This next Big Debate on Carbon Triggers has been indeed triggering.
So much to learn and so much still lacking in Australia compared to other parts of the world that for the sake of convenience for now we will name as leaders.
On that, Australia certainly is not. The world has a massive carbon debt to pay back but Australia proudly takes its environmental carbon cues from the kind of financial engineering that made Macquarie Bank Great Again and Again and Again, and recently sent off its CEO with a total payout of oh… close to a cool $1 billion dollars.
Imagine if the numbers nerds that run that place took a serious look at the climate and tried to fix our struggling excuse for a green revolution. Oh that’s right, it did for a hot second. Then backed away as the PR mavens said, “no, not this way – look this way”.
OK, we’ve made a start – the well funded people at the top of the corporate tree took sustainability seriously for a while but as soon as the political winds shifted they backed out at a rate of knots. Now we see that the aggressive prosecutions of greenwash by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has resulted in a dead halt.
On Thursday Glencore came out to proudly love coal again.
Here’s the headline:
“Glencore bets that Australia’s woke anti-coal era is over, for now –
The coal titan is making a high-stakes push onto the ASX – with a surprisingly warm welcome from the nation’s largest superannuation fund.” AustralianSuper in case you didn’t know. It actually ‘loudly’ urged Glencore to the ASX.”
Shame on you AustralianSuper.
Of course, the world’s climate woes are not just Australia’s fault. We don’t know about you but that does not make us feel any better.
Read Ben Berwick’s article published on Thursday and get a gist of what we’re up against globally or locally – what’s the difference?
Berwick makes a persuasive argument that the cost of living problems we face – and that many people blame for the Great Regression on climate action – is actually a carbon problem.
He makes the suddenly obvious link between rising food prices and climate heating.
“Australia tells itself it is living through two crises,” he says.
“One is about money, rent, groceries, insurance, power; the other is about carbon, and sits, we imagine, somewhere ahead of us or somewhere else.
“Kept separate they compete for attention and for budget, but put back together they describe a single event: much of what households are now paying as a cost of living crisis is the environmental crisis arriving, damage done when the carbon was burned, excluded from its price at the time, and delivered decades later by other routes.”
An article we spotted the other day said wait ‘till countries such as the UK find their fragile supply chain smashed thanks to flood or drought because the places that produce much of its food are in the most fragile regions in the world.
Then there are the obvious links between climate disasters and rising insurance costs. There’s no financial containment lines evident with these disasters; not just the people directly affected.
Governments get involved – so far they must – and that means we all pay the price. Countless funds are invested and often wasted in the monolith task of figuring out how to help the victims because there’s no learning module or template to call on.
In New Orleans, Elizabeth Mossop of UTS and the Living Learning Lab at Lismore told us in a recent podcast, the future of that city is not good. Most people expect the ocean will soon be calling up its dues.
All of this means bigger costs for the taxpayer – and withering support for schools, hospitals and infrastructure.
And we haven’t even touched on housing – yes the big rise in construction relates to the cost of skills (maybe one of the last remaining workplaces where workers still call the shots) but the other big cost is materials.
Where did we think all the materials were going to come from to double or triple the footprint of the built environment we smugly think will roll out.
The Indigenous elders tell us Country should not be placed on an equal footing with people, it comes first. Because without one we don’t have the other.
So back to Ben Berick’s piece that we urge you to read. His big argument is that we have externalised the damage that comes from carbon and have done so for centuries. Like it’s free!
“An excluded cost does not disappear; it waits, compounds, and returns.”
Ouch.
At the Carbon Triggers Big Debate, we have an opportunity to get serious about how to reduce our carbon consumption in buildings.
This industry is at the forefront of potential action. Yet so many people say a budget or limit on carbon is a step too far.
Why, that might put a cost on the industry it can’t afford, they say.
We need to be thinking about what nature would think of that.
Does it care if we can’t afford it? Will it stave off the damage until we figure out a new technology to embed carbon in rocks? Or magically make data centres carbon neutral?
At the Marks & Spencer department store in London Arup will disassemble the vast bulk of the materials in the existing building and re-use them in a new structure. This will bring down carbon per square metre from an initial proposal that came in at 250 kilograms of carbon a square metre to 50 kg a sq m.
It’s a start – and we suspect much better than most.
What drove that?
A strict mandated carbon assessment required by the City of Westminster.
As Arup’s celebrated engineer Tristram Carfrae told us in an interview, “There’s nothing wrong with mandating change, but we shouldn’t wait for it.”
Come and hear what else Carfrae will say at the debate – and ask join the QandA.
