Perhaps investing long term in CSIRO to use science and economics for green growth is the idea we need? Perhaps it is time for regional development and more balanced urban development? Perhaps we can get rid of open plan offices? 

Unfortunately, the usual noisy suspects and vested interests are promoting more of the same lame old thinking, particularly fossil fuel investment in gas extraction, perhaps with domestic reservation to create employment in plastics and fertilizers. 

Others suggest less green-tape environmental control on development for more pollution and degradation of the land, water, air and biosphere. At the same time, we are learning that increasing human exposure in the stressed wild world is where new pandemics will originate. 

Others desperately attack workers, foreigners, trade unions, and ultimately the living standards of the broader community. 

The growing evidence from around the world is that the fossil fuel pathway is not wise even if it seems more palatable than unregulated environmental and job degradation. In the United States, gas from fracking has been a growth industry as capacity shifted from imports to domestic production with reservation for job creation in chemical industries. Recent measurements show fugitive emissions make this gas as dirty as coal, and Australian clean coal is a fraudulent claim to boot! 

Now a massive wave of bankruptcies is washing over the fossil fuel sector as it becomes uneconomic in changed times with falling prices, so the jobs are vanishing too. The finance sector is divesting from fossil fuels globally, and governments are begged and badgered around the world to be investors of last resort in a dying industry. Not too much bold innovation or thinking there. 

Jobs to produce chemical fertilizer and plastics are also not the hallmarks of progress they once were. We regularly hear about plastic pollution of the ocean and can see it for ourselves on many of the beautiful beaches in South Gippsland. Less well known is the growing and necessary trend towards regenerative agriculture drawing back from chemical fertilizer use, instead focusing on soils, land use and animals, often with better economic, environmental and job outcomes. 

Why would we focus on fossil fuels if there are alternatives? 

It turns out South Gippsland is the potential home to Australia’s first offshore wind farm, the Star of the South project. It aims to produce nearly 20% of Victoria’s energy needs. The project is currently undergoing environmental approvals and community consultation to determine if the trade-offs are acceptable to provide this resource. The Danish investment and leadership in the Star of the South project comes from their scientific expertise in wind energy. This emerged from the Riso Labs near Roskilde in Denmark, a former nuclear reactor site, which suddenly lost its social license in a democratic vote. The wind and dispersion scientists that worked to protect Danish citizens from nuclear hazards reinvented themselves as wind energy scientists and are now transforming the energy world. 

In CSIRO we also had wind scientists who formed successful companies to map wind resources, and my group in Melbourne calibrated accurate anemometers commercially for local wind farms in our wind Issue 3 6 May 2020 5 tunnels for many years. I spent a few weeks at Riso working with turbulent-wind-flow experts in my own research career and I have worked on air pollution hazards around Australia, including the Latrobe Valley.