Talking with the decision makers

Talking with the decision makers – a letter to Victorian Member for the Legislative Assembly, Minister for Local Government and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Jeanette Powell.

Dear Jeanette,

I am unsure of your stance on climate change/global warming (call it what you prefer), but I have no doubt about Ian’s views in that he is a total skeptic about what we are experiencing being human-induced.

Jeanette Powell

Being a senior member of a conservative political party, I suspect you also stand with those who have decided reservations about the causation of climate change and so view what is happening as natural and cyclical.

Having read extensively for five or six years about the earth’s climate and listened to a host of speakers, from vastly experienced climatologists to some of the world’s greatest skeptics, I am absolutely convinced that emerging changes to our climate are without question the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.

The threat to the world, Australia and your electorate are so great that the need for a considered response exceeds, in importance, any other measured calculations presently before parliament.

Maybe that seems alarmist and apocalyptical, but sadly unless we attend to our behaviour, and within that work to build a resilient state in which profit and growth are relegated well down our list of priorities, then climate change and its implications will just that – a force so great that an unprepared community will be decimated.

It was in the late 1980s that the head of the New York City based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, James Hansen, and his colleagues warned the world of the damage by us (humans) to earth’s atmosphere.

Extensive research illustrated, beyond question, that our world could continue to operate successfully if we acted to limit the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.

Interesting, when the Industrial Revolution began about 200 years ago the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was about 270ppm, in the 1960s it was nearly 320ppm and today it is almost 400ppm.

Through your portfolio as Local Government Minister, I urge you to have your staff and anyone else you can influence throughout the Government, be they politicians or public servants, to consider how our State can best maintain a reasonable quality of life and equity for all as it engages with processes that will bring a stop to the present trajectory of carbon dioxide and return it to the 350ppm figure as suggested by Hansen.

I am convinced (and this is a truly difficult pill to swallow) that the richness and complexity of our society is that way because of our frivolous use of cheap energy and so it is absolutely critical that we make society poorer and so slow, appreciably, its consumptive behaviour; a behaviour that is depleting the world’s finite resources, seriously changing the world’s climate and dramatically endangering the quality of a world we will bequeath to those who follow.

Jeanette, it is remarkably difficult to escape from the “business as usual” paradigm for society as we understand it is driven by exactly the motivations that if we adhere to that template, society will unquestionably unravel.

Should you wish to talk more about this, I can visit at your office, meet for coffee, talk on the phone (5822 1766) or you can contact me via email at robed@sheppnews.com.au.

I do hope you will seriously consider this, decide on a course of action and then act.

Thank-you,

Robert McLean

February 20, 2012.