Watch your step – you'll leave a footprint

It’s time I confessed! I drive a 4WD and I love taking it on long trips to the outback. I was even a petrol-head in my younger days. And I’m quite partial to the occasional overseas holiday. Oh, and I like eating meat as well.
Some may think it’s shocking that a sustainability advocate would do such things. But I enjoy my lifestyle and I’d like to help ensure that such lifestyle choices are available to future generations.

Easy solutions are not the answer

People have a natural tendency to look for quick and easy solutions to problems. However, easy solutions often create further problems down the track.
This prompted the famous CBS journalist, Eric Sevareid, to say that “the chief cause of problems is solutions.” Sevareid was widely respected by many in America with his two-minute segments on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Some called him "The Grey Eminence."

Everything old can be new again

Do you have an old mobile phone or two lurking in a drawer or cupboard? Well you’re not alone. There are an estimated 16 million obsolete or defunct mobile phones stored in peoples’ homes and offices.
Australians replace their mobile phones about every two years, but despite the best efforts of the mobile phone industry, only about 5% are recycled.

Sea level rises could leave us all in deep water

Back in 1996 while speaking in the Senate in support of a motion condemning the government for not taking climate change seriously, Bob Brown mentioned the possibility of catastrophic sea level rises. He cited the evidence of a massive ice sheet that collapsed 120,000 years ago causing a rapid 6 metre rise in the sea level.

You can't fight the laws of nature

Is there no limit to human ingenuity? From computers to supersonic airliners, solar panels to hydrogen powered cars, technology has endless applications.
With new technology appearing in consumer goods every day, people can be excused for believing that technology can solve any problem.

Gap keeps on growing

Conventional wisdom is that governments change when economic conditions turn sour. When economic conditions are good, governments are often forgiven for various misdemeanours and unpopular decisions.
So with a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth why have the polls turned against the Howard government?

Dissenters may be right but it's not worth the risk

A good friend of mine is sceptical about climate change. He sometimes asks me how I can be sure that humans are causing climate change by burning fossil fuels when a number of scientists are dissenting from this apparent consensus.
I tell him that no-one can be sure. We may not be sure for another decade, perhaps longer, perhaps never.

Don't jump on offsets bandwagon

“Would you like to offset your carbon emissions?” said the operator as I booked my Virgin Blue flight. In the brave new world of climate change it seems you can feel much better about flying for just a few dollars extra.

We need clear population targets

Hervey Bay boasts one of Australia’s highest population growth rates of almost 5% per year. That’s 2,700 extra people every year. If the average growth rate since 1990 continues Hervey Bay will exceed 300,000 people by 2050.
Much of Hervey Bay’s growth is due to migration from the southern states. Queensland continues to grow by about 80,000 people per year including 30,000 interstate migration and 20,000 overseas migration. Queensland will almost double its population to about 7 million by 2050.

Climate change warnings not trivial

When told by a doctor that one’s health is deteriorating as a result of stress, poor diet or smoking, most rational people accept the need for changes to reduce the risks. Some may seek a second opinion. Only a few will keep going until they eventually find a doctor who will assure them that their health is not declining or that if it is, it is caused by something beyond their control. Many people don’t find it easy to change their lifestyle even when they know the consequences. After all, the real consequences are probably many years away.

Australia's starving for population policy

Our land abounds in nature's gifts, or so says our national anthem.
When Peter McCormick composed the anthem in 1878, those gifts were thought to be our vast agricultural lands. It was a time of unbounded optimism.

Gas emissions up, statistics down

Public awareness of the important challenge of climate change has really soared over the last year (2006).
A recent survey commissioned by CSIRO found that 90% of Queenslanders rate climate change "as an issue vital to the nation's future".
Many people would have breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal environment minister, Malcolm Turnbull, proudly announced that Australia’s 2005 greenhouse gas emissions were up just 2% on 1990 levels. Notwithstanding that scientists are calling for 60-80% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, this seemed like a reasonable result.

Limited resources will stall economic growth

You’re unlikely to hear too many politicians calling for the economy to slow down. It would be political suicide. But can economic growth continue indefinitely?
The late economist Kenneth Boulding said "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." I guess he put most politicians in the former category!

Planet paying for business's free lunch

Just imagine running a business where you didn’t have to pay half your staff and you got half of your raw materials for free. Well for some businesses, this isn’t far from the truth.
Our economic system doesn’t account for most of the costs of natural resources and ecosystem services. They are considered external to the economy. Businesses that use a lot of these natural resources and ecosystem services get a real competitive advantage over businesses that don’t.

Cars chew up juice faster than people

The famous astronomer, the late Carl Sagan, once mused that if there were aliens and they put a probe into orbit around the Earth, the pictures would lead them to conclude that cars are the dominant occupants of our planet.
While Earth’s 700 million cars are outnumbered by 6.5 billion humans, the cars are much hungrier than people.
One litre of petrol contains three times the energy in an average person’s daily food intake. So driving is equivalent to a hundred people pushing your car. Petrol is amazing stuff!
But burning petroleum fuels generates greenhouse gases and with the need to curb climate change, there are pressures to cut emissions.

Hydrogen powered cars sound great but there's a catch or two

Just imagine that the only emission from you car’s exhaust was a bit of harmless water! That is the dream, already realised in various prototype vehicles, of hydrogen power.
Central to hydrogen power is the fuel cell, a device which turns a suitable fuel into electricity, somewhat like a battery, and with no moving parts. A fuel cell can potentially operate at more than twice the efficiency of a combustion engine.

Fuel for your body or fuel for your car?

Would you like food on your table or fuel in your car? The choice seems simple enough but the question is likely to create great angst over the coming decades.
As oil supplies decline we are looking for alternatives to power our cars. Biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are currently favoured. These fuels are created from plants that harvest the sun’s energy.
Biofuels seem attractive because they are renewable and are theoretically carbon neutral since the carbon dioxide emitted when they are burnt was only recently extracted from the atmosphere by the fuel crop.

We've solar, tidal energy – let's use it

Addressing climate change requires the world, including Australia, to move to a sustainable energy supply. What part should coal and nuclear play in this future energy regime? To put it bluntly, no part at all!
Yet our leaders insist that the answer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions lies in so called ‘clean coal’ and the possibility of Australia building dozens of nuclear power stations.

What's wrong with the carbon tax?

The so-called 'carbon tax' which came into effect in Australia on July 1st has been one of the most divisive policies in recent political history. The apparent widespread opposition to it suggests that many Australian's are either unconcerned about future sustainability or they have been hoodwinked by some clever political campaigning. There are certainly serious shortcomings in this legislation but these do not appear to be why so many people oppose the 'tax'. What's more, the carbon pricing mechanism is to all intents and purposes the same as what the Rudd government proposed back in 2008 (known as the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme - CPRS) when it was wholeheartedly embraced by the Australian populace, even being suggested as a reason for Rudd's drop in popularity when he backed away from it. So what's going one here?

The first law

There is little doubt that the term 'sustainable' has been appropriated for all kinds of inappropriate uses over recent years. But how are we to discern what is really sustainable? A systems approach leads one to think about this in terms of the characteristics of a complete system that is sustainable, where ideally the system is the entire humansphere, but also potentially (and somewhat problematically) sub-systems such as a country, an industry or a business. To be sustainable, a system must be able to theoretically continue in its current basic structure for an indefinite period.

A question of ethics?

I have often argued that sustainability is an ethical issue. Ethics, most broadly, concerns the choices we make that affect the interests of others, and the basis upon which we judge those choices to be good or bad. Environmental ethics broadens ethical questions to consider the interests of non-humans, and most broadly, the entire environment. But it is human choices that ethics concerns, since we do not ascribe sufficient foresight to other creatures to expect them to make ethical choices. One could plausibly make an argument that the most ethical choice for humans would be to go extinct and therefore stop inflicting such harm on the environment. But this really misses the point.

What's the point?

There are days when I despair for the human species. There is compelling evidence that we need to make major changes to the way we live if we are to avoid catatrophic collapse in the coming decades. Yet our leaders fail us at every turn, clinging to a 'business as usual' paradigm - no foresight, no vision, seemingly no idea. But worse, people everywhere seem not to care. Sure, many are just trying to get through their busy lives, to make ends meet and to pay the mortgage. But many others are actively in denial. As a good friend of mine wryly quips, 'they've got it coming'.