This is an infuriating interview with Polly Hemming, Senior Researcher at The Australia Institute. Polly is amazing, but the interview is infuriating because of the outright deceit practiced in the field of Climate Data and Carbon Credits. I kept wanting to stop the interview to scream and throw things. An enlightening, fascinating, and enraging conversation!
“There’s so many vested interests now, and the lines between government and industry are so blurred in Australia, that it’s really hard to know, even when government is telling you things, the extent to which that is real and what the real story is.”
“Our tagline is ‘we change minds’, and you can’t do that unless you can clearly explain what’s happening to people, and not just in a way that suits your agenda.but in a way that actually empowers them to understand things themselves.”
“What I wish everyone knew is that data is just information. There’s lots of different types of data… I come from a family of scientists, but I’m not… I always grew up thinking that data was just numbers, and that’s something I’ve never been interested in or good at, but everyone uses data every single day. It’s just not codified as data. I think people attribute a very narrow mathematical definition to it which is very limiting. You individually and intuitively and unconsciously use data in every decision throughout your day.”
Infuriating, exasperatiing, disillusioning all yes, even when one is across the underlying facts. If the world was intent on resolving the climate crisis, we would have updated our targets in line with latest data which, according to the IPCC, requires a 45% reduction in emissions this decade rather than 43% since 2005. This would erase the 22% stated progress vs 1.8% actual emissions reduction since 2005 and start from 2019 then requiring 7.5% per year from then (against little over 0.1% per year achieved since 2005).
With the political climate wars only now lessening a little, it seems we are still far from the day we get a leader who will openly, honestly and perhaps emotionally espouse the real situation and what is needed to reset the baseline for efforts going forward rather than irresponsibly using fictitious data around business as usual near 20 years old as a reference.
Until it is clear to the layperson what stacks up and what doesn’t, we can’t even start to have a sensible debate about how we want to proceed as we can’t let go of the so many easy options that don’t.
By not having a plan we’re planning to fail – not just us but the next 100 generations