National Security: Civil Defence first & largest, then Military Forces
Climate Change is a real and pressing issue, for the whole world and especially for Australia.
- Changing Climate is “Real & Present Danger” in Military / Political parlance.
All the evidence you need is in ABC 4 Corners [Mon 29-Mar-2022] broadcast of BBC Panorama's "Wild Weather: Our World Under Threat". 4-Corners page, video on iView (login required).
This isn't a rehash of Al Gore's 2006 blockbuster "An Inconvenient Truth" that earned him the 2007 Noble Peace Prize, nor the 2016 update "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power".
Nobody can say "we didn't know", "we weren't warned" nor "nobody was listening".
Worldwide, there is massive public interest and concern about the impact of Climate Change and the resulting impact on us and destruction of cities, infrastructure, food supplies and the environment.
Yet, there is no political will, locally or internationally, to act in the Public Interest or to even mitigate or avoid the worst of the impacts.
The people with the most to lose are the youngest: they’ll have to live with the consequences of decisions to act, or not, made now.
If they don’t act in their own Best Interests, who will?
Young voters with everything to lose to unmitigated Climate Change, account for around 20% of voters, while a mere 6% swing in an election will change any Government.
They have both the numbers and motivation to force a change, top to bottom, in Australian politics.
That they haven’t already flexed their power at the ballot box is due to any number of reasons: but mainly because those already in power haven’t made them fully aware of the seriousness of the unfolding & inevitable threat to their existence, their lives, livelihoods, and those of their family and friends, all will be threatened by 2100.
To not act is a deadly choice for those who can expect to live to see the consequences.
Greta Thunberg isn’t a media celebrity, “crying wolf” or over reacting.
She’s an exceptional teenager who’s understood that we’re in a fight for our lives and our survival as a species if we don’t act quickly & effectively.
Australia is rapidly heading towards a population of 26 million, with about 20 million adults over 18, and 17 million registered voters.
We have a “median” age across the country of 37: half the population are younger, half older.
Sydney and Melbourne - close to half our population - have a median age of 36, while for all New South Wales its 38.
Meaning people in regional towns are older.
Western Sydney is younger again:
it has a median age of 34.
The impacts of Climate Change are already observable everywhere, causing havoc in communities far and wide with unprepared and unresponsive governments sitting on their hands, often offering platitudes or inadequate promises of "something, sometime"
This inaction, even negligence, is for no good reason:
- we’ve had over 50 years of warning to act on avoiding the worst effects of greenhouse gases and preparing for the predictable, foreseeable and inevitable consequences:
- floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, destructive storms, severe hail, coastal erosion, sea level rise, desertification of large regions leading to dust storms and lost agricultural land,
- wide-scale destruction of road, rail and air transport infrastructure, disruption & destruction of mining, agriculture, horticultural enterprises,
- human disease pandemics, plant & livestock epidemics, plagues of pests, even the forced abandonment of major city centres.
No person, no land, no house, no road, no town, no city will avoid being deeply and permanently affected by multiple natural disasters in the next 20 years, becoming increasingly worse, with “unprecedented” impacts growing exponentially.
The clear lesson from the recent Lismore floods is:
it's already far, far worse than people know or think.
The 2017 Lismore flood at 11.59m almost beat the 1974 record of 12.11m, while the 28-Feb-2022 flood absolutely trounced the record at 14.40m. Lismore floods are getting worse, by a larger margin each time.
The exponential increasinging impacts of changing climate events aren't a “belief” or “ideology”, there are cold, hard facts reported across the world.
We can choose to ignore the already exploding crisis, with later responses being more costly and less effective, or we can act vigorously now.
Hopefully, it’s not too late. This is not over-statement or sensationalist: we are already in dire straits in Australia.
We are passing “tipping points” increasingly quickly - events from which there is no return, where they even accelerate greenhouse gas emissions - like methane now erupting from millions of square kilometres of rotting vegetation that was once “permafrost” above the Arctic Circle.
If Australians are to survive and thrive in this country in 2100, every single Government action & policy, at all levels of Government has to be first directed at Climate Change.
No exceptions.
We need every single politician, at every level, to direct their efforts to keeping us safe, acting in our best interests - not their own or ‘mates & donors’ - with a clear focus on all of us surviving into next century, not the lucky few, the self-selected “elite”.
Australia is a rich country: we don’t have to struggle & cut corners to feed, house, clothe and educate every one of us.
What we do with the wealth we generate is not up to rich individuals or corporations: it’s a collective decision made in our name by our elected Representatives.
Democracies are meant to be "Of the People, By the People, For the People" not run by Elites, for Elites.
This can be changed at the ballot box, but only if there are candidates willing to listen to us and act on our wishes, not push their own “ideology” or the agendas of the rich and influential.
Our political classes choose to give handouts and gifts to the most wealthy, to ignore our environment and the increasing climate change impacts & necessary mitigation work to avoid the worst of the known, coming impacts.
Only recently CoreLogic, the definitive source of Real Estate prices, started reporting "Risks to Coastal Properties", something the Government should've started 20 years ago. The properties identified at "very high risk" are some of the most expensive in Australia, in cities and in locales like the Gold Coast.
We could allow, if we wanted, everyone to live and work with dignity, with housing, food, work and income security, not scrambling paycheque to paycheque with a single accident or incident the difference between surviving another week or losing everything.
The critical factors of “National Security” are not a strong military with hundreds of billions of dollars of assets to wage war on others.
It’s not a “Strong Economy” and “Government Surpluses”.
It’s the factors that sustain life, health and community and, far behind, enough of a Defence Force to deter aggressor nations.
The Pandemic should’ve informed everyone that “The Economy” isn’t an abstract thing: its People in Work earning & spending, each and every day.
Without healthy, fit and trained people, there is no “Economy”, there is no money, no goods & services and no taxes.
Corporations and Governments are useless and irrelevant without People working everyday.
The Pandemic taught us the phrase “Essential Workers” and should’ve made us all aware of their importance and the impact on our lives if they don't turn up. No drivers, no trucks, no rubbish removal, no road repairs, no food on the shelves, no goods for sale - no economic activity and massive consequences.
Paradoxically, the people we are the most dependent upon are the worst paid and in the most insecure jobs.
This is a choice, the result of 25 years of unstinting, unending attacks against these workers by large Corporations, aided and abetted by multiple Coalition Governments.
Everyone in Australia should have the Right to the Basics of Life: we are collectively wealthy enough for everyone to have a decent, dignified, even a little comfortable, life, not hard scrabble, facing food insecurity and homelessness every week.
Basic Rights of the 21st Century should, IMHO, be:
- Clean & breathable Air
- Clean & healthy Water for drinking, cooking, washing
- Accessible, affordable Agricultural & Horticultural Water: without food, none of us survive
- Affordable, Secure Housing, not a method to enrich the few at the expense of the many
- Food, affordable and healthy, not commercial opportunities for large corporates not interested in community health outcomes
- Highly processed food is creating epidemics of obesity, diabetes & heart disease leading to early, avoidable deaths and huge human & dollar costs. All those costs are borne by the public purse, with no contribution from the Corporations deliberately creating them.
- Cheap, affordable Healthcare, including Drugs, Hospitals, GP’s, Specialists, Dental, Mental Health / Counselling and Allied healthcare.
- Humans are not composed of separate, unconnected parts. We are single, highly interconnected systems, with complex interactions that need to be treated as a whole.
- Healthcare must treat the whole person, minimising system costs, not managed as many isolated "cost centres".
- Fuel & Power ’Security’: affordable transport, tools & machines and electricity
- Cheap, fast Broadband / Communications everywhere, including in regional and remote areas.
- Especially, Fibre everywhere there is Grid power. Reliable broadband is as critical to a 21st Century life as Power has been for the last century.
- Free / Affordable Education, both school & tertiary / trade education and on-going courses to retrain for new jobs & careers as they evolve.
- Dignified Work for everyone, especially as machine & software replace workers.
- Universal Income Protection Insurance:
- paid in either dollars or hours of work. Not an unliveable “handout” designed to punish & destroy those who are the victims of circumstances.
A Civil Defence Force isn’t optional, nor can it be done on the cheap by abusing the good will & time of volunteers, as is done with SES and bushfire fighters now. Volunteers can help, but with more events of increasing impact, paid professionals are needed to be at the centre of the response.
We need planning, preparation and practice - with prepositioned “assets” - to quickly & effectively respond to fires, floods, destructive storms and the many new environmental challenges we’ll face.
If the people of Lismore had a shipping container delivered to each house & business 18 hours before the floods and taken to higher ground before the water arrived, they’d have been able to save all their possessions.
That scale of operation needs professional planning, logistics and co-ordination - with properly prepared and tested plans already in place.
Insurance companies, who have the most to gain from minimising avoidable losses, should be advocating strongly for services like this.
Individually, nobody can afford to hold back coastal erosion, mitigate floods, cleanup after major storms & hail or deal with raging, uncontrolled firestorms. Nor should "special people" advocate for a larger piece of the pie, especially if they're wealthy and avoiding paying their fair share of taxes.
Together, we have the money, material, skills and people to cope with everything that Climate Change will throw at us for the next century.
There’s another critical element of Climate Change Impact that’s not highlighted or discussed:
- Weather systems Inertia, or “Climate Inertia”
- The many years, even decades, it takes for a change in heat absorption to reach a new stable level, the ’new normal'.
- Adding more greenhouse gases doesn't immediately change weather systems or add energy - it builds slowly like a boiling kettle, moving water & energy around the planet as energy balances change.
The recent multiple “unprecedented” weather events do not reflect the current levels of greenhouse gases in our air. Like large ships being very slow to stop or turn, the planet has phenomenal thermal inertia. There are an estimated 1.332 billion cubic kilometres of water on the globe. Each cubic kilometre weighs a billion tons. Changing the temperature of just the top metre of water by 1°C requires an unimaginable amount of energy - and once the heat is stored, it'll take as long, probably longer, for the heat to dissipate.
There’s evidence that global environmental systems take 30 years or more to fully reflect the impact of higher solar heat capture. The 2022 Lismore floods likely reflect the 360ppm CO2 of 1992, not the 420ppm of today. We started the Industrial Revolution at 285ppm in 1850 and have dumped massive amounts of dangerous gases into the air since.
We simply don’t know when, or even if, global weather systems will stop changing and “stabilise”.
We have no idea if we’ve broken the Environment, that it’s even possible to ever reverse the effects of greenhouse gases capturing more heat.
Giving up is not an option.
We have to do everything we can to save what we can of our future.
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