Humanity needs to replicate tenacity, innovation, determination, inventiveness, commitment adaptation and damn sheer hard work to escape this dilemma

H

uman tenacity, innovation, determination, inventiveness, commitment adaptation and damn sheer hard work have allowed us to build an earthly superstructure that we now discover rests on massively inadequate foundations.

Responding from innate human needs we built from the ground up, but lacking vision at the time we were unable to comprehend that this human experiment would become so grand that its demands would outstrip earth’s natural recovery abilities and seriously disturb its equilibrium.

Humanity was for millennia simply another life form that plodded about the planet competing with others for space and resources upon which they depended until its inherent desire to know, understand and exploit whatever it found, led to the unlocking of fossil fuel energy, bringing on the Industrial Revolution and, in the last 200 years or so, the drip-feed of disaster that has measurably unsettled earth’s atmosphere.

Aided by the abundant amounts of apparently free energy in fossil fuels, our wants quickly overtook our needs and grandiose dreams replaced more utilitarian goals of simply answering our necessities.

The unsettling of earth’s atmosphere, measured in tiny numbers, but illustrated through large, complex and difficult outcomes, can only be addressed if we are able to re-apply those qualities that got us to where we are, but with a different intent.

The commitment it took to get us to where we are today was unquestionably impressive, but will we be able to replicate that commitment to extricate ourselves from this present dilemma.

An event in Melbourne earlier this week illustrates that our commitment will probably fall well short of what is needed.

The event, “Climate Change: What happens after the Paris conference?” at the 200-seat Village Roadshow theatrette at the State Library was booked out within two days of being announced.

Organizers, Melbourne’s Grattan Institute and the Melbourne Energy Institute quickly organized a waiting list, which equally quickly blew out to 300 names, but it was at this point the commitment of people died.

The event went ahead as scheduled, but the official count of the audience was 160, illustrating that 40 of those who had pre-booked had decided something more important needed attending to, and the 300 on the waiting list simply missed out on what was an illuminating and educative session.

The speakers were the Energy and Program Director at the Grattan Institute, Tony Wood; the lead secretary, Strategy and Planning at the Department of Economic Development, Anthea Harris; and the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences, David Karoly, while the moderator was the Environment Editor from the Melbourne Age, Tom Arup.