The Circular Economy.
Our Australian public universities are doing so much for the future focusing on this move towards a circular economy, in place of the present one built on winners and losers.
This is despite the impact of the cuts Australia’s public universities had forced on them by the refusal of our national Coalition government to support them with Job Keeper during the 2020 pandemic. Instead, the Coalition put Australia’s public revenue into four private universities and into private schools. Such a contrast to the climate change approach being taken in USA by President Biden.
Listen to these audios from our wonderful, trustworthy, public Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Science Show presented by Robyn Williams taking us to the way we can go towards a circular economy where we recycle using clean energy.
Gwendolyn Foo is developing a robot to assist with the dismantling and separation of toxic e-waste.
Science and the public good – chemistry
Excerpts from an Australian Academy of Science symposium featuring Professors Veena Sahajwalla and Thomas Maschmeyer.
I have put up a blog about Professor Veena Sahajwalla before. She was responsible for developing green steel out of waste tyres.
Imagination has no boundaries
No more of those hungry corporations – ‘The Waste Makers’ – doing everything to increase profits regardless of their impact on the world the young will have to try to survive in.
We were warned about them back in the 1960. We were also warned about ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ by the same author – Vance Packard.
Contrast the linear economy with its waste, its pollutants, its terrible armaments, its degradation being pursued by our Australian fossil-fuel, carbon capture and storage Federal government with so little care for tomorrow. Its destruction of people, of land, forests, environments and oceans. Australia even has a new company that calls its ‘renewable’ intending to make money through exporting wood chips from Newcastle! That is instead of recognising that regeneration of forests needs the logs that fall to become homes for bio-diversity.
BUT
We need enlightened politicians. We need to choose those who care about the future.
Those we have now are tied to the past, including people in power who have been climate sceptics and deniers and who, with too many others, have made their wealth through denying climate change since well before the 1990s. As David Harris would put it in his book, they have ‘Outsourced their consciences’.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns so much of the commercial media outlets across Australia’s island continent, at last says he is prepared to accept zero emissions by 2050 when we now know that we need to do much by 2030! At last! But he still funds those who would destroy rather than design for connections. See the destructive goals of the Institute of Public Affairs that is the Australian equivalent of the worst of the Republican approach in the United States of America.
Australia’s Prime Minister is very pleased with himself. He had just got Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, to remove any concern or limitation about climate change and Australia’s behaviour in that regard from the trade treaty ‘Brexited’ UK is eager to make with Australia.
From ‘Greenpeace: Australia Pacific
| ‘The Morrison government pressured the UK to drop references to commitments to Paris Agreement temperature limits in order to get a post-Brexit trade deal over the line, in a leaked email obtained by Greenpeace. The revelation comes with The Morrison government expected to come under further pressure over climate policy when the foreign minister and the defence minister meet face-to-face with their US counterparts in Washington next week. And federal resources minister, Keith Pitt, will press ahead on plans to open up the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory to fracking by giving taxpayer money to oil and gas companies despite a legal challenge to the government’s program.‘ British ministers bowed to Australian pressure to drop key climate commitments for trade deal |
Sciences and Humanities 
Thanks, Erica, for your continuing spread of information that can help us understand out to fight climate change . . . and save our planet!
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Yes Erica Important to have the concept of a circular economy and to view waste streams as assets not a problem to hide away. I think it also needs to be a movement which we all support every day in every way. I refuse to shop at Coles or Woolworths or Aldi because of their vertical integration of supply chains and their unconsionable manipulation of suppliers. Buy local, eat local and seasonal- think of the manufacture and food miles behind every product. Sometimes the only way of exercising any power is the way we spend our dollars.
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Thank you for your reply. I dared not to put it as a question, I do agree with your conclusion. But I’d add – and how we vote.
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Yes and even before the voting how can we influence the policy writers to respond to the significant interest in environmental issues most notably among younger Australians? Smart environmental policy leadership is sadly lacking as we wonder why adverserial old politics fails to engage.
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