We’ve been busy ploughing through the transcripts of Tomorrowland to bring you a wrap of what some of the best minds in the industry shared with our audience.
It will be ready soon and available free for a limited time only, and then just to members and event ticketholders, so make sure you get in quick to have a read.
Or instead, how about how about becoming a paid member from as little as $20 a month to help support our work – and take your time?
Ticketholders to the event of course will still have access. And check out our corporate membership offer, which means your entire team gets access to our premium content plus discounts to our events.
Become a member of The Fifth Estate
Also on our agenda as we rocket towards Christmas is the Extreme Green Buildings ebook which will be ready by around mid February – and in which you can still take display advertising if you’re interested.
There’s also the next event, Urban Greening, on 27 April.
New ebook
We’re also planning more ebooks in the new year. One topic that’s on our must do list is innovative housing. Never before have we been in greater need of brilliant ideas for green, affordable homes – both new, old, whether freestanding or in townhouse or apartment format.
As part of this we need to ask, what makes a great community? How do we regain a sense of control over one of our most critical human assets and the places we inhabit and work in? Whether city or country.
If you have an idea of what other topics would be great to cut a swathe through and place between two covers, get in touch. We are here to help!
Contact Abdul to express your interest – abdul@thefifthestate.com.au
Or on 0433 159 345
Global atomisation
As a teaser to the Tomorrowland wrap, we posted early this week the session on geo political tensions, which focused on the likely slowdown on global co-operation on climate likely to come from the instability generated by China’s threats to Taiwan, the US’s cooling sentiments to trade with China and Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
Ironically, though short term oil and gas prices are soaring, the overarching picture is to hasten the development of renewable energy.
Which at first blush sounds great. Self-reliance and localism are always touted as an excellent solution. But not so good when it comes to awareness that trade with underprivileged nations can help lift them out of poverty (thin though be the line between help and exploitation). And not so good when mutual distrust between nations leads to less of the massive global collaboration that we need to tackle climate change.
A thoughtful comment from someone in the US on the geopolitical session transcript on Thursday was another shaft of light on the China situation. The anti China sentiment in the US, said our commentator, is not driven by fear of Chinese aggression but by rising internal patriotic fervour and the pandering of politicians worried about where their next vote is coming from.
This can be evidenced by the rise of home grown terrorism that in Germany strangely purported to storm the parliament (clearly that was never going to work, making the thing a much more sinister ploy for influence) and in Queensland this week with an attack on police that killed two young officers barely out of the police academy plus an innocent neighbour, along with the perpetrators.
This all points to rising pressures and mental health issues that we are failing to address. Probably inflamed by social media and hyped up screen imagery surrounding so many of us and by the outlook on climate.
But beware the increasingly sophisticated media tactics from the fossil fuel industry that wants to conflate environmental action with home grown terrorism.
Especially by young people who can’t see a world in which to grow peaceful and old.
Let’s be clear the International Panel on Climate Change said it was wrong with the 1.5 degree warming scenario; three degrees is more like it.
Meanwhile in short termism land, our legal authorities concur with the pressure and want to jail Violet Coco for 15 months for some inconsequential disruption (by comparison) to daily life.
Developers can be our next front line
Property and development though is another place where we can be really disruptive and be celebrated for it. Even make a load of money.
As the world gets the message that Coco’s spiritual antecedents tried to tell everyone back in the 60s and onwards, clients of the property world are prepared to reward those who provide safe, resilient, green, comfortable houses, neighbourhoods and offices that all so politely disrupt the universe of our extractive economy, without the need to raise anything that looks at all like a radical sweat.
Developers can be re-shapers of our current world and providers of our future world by simply make common sense. They have the power to meet our deep, human, spiritual organic need for nature, beauty and safety.
They and the emerging providers of green goods and services can make it easy for us to buy organic, eschew plastics, move into sustainable houses if we can afford them, and even better to vote teal!
And we don’t even have to throw ourselves in front of bulldozers.
There are some who are starting to set a new agenda and be our silent new activists.
It’s a skinny little front line at present, but their numbers are growing. They can be hidden in plain sight at the top of the property development tree but are super shy in case the greenwash police call them out for the rump in their company that they have yet to drag into the bright green new world.
Or they’re wielding influence in friendly family or otherwise independent companies whose owners can call the shots and tell the “children with machine guns” running the stockmarket (as someone once described it) to bugger off.
Among our growing clutch of Spinifexes (which makes us very chuffed!) this week is one from Cedar Woods that points the way to this disruptive bright green new world.
At least with the electric vehicle story which we know is not an end in itself but part of the transformation we have to have. In the end we will hopefully all traipse around in renewable energy transport vehicles that are small, safe, made of low embodied carbon that we share with all our neighbours.
An interesting point made by Elon Musk in the disarming interview he did with Ron Baron https://youtu.be/P7wUNMyK3Gs just as he took over Twitter, poised to destroy the joint, was that cars are used roughly 15 per cent of the week, on average. And that when not in use they take up a lot of incredibly expensive, (publicly funded) real estate.
Musk of course imagines a world of Teslas, all driven by artificial intelligence, picking us up where and when we want, no parking needed.
But for now, we are still wedded to owning and parking. So we need to provide infrastructure.
Among the ridiculously modest “reforms” of the National Construction Code of lifting energy efficiency from six to seven stars were sensible new mandates on insulation, solar power, and glazing. Plus providing for electric vehicles.
The author of one of our Spinifexes Nathan Blackburne managing director of developer Cedar Woods has written about this as a “pretty big change”, one that the development industry needs sooner rather than later.
He points to the painful difference between Australia’s track record on EVs with just 0.75 per cent of new car sales in 2020 while in Norway EVs had 70 per cent of the market.
The reason was Australia’s lack of infrastructure.
At Monarch Apartments in Glenside, in South Australia, Cedar Woods provided the correct switchboard sizing, off peak load management and cable trays for future EV charging installations that along with other features that was credited with driving strong sales in the project.
“There is no doubt our customers are becoming more environmentally conscious and increasingly they are expecting energy efficient features in homes” Blackburne says.
It’s always good hear we are headed in the right direction.
And now for a laugh.
If you feel like some Christmas cheer take a look at the uncontrolled infectious laughter that followed Westpac’s declaration at its annual general meeting this week that it would reduce emissions from its own fossil fuels “as well as in our customer financing, particularly fossil fuels.”
Market Forces posted the tweet just after sharing the news that Westpac shareholders, representing more than $8.2 billion of investment had “just defied the board and supported a resolution calling on the bank to stop undermining its climate commitments and end funding for new fossil fuel projects and the companies pursuing them”
So we bring you not just the laughs this week, but the optimism!