Climate change march

I guess that is the problem with the argument.

People want to push an agenda - and they push it with such gusto.

Surely you can see that other people would say "if you were fair dinkum..."

Your hubby works in a job that has his skills and expertise, it is unlikely that expertise would be transferrable to the renewable industry - So he remains doing what he does, cos it suits him and pays well.

Same as other people who are happy to work there, but once they retire will join the renewable army.

In the two examples you posted - You have shown that people's own agenda will always win (Which I can understand). People are inherently self serving, we all are.

If the government was to 'show leadership', how would that have affected your family if hubby all of a sudden didn't have a work industry?

What if hubby was at the start of his work life (Say he was maybe 30y.o and has all of the experience and education, but no option to work)

It's easy when you are 'going, not coming' to be holier than thou.

 

As a process engineer - very transferable - in fact, I would say nearly every mining job is transferable because the majority are not "coal" specific.

Don't forget the 64,000 Great Barrier Reef direct jobs that are under threat

 

Yaknow , been thinking . ln Melbourne if public transport was free you'd imagine it would get millions of cars of the road. A lot of countries it is free or really cheap and practical met people from os that don't even need a car at home.
Yeah they cop a hit in public transport, but l doubt that'd come even close to what they spend on all the freeways and tunnels and crap they've built and the traffics worse than ever anyway. Seems you just keep building it then the cars will just keep on coming. And they take so long to build by the time they finish one traffics increased yet again and they need another.
Yet public transport in Melbourne is that damn expensive and complicated to even pay for it let alone figuring out what to catch to go where .

Wonder if that'd work . And the trucks through Melbourne are insane, literally in the millions not sure about say Sydney but Melbourne is crazy with trucks. imagine what it'd do for the air getting them off the road too somehow or at least a good whack of them .

 

@random - The problem is that public transport (Trains anyway), have been sold off to Metro, so therefore it becomes a business interest for Metro to make as much money from public transport as possible.

For that reason, to carry out your idea, the state would need to un-privatise, the train network. I don't know what that would cost, but it sounds like it, and the ongoing costs, would be bloody expensive

 

Yep - it's comes back "again" to government stepping up and showing leadership

 

Laws should be introduced to make it mandatory to allow employees to work from home unless the employer can claim an exemption as the nature of the job demands physical presence. Problem of more public transport and more roads largely goes away, saving billions. Vehicle emissions also greatly reduced.

After all, that was one of the big selling points for the expensive NBN wasn't it? allowing more people to work remotely

 

Yep that's about it because when l was a kid everything was Vic rail Vline and stuff , all Government, and you know what , it was bloody good too you could go anywhere. l remember Perth was even better back then it was brilliant , dunno what it's like these days.
That must be what they do in other countries . Got a Slavanian friend it's only 4million people yet everything is so cheap or free even medical she lives on hardly anything and she can fly to anywhere as cheap as chips, other countries l mean. The wages aren't high but they don't need it anyway.

 

back to thread, my wife took our children to the rally. They've been to a few rallies now (Some union and environmental ones)... I'm about to switch to 100% green power after being with Momentum for a long time - we need to support the build out of new renewable infrastructure, cost wise it's stuff all for us to change. Going to look into permits to offset our gas usage too....still kicking myself for getting central heating with Gas rather than AC heads :|

 

I could say the same to you, why does Australia need to burn coal? Nuclear is far cleaner and should've been in place long ago and replaced coal.
It was shortsighted to have just kept delaying Nuclear Power in favor of Coal instead, for the past 40 odd years.

I was comparing Nuclear to Coal so I don't disagree with you however if Australia used Nuclear instead of coal our emissions would've been much much lower.

Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources, according to a new analysis by Environmental Progress.

The finding that Germany could have entirely decarbonized its transportation sector with nuclear is a significant one. That’s because decarbonizing transportation is considered a major challenge by most climate policy experts.

Link to that full article if anyone is interested;
Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

Now we're in a position where we really need to ramp up renewable energy asap, build a lot of wind farms or steam or solar or whatever to the point where the costs are going to be huge in the short term but needs to be done

 

Hang on, what is it about uranium waste compared to solar/wind waste?

 

The comparison was Coal Vs Nuclear not Nuclear Vs Renewable's read the whole post please.

 

Before i got sidetracked a moment ago by the nuclear topic, i was about to say that one of the things I love about this forum is that we, as an online community, are very concerned about our real life communities. We often argue (I mean discuss politely) leftish/rightish issues such as negative gearing and franking credits, with the underlying ageism - Millenials vs Boomers.

Here we seem to be in agreement that our government is an embarrassment for its failure to diversify into Renewables, and this discussion is demonstrating that the Boomers here are just as green as the young guys. As Kerry O'Brien said on QandA this week, we have been concerned about our planet for a long time, back when we were the same age as these kids who are currently protesting.

 

Then why has it taken this long for people to become so vocal about it? I would say that the Millenials are far more concerned than the boomers were at the same age, they might share the same level of concern NOW but no way when Boomers were 13 were they worrying about it as much.

 

When I was 13 I was far more worried about the very real threat of nuclear war than anything else.

Hard to worry too much about future events when living with the threat of being blown to smithereens!

 

I think you have to look at the political context in Australia over the past 12 years to understand why people are seemingly more vocal now. In 2007, Howard took his emissions trading scheme to the election and Rudd adopted the plan to introduce carbon trading in Australia once in office. Since the Greens blocked that in the senate we have been all at sea in this country in terms of a cohesive policy on energy and emissions.

Also, it's probably a bit of a stretch to say that boomers weren't engaged in social activism. Even a rudimentary understanding of 20th Century history would tell you that.

 

I'm not saying they weren't engaged at all, I'm saying there's no way they had the same level of concern about climate change at the same age as Millenials today.

 

Wouldn't that just speak to the level of environmental damage that has occurred in the past 50 years?

Emissions and climate change were less of an issue in the 1960s and 1970s. I suppose they they were preoccupied with civil rights, the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation.

 

Well - the science wasn't really definitive until recently. I remember back in the 80's watching a program that was discussing as to whether we would warm up, or cool down. There was also a lot of spin and blockage that needed to be overcome before the message got out.

Only have to go on any social media sites currently discussing this topic to see there is a lot of aggressive denial - and insulting attacks against the forwarding thinking person rather than the topic ... Only have to look at the vile personal attacks by some world leaders on Greta Thunberg. I've been on the receiving end of quite a few of them myself, but pushed back politely and factually until they floundered on their unfounded belief quagmire

 

Exactly, my response was in response to another post that said "we have been concerned about our planet for a long time, back when we were the same age as these kids who are currently protesting" and I disagreed and your last post agrees with my position, they had other concerns back then. It also confirms that if 50 years ago people weren't so against nuclear power maybe we could've had Nuclear Power plants instead of Coal Fired power plants and done far less damage to the environment over the same period.