climate change

Our global commitment on global change so far has been akin to setting out to individually polish each one of the Titanic’s deckchairs prior to attempting to rearrange them on the deck in response to our collision with an iceberg. If we carry that analogy to include Western Australia, it is fair to say that our policymakers have just decided to go below to order dessert in the grand ballroom. I remind members of the words of the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, when he said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” Our response to date has been to tinker with inadequate and short-sighted policy that has been woeful and blinkered.

Much of our direction is still predicated on “greed is good”, as espoused in the semi-fictitious 1987 film Wall Street. Endless global economic growth is pursued regardless of the environmental and the human limits of a finite planet. Signs of ecological collapse are emerging around the world. Values equating welfare with possessions and conspicuous consumption prevail amid unhappiness and stark social and economic poverty. The belief that the “marketplace” is dominant implies that the environment is a subsystem of the economy and that social values exist to serve that market. The reverse is the case. The economy and society are very firmly subsystems of a global environment. 

Population and economic growth have exceeded the carrying capacity of this earth. The prevailing conservative value system is therefore fundamentally flawed. We see this in the uncontrolled expansion and support of the hydrocarbon industry and the desire to mine one of the world’s most toxic elements, uranium, with little concern for the tens of thousands of years of contamination and health hazards that future generations will have to deal with. Currently, we in Western Australia are spiralling towards doubling our carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from those established for our state in 1990 in the year of the establishment of the Kyoto Protocol.