Advice for all who draw a breath from Professor Jeffrey Sachs

Goulburn Valley people were probably few among those who recently almost packed out Melbourne’s Town Hall.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Globally renowned economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs talked about matters that maybe appeared remote to the concerns and interests of northern Victorians, but in fact were relevant to everyone who draws a breath.

The professor has credentials sufficient to near fill a lengthy document, but he was visiting Australia, and subsequently speaking in Melbourne in his role as Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Welcomed to the discussion on Wednesday, May 21, by the chair of the Monash Sustainability Institute, Professor John Thwaites, and then by City of Melbourne’s chairman of the council’s inner Melbourne climate action network. Cr Aaron Wood, Prof Sachs outlined the wonders of modernity.

He gave credit to coal for the growth of civilization – electricity equates with growth, he said  – even heaping praise on the contribution it had made to human life on earth, but was then critical of the unintended damage electricity arriving from coal-fired power stations had caused to our atmosphere.

John Thwaites.

As one of the world’s major exporters of coal, Australians, Prof Sachs said had to make some serious decisions to make either in stopping the mining and sale of coal or investing heavily in helping the world understand and use carbon capture and sequestration, an unproved process and yet the only one that could make coal safe and so useable.

He was concerned about the future welfare of the world saying that climate change could not, and would not be resolved by putting up a few extra solar panels.

We needed, according to Prof Sachs to make significant changes to how we lived as we were pressing many planetary boundaries and had already exceeded some.

He said we are pressing on the accelerator when we should have our foot on the brake.

The professor is astonishingly erudite when considering global economics, and appears to stand with most others when reflecting on how humanity advances and yet successfully mitigates the worst impacts of climate change, or at least what is causing our climate to change.

Our ceaseless and careless use fossil fuels has unquestionably improved many aspects of human life lifting us from what was virtually a hand-to-mouth way of living when the prime source of energy was animal, human and a limited use of renewable energies – wind and water.

The modern live that is now so entrenched that the needed change is almost beyond comprehension, and yet it is the very energy that has made everything we enjoy possible that has seriously disrupted and damaged our atmosphere.

The optimists among us admit to serious changes in how we live, but generally and broadly life appears to go on pretty much within boundaries of what exists.

Prof Sachs appears to stand with that group and although he didn’t articulate how he saw the future, he did say that it would be dramatically different if we failed to attend to the drivers of climate change.

However, many it seems pretend (and maybe that is too strong a word, but few can articulate a workable alternative) that what we presently enjoy will continue in some recognisable form.

Cr Aaron Wood.

Prof Sachs urged those at the town hall not to discount nuclear power pointing to clear difference  between the deaths suffered from coal, which were in the millions, compared to nuclear, which was only in the hundreds.

He is not, in any sense, as advocate of the “business as usual” scenario, which he illustrated through graphs was simply a journey to disaster; difficulties for  humanity arising from global temperatures five and six degrees in excess of pre-industrial revolution levels, taking conditions on earth way beyond anything that humans have ever experienced or lived through.

Evidence clearly illustrates, a point made abundantly clear by Prof Sachs, that nearly all of the known fossil fuels must stay in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change and to do that we have no option but a dramatic and never-before-seen change to human behaviour that demands an immediate reversing of human consumptive and fossil-fuel energy usage.

Rather than globalization, we should be looking at, and working on “localization”, building resilience in our local communities and switching to what some described as “10-minute life” – that is a situation where everything we need to day-to-day contentment is within a 10 minute walk or cycle of where we live.

Work, or at least purpose, is psychologically important to humans and conscious of what Prof Sachs says, we need to re-shape, redefine and reorganise human purpose away from the idea of profit and growth to one of collaboration and resilience that is about human survival.

Idealistic and utopian? Maybe so, but it is a dream we must follow for the only other route is that which denies humanity its fulfilment and sends us crashing into disruptive times from which escape for most is impossible.

A budget built on ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety

Ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety underpin the latest Australian Budget.

Everything is life is ideologically driven, even these thoughts, but opinion that surrounds them and their associated beliefs that endorse them, or otherwise, are disparate and seemingly limitless.

A financial budget arising from a democracy and intended to serve those living within that democracy is a complex beast and the author, or authors, always face an intrigue that exceeds their ability to deliver.

Present budgetary intent to deliver smaller government camouflaged as savings and efficiency, and “repairing the budget”, contrasts with the facts as explained by Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Steglitz.

Writing in “Globalization and its Discontents” about the East Asia crisis of the late 1990s, Steglitz argued that nations that best endured the crisis where those with strong government participation.

Using the recent budget to pursue its ideologies, our government seems to have dropped the reins, and even dismounted, and handed control of its charger over to chance and private enterprise.

As we rush ill-equipped into a world unknown, it seems we are being asked put our trust in faith and leave fact and reason to rust.

The rather brutal facts are that humanity, and that includes you and me, and of course Tony Abbott and his cohort, presently faces its greatest ever threat and urgently needs both scientific facts and all the information it can get about those realities from reliable sources.

Joseph E. Steglitz.

The institutions that both provide facts and help us understand that information were punished or disbanded in the recent Budget, yet millions have been set aside for the provision of chaplains in schools – a place where science should be exemplified, but it is being usurped by faith.

“Trust us” is the plaintive cry from Joe Hockey as he tries to assuage our wounded intellect that is left limping and staggering about from a blizzard of broken promises.

Trust is not one of those things that cannot be bought and beyond that, the intent of our present government became obvious, and our suspicions triggered, from the moment it left the ministerial science seat empty, illustrating it preferred fantasy to fact.

Anecdotal asides, driven by populist credos seem preferred, leaving the administration of Australia locked into thought processes that might have had some relevance a century ago, but inadequate in every sense for a future that every shred of scientific evidence illustrates will be quite different for what was.

With yesterday’s men at the helm, and collecting knights and dames as we go, we sail blithely about with the poor, pensioners, students and the states stoking the boilers, allowing the rich, flaunting their ideological map, to loll about as we seek refuge on Fantasy Island.