Carbon tax will be irrelevant, but we need to prepare

Proposals for Australia to introduce a carbon tax have dominated public discussions.

Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Australians, and anyone else for that matter, is intimately connected to consumption, meaning, simply, that the more we consume the more carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere.
That elementary fact was clearly illustrated during the recent Global Financial Crisis (GFC) – with the world experiencing a cash crisis, consumption and subsequently production slowed resulting in a measurable decrease in our emissions.
The GFC saw the economy escape and bolt free, but a carbon tax is about tackling global warming with some discipline and imagined control over the mysteries of the economy.
However, something else is happening, something that will easily surpass the impact of both the GFC and the argued about carbon tax. We are running out of oil!
Everything our industrial world exists because of oil and rather than argue endlessly about a tax we yet don’t understand, we should be apply the ingenuity we are using to win or lose that debate to prepare our communities to live in a low-energy and “oil-less” world.
Life as we know it today and as it will be tomorrow will be as different as a blink and a wink – strikingly similar, but decidedly different, both in intent and purpose.
Rather that waste time piecing together something ultimately useless, our efforts, from the Prime Minister down, should be aimed at understanding how we can live well in a low-energy world.
The road from here to the end of oil in about 30 years will be exceedingly bumpy.
Much needs to be done, but the absolute first priority is to psychologically prepare people for what will be a transformative revolution to life styles.
Discussing life changing events, the late Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said we go through five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.
The end of oil, that will resolve any need for a carbon tax, will see whole communities experience all those paradigms articulated by Dr Kubler-Ross.
The proposed carbon tax is a divisive distraction that will be both irrelevant and unimportant when the oil runs out.

A man of his times who would have been a man of our times

My dad would have been a man for today.



The late Alec McLean
 - my dad.

 Dad, however, died about 20 years ago, sometime before the ideas of climate change, conservation and sustainability had been subjects of discussion, although clearly understood by some.
Re-use, conservation and sustainability were simply a way of life for dad, an ideal learned as he lived the lessons ingrained by the so-called Great Depression of the late 1920s.
Dad was in his 80s when he died, and although cautious of romanticising his life, I have memories of him having never having new clothes or for that matter, anything new, except a small, new, utility he bought before he died.
He did his best to dress with some dash for important family moments and as the State president of the Victoria Apiarists’ Association he sometimes had new shirts to accompany his suit for that body’s formalities.
His career as an apiarist (beekeeper) was built around second-hand everything from vehicles, clothes, screws, bolts, nails and anything else imaginable.
Our home and cement toilet in Echuca had been carted by dad, personally, from what was to become the Port of Echuca, his huge shed was built from used materials and was covered with metal stamped out and painted for kerosene tins, second-hand naturally, but unused.
Much of what was in our house came from auction sales as did some of my Christmas presents.
Loo paper was originally old newspapers until dad fell upon boxes of docket books at a clearance sale and so for many years a former Echuca dry cleaners had a new role in the McLean household.
Soon after my wife and I were married, we had mum and dad for meal of chicken and having cleaned the bird of all its meat, my wife was about to throw away the carcass, but dad asked for what was left arguing he could get three meals from it – he did!
Old furniture from auction sales fuelled our wood fires and in some instances became “bottom boards” on dad’s beehives; nails were carefully removed, straightened and stored for future use.
Dad’s times had made him a man for our time, before his time.

Artisans helped us build and understand the world

Artisans helped build the world and through them we came to understand the crucial connection between creativity, ingenuity, nature, time, quality and the subtle beauty of the craftsman’s skill.



 Henry Ford gave us
the car and we paid
with our
 understanding of
 craftsmanship.

 The elusive beauty that craftsmen/women brought to the world has been largely eroded by technology and the urgency of mass production driven by fallacious need for growth.
The commercial world’s need for a standardized “more” has ended creativity and seen the demise of quality, repairable products.
Factory made products shaped remote from the touch of the craftsman seem to have no affinity with nature and so leave the end-user with no sense that nature played a critical role in bringing to them whatever it is they have in their hands.
Henry Ford introduced the world to mass production about a century ago and it proved to be the opening gambit of what was to be the end of the era of the craftsman.
Ford may have made the motor vehicle accessible to all, but he really did humanity a disservice robbing it ultimately of a great asset – the uniqueness, ingenuity, patience, inventiveness and the understanding of nature and time afforded us by craftsman.
Interestingly, those skills and the qualities they bring are only years away from again being in demand when we begin to feel the pervasive impacts of climate change; a reality to be complicated beyond comprehension as the world exhausts its fossil fuels.
The craftsmen skills that sustained the world before we accessed the bountiful energy of fossil fuels will again be crucial as we work to recover from our oil-soaked way of life.
The world of tomorrow will need people who understand the crafts and skills that were common in the 19th century, and of course put those to use, but at the same time integrate modern technological skills when and where they can.
In the decades ahead we will need people who can make clothes, provide locally-sourced food, build houses, understand animal husbandry, build a workable infrastructure from the remnants of our fossil fuelled-festival, establish low entropy ways of living and maintain the human project of civilization.

We are living in a dream; a dream that's becoming a nightmare

Dreams, good, bad or otherwise, have bequeathed us this world.

Our modern world is the product of dreams, much of what we enjoy sprang from dreams and, interestingly, disillusionment also arose from dreams.


James Howard Kunstler

Today’s dream, or life narrative, has become something of a nightmare with the indisputably reality of human triggered global warming and then to further complicate matters, the end mid-way through this century of the world’s oil resources. Last week I invited readers to join me and consider my dream, a dream that I humbly suggest would ease the difficulties that society and humanity generally, face as our climate changes and we embrace a low-energy future.
To withstand significant changes to our climate and live successfully and psychologically prosperously in a low-energy future we need to re-engage with our near-neighbours, in turn with our wider communities, society generally and so civilization.
Early in his 2005 book “The Long Emergency” James Howard Kunstler said he hoped it would wake the American public from its sleepwalk and defend the project of civilization.
“Even in the face of epochal discontinuity, there is a lot we can do to assure the refashioning of daily life around authentic local communities based on balanced local economies, purposefully activity and a culture of ideas consistent with reality.
“It is imperative for citizens to be able to imagine a hopeful future, especially in times of maximum stress and change,” Kunstler wrote.
Discussing why alternative fuels won’t rescue us Kunstler said: “Based on everything we know right now, no combination of so-called alternative fuels or energy procedures will allow us to maintain daily life in the United States the way we have been accustomed to running it under the regime of oil.”
And so what do we do locally? The world-wide Transition movement enables communities to ease into a low-energy future and a Tatura based group aligned with those aims is working to expose its community to those critical ideals – join them, or at least endorse its ambitions.
Tatura Transition is working to understand our crisis-laden future and can help us turn a certain nightmare into a dream.

I have a dream! Join me and we can 'dream large'

I have a dream.

The late Martin Luther King Jr (below) had one too and although different in specifics, it was driven, however, by similar ideals; ideals that ensured human flourishing.

King dreamed of equality between humans, something I dream of too, but beyond that, I dream also of small tight-knit, self-reliant, resilient, interlocked and prosperous communities in which the people who live there and the communities in which they live, stand as one as they address tomorrow.

My dream is not proprietorial and so you, or any others, may step into the dream and taking the advice of the University of Melbourne, “Dream Large”.

Our generous, spacious and prosperous future is not about traditional growth or profit, rather a stationary state of capital and wealth that one of the 19th century founding fathers of economics, John Stuart Mill (right), said would be both necessary and desirable.

Mill, an enthusiast of the stationary state, imagined such a position did not imply a stationary state of human improvement.

Join me in my dream as we consider life in our finite world and on how we best can unleash the endless bounty of the human intellect, innovation, spontaneity, charisma, kindness and the social necessity of mingling and sharing with others.

Join me in my dream - join me in my contemplations about why our world is divisive, competitive, consumptive, and violent with an addiction to wasteful and destructive fallacies and superstitions.

Join me in my dream - join me as we ponder the way ahead and contemplate a community in which most of what we need is within easy walking or cycling distance.

Join me in my dream - join me as we think about how we liberate people from the shackles of what modernity terms progress, a progress that sees the young who ache for the wisdom of their elders are starved of it and those who can give are trapped in the iron cage of consumerism.

Martin Luther King dreamed of equality; I also dream of it, but in small tight-knit, self-reliant, resilient, interlocked and prosperous communities free of narcissism that are physically and psychologically prepared for our low-energy future.

Considering the opening gambit of global warming

Australia’s most recognized scavengers stalked the park as the media repeatedly told us that Cyclone Yasi was stalking Queensland’s North coast.


Frederick Buell's From
Apocalypse to Way of Life,
 available from Amazon.com.



The common crows, mouths agape, prowled about and there seemed something symbolic with their black image considered by some a harbinger of death or, at least, difficult times.

A further mental complexity arrived through the reading of Frederick Buell’s 2004 book, “From Apocalypse to Way of Life”, in which he discussed the environmental crisis in the American century, a scenario easily extended for the whole world.
Yasi made landfall some 2000 kilometres north of where I read and watched the crows, but the impact, beyond clear skies and a slight breeze, was endless warnings and then constant news about the devastation.
The effects of the cyclone, strangely, are being felt in other places, for instance, in Victoria with a deluge across the state, sufficient to see rescue and emergency services hard at work.
What we are experiencing is the opening gambit of the global warming that climatologists have been predicting for decades.
Humans have long imagined themselves as standing apart from nature, but the arrival of Yasi illustrates the fallacy of that view, just as nature driven difficulties in disparate parts of the world also clearly illustrate that same fact.
Like many other authors, Buell warns us of how we rationalize the deterioration of the planet, or how we repeatedly excuse ourselves of deforestation, freshwater depletion, ocean pollution, biodiversity loss and how human narrative says little about how we resolve, or escape from this impasse.
Having read only about 80 page of Buell’s work, I’m unsure what way of life he will suggest, but should he reflect the thoughts of many others, it seems likely he will discuss the need for a more restrained way of living in which we put fewer demands on earth’s environmental resources.
Huge industrial throughput of the past two centuries and the resultant refuse and toxins have stressed nature’s sinks, but that which is probably most stressed is the human psychology “sink”, something facing even further demands as it contrives, understands and deals with a new way of living.

Proposed levy will ultimately be ineffective

Australia’s new flood levy will ultimately be ineffective.

Individually the cost is insignificant, but with most Australian workers tipping into the fund, it will have sufficient financial clout to see much of what has been damaged, repaired.
Returning to a business as usual paradigm is understandable, but it is a lost opportunity.
Australians should work together to ensure their fellows are safe and not alienated from comforts that bring contentment and allows a worthwhile contribution, but rather than rebuild processes and infrastructure that worsened the difficulty, we should be exploring and investing in a strikingly different way of living.
Most of us, including me, have been seduced by the bounty we enjoy in this modern life, a way of life funded by the consumption of what those who follow should inherit.
So rather than spending with enthusiasm to re-build a life dependent on practices known to worsen climate change, that money should be directed at understanding a different way of living.
Australia already has many voluntarily set up Transition Towns organizations, groups that are working to prepare their communities to live and flourish in a low-energy future, and they, and their communities, would benefit greatly from Federal Government recognition and funding.
Resilience is an idea often discussed at such groups and it is essential those presently dealing with the aftermath of floods understand that concept.
Transition groups, we have one in Tatura (about 18km east of Shepparton in Northern Victoria), explore how we can live a fulfilling and contented life in a future that is missing many of things now considered normal.
Rather than simply return to a life as it was, Queensland and Victorian people affected by the floods, along with the broader population, need to re-imagine life and apply cash from the levy to re-engineer of life.
The starting point in any community re-building process is equality, something many would argue is impossible to achieve, but that error in thinking doesn’t devalue its pursuit as research illustrates equality positively impacts on the poorest to the wealthiest.
This levy is an opportunity to help communities become resistant to similar future difficulties and resilient enough to survive them should they happen again, something climate change makes almost certain.