This will be my last Time and Energy for a while. Lately I’ve been conscious of sounding repetitious and continually negative about government and its resolve to tackle climate change.

I’m not the only one stuck in a groove though. Side A of the hit single, ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ goes something like, “Unless quick smart our ways we mend, we’re all gunna come to a sticky end ... click ... sticky end ... click etc.”

But the flipside of the record raps, “What is the point in being good and going down, if our smoke and jobs go to some other clown”. It looks like this particular record will be in the 21C charts for quite a while.

The ‘we’d like to do the right thing, but we can’t afford the risk’, argument is being supported by a coalition of industry doing nicely thanks, opportunistic politicians and a media enjoying bumper advertising revenue. The danger is that our poll-watching Federal Government might lose the will to keep up an environmentally sustainable agenda.

In order to make our emissions targets achievable, we need to first commit to a few admissions targets. We should admit, for instance, that petrol is going to continue to rise in price and there is not much we can do about it, therefore a full-on effort to upgrade public transport and encourage ride sharing would be an excellent strategy.

We could admit that most of our electricity is made in a filthy way, atmospherically speaking, and that there is a real problem changing our method of electricity generation in the short term. We could then demand from government that every spare cent they’ve got is invested in clean and renewable energy sources.

But it’s not happening because the ‘leave it to market forces’ paradigm still holds sway in the corridors of power.

Remember the story of the emperor’s new clothes? Vain and foolish, he was convinced by conmen that the garments they had for him were of the finest quality but would not be visible to anyone stupid or unfit for their current job. Of course they sold him very expensive non-existent clothes and shot through before the day of the great procession.

Everybody pretended to see his fashion finery just to be on the safe side, until a child piped up, “Look, the emperor’s wearing no clothes”.

This is our governments’ dilemma. As far as environmental protection is concerned, the market-force economists will promise fine clothes for top dollars. But the day will come when government ministers get caught in public in their undies and someone finds the courage to expose them.

Materially, a healthy environment and sustainable infrastructure is all that’s worth leaving as a legacy for the future. But it looks like our public policy makers are going to keep ducking behind poll-driven fear of the unknown while big business continues to focus on wherever a quid can be made.

If that leaves us, as communities, to work out our own plan for the future, then that is what we must do. With that in mind, I’m putting my hand up as a prospective Palerang councillor.