The Australian Government employs about 237,000 public servants. Not one of them is planning for the country to make a complete transition to renewable energy or even seriously envisaging such a scenario.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister confirmed this week a clean energy future is not on our agenda, even as an option - not for 2020, not for 2050, not at all, even though thousands of people will march around Australia today demanding just that.

As a result most of us are completely in the dark as to whether there is potentially enough renewable energy to go around and at what cost. We are held hostage to the argument that coal and nuclear are the only credible options for "baseload power".

It would be prudent at least to work up a plausible transition-to-clean-energy scenario, because a tipping point is looming and the public's patience will not last forever.

As soon as 2013, we face the total loss of Arctic summer sea ice. A blue North Pole will be more than a psychological shock - cue media frenzy, photos from space, political promises, sceptical blathering etc.