Excess is followed by collapse - learning from history

A Lowy Institute poll reported that Australians are more concerned about jobs than about climate change. The report said, “Asked how much extra each month they would be willing to pay on their electricity bill to help solve climate change, 53 per cent of Australians were only prepared to pay $10 per month or less.” What about an option of using less electricity? Why is this not mentioned? What about the jobs that are needed in order to respond to climate change and the other challenges ahead? Low technology offers enterprising opportunities for our manufacturing industries and jobs, and is a fast way to help cut carbon emissions. The powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution was human energy, even more than coal. This mental energy can surely be directed to the new challenge of adapting our economic system away from its fatal dependence on consumption regardless of the consequences.

Rather than abandoning all our manufacturing and skills to go overseas, we could at least develop, manufacture and sell simple appliances to complement the rapacious “big” machinery that we now use automatically, without thinking and on every occasion, to save household labour.

We are obsessed with cutting labour costs (translated as cutting jobs). So our salvage industries are still minimal. Millions of potential dollars are thrown out with our hard rubbish collections and during repairs and renovations. These salvage operations cost labour but see what else they save, and future-wise they become profitable. There are jobs in preferring re-using rather than re-cycling - which has greater costs in fossil-fuel energy and emissions.

Our current building methods involve reckless waste, including the problem that renovation can cost more than destroying and building from scratch. We are not building sufficiently repairable or sustainable houses “because it would cost too much labour”.

Alternative technology magazines <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_technology > today report marvellous and gung-ho technology to help save the world, often do-it-yourself. It is great that sophisticated Australian products are increasingly advertised. But for the future we also need to think about the small and easy innovations, and how changes in relative costs of products and repairs must be made, and how to pay for the jobs that are needed instead of, as now, paying for jobs that increase waste.

We need public education to seek the alternative technologies. Where is the TV show that makes showmanship of “best kitchen” practice before and after the present limited window of merely cooking? Where is the TV sitcom about preventing climate change through our own jobs and our own household? Where are the “Australia” shops that showcase local and other Australian products and inventions?

So much attention is being paid to carbon trading in by-and-by-2014 and what governments should do - but less to how our clay-footed economic system could adapt to a world without waste - without the waste of resources, production, environment and people, now thought essential for economic prosperity.

In shutting down our manufactures, we neglect what the factories and abandoned skills might be producing instead. In trying to stick to the jobs we have, regardless of what they may emit or waste, Australians neglect the jobs we need to have.

In trusting government money to inspire innovation, and future carbon trading to miraculously cap emitters, we neglect our greatest resource, our own enterprise. (Tom Quirk gives an angle on this in his On Line Opinion article.)

To produce further jobs with low technology manufactures, we need to come up with public lists of what we need to invent, to improve our world, and to perhaps set an example to the world. We could think of commercial uses for pests like locusts and cane toads; weeds and waste from gardens; problem by-products such as carbon dioxide, arsenic, tailings, salt and so on. We could re-invent our sewerage systems, which, currently, are based on unlimited supplies of water; and think about how to use the liquid human sewage that is currently flushed away.

Do I think that taking on more low-technology can make any difference to our future? Perhaps - over 20 million Australians can save waste and cut emissions faster what is going on at present. “Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will” in practice.

We have to do these things ourselves.

Governments dare not presume to dictate or even suggest. They expect they would not last a minute.