Push for sustainable future

The News is running a series of interviews with community leaders about their views on climate change.

We asked four questions:

1: What is your position on global warming and climate change?

2: Are we doing enough to mitigate the impact of climate change in the region?

3: Do community and business leaders have a role in advocating for more action, and positioning our region to take advantage of emerging opportunities?

4: What is your number one priority to help mitigate the impacts of climate change? Today we feature the responses of Shepparton-based Legislative Council Member for Northern Victoria Wendy Lovell.

Wendy Lovell.

What is your position?

The world’s climate has always changed — the history of the Earth tells us that and that is why we have had ice ages and ice melts. However, I believe that we all need to accept that our climate is now changing more rapidly due to human activity and I accept the scientific evidence that supports this.

Are we doing enough to mitigate the impact of climate change in the region?

The short answer is we could do more but climate change can’t be solved in one region alone. This is a global problem that needs global action.

Governments and industry will have to do more but they also need to act in a responsible manner that doesn’t cause significant hardship and unintended consequences.

For example: industry just packing up and moving to another country, that doesn’t address their responsibilities; or causing power prices to rise to the extent that lower-income households can’t afford.

There is also an onus on all of us as individuals to ensure we reduce our environmental and carbon footprint. We have become a consumer-driven, disposable society and over the past 50 years we have gone from small homes housing large families to extremely large homes that house fewer people but are fully airconditioned and centrally heated. We have numerous cars, TVs and mobile phones and a household’s carbon footprint is now much larger than what it was 50 years ago, let alone a century ago. Governments can assist individuals to reduce their carbon footprint through the provision of, for example, more public transport, but we also need to ask ourselves — what can we as individuals do to assist?

Do community and business leaders have a role in advocating for more action to combat climate change impacts?

Our community leaders have an obligation to advocate for the best outcomes for our region, and that means ensuring we can move to a more sustainable future while limiting the impact and risks it may have on our economy and liveability.

The rest of the population will always look to the leaders to provide solutions and lead by example, and I see that leadership happening in our region now. We have already seen our industries investing in better technology and more sustainable practices.

A good example is our irrigation industry, which has invested in better technology with solar power, and our irrigators, who have invested in irrigation practices that use less water. The recent expansion of solar facilities throughout the district shows that our region is taking advantage of emerging opportunities and also demonstrates a commitment to renewable energy and sustainability.

What is your number one priority?

The first thing that needs to happen is to move the discussion away from the current extremes of ‘Climate Change Deniers’ and ‘Climate Change Alarmists’ to ensure we can achieve an informed plan that will lead to a more sustainable future.

Other than that, investment in education and science to guarantee we are constantly producing better evidence and technology to ensure we make the right choices that produce the biggest gains in addressing climate change and our future sustainability.

However, one thing we could do immediately is to adopt the Victorian Liberal Party’s ‘Zero to Landfill’ waste-to-energy policy, which is based on technology that has already been successfully implemented in central Paris, Amsterdam, Germany and Singapore. This technology, along with reforms to recycling, would allow us to achieve zero waste going to landfill by 2035 and produce a reliable low-emission baseload energy supply to help meet Victoria’s growing needs and reduce reliance on high-emission fossil fuel-based energy production.

I BELIEVE THAT WE ALL NEED TO ACCEPT THAT OUR CLIMATE IS NOW CHANGING MORE RAPIDLY DUE TO HUMAN ACTIVITY AND I ACCEPT THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE THAT SUPPORTS THIS. — WENDY LOVELL

Story by John Lewis from The Shepparton News - “Push for sustainable future.”

Being 'positive' is not what many imagine

“Let’s be positive, let’s focus on the future,” Victorian Agricultural Minister, Peter Walsh, told a Shepparton meeting on Wednesday night (September 10).

Victoria's Agriculture Minister,
Peter Walsh.

The Minister was being not only positive, but naïve when he claimed it was his aim to see food production doubled in the state by 2030.

Although Minister Walsh argued that would be achieved by “focussing on the future”, it appeared that in reality he, and his head-nodding cohort were looking in another direction – backwards, rather than to the future.

It seems that the future Mr Walsh can see and is so positive about, is not the one that all Victorians will be engaging with.

That future, despite his positivism and unbridled optimism, will be plagued by water shortages, energy depletion, and weather quite unlike anything farmers and the communities that are integral to their infrastructure have ever had to deal with in the past.

Beyond that there will be a collapse of the services that the production and growth the Minister so idolizes depends upon.

There were many questions at the “Vison for the Valley“ meeting organized by the Committee for Shepparton, but they were all about machinations of maintaining the status quo and none ventured at all into the vacuum that will suck the productive life out of Victoria as our climate changes.

Deputy Premier, Mr Peter Ryan was holding the same song book and although she was at the other end of the table, the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development and the Minister for Housing, Wendy Lovell, appeared to reading from the same pages.

The National Party’s endorsed candidate for the November 20 State Election,

Greg Barr was the only person on the night to mention climate change, and that was only in passing.

There was considerable excitement at the meeting to have such an event at which people could openly and freely engage with senior politicians who either answered questions on the spot or promised to get back to the individual quickly with an answer.

Some said after the meeting that the process was democracy at work however, that was a rather hopeful exaggeration as fewer than 150 people at the meeting represents less than one per cent of Shepparton’s population. That appears to be democracy by the tyranny of the minority.

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.