An hour about the Melbourne municipality that rose to the challenge of overcoming climate change – and what happened next

Our guest in The Sustainable Hour on 18 July 2018 is climate action campaigner Adrian Whitehead who co-founded Beyond Zero Emissions, the political party Save the Planet, and Community Action for the Climate Emergency (CACE). He has been part of the group of local residents in the Melbourne suburb Darebin who have inspired and helped its City Council create the world‘s first local government Climate Emergency Plan. In September the first Climate Emergency Conference is held in Darebin.

Over the phoneline to Perth, Rebecca Prince-Ruiz explains how we can become more clever and thoughtful about the ways we use plastic. As a local government waste educator she started off the amazingly succesful Plastic Free July campaign, launched together with two colleagues in 2011. 40 people in Western Australia participated that first year. This year, 3.3 million people joined her vision of “a world without plastic waste” – in 159 countries.

Re: Plastic Free July: Geelong Sustainability’s Green Drinks on Wednesday 25 July has Plastic Free Living as its theme – starting at 5:30 at Beav’s Bar in Lt Malop Street.

Colin Mockett shares a global outlook on various countries’ percentages of renewable energy in the electricity grid; we play a Youtube clip with speakers from the We Don’t Have Time conference, ‘These people speak the truth about the urgency of the climate crisis!’, featuring the American economist Jeffrey Sachs; a Youtube clip produced by the Victorian government about ‘Victorians concern about climate change’; and we play the song ‘Erosion’ with peer-reviewed rapper Baba Brinkman.

“The climate emergency message will be unstoppable”

“In Darebin, we’ve got a climate emergency response for the first time rolling out at government level. We are getting a momentum and actual, real change happening. But we need to start getting other councils to do the same. Because once that communication starts pumping out from Darebin, once we start reaching out to the ethnic groups and the churches, through volunteers from the community working hand in hand with council to get a combined approach, I think the climate emergency message will be unstoppable.”

~ Adrian Whitehead in The Sustainable Hour

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 225 on 94.7 The Pulse:

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