While various levels of government in Australia each dabble in the field and put on token programs of ‘environmental awareness’, each chooses to use the vernacular of ‘sustainability’ as though all our problems have now been solved.
Senior bureaucrats and politicians bounce spin doctor terminologies off each other in think-tanks that focus more of spin-doctoring and pretty much inconsequential programs that make minute energy savings all the while looking for and spending public funds on projects under the guise of ‘jobs, jobs’, jobs’’ mantra that works in the opposite of sustainability.
All around Australia, in every state and territory, we see the environment in collapse, as we unsustainably try to extract more resources from already over-taxed food growing soils, milk river systems to flush toilets and run industry of questionable productivity and look for ways to sustain the profits of major greenhouse gas emitters by making them exempt from paying for the pollution they cause.
Its quite common to see and read of people who are intelligent who honestly believe sustainable living is assured and achievable via technology, ignorant of the fact that every technology has an embodied energy component that 99 times out of 100 is never paid off by that technology.
As an example, in Queensland there is a plant that ‘generates’ electricity by burning macadamia nut shells; however, if the total embodied cost of the machinery, environmental cost of growing, watering, harvesting and transporting and then end disposal of waste of burnt off shells were calculated, then the ‘savings’ or sustainability would be in the negative; in other words the end outcome and cost far outweighs any purported benefits.
Therefore, the focus and current thinking about sustainability is flawed; a sort of have our cake and eat it. The promotion and planning for more housing development – which means more people / population explosion – means that government still can’t grasp the logic that you can’t spend more than you have and that we can have a sustainable future by just buying green products. Sustainability cannot rest on the ‘achievement’ of a cloth bag over a plastic bag when we still drive to the supermarket.
Status symbols come in many forms, from where one lives, to the car they drive, the way they dress and even the pet they have. People are becoming aware of ‘food miles’ (the distances food travels to just get to their local retailer, and their ‘foot-print’ and how it associates with the cost to the environment to sustain them. Many people would be astounded to learn that a big dog (like a Labrador) has a much bigger ecological footprint than a big four-wheel-drive and an even bigger foot-print than the average citizen of most Asian countries.
So what should a sustainable house reflect … is not function and comfort paramount ? The BCA (Building Code of Australia) currently requires a 5 Star energy rating, yet homes are still expensive to build (because of the high embodied energy of much of the materials) and they still are a major drain on energy to try to make them more comfortable, when it comes to sustainability, all homes should be zero energy, achieved by being designed and built for comfort and energy efficiency.
The use of passive, non-mechanical means of making buildings comfortable is far more reliable, and in practice offers higher performance and simpler operation for the users, the ING Bank in Holland is living proof. The need for truly sustainable homes and all buildings for that matter is because there are insufficient carbon offsets because there are insufficient carbon sinks in the world for this to happen and energy manufacturers and providers can’t make money if we reduce energy consumption.
In the 1970s book ‘The Limits to Growth’, a computer analysis predicted the collapse of civilisation by 2050 as the result of population, pollution and resource depletion. In 1979 a National Energy Conservation Program was set up – in Australia – to address the coming of Peak Oil and our vulnerability, yet the research was dismissed by economists at the time; politicians at the behest of their corporate masters chose greed over green. In 2008 a scientist working for the CSIRO looked at what has happened since the 1970s and compared the real data with the Limits to Growth predictions and found that we are currently right on track for the collapse of civilisation by 2050.
Yesterday I received an email forwarded on by a friend that proposes that the Copenhagen meeting is more about selling Australia out; that we as a nation we will have to pay some $5 billion a year for damage to the environment, that there will be middle mean with sticky fingers and most of the money will go to less than deserving nations (the likes of China, India and Bangladesh), but what the spin-doctoring failed to mention is that corporations – that have long avoided paying restitution to not only to natives around the world, but even here in Australia – are complaining that they will have to pay their way.
So are profits more important than people and the environment ? Well when you assess the lack of performance by governments controlled by the corporations, the answer is a resounding yes. Is it sustainable ? NO.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dave Gardner // Dec 1, 2009 at 1:12 am
Few have the guts or the vision to write about how job creation is in direct conflict with sustainability. Shifting from dirty jobs (mining coal) to cleaner jobs (building wind turbines) is a good goal. But adding jobs increases carbon and ecological footprint.
Bravo for pointing that out.
Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
2 Daniel Boon // Dec 1, 2009 at 9:39 am
Thanks Dave,
The nub is over-population; we are teetering on the wrong side of Peak Population and the environment is in a state of collapse, so whilst I agree that jobs as such, increase carbon and ecological footprint, there are many jobs that could be undertaken to address environmental issues; a way of utilizing the ‘spare capacity of surplus humans’.
When I was a child, there was a deposit on drink bottles, which I used to provide pocket money; when my woman and I go for a walk (nearly every day) we pass by all manner of drink containers and I wonder if we re-introduced the deposit, how much of that pollution would be immediatley addressed by a wide spectrum from school kids to unemployed adults.
Whilst in Cuba I stayed in a ‘public highrise’ and in the early morning, watched a daily ritual of cleaning, where one person came along picking up all garbage, another was responsible for empty bottles, another dragged a box (like a milk crate) around the streets picking up the rubbish left for him to collect, another wheeled a bin around collecting the bottles, another swept the street and another was reponsible for mowing and another to collect the clippings.
Now granted these people receive food from the government (three weeks of every four) but their ‘obligation’ is to work and maintain a cleanliness which we don’t see here in OZ. Am I saying we need to implement some sort of system that ‘rewards’ people for ‘doing the right thing’ and the answer is Yes.
So while I appreciate the negatives of creating jobs, I also believe we can ‘create jobs’ of necessity and needs being met which are not really energy reliant other than the food they eat, which they would eat anyway.
Even building wind turbines and solar power have limitations based on the embodied energy; the pay-back time frame. What we really need to do is to reduce energy dependence.
The main problem is that goverment/s take advice from corporations (hence my favourite saying ‘corporate government’) and the end result is more rather than less energy consumption. An example is under the building code in Queensland, you can earn an additional half star in a house’s energy efficiency rating by adding a lined (insulated) roof (of no less than 12 square metres; minimum width 2.5 metres) that provides access off a family or lounge room that has an electric fan … thats right, a half star bonus for an electric fan outside the house.
By all means provide your site details for people to access your project, which I am intersted in learnig more of.
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