It is time for an energy shift in 2025.
Opening our minds to new visions of the future based on ecological and progressive economic thinking is a great opportunity. The energy transition provides us with a wonderful chance to freely express and implement new economic thinking. This will result in better vibes all round: healthier and resilient people, places and planet.
The fluxus campaign at Environment Tasmania is facilitating a community-led movement to reimagine energy policy and projects state-wide. We will be running engaging events, such as ‘New Energy Discos’, co-design workshops to design the future of energy in Tasmania and exploring real-world community energy projects throughout 2025. We are looking forward to collaborating with a diverse array of people in the Tasmanian community, and empowering Tassie voices.
In 2025 we will empower communities to ask for better decision-making, re-imagine energy policy budgets and ‘roll-outs’. fluxus is calling for a strategic redirection of decision-making that reflects governance and policy for public interest.
The state government’s lack of response to the State of the Environment Report 2024 reflects its priorities. We will be reminding the government of the importance of a refreshed way of governing that includes the wellbeing of people, places and planet – which is in fact the Tasmanian Integrity Commissions definition of ‘public interest’.
Tasmanians are close to government decisions on energy. Communities are being directly impacted by the energy transition for better or worse, and we need to maximise the opportunities.
Energy policy, in fact all policy and decision-making, is a fundamental expression of the economic thinking and decision-making of our time. By observing the political decisions being made, the projects being proposed and undertaken we are by default given insight into significant ‘living data’ of the world views and macroeconomic models driving policy and projects.
In 2025 the political and economic thinking will shift from old-fashioned top-down approaches to community empowered, creative and bottom-up co-design of policy. We are going to collaborate for innovation and action. We are optimistic because we all have the freedom to make this happen in our beautiful democratic society. It’s time to flex the muscles of our democracy and get in shape!
We will be saying goodbye to many of the big shiny projects that are being proposed as they grossly highlight outdated economic and political thinking and decision-making.
We are saying goodbye to economics that does not account for limits to growth and planetary boundaries, which perpetuates the cost-of-living crisis.
We will be welcoming in refreshed, creative, evidence-based and experimental decision making that implements fair energy solutions such as solar on all rental properties and commission housing, locally owned solar farms, community-owned batteries and much more.
Renewable energy is an opportunity to shift economic decision making and planning, however we need to be making decisions from a scientific form of economics and politics that is for people, places and planet.
2025 is a year to create strong action to change the course from a planet-destroying and disconnected way of living to one which is regenerative and connected. The 2025 energy shift will have significant implications for improving societal wellbeing. By designing our society within planetary boundaries, will lead to smaller scale design of infrastructure and services, leading to greater resilience, diversity and local economic and community benefit.
Energy production should be as local as possible, including supply-chains of energy infrastructure. Small-scale solar farms, community batteries, household energy efficiencies and shortening supply chains of goods and services can have significant flow-on effects and be part of the policy and economic innovation required.
The Tasmanian Government can shift their vibe in 2025 by rethinking their economic decisions. For instance, they can adopt the planetary boundaries framework and ecological economics to enable them to deliver policy in public interest and this way everyone will win.
Dr Emily Samuels-Ballantyne is Energy and Climate Campaigner at Environment Tasmania.
Ben Marshall
January 15, 2025 at 16:13
The frustrating barrier to good long-term planning that acts on climate, transitions to non-fossil-fuels energy, addresses the needs of our local communities and genuinely benefits our State, is corporate State-capture.
The sole belief of the Liberal-Labor Party is that by subsidising ‘investment opportunities’ for extractive industries, sufficient profiteering will allow ‘trickle-down’ of “Jobs ‘n’ Growth” to provide votes and a tax-base worth plundering for, for example even MORE subsidies for extractive industries and global investors.
It doesn’t matter to Liberal-Labor if it’s supporting the gambling industry exploiting us and laundering money while also practising routine cruelties on horses and greyhounds, or mining that extracts and walks away from the tailings dams, or new transmission grids to export privately owned Tassie wind energy to the Mainland market, or bulldozing Wilderness for woodchips. As long as there’s opportunity to bellow angrily about ‘defending Tasmanian jobs’ to win votes and corporate donors, it seems that there’s no need to really plan anything long term.
Our Lib-Lab pollies are never held to account by our supine corporate media, and the ABC is too craven and underfunded to criticise or engage in much actual investigative journalism that holds Truth to Power.
Only by convincing rusted-on Lib-Lab voters to vote for Independents and minor parties do we have any chance of forcing our truly inept and rotten Lib-Lab governments into decent planning. Until then, they’ll dump protections, and democratic checks and balances, to ensure that their corporate mates and global investors see Tasmania as ripe for exploiting.