Minister Chris Bishop is on the right track calling for a bipartisan approach to infrastructure planning, and for a long-term (30 year) appraisal.

30 years, however, takes us beyond any guaranteed supply of fossil energy, indeed it traverses an inevitable period of increasing tension over use of the last half of that (very finite) resource.

All infrastructure has a design-life: dams 100 years, buildings 50 years, solar (PV) panels 25 years, and windmills currently 20 years. Nobody has yet proven that we can build – or even maintain – those, without the impetus of highly-concentrated fossil energy. Other fossil-dependent items include concrete and plastic pipes (water, sewerage, storm-water) and bitumen (roads, cycleways).

Our look-ahead, then, needs to factor-in decay, maintenance, and our ability – by 2054 - to replace old with new. We only have one fossil-energised chance, more or less correlating to Bishop’s 30-year timeline. Squandering it building un-maintainable infrastructure, would be regarded by our children (and theirs) as suboptimal thinking.

Designing a collection of infrastructure which can operate beyond fossil energy, is vastly different from attempting to morph our current fossil-dependent collection to run on ‘renewable’ energy and renewable/recyclable resources. The former is imperative; the second, invalid.

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