Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead

The climate wars between the major political parties have cost us a host of lost business and employment opportunities, even a global leadership role, and yet we drift on without an energy policy that might provide some relief to rising power costs and some strategy to meet our commitments to reduce emissions.

John Hewson takes us through the climate wars.

The government’s most recent policy, the National Electricity Guarantee (NEG), is the fourth most effective response, only being proposed after an emissions trading scheme, an emissions intensity scheme and Finkel’s clean energy target were sequentially rejected.

In this sense, the guarantee is the last, and only, game in town, but it is still likely to be exhaustively debated, mostly for not moving fast or far enough, with concern about the longer-term future of the renewables sector.

Read John Hewson’s opinion piece from The Age - “Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead.”

Developing a Climate Change Framework for action

The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning is building a framework for climate change action in Victoria that will be released in 2016.

We want to hear from you about the challenges and opportunities for climate change action, your vision for a thriving and resilient future for Victoria, and how government can work with you to get us there.

Read more here - “Developing a Climate Change Framework for action.”

Commemorating human failure - we need to shift our focus

Today we commemorate and lament the tragedy that is war.

We dote on Anzac Day - we need to shift our
attention to addressing climate change.

Thousands of people gathered at ceremonies throughout Australia to remember events that are clear evidence of humanity’s failings.

Another event of a magnitude sufficient to make all the wars resulting from those failings appear of little consequence is about to rush over our horizon to disrupt and disable humanity and leave unimaginable carnage strewn about the planet.

The door through which we can access the solutions brought upon us through the damage we have done to our atmosphere is closing – our opportunities to address climate change are quickly becoming fewer and fewer.

The time, effort and money invested in commemorating our mistakes is misplaced for if we re-directed that trio, accompanied by the massive and sweeping media coverage war and its commemoration is given, then we would at least have some chance of mitigating, or adapting to climate change.

Among those things which will disable much of society and bring with it costs almost beyond comprehension is see level rise.

ClimateProgress discusses the consequences of sea level rise in a story headed: “84,000 Lives threatened by sea level rise in New England”.

The troubles facing New England are just one of an intricate mosaic of troubles facing people around the globe in this and the next decade.

Commemorating wars is a relatively simple emotive process as for once a year you assemble, illustrate your concerns, have your thoughts assuaged, secure endorsement from  your fellows (that’s most people), endorse business as usual and then return to live your life largely unchanged.

Nothing has effectively happened, unlike what is required when you become a climate change advocate and to say you endorse the science that unquestionably illustrates the reality of a damaged atmosphere, means you are stepping aside from society’s momentum and effectively saying “there’s another and better way”.

That takes courage, dramatically different from that exhibited by those who stormed the beaches at Gallipoli nearly a century ago, but still an aspect of courage about which people have little, or no understanding.

Chance is our friend, but we need to understand it

Humanity is here by chance.

Sir Martin Rees.

And despite our wonderful and innovative technology, it is again chance that stops us straying into harm’s way.

The Scientific American, in the story “Doom and Gloom by 2100” by Julie Wakefield, quotes British cosmologist and astrophysicist, Sir Martin Rees, who thinks science and technology is creating not only new opportunities, but also new threats.

So compelled was he to alert people to these hazards and the special responsibilities of scientists, that in 2004 he wrote the book “Our Final Hour”.

Rees directed Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy until 1992 and then served for a decade a Royal Society Research professor before assuming the Mastership at Cambridge’s Trinity College.

He insists that astronomers are well positioned to ponder the fate of humanity.

Writing about Rees, Wakefield says: “Innovation is changing things faster than ever before, and such increasing unpredictability leaves civilization more vulnerable to misadventure as well as disaster by design”.

Wakefield writes that Rees has made a £1,000 wager he hopes to lose arguing that a biological incident will claim one million lives by 2020.

Rees said: “In this increasingly connected world where individuals have more power than ever before at their fingertips, society should worry more about some kind of massive calamity, however improbable.”

He argues that it is possible to tip the balance to civilization’s favour. However, to do that, he says, environmental and biomedical issues should be higher on the political agenda.

“To raise the debate above the level of rhetoric,” he says, “the public must be much better informed.”