Reply to letter of concern about our coal is as expected

Concerns about Victoria’s plans to exploit the state’s massive coal resources and its implications for climate change drew an expected response.

A note of concern to Victorian Premier, Mr Ted Baillieu, on March 30 this year (2012) was referred to the state’s Minister for Energy and Resources, Mr Michael O’Brien, and in that turn generated, again the expected response.

The Departmental Liaison Officer from the Minister’s office, Lee Evans, wrote:

Dear Mr McLean

 Coal Fire Power Stations

Victoria's Minister for
Energy and Resources,
Michael O'Brien.

Thank you for your correspondence of 30 march 2012 to the Hon. Ted Baillieu MLA, Premier of Victoria, regarding the above matter. You query has been referred to the Hon. Michael O’Brien MP in his capacity as Minister for Energy and Resources.

The Minister is currently receiving advice from the Department of Primary Industries on the issues raised in you correspondence. A reply will be sent once the advice is received and considered.

Yours sincerely.

It is intriguing that the decision to exploit our coal fields could be made without first considering all the implications, including what the Department of Primary Industries thought.

To be fair, what has been discussed so far, publically at least, appears to be a Federal Government initiative, but surely such sweeping decisions with huge environmental consequences are not made in isolation and unquestionably the State would have been implicated.

I await with interest Mr O'Brien's response.

Melbourne’s daily newspaper, The Age, reported on Latrobe Valley plan in a story headed: Pilbara Plan for Victoria.

- Robert McLean

A plea to MLC and Minister seeking climate change abatement stance

As the Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, the Shepparton based MLC for Northern Victoria, Wendy Lovell, has a critical role to play in understanding and preparing Victoria’s response to human-induced climate change, subsequently this letter went to her office today (March 30, 2012) – Robert McLean.

Dear Wendy,

The Minister for Housing
and Minister for Children
and Early Childhood Development,
 the Shepparton based MLC
for Northern Victoria, Wendy Lovell

I am unsure of your personal beliefs about climate change/global warming (call it what you prefer), but as a member of a Victorian Government that has absolute disregard for human contributions to the difficulty and so our behaviour, it is clear where you stand professionally.

As the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development it is something in which you should be critically interested in the impacts of climate change as it is our children, and particularly our grand-children, who will feel the effects of a changing climate that will produce circumstances far different from what has existed for the past 10 000 years and in the modern era, the last 200 years or so.

Those effects, despite the verbose claims of the many doubters and skeptics, will bring droughts, higher temperatures and rainfall that will be dumped on the state, including your electorate, in torrential downpours that will produce flash flooding causing soil erosion and the washing away of the state’s rich top soils.

Combine droughts, those higher temperatures and erratic rainfall and we have a situation in which lives for people of all ages will become increasingly difficult.

The Baillieu Government’s (your government!) intentions to abandon the already trifling carbon dioxide targets is socially irresponsible in the extreme and along with that we have the idea that the Premier echoes federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's fatuous views, in pointing out that the recent state budget set aside funds for ''direct action'' with a $40 million clean energy fund as well as the replacement of street lights and tree planting to help cut emissions.

Wendy, I urge to seriously look at and do your best to understand the science of climatology (it’s hugely complex) for unless we respond positively, we are doomed to an increasingly difficult future.

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 do just that – and unleash force so great that an unprepared community will be decimated.

James Hansen

It was in the early 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.

Interestingly, 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.

Ted Baillieu argues, in handing responsibility for our CO2 emissions to the Federal Government, he is acting responsibly, economically and every other way, for the state, but the reality arising from “business as usual” , we will, within a decade or so, see Victoria as a “State of Disarray”.

Wendy, I urge you to put the welfare of your electorate, along with that of Victoria, Australians and people of the earth generally, ahead of your professional aspirations, step aside from your government’s beliefs and policies and commit to helping Victoria, your home and my home, to be a place that will do what it can to ease climate change.

Although you may lose your role, it would be wonderful that if future historians noted that it was Wendy Lovell as the Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development and the MLC for Northern Victoria played a key role in building Victoria’s resilience and helped prepare the state for the undeniable rigours arising from a warming globe.

Through your portfolio as Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, 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.

Wendy, it is remarkably difficult to escape from the “business as usual” paradigm, but should 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.

Concerned about the State Government’s decision to abandon climate change abatement plans and, beyond that, “sell” Victorians on the idea of using more coal made me somewhat unhappy and so I wrote the following letter to Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu – Robert McLean.

Premier of Victoria,
Mr. Ted Baillieu.

Dear Ted,

You and I, and all other Victorians, not to mention all Australians and the other seven billion who populate the planet, are locked into the most important and dangerous environmental experiment in the history of mankind.

Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu.

I admire you for elevating the importance of economic considerations for the state, but in the same breath condemn that approach as it is little more than a response aimed at ensuring political survival – it is populist decision devoid of courage and simple good sense.

Nature does not play any favourites and rather and make decisions aimed at financial securing and enriching our state, you and your counterparts should be investigating, understanding and applying processes and state-wide programs that will enable and build strong and resilient communities able to withstand the rigours of a changing climate.

Those changes, unquestionable and certain to grow worse within years (already Victorians have had to endure fires, record rains and never before seen floods and disabling droughts), are clearly and undeniably illustrated by science that has been repeatedly articulated by many of the world’s best climatologists.

According to those climatologists, whose evidence is indisputable, the south-east corner of Australia, including Victoria, will be drier and warmer, significantly in both cases.

Ted, the hallmark of a good politician if courage and I urge you to illustrate your bravery and integrity by seriously considering and honestly considering the realities of climate change and work to ensure Victoria and Victorians are positioned to address the unquestioned changes to lifestyle that climate change will bring.

Coal fired power stations are the absolute villain in relation to carbon dioxide emissions and claims of “clean coal” are simply misleading.

Coal-fire power stations are
 the absolute villains with
 regard carbon dioxide
emissions.

A workable alternative is nuclear powered integral fast breeder reactors – they are absolutely different from traditional nuclear power plants as they use different technology and the science was virtually complete when the U.S. was frightened off from anything nuclear after the Three Mile Island incident.

The integral fast breeder reactor is safe in the worst imaginable catastrophe, consumes almost all its own waste and any other nuclear waste presently stored around the world and because of the technology on which it depends, they would never “melt-down” rather simply shut down, and because of the way it uses its fuel, that same fuel would never by usable in any sort of nuclear weapon.

I urge you to consider an integral fast breeder reactor as one or two could answer all Victoria’s power needs, be built to use much of the state’s existing infrastructure, reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by as much as up to 50 per cent and end our dependence on coal.

Turn the money and expertise you intend to spend and use convincing Victorians about the relevance and usefulness of coal (a fatuous argument) toward helping all our friends understand the benefits of switching to nuclear powered integral fast breeder reactors.

Author Tom Blees writes about nuclear powered integral fast breeder reactors in his book “Prescription for the Planet: ThePainless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises”.

We are trapped in the “endless growth” cycle and although economists may applaud and encourage its maintenance, the earth has other ideas and it will be the neighbourhoods, communities and states who step first into a steady state economy will be those that endure best and so be the most content as we wrestle with the challenging changes brought on by a warming world; something that is unquestionably happening according to respected Australian institutions, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Ted, should you be keen to talk more I can be contacted at 5822 1766 or as I frequently visit Melbourne (by train), I can call and talk with you personally.

Thank-you for being accessible.

Make your displeasure known about State Government's adandoned plans

Environment Victoria is rightly upset by the Victorian Government’s plans to abandon reduce greenhouse pollution in the state by 20 percent by 2020.

It has urged people to make their displeasure with the decision and has listed these avenues of objection in the story on its website Tell Mr Baillieu – Wake up to Climate Action.