Simon Roz will be talking at the Australian Museum in Sydney on “Humanity, the Climate Crisis and the Case for Hope” this Saturday 15th August at 12.30pm. He shares his thoughts here on some of the lessons we can learn from our previous triumphs over seemingly insurmountable challenges.
When President John F Kennedy told the US public in 1961, that he intended to send humans to the moon, by the end of the decade – he would have been considered a lunatic by today’s standards.
The US had only just sent a single man into space three weeks earlier. And that flight was a quick sub-orbital flight. What was being proposed was achieving a goal that wasn’t technically feasible at the time. More than that, the public was only just getting to grips with the ‘idea’ of humans going into space. It was pretty far-out.
In the intervening years before the moon landing in 1969, thousands of people worked on developing technologies that would achieve the President’s vision. Sending more than one person into space, sustaining them, getting them on, and off, the surface of the moon, and returning them all safely to earth were challenges that had to be overcome.
Did anyone ask how much it was going to cost? Did big business talk about the cost to the economy? There were no established private enterprises that were going to lose out. It was just massive government investment, which stimulated whole new industries.
The Apollo program was really about the Cold War and furthering national security objectives. But still, it rightly captured the imagination of people all around the globe.
Fast forward 40 years since Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words, to a world threatened not by the Cold War, but by climate change.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we had a leader, any leader, who was prepared to be as bold, and inspire as many people, as Kennedy?
What if their vision was as profound as the industrial revolution, where they laid out a program to, once and for all, separate economic activity from fossil fuels? This vision would drive a new era for human civilisation, where digging up dead things, and burning them, became a quaint historical anomaly. A blip on the human historical record, where we nearly blew it.
What if these leaders spoke about a concerted program to phase out all fossil fuels, to be replaced by technologies that harvested wind, wave and sun power. How many of the public would support a managed, planned effort to cut pollution so we could live cleaner, greener and safer? 30%, 50%, 100%?
The technologies already exist to largely make this transition. We don’t need to re-invent the Apollo program to re-engineer our energy system. Sure, there are still some obstacles, and the job before us is enormous – but what is the alternative?
What we need, as a start, is for governments, and leaders, to ‘simply’ implement policies that prioritise clean energy over dirty energy.
Plenty of people, in fact millions, all around the world, are asking and demanding their governments do more to address climate change. And some governments have started to move.
Despite overwhelming global subsidies and cultural mindsets that preference fossil fuels, in 2008, total investment in renewable energy outstripped their dirty competitors. Imagine what we could do if governments stopped holding the renewable sector back!
But the old mindset of dig it up, cut it down and burn it persists throughout our bureaucracies and elected officials – and Australia is no exception.
If we are to have any chance of avoiding the very worst of climate change, we need to let our elected leaders know, in no uncertain terms, what we expect of them.
I’ll be talking at the Australian Museum in Sydney on this topic on Saturday, 15 August at 12.30pm. Hope to see you there. More details here.
