Response to The Australian’s endorsed article – Beware the greenies

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25667725-7583,00.html

To quote: “We don’t need to rein in the “human footprint” but rather stamp it even more indelibly on our planet, and in the future, on other planets too.” – Brendan O’Neill

Mr. O’Neill, you may be shocked to learn, just like Steve Fielding, that a human invention- science, has told us we have indeed overreached our grasp and are plunging the world to the point where we threaten our way of life. These same infallible, luminous beings called humans, who magically turn the world in a “place of abundance” have through our divine cleverness decided to think about what is happening around us and use our communities to pool our learning. Amazingly, we come to the conclusion that there is some connection between the consumption activities of billions of people and the shape of our world’s resources and climate.

Clever humans looked ahead for once, saw the earth isn’t flat and along the way, found that supplies are not limitless and greed and laziness (the cause of most emissions) have put us on our own path to well, hell. Little wonder the rest of the world finds Australian’s arrogant when we think we can be some sort of exception to the natural forces of the world and should be entitled to emit, “stamp our footprint” further as Brendan suggests.

Humanising our planet might sound like some devine entitlement and stewardship, but what are you hoping this leads to Brendan?

Do you mean Waterworld or Mad Max? What would you prefer?

Live for the moment sure, but govern for the future

Many clichés cover the subject of living for the moment, follow your dreams, you only live once, youth is wasted on the young and so on. All wonderfully motivational and can be a good reminder of our mortality, thus making sure we don’t procrastinate too much and do things we feel must be done before it is too late. We are inherently short-term thinking creatures, if something happens around you unsuspecting, you react initially in self-interest.

If something is announced by a government to spend more billions on a wasteful, short-term initiative, most will immediately wonder if and how it benefits or costs us. How does this effect my goals, my way of life? I need to do and see everything, I am special and need to feel I’m being protected as such and that my government empowers me to toil with the world as I see fit. I would like to examine what this sort of thinking means in the context of our legacy, our recorded legacy.

We are going to be the most highly documented century in history- while it could be argued all successive societies bring new technology an sophisticated means of recording it, none had such means for widely distributed and individually participated content as that which I am using as I type this tirade. The internet is now a mind-bogglingly huge record of our individual and collective thoughts and ambitions, our activities and achievements, our news- real and manufactured stories. Hopefully, it will be preserved for those in 2100 and beyond to open up, review and discuss just as do with a history book.

We need to be mindful that our way of life, our priorities, our debates and our work is being documented and distributed so widely that any retrospective view of our society will be highly accessible. What will they see? What will they think of it? It could be argued that it doesn’t matter, we are here to live for the now, it is the natural course of history to look back with scorn or amusement at past societies. But when a new generation faces the sort of legacy that we, the industrialised world leave in our wake, there will rightly be much to answer for. Will we just blame the government? probably.

Governments will tell us that they govern for the people, they make decisions to enhance and protect the quality of lives (usually they say our economy, but we assume humans are involved somehow). As governments feel their mandate is to protect our living standards they work tirelessly to do so only for the current generation of voters. Why wouldn’t they? What point is there in inflicting any pain, sort term or otherwise, on a current crop of voters, no matter how critical it may be to anyone 10, 20, 50 years from now?

Unless the positive effect (or absence of negative effect) of drastic action can be felt now, it must not be acted on. Where the change in policy or expenditure may effect profitability or affulence of the voters now or in the next 3 years, it must not be done unless they are guaranteed to see the benefits and thank the government at the next election. Why should a government take that risk?

Why should a politician alienate the interest groups of business, unions, their department, their electorate, their undeclared personal share portfolio or their future directorships? There is no incentive for a government, elected on short terms and funded by interest groups hell bent on maintaining the status quo, to take any brave action beyond the tokenistic PR or political wedge stunts. The federal governments ETS bill will become a case study on dirty politics played with an issue of vital importance.

I see no way around the issue of conflicted interest of any elected government of Australia, our cultural nuances mean that we are unable to take a long-term view in taking any sort of sacrifice now for the benefit of the future, even if it means our retirement age is played out in a quagmire of resource depletion, famine and chaotic weather.

I won’t pretend this is my idea, you can thank Mr. George Monbiot for this; we need to have some means of overseeing all of the policy and spending decisions to ensure they do not unduly burden future generations. The oversight group would have to ensure that in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years the decisinos can be justified against what we can project would be a reasonable state of affairs.

Some might say the Senate is meant to provide such checks and balances, except they are from the same crop of political parties, with the same biases and conflicts of interest that cloud decision making and render it largely an exercise in frustration and back-room dealings benefiting only marginal groups of society.

From what I can observe of the political decisions for the past 15 years in Australia, it seems that the best strategy to get re-elected is to follow this recipe:

1. Sell assets to the private sector, give public assets to shareholders to top-up government coffers now, future profits go to those that manipulate the markets- but you will deliver much on election promises from a once-only sale
2. Spend the proceeds of decades of public investment to benefit voters now on short-term election promises, baby-bonuses, hand outs, bail-outs of dead industries, duplicate gym buildings for schools scheduled to close in the next year etc.
3. Allocate funding for a decade to come to initiatives to be spent over the next 2-3 years, ensuring that benefits are felt by the people that don’t have to fit the bill for them now, you will never be held to account as the cost is born by others and you’ll be out of office by then
4. Be seen to be busy by taking rash spending decisions to stimulate the economy, you are not seen to be indecisive, you are responsive and people won’t think of you as reckless until it is too late to hurt you at the voting booth, maybe you’ll have bribed them with more one-off payments by then
5. Never ever take a courageous step by investing the 100 billion or so needed in re-shaping the economy to a sustainable one, just try and make it look like you tried, create a scheme no-one likes, creates a false permit economy, insulate everyone from actually paying anything more for their high-emission lifestyles, exempt every industry that you already subsidise to make competitive on an international stage, then blame the opposition and the greens when it is voted down

We need more than that, therefore I propose to the Governor General, the Queen, the Pope, Ban, Ki-Moon, Barrack Obama or whoever can get rid of Australia’s abominable political dynamic, gets around to putting a governance panel that can ensure we don’t steal everything from the future to profit in the now.

Let’s start the veto-power controlling entity with broad terms of reference measuring any policy against effect in people in the future, a “Future Committee“. There you go, our saviour might be another committee- what have we come to…?

Our time is now

We face a number of challenges at present, some real and some perceived or exaggerated. Chief among those we hear most about are the credit crisis which, initiated by greed is now being seen as a reason to nick money from the future to convince people to keep being greedy. The most greedy act we can do is surely to deny others their entitlements by stealing it from their future and calling it something benign like “economic stimulus”.

Let us put things into perspective, what are the first world’s biggest challenges? I mention the first world as the problems started there and have their highest long-term impact as distinct from the under-developed world. A quick cross section of counties and issue counts reveals common threads:

• Depression in urbanised societies, leading to abuse of alcohol, drugs, gambling or indeed abuse of each other
• Anxiety caused by many factors, chief among these a bombardment of too many messages, positive and negative, and a disconnect from the natural world for prolonged periods
• Obesity and sedation among the young, the middle aged, the growing majority of the population, leading to dubious quality of life
• Education standards reducing for most and investment in public sector education dropping
• Heath care facilities improving but only for those wealthy enough to buy it
• Job insecurity as a result of the credit crisis, often opportunistic sackings by investor-oriented companies looking to use the crisis as an excuse for cutting excess staff
• Infrastructure meltdown through congestion as a result of over-reliance on fossil-fuel driven urban planning and investment
• Rate of consumption of raw materials and foodstuffs out-stripping supply creating food crisis for the poor and inflation in product prices
• Collapse of ecosystems and predictable weather patterns that have been established for several millennia, as a result of human-induced global warming

In response to these issues governments of the world have spent trillions of dollars:

• Propping up dead investment banks to reward gambling failures
• Frantically appeasing big business and corrupt governments by refusing any protectionism and keeping globaised trade open by sending cheap goods thousands of kilometers (and billions of tonnes CO2) round and round, only to find the goods are also produced locally- but cost 5 cents per rationed more
• Bailing out archaic motor companies that produce 3 tonne personal vehicles to move fat individual Americans from a home internet terminal to a work internet terminal, via a drive-through, then running over someone else’s child as they drop them off their own at school which is 20 meters down the road from home so that the children can have a “safe” arrival
• Delay and water-down emissions reduction policies and infrastructure developments which would only employ people long into the future rather then employ them for the next year or so in high-carbon industries which failed to modernise and help only to perpetuate unhealthy lifesyles
• Splashing out one-off payments to people with orders to go out and spend it IMMEDIATELY on retail goods made in another country to then stick on the shelf at home and occasionally admire
• Slash interest rates to near-zero in the hopes of solving a credit-fueled crisis by having MORE debt and CHEAPER credit

Makes sense anyone?

Hope is not all lost, after all Mr. Obama has declared $115 billion for renewable energy in his economic stimulus package. Despite the over-hyped media frenzy around him, he has at last planted the seeds for a slowly more progressive America and through media saturation, slowly the world gets his message too.

Australia? Hey we have our stimulus package too. Go spend it now! Enjoy your future tax payments now- why wait!?

Somehow, this does not seem responsible… Is there nothing else more worthwhile we can plunge ourselves into collective debt for?

Great things have been achieved in far more difficult times. The British build an unprecedented floating harbor in the height of WWII, lugged it across the channel, connected it in northern France and had it up and running on the coast of an occupied country in a few days. It stood working for 18 months supplying goods through Normandy and was critical to ending the war that shaped the modern world.

The Sydney Harbor bridge was also built during war, through great political upheaval and the biggest depression of the modern times. Its construction plunged the state and the country into massive debt- but it employed masses of people, provides an key piece of infrastructure to a great city created an icon of national pride.

What these demonstrate is our capacity to adapt at times of difficulty and that we can and should take leaps of faith and turn the looming economic and environmental ruin of our current trajectory on its head. We can spend our taxes, our labor, our ingenuity and imagination on building meaningful things of practical, sustainable use and national pride.

Right now, we could power our economic recovery by building Solar panels in the outback, unobtrusive tidal power on our coast, hydro with reversible pump stations (to deliver base load at night from the surplus solar energy for when the solar is dormant at night), renewable-electrified rail network linking all population hubs in place of carbon-intensive and noisy flying.

We don’t need to reinvent anything, we can build this all now. We could employ many people, reconnect with the rural areas we build in, leave a worthwhile mark on our time and inspire people.

Or we can collectively spend those billions on one-off purchases down at the mall. Who will remember us for that?… I wonder.

Limited choices

Survival is about trusting your instincts, tempered by experience and knowing limits and your abilities.

In Australia, for the majority of people, survival is not usually under immediate threat. Risk always present, accidents a possibility, external threats perceived but not real nor imminent. We live fantastically easy lives compared to most people in the world and most people throughout time. We plan to hold onto our borrowed time no matter what it means down the line.

Most people seem content to gloss over the climate change problem and tell everyone how good their weekend was, what they plan to cook that night, or discuss how Brad & Angelina’s relationship is going. While all very important to our own needs & intranets, at a time when pivotal decisions are upon us and consequences so great, it is important not to live in denial. It is not someone else’s fault, our actions will be judged.

Ignorance might be bliss. But unless the world does better than Australia did today with a meaningless 5% target- then children born today will know very little bliss. What give us the right to deny them the things we take for granted.

Assuming the rest of the world adopts a similarly short-sighted posture on targets then we’ve committed ourselves to runaway climate change.

Where does this leave us as individuals with a desire to survive?

Two choices only. One- Lobby hard & relentlessly for change against the selfish instincts that reign in a fearful culture. Or Two- Prepare for the inevitable frenzy & find somewhere that can support yourself & your loved ones and be self-sufficient and unteathered to the world soon to collapse in on its own greed.

The Incas, The Summarians, The Mayans, The Romans… Write the next fallen chapter, the First World of the 21st century.

Easy targets

Greed makes us do strange things. A so-called global credit crisis and associated stock market crash has made us seek to point the finger at someone. Anyone. Anyone except for ourselves.

CEOs of big companies certainly do pocket attractive salaries, these usually mask the real value of their earnings which are obscured in a deliberately elaborate series of calculations to hide the real value. Base salary is usually peanuts stacked up against other incentives.

It is also true that they do not loose out on much when the company fails to do well, or completely collapses. CEOs never loose money when the company or they themselves under-perform, they can only earn slightly less than the maximum possible, never will they actually feel the pinch. Departure packages are often insanely generous, albeit legal and gross in hindsight-so why exactly do shareholders allow companies to hire these people on these stupid contacts?

Which brings me to the main point. Aren’t these CEOs and other Executives rather obvious and easy targets for us to complain about? Big salaries, packages, travel, company-funded entertainment and no purpose for being other than to generate profit for the shareholders.

Take a fictitious bank for example. The oft-criticised companies that charge excessive fees for their accounts, interest rate above the reserve values, quick to pass on increases, slow to trim cuts in rates. Quick to follow up when you owe them, slow to process things when they owe you. You hate them, but when you are a shareholder- you asked for it, you in fact demanded it of them to rip you off.

Shareholders demand growth, dividends, transparency (on occasion) and a board that will fight in their interests to extract the maximum returns in the fastest possible time cutting as many corners that they can. This insatiable desire for a growth momentum empowers boards to make decisions “in the interests of shareholders” and can rationalise anything in their name.

Safety, health, environment, ethics, customers, all are secondary compared to an increasing trajectory of profits. Shareholder give the board an excuse to do anything at all to grow the company and have their puppet CEO sing and dance for the media and all under the guise of acting in shareholders interest.

So, whilst the CEO battles through all those difficult conversations with his tax accountant on how he can avoid paying any tax- can we really blame the CEOs when they get these high salaries to fight on your behalf?

Shouting at executives as being undeserving of their high salaries is little more than professional jealousy and a cop-out for those among that either don’t understand their mission statement or would prefer to hide behind the same excuse that the board uses- the shareholders.

Investors greed has driven the crisis we now find. So we bail the companies out to the tune of may billions and indeed trillions across the world. Effectively a wealth transferral from the tax payer (the many) to the shareholders (the wealthy few).

We are a bunch of suckers for bailing them out. In 5 years time they will laugh at us as they profit from our panic and bail them out for their incompetency.

The “Blame China” Syndrome

Topical with commencement of the Olympics is the state of the air in Beijing, the visual pollution in that city and its possible effects on the athletes at the games. Effect or not it might have the the athletes of the games, one is left to wonder how bad things must be across the country, this rapidly growing country of 1.3+ billion people. We are also conditioned to make this more of an issue than it might have been, we are also perhaps ignorant of the reasons for the pollution- the rest of the world.

There can be no doubt that it looks bad, is not healthy for the people nor the world as a whole to have a smoke haze like this. In many parts of China it is not rare to have air like that which we see on TV this, or worse, in this country and indeed many other countries. We make conclusions that this must be a country with poor standards of care for the environment, the effect it has on its own people and the world as a whole through the emissions.

Truth be told, China’s growth is largely the result of the rest of the world’s desire for cheap goods and a distaste for messy factories close to “our” populations. China today is the result of globalisation, abundant labour and cheap fuel for making long-haul for the production of goods feasible.

Over at least the last 30 years we have gradually decided to move away from most messy industries and off-shore production of everything that is hard, messy work and could be done cheaper somewhere else with lower standards and. Couple these facets with proximity to populations and sensitive ecosystems- the “west” has pushed out its manufacturing of many goods to this one huge country.

We decided that we would rather be a service based economy with white collar work, a food bowel for our domestic consumption and export, plus a resources basket for the less developed world to then turn into something. Profits brought on by cheap fossil energy meant that we could do nearly anything we want to in terms of the movement of goods. We, who do less manual work then any other civilization in history, have cast ourselves as the clever, elite class that get others to do our hard and dirty work.

As disappointing and unpatriotic as this sounds, we most certainly are not the clever ones, Australian in particular are the dumb country. We have perhaps the richest renewable energy potential in the world, one of the largest land masses, one of the most diverse climates. So much potential to be self-sufficient and completely wean ourselves off oil and be a positive solution to the global warming issue. Instead, we continue to log forests, continue to build highways, airports, continue to waste water, continue to build fossil-fuel power infrastructure.

Unfortunately, Australia has been virtually stripped bare of trees over the last 200 years to make way for mostly grazing land for farm animals for meat, wool and milk production. We removed the ability to sequester the carbon that created the conditions for sustainable living for the species of the planet. Our rivers, flushed with erosion from lack of surrounding trees and diverted rivers are gasping for a drop and we pull out the dregs of it for unsustainable irrigation. Our farmers then ask for handouts when we fail to plain for the inevitable drying- again and again.

Many commentators and politicians in Australia, the worst carbon emitter per capita in the world, then have the arrogance to demand that the rest of the world- most commonly focussed specifically on China, commit to cut their emissions and clean up their act FIRST before we do.

Arguments of Australia being such a low percentage of the overall emissions footprint are amazingly foolish. It is the most basic and fundamentally flawed argument that we all were supposed to have learnt in life:

Teacher : “Why did you make that mess?”

Kid : “Because that other kid did!”

Teacher : “Well, if he jumped off a bridge- would you also jump off??”

 

We are in fact close to jumping off a bridge by in fact blaming others as a stalling tactic for avoiding the tough and costly decisions. Blaming others is just lame and cowardly, let us be a part of the solution not part of the problem.

If every country in the world took a view like Australia, that our footprint to too small to bother, we are all up a dry creek, sans paddle (Made in China).

Nearly run over

I’ll try not to read too much into it. Though I cannot explain why a driver in a car thinks they they can shout abuse “watch where you are going- you w#nker!” at a pedestrian walking over a pedestrian crossing. I did not suddenly dash across the road, I was walking normally over a well-marked crossing in an inner city area where people had only just walked across a second before I got started to go across.

To make matters worse, not only was the subsequent bad language uncivilised, the man driving had his pre-teen aged son in the front passengers seat to witness his father’s dressing down of a pedestrian minding his own business crossing the road in full compliance with the law. A fantastic example to the child, to the other people witnessing in the area and encapsulates an unfortunate facet of the mindset of many a driver.

I’ll cut to the chase- I love driving. Cars sounds good (some of them) they can be fun to drive, they can take you to amazing places and can bridge families together over distances. They move goods all around and provide services we have conditioned ourselves to think are critical to survival.

Unfortunately, the feeling of having control of a what is percieved to be a highly sophisticaed machine has the effect of switching off the mind to good reasoning, to manners and gives many people a sense of ownership or rights to the road over anything else.

Some typical driver mindsets:

• Animal crossing the road?  = I want a bull bar
• Cyclist? = Get off the road, you don’t pay rego!
• Pedestrian = What?? I have to stop? – I’m in a hurry!

I was just as susceptible to this mindset and I would consider myself to have been an “angry driver” who felt that anyone that didn’t see my logical reasoning and started moving as soon as those lights went off was holding me up and was in my way!.

It is a good thing for my safety, sanity and health that I now can use a number of public transport options as alternatives and live in a sufficiently well-serviced area that I do not need to drive to get by.

As deeply remorseful as I am for holding up that driver this morning for 0.5 seconds at 8am this morning. I am far more sorry for that child in his passenger seat who will retire to a 3 degree warmer world of depleted oil reserves.

Why?- because daddy used up all the oil and good will shouting at pedestrians crossing the road and then flooring it in a turbo subaru…

Adam Gilbert

Christmas cheer

Having eroded our accounts buying presents, booked up our calendars and committed ourselves to various social events- are we feeling the Christmas spirit?

Yes this is a rant about the meaning of Christmas and what it means to different people. To me it means, on a basic level- not working (hopefully). More than that it means getting some sun, going for a run or a cycle and shedding some more winder wobbliness from the mid-section or “contentment layer”.

Having moved away from immediate family for the first time it alters what Christmas is significantly. Although I will spend it with some of the family it takes on a new dimension. One is forced to choose where to spend Christmas, rather than having only one default option, a home.

Family is the ultimate support base, the rock, your friends and they are complex relationships. To choose to spend time with some of the family and not have the option to see the other due to the tyranny of distance is a dilemma. No matter what choice you make you are likely to offend some and please others.

This year for me will be different, though hopefully not difficult. I am in a new city that has a wonderfully rich culture, things to do and amazing places to eat- all highly important in my book. It is inescapable that times change and people move on, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. In my case I think the jury is out on which it is- but I have no regrets. Only for missing the cat of course!! L

Christmas will be different in many ways this year and having moved away from any semblance of a family home it is less warm and feels like the last ties to being a child in some ways. By no means am I grown up but I do feel a much more grounded individual these days. Whilst I see so many petty things going on I try and look beyond the petty things that often occupy ones mind and focus on living a sort of life that I both enjoy yet am not ashamed of in any way.

Although slightly off topic, over the past month I also sense a change in the wind with people recently. Post-election in Australia people seem a little less tense, a little more relaxed, open… perhaps even happy?

I do hope that this Christmas is good fun and that the optimism of new government, a new year and an opportunity to create a more considerate national identity can be the revelation of the year ahead.

2008 beckons