Monday, July 19, 2010

Looking Forward

If you don't know where you are going you are liable to end up elsewhere. Not so bad if you are talking about just yourself but a leader who is planning to take the country with her then that is worry.
Moving forward without showing any awareness of the need to make the transition to a low or zero carbon society, without any appreciation of the impact that peak oil will have on the sort of future we can expect suggests a leader who is either willfully ignorant or incapable of describing policies that will enable us to cope with the challenges that the world and this country faces.
It is cold comfort that neither the Coalition nor the Greens perform any better.
There seems to be a chronic fear to suggest that our comfortable lifestyle could possibly be at risk. Yet given that our lifestyle is unsustainable, that the notion of indefinite growth flies in the face of reason, means that instead of a managed, smooth transition to a sustainable lifestyle looking forward will mean that we close off more options making a catastrophic collapse even more likely.
The Greens too have to be taken to account. Their policy is silent on population growth. Bob Brown is on the record as asserting that a population cap is impossible. The Greens have allowed themselves to be seduced by the border security debate but as far as population is concerned that is the least of our problem - the real problem lies with a migration policy that continues to encourage people to settle here.
Given the Greens support of the environment why not reduce global environmental pressure by inviting the world's population to settle in Tasmania? Tasmania could accommodate all 6 billion quite comfortably (using Hong Kong's population density as a basis) Of course it would mean damming the Franklin and wood chipping the forests but think of the benefits to the rest of the world.
Brown's failure to acknowledge population growth as a significant threat to the core values his party espouses suggest that they do not really understand what it means to be environmentally sustainable.

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