The appropriate mindset

For a chance at a future, we need to be acting like the house is on fire. Governments have been promising incremental change for three decades, over which time greenhouse gas concentrations have dramatically increased, increasing warming impacts and setting off all the major feedback loops (tipping points) that were theoretical when governments first started promising incremental change.

We need to be reducing greenhouse gas concentrations and reaching huge net negative emissions. It’s all doable and can only be good for us in by any measure, though not so good for the balance sheets of people emitting obscene amounts of greenhouse gases and mining coal and gas. ​

We save the planet not via suggestive ‘economic signals’ but by hands on steering down the right path:

• passing regulation (eg, no more fossil fuel extraction, no more land clearing!) 
• new-deal-style subsidy for the right direction (almost what the LNP has been doing for fossil fuels) 
• mobilisation - acting as if it’s WWII and our lives depended on it, because our lives actually depend on it.

​The global Climate Emergency Declaration Movement, which started here in Australia, was based on the idea that a declaration is followed by a mobilisation.

We achieve a safe future by dropping the ponzi scheme of perpetual GDP growth. Instead we adopt a model such as Doughnut Economics (image on right). The idea that we shape society to live within the limiting boundaries of climate change, pollution, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss etc. while maximising societal wellbeing measures across housing, equity, education, political voice, etc. 

So simple, so far removed from what we are doing. What the hell are we waiting for?

Naturally, feel free to facebook like articles on a government taking an incremental step in the correct climate direction, but point out how far they are from where we need to be.

Read more on Vote Planet's policy page.

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