• Sydney City Council draft budget papers 2022
Sydney City Council continues to do good work in many areas and the draft budget for the 2022 financial year seeks to fund more such works.
Thank you all there for that. And thank you for asking citizens to comment on the draft budget by 13 June 2022. Here’s how I read the draft budget.
I regret that in a fundamental way the draft budget fails to sustain the city and over the next financial year will, if made in its current form, hasten the city’s collapsing climate.
As I don’t expect the budget to be changed, however, I confine my review here and my time to make this submission to a brief summary of some key structural failures and provide some examples.
Failure to prevent climate collapse
As someone who has spoken about the city’s and Earth’s collapsing climate on the City’s Town Hall stage beside the current Mayor, Christiana Figurues puts this budget into the context where it must be judged when she wrote:
“The atmosphere does not react to pledges for the future or reports about past achievements. It only reacts to real emission reductions.”
The budget proposes to continue the city’s significant climate pollution for the next financial year and anticipates reducing it to nil only after a decade - by 2035.
On 5 April 2022 the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said that government and business leaders were lying about the actions they are taking to combat climate change. The words were spoken after the UN report that week and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report
Council’s draft budget nowhere mentions the U.N.’s April report. An uninformed reader of the budget is therefor, in my opinion, significantly misled about the impact of the draft budget on the city’s and Earth’s climate.
The U.N.’s April 2022 report said:
“In the scenarios we assessed, limiting warming to around 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43 per cent by 2030; at the same time, methane would also need to be reduced by about a third. Even if we do this, it is almost inevitable that we will temporarily exceed this temperature threshold but could return to C below it by the end of the century.
“It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F)…Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”.
In its April 2022 report the UN says we humans have 30 months left to cut the pollution – until 2025 – when the IPCC expects we will lose the slight remaining potential to prevent cascading, out of control, climate collapse.
Here’s a graphic I made to sum up the little time left for we humans to save ourselves.
If we’re to get things done in the 28 months we have left to prevent Earth’s climate collapsing a key solution is for this draft budget to allocate funds to such things as:
· Generating solar power in all the city’s parks for the parks and to export to the main electricity grid;
· Restore the natural water cycle to keep rain where it falls on parks and footpaths so as to cool the city, reduce energy use, increase tree and plant canopy, and to end microplastic pollution of Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay;
· Provide rate rebates to households and businesses which reduce or end food waste – it’s the third highest source of climate pollution according to the U.N.
I’ve written about the city’s good work, suggested solutions to end climate pollution, and provided examples in my blog (including for rate rebates), my books and most recently in these articles about water, food waste, footpath gardens, and how to restore local businesses.
An example of how disconnected are the City’s day to day operations from real climate action is the decades-long project to re-build over 60 parks at what appears to be a total budget of some $529m.
So far, over the last few years, that project has confined the scope of its design and use of materials in each park rebuild to testing for soil pollution. It calls these soil tests a “Review of environmental factors’ which they plainly aren’t. That narrow thinking shows that for the city’s 60 parks there’s no curiosity, or review, and plainly no energy for designs, materials to cut water and energy use, to end this year or at some time before 2025 the use of diesel and petrol construction and maintenance vehicles, no plan to end plastic grass which is causing microplastic pollution, no plan to grow food or citrus or other plants, no plan for composting during construction and in the operation of the parks.
The pollution from the oil and diesel and petrol garbage trucks is not to be ended this year and an end date is not indicated. The weekly sight of these fossil fuel consuming trucks is the truth in plain sight for us all to see here in Sydney – there’s no on the ground implementation of real action to end the climate emergency.
Let’s see what happens - to make your comments, visit:
https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/policy-planning-changes/have-your-say-delivery-program-operational-plan
Michael Mobbs