I would be interested to know what finally persuaded the fourth estate that the environment was mainstream. Until very recently, even in the self-proclaimed progressive pages of Crikey, “greenies” were ridiculed. Did it really only need the price of petrol to go up?

Unfortunately, the damage is done. The sustained posturing of journalists, whether at the behest of their baron-employers, or on their own, economic rationalistic initiative, has convinced the electorate that only two parties, and those conservative, are required. This is true in all the English speaking partners of the near-defunct coalition of the willing, or rather, killing. I have watched the Australian media devote column metres and gigabytes of bandwidth to making fun of the Australian Democrats, which is the first Australian party to have formulated a comprehensive set of policies based on the triple bottom line - decades ago. The Australian media never thought it necessary to inform the electorate that the Democrats had any policies, or what they were. The electorate can now thank the media for the gift of a Senate with no honest broker.

The Australian Greens are all very well in their way. The media regards them as the left wing of the Labor party, and therefore acceptable. The Greens’ policy base is rather less costed and more wishlist than one might hope, but their hearts are in the right place.

In 1990, Scientific American did an Alternative Energy issue. Terms like “peak oil”, and “global warming” featured often. Back then, a number of Australian inventors, entrepreneurs and small comanies were designing and building lots of interesting technologies. Anyone who watched Landline during the 1990s would have seen quite a few of them, as they had applications for remote areas. Unfortunately, these ingenious folk continually found it difficult or impossible to access finance to develop their products. One after another, the inventions were picked up by overseas companies, many European, or left to wither.

These were the days of deregulation, privatisation and market forces, whichever horse you backed. The days of short horizons, profit forecasts and share market poker games played with other people’s superannuation. And the topics of energy conservation, environment degradation became unfashionable, even faintly distasteful. As if to be opposed to uncontrolled growth was somehow un-Australian…

Well. Now, it seems, there might have been something to those tales, told by fairies at the bottom of the garden. Some of those inventions went off-shore and succeeded. Germany produced about half the world’s solar power last year (according to the Washington Post). Australia could export solar power to the world (see * below). And the new PM (same as the old one?) has just revoked the solar panel rebate for households with combined incomes of over $100K. Any household with combined income less than that is probably too busy saving to pay for their children’s healthcare, education and transport to consider solar panels. And they are probably renting because they can’t afford to buy a house. Who is going to put solar panels on their rental house?

*The United States is developing technology to microwave energy from solar arrays in space back to earth. Always the big technology fix. And anyone who thinks that a bright new day can now dawn in Australian renewable energy might do well to read the US FTA. It was not widely discussed at the time, but there are provisions which may come into play if our trading partner’s companies’ profitability is threatened. Some of you stock market junkies may also have noticed that Australian energy companies are being gobbled up at an unseemly rate. Personally, I consider energy and communications to be factors of national security and find it astonishing that anyone would relinquish control of them to the likes of Enron.

But I don’t expect the media to grow any investigative muscles about how the current situation came about. After all, it took them - how long? Years to wake up to the fact that they were being lied to by the coalition of the drilling. And so far no apology to the hapless reader / listener / viewer for the oversight.

Richard, I admire your positivity in the face of your 1/3 odds that you’ll catch a deadly disease

“It will be an awesome time and place. A decade before $5/litre pricing came, many nuclear and environmental energy electrical power sources came on line. The conversion from petroleum to electrical propulsion engines came quickly, aided by both personal initiative and governmental mandating a ‘drop dead’ date for all petrol vehicles to be off the roads.

The international emissions trading schemes and carbon crediting allowed bus and train entrepreneurs to establish new high-speed and frequent commuter lines utilizing electric-hydrogen propulsion. As a result more that a quarter of all metropolitan populations migrated to previously marginal-to-inhospitable agricultural land, intersecting with the lines. The abundance of clean electricity and other innovations, generated breakthroughs in abundant atmospheric water harvesting which in conjunction with subsoil irrigation, made the deserts bloom.

The massive and regrettable plagues of 2020 which reduced global population by 33% did have their silver lining in the form of reduced competition for resources, a greater appreciation of being human, and a reduction in territorial conflicts. They gave us a feeling of starting over from a clean, yet enlightened, slate.

Thankyou, thankyou you ole peak oil for forcing us to kick your habit. What a wonderful time to be alive.