Rudd got the flick just as two million voters had swung behind the Greens after the backdown on the carbon pollution reduction scheme; the UK entered a new era, with a third party holding the balance of power.

How long will Gillard go before voters decide she dances too close to the wolves and will will she deliver less than Rudd on value issues while the Green tide rises ? What pull has Romilly Madew (boss of the Green Building Council of Australia) got after softening the sustainability stance on various toxic (no pun) issues like vinyl ?

Does the Green Building Council need a review; to mature; will a Green Star rating dominate and control which suppliers are in and which are out; should such power come under some form of government regulation? Never, says Madew.

Urban un-myths

Public transport is up. Car use is down. Density is on the rise and light rail is growing around the country. If that continues for the next 30 years, many problems may be solved, but that assuming Peak Oil has yet to arrive, but you certainly wouldn’t want to invest in toll roads.

Climate deniers like Abbot, what of them … are us envionmentalists still raving nutters ? A more serious world moves on, concerned with pollution, poor practices in building design and techniques, toxic materials, fairness to fellow humans; we all need to lift our game.

The business world, led by property – as usual – is busy rewriting its sustainability vision. From GPT to Stockland and Mirvac – even Walker Corporation has a new six star Green Star building in Canberra. Green action is endowed with significant strategic value these days.

Another issue is NABERS, the missing link for the engineers who love to retrofit buildings to more sustainable energy-efficient levels. Easy to use; useful to the building owner, tenant and technical aficionados alike. We know NABERS needs tweaking – some variations in the underlying formulas mean that, at around 2.5 stars and below, buildings in Melbourne rate lower than buildings in Sydney.

According to an insiders’ views, the real problem with NABERS isn’t NABERS at all but mandatory disclosure’s definition of what an office building is. According to just-passed legislation, offices of 2000 square metres or more need to be NABERS assessed at the point of sale or lease. Think about it: developers have done a great job of creating hybrid office/industrial premises that blur the boundaries of uses. They are not so easy to unscramble.

In many of these facilities the only way to separate the energy ratings of the base office building and the rest of the premises might be to turn off the operations while you put in separate metering systems. Not exactly a very feasible thing to do. Some city offices have been caught because savvy tenants have offered to put their air-conditioning system onto their own electricity metering system – and now the owner has no way to create a base building rating.

The only rating available in this case would be a whole building assessment, which is not much help to the owner when he or she is looking to disclose base building energy to a prospective tenant.

Energy assessors roles are crucial to becoming energy efficient.

But the reality is that the system – driven by greed – has tempted one too many and delivered on one too few investments; the king has no clothes and soon his subjects will join him.  The larger the energy dependent and consuming the country, the farther they will fall. Those least dependent on energy and well versed on making ends meet will suffer as well, but practice will have given them the edge.  Those closest to living off the land will be least under threat.

So did it have to end like this ? Well the answer is yes; we don’t recognize limitations like our ancestors did; population growth was policed by the immediate environment to support a community; cheap energy in this day and age meant we could ship food from anywhere around the world; however, two things have happened, disproportionate population growth in resource rich countries have translated into these highly exporting countries scaling back exports to support their own populace before the populace rebel and take over.

Now, the realization is that there is a bottom of the barrel, resources are finite and if ‘we’ sell \them off to the highest bidder, regardless of the jobs it may create, at the end of the day we are left with big holes in the ground and the profit has disappeared off-shore with some locals receiving blood money to sell out.

In the ‘great depression’, a small proportion of the population was mobile, looking for work just for a meal, these days there is far less arable land, a higher incidence of food is imported and farming communities have long suffered from poor prices, drought and interest rates that drove many farmers to their own private depression and even suicide.

As disposable income shrinks, people are looking for ways to reduce their exposure to debt, but the ripple effect reduces everyones ability to get in front; financial institutions have pushed the envelope too far and humanity will hit a wall that is immovable.

The G20 meeting in Washington was largely ineffective; no significant actions came out of the meeting and the our Leaders showed no comprehension, no understanding and no foresight for any actions that will mitigate or prevent the financial collapse. A little known Baltic Dry Index (a ocean shipping volume index) is at record lows, dropping to 841 this week from a record high of over 11,473 just last May. That means that the cost to charter an ocean-going vessel is at or below the cost per ton to crew and fuel the vessel.

A Ukrainian operator of about 55 vessels, filed for bankruptcy last month and Zodiac Maritime Agencies Ltd. (a shipping line managed by Israel’s billionaire Ofer family), said last month it may idle 20 capesize ships which typically haul coal and iron ore. That’s about 5 percent of the fleet operating in the spot market. Why the collapse ? Banks refuse to issue Letters of Credit because the S&P GSCI index of 24 raw materials has dropped 31 percent this month, its worst performance since at least recession.

If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruption starts; wheat doesn’t get exported, the mills have nothing to grind into flour; no flour means bakeries and food processors can’t produce bread and pasta and other foods means there is no foods in the shops no foods in the shops means people go hungry; if families go hungry, people will riot and governments fall, but before that anarchy will take hold and it will be survival of the fittest.

Nations like Russia and China seem to be heading toward the former (after signing a 20 year multi-billion $ loan-for-oil swap, which guarantees China a place at the head of the line, when crude oil supplies start to dwindle from Russia.  So, will falling crude oil supplies, shrinking water resources, shared cross-boarder aquifers and harder to extract minerals be hoarded by nations or shared between nations? What conflicts will result from this?

Are you getting just a little concerned ?