Post 12 – When the Week Wins!

With two hours until my self-proclaimed publication deadline of 9 am Monday and a week just gone that had a life of its own, decreeing that ‘thou shall not write this week’, I have woken at various times during the night wondering what I will say today.  I could try to finish one of my nearly complete posts but I know they require additional research and two hours will not be enough time so I reread my welcome page which reminded me what this blog is about.

This blog is about the actions that we can take as individuals and households to mitigate climate change; it is about measuring those initiatives; and, it is about hope for the future.  This week, I must confess, as I trawl through material on climate change, and get a sense of the enormity of the task before us, as well as the murky, ill-formed path on which we must travel, I feel overwhelmed.  I wonder if we really can manage the transition to low carbon lives before we are struck by irreversible changes that lead to our demise.

A popular quote that has been doing the rounds over the last week or so has been one that is attributed to  the anthropologist Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  In following up this quote, I did a little bit of reading about related ideas and the concept of a tipping point at 1% of the population emerged.  Basically this idea is that if 1% of a population gets behind an idea it will take hold with the other 99 % of the population and so, at that point, ‘job’s done’.  Here’s hoping that very soon 185,000 people, which represent about 1% of Australia’s voting age population (80% of 23 million equaling 18.5 million people), will believe that wide-ranging, rapid action is needed to stop global temperatures rising 2 degrees Celsius.  It really doesn’t sound like many people so, maybe, there is still a chance but I do wonder if we need a single rallying point for the ‘rule’ to apply rather than diffuse concern. To fall back on the old cliché, ‘time will tell’.

On a hopeful note, much has been made of Pope Francis’s encyclical which I have referred to in previous posts.  It’s good to see it getting wide coverage.  As far as I am aware, Australian politicians have not responded to it directly although the media has, with a reasonably wide coverage of climate change issues contained in more articles than usual. On another positive note, the class action in the Netherlands, claiming that the Dutch government was not doing enough to protect its citizens from the likely effects of climate change, has been successful.  Whether or not it leads to action, and whether or not that action is effective, are other matters but the victory is important in its symbolism.  I listened to an environmental justice lawyer from Australia talk about why such an action is not yet possible in Australia and it relates to our constitution.  As far as I understood her, our constitution does not say that our government has to protect its citizens in the same way that the Dutch constitution does and so, to date, lawyers can’t find a cause of action to bring in the Australian courts.  Apparently, they might find an argument if they can creatively interpret the various documents that govern our lives but they haven’t found anything yet.  I don’t think we should pin our hopes on an initiative such as this!

On a sadder note, the other stories in the media that have caught my attention this week relate to the awful heat wave in Pakistan and the wildfires in California.  The most recent article I read on the heat wave in Karachi said 1,100 people had died due to the heat.  Needless to say, it was the very old, the very young, the sick and the poor; the very people that we told, time and time again, will be the worst effected by climate change. It seems that the power failed in Karachi leading, of course, to no air-conditioning or chilled water.  Probably water pumps also failed as well as refrigeration and communication systems. I was tempted to sit here, in very cold central Victoria and think two things.  First, it wouldn’t happen here and second, temperatures over 45 degrees are probably a regular occurrence in Karachi but then I remembered that a cheque for $200 unexpectedly turned up in the mail a couple of months ago.  It was from our electricity distributor, telling me the money was compensation for the failure of the distribution network to have fewer outages than their charter allowed for.  Now I can’t say I even knew that there was a service standard for the distributor but, having received the cheque, I was reminded how often our power failed over the preceding year, often for hours at a time and more often than not in summer.  So, it can and does happen here but the consequences are not as massive, probably because our population is smaller and we are richer and so have generators and better insulated houses and so forth.  My guess is that the death toll in Karachi was even greater than that reported.  There are probably many people in outlying areas whose plight does not even come to the attention of the authorities and the counters of mortality statistics. As to whether Karachi regularly and typically has temperatures over 45 degrees, a reporter said not, as did a person from the Pakistani weather bureau.  Temperatures of such magnitude were, historically, atypical for Karachi.  As far as the wildfires in California are concerned, they seem to be under control as I write this post but they were attributed, in part, to the decade long drought that California has experienced which, in turn is variously attributed to climate change.

So here I am, having written my promised 1,000 words or so, but I’m afraid I haven’t directly said anything about personal or domestic initiatives to mitigate climate change.  I’ll focus on such things next week and include my most recent experience of using the local bus network to get me to work on time (it didn’t but I’m not daunted).  By implication, however, this post is saying that as individuals, we need to think carefully about how we use our power at the ballot box to effect a safe, secure future.  Bye for now, Jane