My eldest grandson is nearly 16, the next is a couple of years younger and the third has just been born.
Distress and despair captures my thinking when contemplating their futures and so it is for them I obsess about the climate crisis and wear with a badge of honour accusations of obsession or my silliness.
Don’t worry, many argue. All is at hand. We have the 2019 Paris agreement about climate issues; or technology will answer any issues. We just need to sweep aside bureaucracy and allow the invisible hand of the market to work its magic.
Well, it is our comfort with those issues, our acquiescence to what was agreed in Paris, our belief in the intrusion of bureaucrats and our slavery to the market that has brought us to where we are now.
In the name of my grandsons, their parents and all the sub-70-year-olds in Greater Shepparton, it’s time (in fact way beyond time) to raise the bar.
Weather and circumstances, incomprehensible to most of us, are barrelling towards us, and not in centuries or decades, but rather, in just a few years, and life will change.
In reality, if we take note of what’s happening around the world right now, and allow honesty in your appraisal, the world’s weather system is already, in many places, outside the niche that allows humans to thrive.
The memo arrived at the City of Greater Shepparton and although taken seriously to the degree that Greater Shepparton City Council declared a climate emergency, it seems far from certain there is a broad understanding of what that really means.
Some on council staff pounced on the memo seeing it as giving added reason and urgency to their responsibilities.
Others, well, I’ll just say, were not so enthusiastic, but it seems the need to give the climate issue priority appears to be filtering through the organisation.
However, just recently I ended up being one of two people talking with the whole council about how the climate issue should be applied to its budget considerations.
And although the annual Shepparton event, the Spring Car Nationals, was not the reason we were there, I did mention that it being a wholly fossil fuel-powered event, it was not something the council should involve itself with. In fact, it should be discouraging such happenings.
In making that observation, I heard the Mayor Shane Sali, say it was a “good community event”.
Well, that may be so, but in terms of the city’s declared climate emergency, it’s contradictory and foreign to the essence of what course the city should be plotting to net-zero emissions by 2030.
That 2030 target is, of course, for council’s operations alone and so events such as the SpringNats are beyond its remit.
What is within its remit, beyond its actual operations, are such things as Victoria’s “regional Commonwealth Games”; an idea which began here, but is now a state-driven concept.
No doubt we will hear much fine talk about how the games will be sustainable, but I await with interest an explanation, from anyone, how people flying from all around the world in fossil fuel-powered planes can possibly be sustainable and not worsen our carbon dioxide emissions.
And beyond that, the success of the games themselves, contrary to the sustainability greenwashing that will swamp the media, depends almost entirely on fossil fuel-powered energy.
I leave the final word to Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, who wrote in The Climate Book (a book endorsed by the world’s best climate scientists in that they contributed chapters) saying:
“If we are to stay below the targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement — and thereby minimise the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions — we need immediate, drastic, annual emission reductions on a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen. And since we don’t have the technological solutions that alone will do anything close to that in the foreseeable future, it means we have to make fundamental changes to our society. This is undeniable. It is also currently the most important piece of information we have when it comes to protecting the wellbeing of humankind and the only civilisation we are aware of in the entire universe.”
She calls for “fundamental changes to our society” and in the name of my grandsons and all sub-70-year-olds in Greater Shepparton, I urge you to think about what you can do to help yourself, your family and friends and the city adapt to the changing and challenging times ahead and, within and along with that, do what you can to educate yourself about reducing your carbon dioxide emissions.
Finally, if nothing else, talk about the climate crisis for discussion is the only thing that leads to solutions.