Want to be a billionaire?

It seems that finally the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming is gaining traction on the oil soaked slippery slope of the mainstream media – albeit buried between the latest political hijinks and some actor or other that is wearing a new dress – with the Australian Climate Commission’s latest media foray suggesting that to avoid a pretty different planet to the one we have come to know and love we need to leave the majority of fossil fuels in the ground instead of burning them as fast as we can.

Anyone with an entrepreneurial bone in their body would be looking at this issue with an open mind and firing up their creative juices to do a bit of future gazing to figure out where-oh-where the opportunities are really going to lie in the next decade or so. Now would be the time to try and, in the lexicon of the football field, be where the ball is going and not where the ball is right now because the swell of popular support for the notion of moving toward a genuinely sustainable future is growing quite quickly, and where the swell of support heads, so too does political will and the eventual policies to facilitate a change, and that, my entrepreneurial friends is where goes the money (the popularity of the likes of Bill McKibben with his recently sold out tour of Australia where he was spruiking the ‘terrifying new math’ of climate change shows just how far we have come, despite the usual naysayers).

Unfortunately, the political will on this one will lag for as long as there are budget deficits, an addiction to growth and a populace too self-obsessed and distracted by whatever latest gadget they are being told to buy by corporations whose sole raison d’être is to make money and to hell with how it is done (this in spite of all sorts of major otherwise conservative organisations clearly articulating their concern on this issue). It seems it is easy to preach to the converted or to mouth off some platitudes, but the powerful interests with very long investment pipelines in fossil fuels are digging in, puns intended, for a long and expensive fight. Long enough, perhaps, to get all the black gold in all its forms out of the ground, muddying the waters of the by now pretty clear science, funding ‘think tanks’ to obfuscate for as long as possible, and basically playing the role of a fiddling Nero while the Earth fills the backdrop of a burning Rome.

Nice work, guys.