November 2008

I thought I’d take the opportunity of my first post to quickly outline and wholeheartedly endorse our employee health scheme.

Barry has personal experience of the problems caused and exacerbated by computer terminal use, and decided to bring in an expert to advise us on our desk ergonomics, posture etc. Before we knew it we had all signed up for a weekly one hour training session at the nearest park. I was envisioning some stretches and some hippy ‘how-to-sit’ lessons, but what we ended up with was pretty much a personal training session like you’d find at a gym, but with emphasis on exercises and stretches relevant to our jobs. And the best bit is that it’s actually quite fun (even after a couple of months).

The good points:

1. Becoming healthier
2. Feeling healthier (not necesarily the same as point 1)
3. Informal team bonding
4. Friday wind-down (a.k.a. guilt-free slacking off)
5. Hopefully fewer long-term health issues, rsi, sick days etc…

The bad points:

1. Barry has to pay

So as you can see it’s 100% good news, there’s absolutely no down-side at all!

I was looking at the Rocky Mountains Institute web page directed to transport, which follows watching The Daily Show last night in which I heard for the first time someone saying that the smart way ahead is to plan for the termination of our dependence on fossil fuels.  The RMI is planning for the end of oil, Australia I would propose needs to plan to eliminate coal mining by 2050 as well.

Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?  Because someone is going to work out how to produce power without pollution.  That person, company, group or country will have a mortgage on the future.  The market economist must admit that with the climate situation as it is, there is definitely demand there.

In the Daily Show interview the ‘bubble’ nature of economics was discussed.  That is we had the first wave of internet players, this created a hyper infalted bubble that crashed and cost a lot of people lots of money. When the dust cleared we had this amazing resource called the World Wide Web which is now core to most of world trade.
We can look at Coal in the same way.  We currently have a hyperinflated buble of coal generated power networks.  Once this bubble bursts, there will be huge costs and business failures etc, BUT we will be left with highly valuable power networks that the new generators can leverage.

But how do we get there?

2 ways:

• Wait - then pay the price and conintue as a third rate economy, desperately trying to catch up.
• Take the pain in lumps

• Stop all subsidies to fossil fuel immediately

• E.g remove trade incentives
• Tax emissions
• Make them pay for the water they use
• Cancel all exploration permits immediately

• Free, non-poluting universal public transport
• Free, non polutting  personal  public transport
• Disuade private fossil fuel use

• in cars, lawnmowers etc

Of course we cant see thus happening for a while because of the outrageious lobbying power that these organisations have.

Coal Miners, Oil companies etc may well employ a lot of people, but the damage they are doing to us is now measurable and must be acknowledged.

Protecting these dinosaurs serves noone, we must see them off the premises for our own good, regardless of how good they make us feel.

I was waiting for a take away coffee and I saw today’s Sydney Morning Herald.  While I love it when the Markeeters and Fund Cowboy’s start crying fowl because the circumstances others have had to face that lead to fat commissions are now at play on them, I was more struck by a question.  Why would anyone care what the likes of Access Economics thinks about the current financial crisis.  We are in the direct consequences of their advice for the past 10 years.  They have, apparently been so wrong that the only measurable output from their advice right now is the largest financial crisis since the great depression.

When will we start to hear from credible analysts that have a different world view?

As Albert Einstein said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” (Ref Quote )

While we have an incredibly severe financial crisis on our hands, it is dwarfed in both size and immediacy by the changes in the planets climate.

Planetary Change is bigger than all of the economies in the world, if only because to totally encloses them.

We must have more and very different ideas to provide us with an alternative to the vision that is able to ignore the single largest threat to civilisation ever encountered.  This is bigger than the last Ice Age, at the level of the organism the change is on a par with the extinction event that saw off the dinosaurs.

And we engineered this one.

To quote a very smart man “”We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein