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