Prisoners are to be co-oped to make rainwater tanks, and a political party has committed to providing $10,000 interest free loans to improve energy and water-use efficiency inside our homes. Things are getting serious indeed.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is meeting in Bangkok this week to complete a report on what steps can be taken to reduce levels of heat-trapping gases. Made up of some 400 scientists from 120 countries, the panel will add to two earlier reports that have defined the impacts of climate change as imminent and its consequences as dire.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd’s policy to make available $10,000 interest-free loans to everyone earning up to $250,000 has been lost in the nonsense about whether those earning $200,000 a year can be described as battlers. It was an ill-disciplined line from Rudd that failed to make the point that it’s not your income that matters.

Unless we take action, locally and globally, the world is heading down a path to dislocation, death and starvation for many millions of people. Sceptics can be dismissive, but there is little doubt that our dependence on polluting, non-renewable energy sources is not sustainable.

The nuclear-power push denies this, arguing that it offers a “green” energy alternative to polluting fossil fuels.

Nuclear is an energy alternative, but nothing is green that has the afterlife of nuclear waste. The problem with solar power is that you can’t sell sunlight, you can just service the means of capturing it – and that is an income stream that governments can’t tap.

Energy from the sun and self-sufficiency in water are well within reach of existing technologies, which can only improve with greater investment in research. It may be time to not just require that new developments be energy and water self-sufficient, but to also retro-fit existing communities to allow their disconnection from electricity and water grids.

Surely self-sufficiency makes more sense than dependence on water authorities and energy companies. Such consolidation leaves you not only vulnerable to their capacity to deliver, but also to the levers of price and restrictions that are already being used to ration supply.

Instead of subsidising existing, nonrenewable energy sources, constructing dams in the hope of consolidating water to on-sell, and planning massive capital investment in nuclear technology, would it not be better to take a more decentralised approach?

Money would be better spent on truly green technologies, subsidising existing research and development and providing subsidies and tax concessions to encourage greater self-sufficiency. Leadership and commitment to change are appallingly lacking at all levels of government.

The IPCC says that within 40 years, two billion people will face water shortages and 20-30% of the world’s species will be threatened with extinction if climate change is restricted to only a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature. “The science certainly provides a lot of compelling reasons for action,” IPCC chairman Rajendrat Pachauri told the Herald-Sun newspaper. “But what action and when is what the governments will have to decide.” Queensland premier Peter Beattie’s must-have people, must-have-dams mantra and prime minister Howard’s “green nuclear” energy are examples of leaders in self-denial.

There is equally no doubt that Kevin Rudd’s support for “uranium mining but not nuclear power” is two-bob each way hypocrisy. But his policy of no-interest loans for home owners, whatever their wealth, indicates a realisation that global warming is one problem that may best be tackled locally.

The prime minister says the economy and national prosperity are his primary concerns. That perspective should not preclude change. Nor should it dictate further consolidation of energy production and distribution to one or two nuclear power authorities, which no doubt would be owned by individual companies.

Queensland government policy may well be driving the need to use prisoners to pump out enough 3000 and 5000-litre polymer water tanks to meet a supply shortfall.

Yet it is the public that has a rapidly developing appreciation of the need for personal responsibility, while governments appear more interested in protecting and developing revenue.

The national economy’s narrow base, sustained by massive profits from nonrenewable mining, explains in part their slowness to act. It does not explain what comes after those resources are tapped, nor inform what plans this government has for that future.