Time for Australia too wake up to the scale ands pace of clean energy transition

UK billionaire Sanjeev Gupta is a very rich man, with a very big business that consumes a lot of energy.

In the last few months he has come to the same conclusion as tens of thousands of Australian homeowners and thousands of businesses, big and small: the best way to cut your bill for energy is to generate your own.

Gupta this week unveiled the details of his plans to build 1 gigawatt of large-scale solar, battery storage, pumped hydro and demand management for the Whyalla steel works and other big energy users in South Australia.

Gupta reckons it will slash his company’s energy bills by around 40 per cent, and he intends to repeat the dose in his even bigger steel plants in Melbourne and Sydney, which he says will be powered 100 per cent by renewable energy within a few years.

Read the RewewEconomy story by Giles Parkinson - “Time for Australia too wake up to the scale ands pace of clean energy transition.”

Drought-stricken Queenslanders cultivating big business ideas

Julie Brown photographs family and friends
 dressed in her swimwear designs.

In western Queensland, where drought has dominated most lives during the past five years, the small seeds of big business ideas have started to grow.

A dusty sheep station in the grip of drought is not the most obvious place to start an online swimwear business, but Julie Brown from Ilfracombe in western Queensland did just that.

At the height of the drought in 2015, with no formal business experience behind her, Ms Brown put her life savings and every second of spare time she had into developing an online, sun-safe swimwear business.

"We had no control over the weather but I felt that if I worked really hard on Coola Cozzies, I could have an element of control on that, I could make a difference," Ms Brown said.

Her husband, Adrian Brown, said he was proud of his wife's hard work.

Read the ABC story - “Drought-stricken Queenslanders cultivating big business ideas.”

Big business is finding being responsible is 'big business'

Investors are becoming more and more concerned
 about where their money is coming from.  

Being seen to be a responsible company has become big business, both financially and reputation-wise.

Last month the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) released a report revealing that 71 cents in every dollar invested in ASX200 stocks goes into companies shown as reporting on ESG [environmental, social and governance] to a "leading standard".

ACSI, whose members include super funds and asset managers that manage a combined $450 billion of 8 million members' retirement savings, has been reporting on environmental, social and corporate governance for nine years.

It is part of a growing push by the public to have greater access to what is going on inside companies.

Read Adele Ferguson’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Shades of grey in stand-off over super emissions.”

The 'moneyed men' fear anarchy the most, but profit greatly from it

Anarchy is the social movement feared most by the “moneyed men”.

Corporate anarchy is what
 we should fear the most.

Interestingly, though, and even more confusingly, it is the preferred mode of operation by those same people.

They abhor control, unless they have it, and see the freedom afforded by anarchy as an avenue to the erosion of corporate profits and growth.

They seek freedom from government and societal control and yet take a contradictory position in pushing whatever buttons they can to ensure that society is obedient to the ambitions of the corporate world.

It is the anarchy of big business that has shaped the thinking of the world’s populace, turning us all into consumers and so manufacturing behaviours that have that have disrupted the world’s climate system to such an extent that are now manifesting itself in ways that threaten humanity.

The control that the money men have so long feared, and have suppressed at every turn, now stands as our last and only resort to avoid humanity’s possible collapse.

Until humanity can reach an understanding that its wants and desires must be quelled and it must embrace a broad-based control mechanism, particularly the stifling of the profit and growth mandate of the world’s corporations, then climate change will continue unabated.

The privatization of public assets is anarchy gone mad – a public asset that was once just that, public, controlled and there to serve the people, but in being privatized has become an anarchical process, in that its only master is profit; profit arrived at the expense of people and, of course, the externality that is the world’s environment.

The modern corporate consumerist world inculcates individualism and success measured by accumulation and derides those who see value in, and work to build stronger communities that are about sharing, collaboration, social inclusion, and the strengthening of every public process, including education, health, accommodation and transport.

The privately owned car is anarchical and the antithesis of how we need to behave in a world facing unrelenting difficulties  evolving from climate change; the extraction and burning of Earth’s fossil fuels to create energy and a profit orientated consumerist ideology.

Corporate anarchy must end and control, without being authoritarian, must replace it.

We procratinate and the costs mount

The idea that climate change will be hugely expensive seems to escape most in the business world.

CBC News has written about that topic in its story headed: “Climate change will cost big business dearly, report warns”.

CBC focusses on what is happening in America, but the dynamic is similar in most developed countries.

It quotes a report published by the so-called “Risky Business Project” that argues that American businesses need to start factoring in weather and environmental-related losses, and take tangible steps toward reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Michael Green writes about big business taking an interest in climate change

Michael Green.

Michael Green writes in today’s Melbourne Age that the financial implications of climate change have begun to trigger a significant interest among those in big business.

In his story “Flirting with disaster” he interviews several people and can illustrate that it is far cheaper to better prepare for an event than pay the price of repairing the subsequent damage.

Green reports Victoria’s Environment Minister, Ryan Smith, declined to be interviewed and he did quote Australia’s PM, Tony Abbott’s response to the latest IPCC report in which he said: “Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains,” adding, “Always has been, always will be”.

Big business profits from troubles arising from 'business as usual'

“Business as usual” is the root cause of climate change and already the world’s corporations have figured out how to profit from this slow motion shipwreck-like event.

Climate change itself has produced its own niche industry and now the “big hitters” have linked their growth to earth’s climatic difficulties.

 

In the story headed: “The Big Business of Global Warming” Time magazine tells us that corporations are betting on climate change — and primed for a big payday when things really heat up.