Episode 4

Posted on by

The Togetherness Project

Today’s Topic – Climate Change

Lets look at some of the things that happened last week – Nepal and much more locally:

  • ~2 cubic km of ice and rock going 4,000m downhill1
  • Why did it happen? Is it “normal”?2
  • Denial again. One nation wants to abolish renewables in favour of coal and gas3
  • VNI West. What it is supposed to do and why cancelling it is a bad idea 4

A focus on Climate Change

The Issue – Addressing runaway climate change is critically important

So today we’re going to talk about why it is critically important that we remove fossil fuel usage as rapidly as it is possible to do so.

The Issue

What happened in Nepal is now a frequent occurrence. It is also something that used to hardly ever happen, Sure, there were snow avalanches but not the whole side of a mountain breaking away like this. The cause was thawing of permafrost (frozen soil/rock that has remained so for decades and more) that triggered the collapse of a glacier and brought down vast quantities of rock with it. Permafrost is thawing at an unprecedented rate, mainly in the northern hemisphere where there is more land for it to form. Why?

It is all about the heating of the atmosphere, oceans and land. Heating that has now accelerated to a rate not seen for over 50 million years. Temperatures not seen for over 3 million years in the Late Pliocene when the earth was dry and sea levels 15-25 m higher than now. The temperatures then were 2.5-4 degrees above 1800/preindustrial levels.

What the geological record tells us is that the rate of change in temperature is higher than any time. Possibly with the exception of when an asteroid hit 66 million years ago and turned the earth into a fireball.

That means we are heading towards a possible to likely scenario where much of the world becomes uninhabitable in the next 30 years. Not a hundred or a thousand. The rate of heating is 10-20 times that of past geological (Pliocene/Eocene boundary) rapid heating records – that is extreme.

Looking at Europe and its record hot summer and the statistics show that the continually escalating unprecedented summer heat is made 130 times more likely by the effects of global warming. People are suffering (even dying) from the heat, fires and drought caused by the effects of global heating.

Even more concerning is that with global population increasing, more and more places where people live are becoming uninhabitable. Low lying places due to sea level rise. Desertification of formerly productive land. Floods and fires as we can see increasingly making places dangerous.

So that is the scary bit. Time for something more scary.

We have politicians in Australia telling us that they want to build coal fired, gas fired and nuclear power stations and avoid renewables. They also want to stop the VNI West transmission line that is planned to allow load balancing of power between NSW and Victoria as well as better access to the abundant wind and solar power in western Victoria.

This is a continuation of climate change denial and a blatant push to support miners, who are struggling to compete with far cheaper and cleaner renewables.5

The case for new coal fired power seems to be that private investment will build and maintain them. The exact opposite is true. Coal fired power stations are expensive to build, expensive to maintain and require polluting feedstock that does environmental damage to extract and transport. Existing coal fired power stations are uneconomic to run without extensive government subsidies. New ones would be facing even bigger challenges and bigger government subsidies to be economic.

Gas is in a similar bind. It is far more expensive now and drives the highest cost of power when it is used to meet peak demands. It is also highly polluting.

Nuclear is more of a stalking horse to delay large scale deployment of things like offshore wind farms. It is the old method of FUD. Use FUD to create uncertainty and that benefits the incumbents.

Lastly, the VNI West is a major transmission line. It gets represented as a burden on western Victoria when it should be seen as a great opportunity to build a stronger, clean economy based on renewables. It is one of the keys to making energy cheaper and available in the quantities needed with electricity demand skyrocketing (did we mention data centres?).

So, the issue in summary: We have a global crisis that is real and imminent. The proposals by One Nation and the Conservative side of politics can only lock in higher prices and make the climate crisis worse. Recommend reading Juice by Tim Winton to see how things could play out.

The Response

What can we do?

  • Start by understanding what is really happening
  • Do the best we can individually:
    • Any energy saving project you can afford. Bring it forward
    • Look at the energy plans that use renewables rather than fossil fuels
    • Look at EVs for your next car
    • Use public transport
    • Consume less while still being comfortable
  • Make a noise. Don’t let vested interests to avoid the consequences of what they have been doing
  • Get involved with local groups that are doing good things. Remember that your own contribution might be small but a million people like you can move a mountain. In a nicer way.
  • Talk to friends and acquaintances with some simple messages. Questions are a good way to start:
    • Why do we want to burn fossil fuels when we know that they are expensive and kill people?
    • Why choose technologies that the market has refused to fund because building coal and nuclear power plants in Australia would result in stranded assets?
    • Why do we want to choose the most expensive forms of power generation over the least expensive?
    • Why are certain powerlines that produce economic benefits and grid resilience seen as a bad thing when the 10,000 km of existing power lines were considered as essential services?
    • Who is behind all this push to do things that independent analysts say are economically and environmentally reckless?
  • Make your vote count. Talk to political candidates and ask them those questions as well.

The final takeaway is that we know what we can do to make it better and we need a concerted effort to bring about change – TOGETHER

  1. https://theconversation.com/the-collapse-of-a-mountainside-triggered-nepals-devastating-floods-as-the-regions-mountains-heat-up-it-wont-be-the-last-290924 [↩]
  2. https://theconversation.com/when-a-mountain-falls-how-ice-and-rock-triggered-nepals-catastrophic-flood-and-why-climate-change-is-raising-the-risks-290779 [↩]
  3. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-31/one-nation-victoria-energy-policy-announcement/107097686 [↩]
  4. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-19/victorian-coalition-promises-to-scrap-vni-west-transmission-line/107053638 [↩]
  5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-24/fossil-fuel-climate-disinformation-threatens-australia/106490840 [↩]