What a fantastic day at this year’s Living Smart Festival at Speer’s Point on Saturday 20 September – thank you Lake Mac for a brilliant event! Located under the beautiful paperbark trees on the banks of the Lake, we had a great big team of Renew Hunter members keeping the day buzzing at our stand, plus catching everything as the wind blew our display away!

Thank you to everyone who came along and helped out at our stand, and also to the talented community of stallholders, entertainers and festival goers who created such a wonderful and warm atmosphere. Not just AEVA’s but Renew’s EVs were a drawcard too – with a Renault Megane, a BYD Atto3, and a very cool Geely EX5 demonstrating vehicle to load capability.

These were some of the conversations at the Renew stand:

  • How to retrofit a home to make it more comfortable to live in and cheaper to run.
  • Sustainable House Day homeowner, Kevin Sweeney talked about his Low Emission Household. Kevin’s household energy bills went down from $6,500 to $1,000 per year.
  • Who wants to keep the lights on during a power outage?  Several outages and none of Les and Anne’s freezer food was wasted. We found out all about how much can be done with e-vehicle to load capability.
  • After major flooding, Sasha rebuilt her brick veneer, slab home, to make it flood resilient. Sasha shared her experience on refitting her kitchen, and brought her fab artwork to show us, previously featured in Sanctuary Magazine.
  • Designing a home that feels good and does good. Renew member, Nadine is always on hand to help us choose planet-friendly materials for our renovations which don’t harm our health.
  • Finding holes in your house and your energy bill. Tim showed people what consumes their energy – and how to make their bills shrink.
  • Sanctuary and Renew magazines were on sale, and attracted a lot of interest especially from people who had never seen them before.

The annual Living Smart Festival at Speer’s Point Park is one of Australia’s largest community sustainability events. This time, in its 14th year, the Festival was headlined by popular science educator, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.  Facts and figures flowed freely from Dr Karl, including:

“Most people don’t know that of the heat that’s trapped, 93 per cent goes into the ocean, and if that heat didn’t go into the ocean, we’d all be dead, because the air temperature would be about 70 degrees Celsius.

“We’ve increased carbon dioxide, since Captain Cook times, by about 50 per cent, and this is trapping 400,000 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat each day.”

Disinformation is a challenge, but Dr Karl says he remains “irrationally optimistic”. He has accepted an invitation from The Rockefeller Foundation to develop a strategy using AI to counter climate change disinformation.