The Sustainable Hour no 378

[09:10] In The Tunnel on 1 September 2021 our first guest is Newcastle’s Dr Rob Eisenberg, the founder of Vote Earth Now. Realising that the climate crisis we face is a major issue for more and more Aussies, Dr Eisenberg and his team have developed an online tools where people in each federal electorate can pledge that at the next election they are going to ‘vote for the Earth’. The online tool makes sure to notify the elected parliamentarian representative in that particular electorate right away.This means that before the election, no politician will be left in any doubt as to just how important real action on climate is for their constituents, and these concerns can then be taken into the party rooms and cause real policy changes, for instance when Zali Steggall’s Climate Change Bill comes up for a vote.

We believe Rob and his team are onto something important with this project and we will do all we can to help publicising it and get all ‘climate voters’ of Australia to participate in this exercise. You can make your pledge right now – it doesn’t take many seconds! – and find out more about how you can help the VoteEarthNow project as well – at www.voteearthnow.com.

[28:13] Speaking of the power of pledging, it is significant that via www.theclimatepledge.com 115 major businesses and global brands have now accepted the challenge of reaching net zero carbon by 2040. The Climate Pledge is a cross-sector community of companies, organisations, individuals, and partners, working together to crack the climate crisis and solve the challenges of decarbonising our economy. Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge in 2019. We play an excerpt of one of their promotion videos.

Something the Australian business community – including Geelong Chamber of Commerce – should take notice of is the quote from Deloitte’s new climate report, which Mik Aidt opens the hour with. It states that “This is our global turning point.” There is no turning back.

[29:04] Geelong local Greg Lacey recently founded the driving school Bright Spark Eco Driver Education. During Covid last year, he saw a business opportunity for himself driven by his passion for electric vehicles. As well as promoting EVs by having his students drive them around, he was also able to educate them about ways to reduce their emissions generally. You can sign up and get more informed about Greg’s driving school at www.bspark.com.au.

[02:31] Colin Mockett‘s Global Outlook this week begins at home, with a YouGov poll of federal electorates which found that every one had a majority of voters saying government was not doing...