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.
