[LINK] Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK'

[JanW]

At 06:15 PM 24/11/2014, Janet Hawtin you wrote:
>The government represents money not AU
>It would appear through the above actions that the money is not being
>invested in taking the nation forward constructively
>and in many cases is proactively breaking and removing the country's
>community's tools for change.
>Money is restricted to extraction and militarising.
>
>Fracking is happening in other places so I have to assume that the pattern
>is not special to AU but it is the AU stuff I can see.
>
>We need a plan B? How does that happen? 

I think this is sort of what Kevin Rudd had in mind with his major confab. The problem was, he didn't know what to do with the enthusiasm he garnered, and it soon backfired on him. You don't bring that many minds and that much good will together and then ignore them because your ego is challenged as a result.

This is where I get a bit itchy about centralised procedures, like the social democratic option from a national level, and the value of devolved decision-making. I think it needs to be a cyclical flow up and down and around, with a willingness to include input from non-experts as well as experts for a 'pub test' of ideas. We used to call this cross-something/something and vertical integration. I'm on a glass of wine, so can't come up with the 'something' concept. Anyway, this allowed for testing ideas and letting the top and bottom to listen to each other. The 'cross' idea is diversity instead of stovepipes, sort of like COAG. Only I think COAG is problematic because it's still politicians rather than the public service.

There are steps involved, too, to avoid the problem of decision by anecdote. Awareness, education, discussion, idea proposition and testing, consensus, then moving to the concrete elements of planning and through to implementation, which are basically management techniques.

I was involved in a small group of people interested in developing models for what you are pointing out. We just pulled ourselves together and started working on the model. We tried to use the processes above. It was pretty powerful. Keeping the momentum going, with people who were interstate and many in Victoria, became a challenge. But some of the group are still exploring the model. One of our members died, sadly. I caught up with one of the members who moved to the other side of the bay recently after a few years gap. I think he's still using the ideas we developed.

I can understand the despair. I've been there, still am, on many levels. Part of it is isolation from people who think the way you do. Once you find you're not alone, you can get your voice back. Too many people in that box, I think. Social media is helping. Young people get it. They are forming new alliances. It's the people in power who aren't engaging. Some do, but not the right ones, so far. They still only deal with $$ power as far as I can tell.

BTW, ABC and its cuts are trending 3 out of 10 topics in Australia on Twitter right now. I think politicians ignore this at their peril. People on Twitter have this uncanny ability to remember all the bad and dumb stuff politicians do. 

Jan



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