ReEnergise Australia

Last night I went to a meeting of the Perth GetUp group, as part of their ReEnergise Australia campaign. It’s their latest effort to get cleaner energy happening in our country, as opposed to coal.

The idea is to educate the public about how many jobs there are in emerging green industries, and campaign for our politicians to give more funding to renewable technologies, or even just cut all the coal subsidies so there’s a fair playing ground to start with. We need to counter the misinformation being spread by the coal industry and it’s other fossil fuel friends.

If you think about it, there are so many job opportunities in greening our nation:

• Installing insulation and weatherproofing people’s homes for greater energy efficiency
• Installing solar hot water or heat pumps
• Building and maintaining wind farms, solar thermal, and geothermal plants
• Building, maintaining and running a high-speed rail network between capital cities
• Accounting for carbon budgets for corporations, local government, etc
• Legal work in developing agreements and protections for our natural wonders
• so many more, it’s only limited by our imagination…

If you look at this Inside Story article, Shortchanging the ‘greatest moral challenge’, you’ll find out the vast difference in funding between renewables and coal in Australia. With over $25 billion going to polluters and just under $2 billion going to renewables, it’s pretty clear where our government’s priorities lie.

This graph is one I made based on the figures in that article. I’ve put the date on it, because I hope that in the future we’ll be able to change these numbers to something more sensible that gives better value for our taxpayer dollars.

Although I admit it’s nice to see households getting quite a lot of money too! But really, if we switch to renewable energy, the costs of that and higher prices of petrol won’t be so bad that we need to give huge handouts. We want people to cut back on wasting electricity and driving too much, and I think the hitting the hip pocket will be more successful that politely asking people to stop doing things they’ve done all their lives.

The meeting last night was great: our local MP, Steve Irons, was there to show his support for renewables, and a Greens MP as well (so sorry, I didn’t get her name – please let me know in the comments if you remember who it was!). The GetUp head guy was there to get us all revved up, and there were lots of enthusiastic people there willing to put some time in to make progress on this issue.

Our Perth group has a lot of work ahead of us – we’re going to have some meetings to come up with some ideas, and a doorknock survey is already planned to find out what the general public thinks and already understands about the issue. If you’re interested in being involved, email the GetUp group and see if there’s a group already going in your city – the GetUp crew are always fun and positive to work with, in my experience, and very welcoming to anyone and everyone.