farmers from bores would not recover for at least 300 years. If the land is mined until 2029, Acland farming will never happen there again.
Nine years of coal or potentially thousands of years of farming.
There has rarely been a clearer choice between food and coal.
Now, fracking has emerged as a threat being proposed in the Toowoomba Regional Council (TRC) after unconventional gas companies like Cougar Energy in Kingaroy and Linc Energy at Chinchilla already left a toxic legacy that may never be remediated.
After fracking, attempts to use the produced water for agriculture have failed, with poor, sick, unsaleable crops resulting.
We are in a period of enforced introspection. Our economy was stagnant before the virus, and our returns on coal and gas were in decline. We can never expect a return on those investments. But we have a solution.
Solar and wind energy are free, can be harvested more cheaply than coal and gas, and can co-exist with our farming.
And it's already creating jobs here, with the largest solar farm in Australia is about to commence construction and just to the north, our largest wind farm will soon go online. The new path is much clearer, with 2020 vision.
Paul King is community organiser with the Darling Downs Environment Council
