Page 2704 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 21 September 2022
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We are doing quite a bit in the ACT. We have 100 per cent renewable electricity. We have legislated targets and we are meeting them. We have launched our electrification pathway and we have launched our EV strategy pathway. We have quite a lot of fossil fuels that we know we are on the road to phasing out, and that is fantastic.
This morning, I was at a breakfast discussing one of the issues that we have not yet sorted out. This was a scope 3 emissions business breakfast. I think that we are having some trouble in the climate movement because we use a lot of language that people do not understand. Scope 3 emissions are basically the emissions in all of your stuff. Canberra has not really started work on this bit of our footprint. It is 16 times higher than the bit of our footprint that we are really well advanced on, and we have not really begun work on it.
We heard from our Greens environment minister, Rebecca Vassarotti. We heard from the MBA and the ACT’s chief architect. I have to say that it was really good; it was quite uplifting. There is a lot of innovation going on. There is a lot of work going on. There are a lot of really smart businesses who are looking at low-carbon concrete. Sophia Hamblin Wang could not join us. She was telling us how to save the planet only last Thursday at another conference, but she could not make it to this one, so it was a pretty good idea to skip it. She has come up with a type of concrete that genuinely sequesters carbon in the concrete.
We are rolling out a lot of technology like that. There are a lot of really smart systems, and there are a lot of people who are thinking about this stuff. It is good to look at the solutions.
I was at a conference on Thursday that was on the circular economy, which is working in the same kind of patch. Again, not many people readily understand what the circular economy is. We used to just say “recycling”. It is a bit bigger than that. It is basically about how we get what we need without destroying the planet. It is a bit broader than that. That was, again, a really great event, because there is a lot of bad news but there is also a lot of really quick action. It was put on by the Conservation Council.
We heard from Two Before Ten, a cafe in Aranda. They have looked at their entire supply chain and how to make it more sustainable. They grow their own food and they compost on site. It is really fun. We heard from Lids4Kids, Tim Miller’s charity company that does lid recycling. We had reps from the community toolboxes, who are making sure that you do not need to buy stuff that you only need once; you can just re-use it. We heard from Upparel, which is a business that I have used a lot. They do fabric recycling. They do a lot of stuff behind the scenes that you would not know about. They also have a consumer branch. We had the Green Shed there. I think everyone knows what the Green Shed does. It was really good.
A common thread from all of these businesses and non-profits is that they do not behave like any ordinary sector. They do not behave like capitalists. All of them said they want to no longer exist. They actually want to do their jobs so well that they put themselves out of business, and there is no longer any stuff to deal with. I thought that was delightful.
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