Warnings pass unnoticed as Victoria presses-on with business as usual

by Robert McLean

Manifest warnings about the increasing entropic pace of the human infrastructure pass largely unnoticed.



Rather than something like this we should
 be building Victoria's resilience.

Many who discussed evolving difficulties, including the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and the climatologist who first warned of our changing climate, James Hansen, were roundly criticized.

He was, in the 80s, something of a voice in the wilderness and despite the views he expounds now having the support of nearly all the world’s scientists and fellow climatologists, legitimacy still eludes him in many circles.

The world he envisages is not encouraging with its extreme weather events, being droughts, huge dumps of rain, a broad increase in temperatures;  changes in traditional and well understood weather patterns, meaning once productive areas will no longer be so; and seasons foreign everywhere and disrupting life of every form.

The practical infrastructure and weather on which humans depend is under direct threat.

Today’s decision makers are governing for today appealing to short-term thinkers, but those more expansive thinkers among us, Hansen was one, understand the importance of us acting now to ready the world for the testing circumstances decades ahead.

A story in a recent issue of Melbourne’s Age  (headed "Government urged to consider secret 'Bay West' option for port") discussed the intent of Victoria’s State Government to spend billions of dollars establishing a massive new container port in Port Phillip Bay.

The argument, it seemed, was about where the port should be when it really should have been about whether the Victoria of tomorrow even needed such a facility.

Governments, State and Federal, need to invest in infrastructure, but rather than spend heavily on what is already obsolete we should be spending those billions on building a resilient Victoria; a Victoria able to cope with the rigours of a future in which communities will bounce and ricochet through times decidedly different from anything ever experienced.

Entropy is only forestalled when energy is applied and initially it was slowed by tireless human effort until we uncovered the secrets of fossil fuels to reshape the disorder brought on by entropy, but unaware for decades that the resultant carbon dioxide it produced was hurting our atmosphere.

The export of coal, the greatest villain in the carbon dioxide stakes, is the prime reason for the proposed new container port, but beyond that will be the State Government’s intention to ensure business continues as usual.

Rather than maintaining failed 20^th Century policies we should be investing in infrastructure such as sophisticated public transit; rating and taxing structures that favour small business; the refurbishment and reinvigoration neighbourhoods and communities on which our future will depend; and the articulation of ways in which Australia can put an end to corporate subsidies, reduce its commitment to the military and distribute more fairly the wealth arising from Australia’s natural resources.