Our guest in The Sustainable Hour on 18 October 2017 is Geelong Gallery’s deputy-director Penny Whitehead.
On the phone we talk with Councillor Cathy Oke, chair of the City of Melbourne Environmental Portfolio.
At the Humans in Geelong Expo, Tony meets two 20-year-old cycling Danes, Marcus Frellsen and Kenneth McDonald Kelly, who are part of a six man strong Cycling Without Age team riding 2,000 kilometres from Newcastle to Hobart on trikes to create awareness about the project.
We also play a short excerpt of a ‘climate criminal’ media statement by the Greens’ climate change and energy spokesperson Adam Bandt – and a new ‘Love your home’ advertisement from Denmark’s largest energy company, Ørsted.
Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 191 on 94.7 The Pulse:
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Facebook comment | By Mik Aidt
Three years ago today, we were so pleased and proud to see a united Council say no to fracking in Geelong’s backyard – a toxic method of extracting onshore gas.
Now the Liberal party is pushing for opening up for onshore gas drilling once again, both at state and federal level. What position will the new Geelong Council we vote in be taking on this issue? Will it depend on its councillors’ party-political alliances and stands?
Some people in their 60s and 70s – which includes many government politicians – seem to think it is fine to live as if there is no tomorrow. “Let’s just continue business as usual with burning coal, oil and gas – its been working fine up til now,” they are saying, because they have also cynically calculated that in 30 years time, they are likely to be out of here anyway. So who cares what happens by then?
Surely many of them would have children and grandchildren whose safety and well-being they care about?
As a parent with small children, I don’t understand how it is possible to defend the continued – and even continuously growing – burning of fossil fuels in Australia. It is a short-sighted, immoral way of generating energy which totally disregards the environmental and future economic consequences.
Gas needs to go. So does petrol, oil and coal. Regardless whether our decision makers like it or not, it is going to happen, simply because renewables are getting cheaper and safer by the day, and will keep getting cheaper in the years to come. The only question is: in which speed is the transition going to happen?
And will it be a transition that leaves underprivileged behind in an even worse situation – or will we manage to get everyone involved so we all benefit from the technological progress?
I say: Its time to stop talking about more investments in fossil fuels. Let’s bring the transition on and let’s be first movers in this space. From an economic point of view, there are lots of advantages and benefits to harvest when for the entrepreneural first mover.
LISTENER SERVICE:
Content of this hour
Links, excerpts and more information about what we talked about in this Sustainable Hour
“Let’s create a world which runs entirely on green energy.”
~ www.orsted.dk, Denmark’s leading energy company
» Inspirational video from Denmark’s largest energy company
» More about Ørsted’s video commercial
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Radio interview with Councillor Cathy Oke
Dr Cathy Oke is a City of Melbourne councillor and chair of the municipality’s Environmental Portfolio. A resident in the City of Melbourne municipality for more than 30 years, Cathy is committed to supporting programs which enable a safe, vibrant and creative community. She was first elected to the Melbourne City Council in 2008, and has over 20 years’ experience in the sustainability sector. Currently she works at the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Research Hub, based at the University of Melbourne.
The Portfolio includes:
• Council Carbon Neutral
• Total Watermark
• Zero Net Emissions:
◦ Public Lighting
◦ Waste and resource recovery
◦ Whole of council sustainability programs
◦ Energy resources
• Climate adaptation and resilience:
◦ Whole of council sustainability programs
◦ Urban Forest and precinct plans
◦ Resilient Melbourne
◦ Climate resilience
• Urban Ecology and Biodiversity
• Open Space and parks plans
• Partnerships and alliances e.g. the global network of more than 1,500 Local Governments for Sustainability called ICLEI, 100 Resilient Cities program, C40 Cities
• Community engagement relating to the above
» More information on www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-council
» RMIT University – 16 October 2017:
Tree change a major win for Melbourne’s west: study
“A major urban greening initiative across six local councils has dramatically reshaped western Melbourne’s tree cover, making the area more liveable and cooler, an RMIT University study has found.”
Inspirational tweets about sustainable and resilient cities
There's still time to take climate action & join #Climathon 2017! Registrations close 25 October. Register: https://t.co/Q1kl9mNF94 @EUC_UoM
— Resilient Melbourne (@ResilientMelb) October 18, 2017
#seng2017 @jwthwaites demonstrates the importance of citizen action to critical environmental outcomes, including water savings #target155 https://t.co/G4yX3CfwII
— Resilient Melbourne (@ResilientMelb) October 17, 2017
Active cities underpin a healthy liveable city #liveablecities17 says keynote pic.twitter.com/grp50fWWVw
— Billie Giles-Corti (@billiegc) October 18, 2017
#DesigningHealthyLiveableCities showcasing research on liveable #cities 19-20 October Melbourne @billiegc @RMIT_CUR https://t.co/TnjWeUxhpP
— ASBEC (@ASBEC1) September 15, 2017
Living near green spaces linked to longer lives, study finds https://t.co/llSZwnd1he
— CONNECTING NATURE (@CONNECTINGNBS) October 11, 2017
Following extensive collaboration with @gbcaus, the Australian Government today launched #NetZero building standards https://t.co/xhffyUMOqz pic.twitter.com/VixRY24TDB
— WorldGBC (@WorldGBC) October 9, 2017
We need to talk about the weather. Refuge at Arts House. Sat 11 Nov. Midday-10pm. More info: https://t.co/96fMtzXVVv #refugeartshouse
— Arts House (@artshousemelb) October 16, 2017
» Resilient Melbourne on Twitter:
@ResilientMelb
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Travel with Purpose – on trikes
Cycling Without Age aims to build bridges between generations and reinforce trust, respect and social glue in our society by using the rickshaws as a tool to bring people together.
The global network grows by the hour – especially since this film came out recently: The Falkirk student bringing joy to care home residents
Cycling Without Age has created a Travel with Purpose platform, that encourages people who are traveling to engage with a local chapter of the movement – to add to the rides and keep seniors as part of not only there community, but the global world, too. At the same time, the travelers themselves get a better understanding of the place they’re visiting by getting to know their trike-‘colleagues’.
For instance: a person from Scone wants to visit Montreal. He or she can then be linked to the Montreal chapters of Cycling Without Age who’ll host the visitor and the visitor offer rides and take part in the CWA activities. Or a person from Barcelona would like to visit Melbourne, and gets involved there. Recently CWA had a New Zealander involved in Kolding, Denmark, where she spend the summer. Now she has returned and is pushing the Christchurch chapter further.
In Australia, a team of six 20-year-old Danes started out in Newcastle to embark on a trike-journey through Mudgee, Canberra, Bendigo, Geelong, Melbourne and then off from there with a ferry to Tasmania.
CWA’s first Travel with Purpose team are: Frederik Pedersen, Christian Hvid, Mathias Hansen, Marcus Frellsen, Rasmus Bosack, and Kenneth McDonald Kelly.
» Learn more about their journey:
www.facebook.com/CWAstrib
» Learn more about Cycling Without Age:
The transformative effect of cycling with neighbours across all ages
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Adam Bandt: “Stop the climate criminals”
At a time when the world is burning, the climate deniers in the Turnbull-Abbott Government are wrecking our climate and locking us into a future dependent on coal. Send a message to Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, that the wrecking of our climate and the destruction of our way of life is not an option for Australia’s future.
» Sign the petition: www.adambandt.com/climate_criminals
» More on climate change from Adam Bandt
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Graph of the Day: What we need, what we’re getting https://t.co/z19aIcLeCG #auspol pic.twitter.com/RL2OnRBXvB
— RenewEconomy (@renew_economy) October 19, 2017
Malcolm Turnbull’s energy strategy:
Solving his immediate political problems at the cost of our climate
“The most important thing to understand about the federal government’s new National Energy Guarantee is that it is designed not to produce a sustainable and reliable electricity supply system for the future, but to meet purely political objectives for the current term of parliament.
Those political objectives are: to provide a point of policy difference with the Labor Party; to meet the demands of the government’s backbench to provide support for coal-fired electricity; and to be seen to be acting to hold power prices down.
Meeting these objectives solves Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate political problems. But it comes at the cost of producing a policy that can only produce further confusion and delay.”
~ John Quiggin, The University of Queensland, on 18 October 2017
“Coalition’s new energy policy appears to lock in Australia’s extraordinary high energy costs for at least another decade. This will encourage more households and businesses to turn to solar, or even leave the grid altogether.”
~ David Grogan on 19 October 2017
ADDITIONALLY:
In other news
From our notes of this week: news stories and events we didn’t have time to mention but which we think you should know about
Waleed Aly nailing it as usual:
The Australian climate paradox
“… is climate change a “notional” threat or a “probable” one? Perhaps the enduring assertiveness of climate scepticism within the Coalition makes this politically unanswerable. But, officially at least, we have a bipartisan consensus – reinforced just now by Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg – that climate change is real. And if it’s real, surely it’s extremely serious given the mass displacements and deaths it promises to deliver. Indeed, that would make it as serious as it gets; the kind of thing we should throw everything at, no matter how much it costs us. Does that mean it’s not a time “to have debates and arguments” about it?
We’re staring at a paradox here. One of democracy’s central conceits is that our best ideas are realised through debate. Presumably the idea is that government is so important that it cannot be left to the unchallenged whims of a regime. But if so, what does it mean to say a political issue is so serious it exists beyond politics? Is this meant to be a concession that political argument is often a confected game designed to stimulate an audience rather than solve a problem?”
» Sydney Morning Herald – 12 October 2017:
Focus on terror threats a convenient distraction from climate change
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“Paris City Hall said in a statement France had already set a target date of 2040 for an end to cars dependent on fossil fuels and that this required speedier phase-outs in large cities.”
» Reuters – 12 October 2017:
Paris plans to banish all but electric cars by 2030
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Podcasts and posts about climate change
Acknowledgement
We at The Sustainable Hour would like to pay our respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wathaurong People, and pay our respect to their elders, past, present and future.
The traditional owners lived in harmony with the environment and with the climate for hundreds of generations. It is not clear – yet – that as European settlers we have demonstrated that we can live in harmony for hundreds of generations, but it is clear that we can learn from the indigenous, traditional owners of this land.
When we talk about the future, it means extending our respect to those children not yet born, the generations of the future – remembering the old saying that…
The decisions currently being made around Australia to ignore climate change are being made by those who won’t be around by the time the worst effects hit home. How utterly disgusting, disrespectful and unfair is that?
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How to love your home with natural light and trikes https://t.co/MFAWpYqNBx pic.twitter.com/XYB0ZcT6Ol
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“Participation – that’s what’s gonna save the human race.”
Pete Seeger, American singer