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The Sustainable Hour no. 453 | Podcast notes
Our guests in The Sustainable Hour on 29 March 2023 are Dr Mary Debrett, who is president of Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions, BREAZE, and Tamzin Revell, who is founder of Farming Revolution and the Regenerative Business Directory.
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Dr Mary Debrett is president of Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions, BREAZE. Mary is a retired climate communications academic. From her we learn about the history of BREAZE and the sort of projects that they have created for their community.
• For more information about BREAZE, see www.breaze.org.au
• Hot Water Heat Pump Bulk Buy (for residents of Hepburn, Ballarat, Macedon Ranges) – Webinar on Monday 3 April at 6:15-7:15pm.
• Building Better Homes forum on Sunday 23 April at 1:00-3:00pm – Free. Book via Eventbrite.
• EV Bulk Buy and Show & Shine Day in Ballarat on 6 May at 12:30 to 4:00pm.
• BREAZE Social Solar Program
• You can donate to BREAZE via the One Dollar for One Watt plan: For every one dollar you donate, BREAZE will install one watt of solar power on a building. So far, $2,800 has been raised.
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Tamzin Revell has developed the Farming Revolution platform for people to come together and learn about regenerative farming. You can find out more about it here: www.farmingrevolution.org.au
Tam is also setting up the Regenerative Business Directory for small regenerative businesses – that is: businesses who want to help make a better world, rather than make a profit above anything else. More information about this can be found in this presentation Tam has given about the Regenerative Business Directory.
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United Nations chief António Guterres starts us off today with yet another warning to all of us about the essential need for real action on climate. This is followed by a sound clip collage urging the same real action on climate message, the main one being: No more new fossil fuel projects. Among these messages is advice from independent Senator David Pocock on what our government should do. Dr Roger Dargaville from Monash University explains to ABC News on 21 March 2023 why Australia needs to be doing more. Mik Aidt closes this with a vision for Climate Emergency Rooms all over the country. This is what a responsible government would set up, considering the urgency and the dire consequences of the matter.
We play Jonathan Pie‘s very humorous satirical clip which combines the science followed by his “translation” of what the scientist says: Jonathan Pie Meets Prof Haigh | Climate Science Translated
The songs we play are first Fugitives‘ Edge of the Sea and then and Missy Higgins‘ The Difference
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Colin Mockett‘s Global Outlook this week begins with Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. That’s according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres who borrowed the title of this year’s winning Best Picture Oscar when launching the latest IPCC report.
Secretary-General Guterres said that it was suitable because all countries on our globe must now do everything, everywhere, all at once to limit heat-trapping emissions. Now, if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. And it starts, he said, with no new oil, gas, or coal development, anywhere in the world. But this imperative, which collated the work of six previous reports, involving 700 scientists over six years, drew on tens of thousands of scientific studies and was signed off by 195 countries, including Australia, was met by a wall of official silence.
It’s being ignored by, not only our government, but also the world’s two leading climate superpowers, the US and China. The US just approved the massive Willow oil project in Alaska and China last year authorised construction of 106 gigawatts worth of new coal plants. For our part, the Albanese government, which was elected 10 months ago on a platform of real action on Climate Change and political integrity, has 28 new coal projects on its Resource & Energy Major Projects list for approval, which, according to analysis by The Australia Institute this week, is going to add 18 million tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere.
And don’t forget that Australia remains the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas and the second-largest coal exporter. Neither count for our emissions because they are burned elsewhere in the world. And the bipartisan position of Labor and the Coalition is that we should mine and sell more coal and gas.
Meanwhile, that movie title also applies to the impacts of climate change, which a separate UN report this week said was striking “everything, everywhere, all at once.” We know about melting ice caps, typhoons in the US, floods in California and Asia but here’s an unpublicised one in the horn of Africa, where a new report from Nairobi, Kenya says an estimated 43,000 people have died in the longest drought on record. That’s in Somalia over the past five years. Half of them were children.
This is the first official death toll announced in a drought that is still withering large parts of the Horn of Africa. At least 18,000 people are forecast to die there in the first six months of this year. We’re already three months in and ‘The current crisis is far from over,’ says the report, which was carried out by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and released by the World Health Organisation and the United Nations children’s agency. Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are facing a sixth consecutive failed rainy season.
Rising global food prices are complicating the hunger crisis and the United Nations described the situation as ‘extremely critical’ with some humanitarian and climate officials warning that this year is likely to be worse than in the 2011 famine in Somalia, which killed 250,000 people. But this year, the UN report said, the world is looking elsewhere.
Now to Europe, where a Swedish court has given Greta Thunberg and hundreds of other climate activists the go-ahead to proceed with a class action lawsuit against their government for “insufficient climate policy”. Thunberg and 600 other young activists in a group called Aurora actually sued the Swedish state last November, claiming it had to do more to limit global warming in order to live up to the European Convention on Human Rights. This week’s announcement simply allowed the lawsuit to go ahead. The wheels of justice grind slowly in Sweden. The state now has three months to respond to the lawsuit before the case could be heard or settled in writing, the district court said, adding it could not say when the suit might be decided.
Elsewhere the wheels of progress turn even slower, much too slow for the UN, where apart from the Secretary-General singling out the underwhelming response from Australia and New Zealand and warning that the “climate time bomb is ticking”, a second voice chimed in. The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hoesung Lee, said the UN’s ICC report ‘offers hope and it provides a warning.’ ‘The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years’, he said.
And that’s a sombre note to end our round-up for the week. Except to say that Forest Green Rovers played Sheffield Wednesday at the weekend, winning 1-0. Their Women’s team played Royal Wooten Basset Town Ladies and won 9-0. the second time they’ve won by that score in three weeks. And that’s a brighter note for our global outlook for the week.
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Episode 453 of The Sustainable Hour goes to air while the dramatic media headlines, which the new IPCC report created, are still blowing in the wind – ‘World is on brink of catastrophic warming’ (The Washington Post), Climate change is speeding toward catastrophe. The next decade is crucial‘ (New York Times), ‘Humanity at the climate crossroads: highway to hell or a livable future?’ (The Guardian) – while our federal government keeps approving coal and gas projects every week as if they couldn’t care less about the consequences.
To that end, we gain new strength, ideas and energy from this week’s solution seekers, Mary and Tamzin. They are both very much in tune with the serious nature of the climate crisis we face. They are also critically aware of the responsibility that comes with this knowledge. That is: the importance of working with others on solutions.
We’ll be back next week with the fervent hope that you, our listeners, find something not just to hang onto in the meanwhile, but to take new steps, regenerate yourself and get active in the transformation towards true zero carbon living. Something that makes you rise above the doom and gloom is to clarify what your role is going to be as you join the growing army of changemakers in the climate revolution.
#BeTheDifference
“There are a myriad of reasons why we are in the situation we’re in, but one is that we’ve lost connection with our planet, and our planet is alive. She is screaming at us at the moment that we need to pull our socks up, actually sit back, listen to her and do what we need to do to create a more holistic environment.”
~ Tamzin Revell, founder of Farming Revolution and the Regenerative Business Directory
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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 land. They nurtured it and thrived in often harsh conditions for millennia before they were invaded. Their land was then stolen from them – it wasn’t ceded. It is becoming more and more obvious that, if we are to survive the climate emergency we are facing, we have much to learn from their land management practices.
Our battle for climate justice won’t be won until our First Nations brothers and sisters have their true justice. 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, “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.”
The decisions currently being made around Australia to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t be around by the time the worst effects hit home. How disrespectful and unfair is that?
“Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?”
~ Rebecca Solnit, author and Washington Post columnist
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“…and now to our daily climate report…”
News weather reports are one of the most respected sources of climate information. Last week two French TV stations announced they will be giving climate context to their weather reports. While some great work has been done by Monash University to infiltrate weather reporting, there are still some dark corners where climate is not taken into consideration.
Belinda Noble from Comms Declare had some fun with them on Twitter:
Comms Declare: “Fossil fuel’s grip on @newscorpaus could be solved with a #fossiladban.”
The ‘From what if, to what next’ podcast asks ‘What if the advertising industry created a better future for humanity?’ Good question! It’s answered in this episode.
Project Drawdown has written a guide on how marketing professionals can make their jobs a climate job.
Clean Creatives caused a stir by hijacking the social handles of Ad Net Zero over its stance on fossil fuels.
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Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour
Events in Victoria
The following is a collation of Victorian climate change events, activities, seminars, exhibitions, meetings and protests. Most are free, many ask for RSVP (which lets the organising group know how many to expect), some ask for donations to cover expenses, and a few require registration and fees. This calendar is provided as a free service by volunteers of the Victorian Climate Action Network. Information is as accurate as possible, but changes may occur.
Petitions
→ List of running petitions where we encourage you to add your name
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