The
Road from Copenhagen Thinking Points
Dear Bernard,
Welcome to our special Road from Copenhagen edition
of Thinking Points - where CPD looks at the future of climate
policy in light of what was (and wasn't) achieved at the
climate talks dubbed 'the
most important meeting of our lives'.
Copenhagen has delivered a non-binding agreement more
disappointing than the pessimists amongst us could have
predicted. While British Prime Minister Gordon Brown darkly
muttered, 'There is no Plan B', the idea that Copenhagen was
our last chance to act is a dangerous proposition for those
who continue to push for policy based on the latest climate
science. Both in Australia and at the talks, we have seen
inadequate targets and policies that do not take heed of
recent scientific observations - for example, that the rate of
ocean acidification, the thawing of the permafrost and
the melting of Arctic sea ice are all happening faster than
the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change)
predicted.
As the ink dries on the COP15 agreement and
delegates board their planes home, we ask CPD contributors to
look at how we might move beyond posturing to real progress.
Does Copenhagen represent one small step on a very long road
to avoiding a climate disaster? What global and national
actions do we need to take on climate change in 2010? And when
- and how - will the politics catch up with the
reality?
In
this edition of Thinking Points:
On the ground at Copenhagen, join our correspondents
and find out what they witnessed unfold at the COP15
talks.
- Rupert
Posner from The
Climate Group looks beyond the disappointments and
debacles of the global conference to see the glass half
full.
- Peter
Colley, national research director at the CFMEU,
a union whose members will be at the frontline of any
transition to a carbon-neutral economy, was in Copenhagen as
part of a four person CFMEU delegation, and as one of about
316 union representatives.
With an eye on the
talks from Australia, CPD thinkers and other commentators are
asking what Copenhagen means for our political landscape and
local action on climate change.
- Miriam
Lyons, CPD's Executive Director, looks at the
role of faith and visions of change in moving beyond our
current impasse.
- CPD Fellow, Ben
Eltham asks if the world is really ready to face up to
the full challenge of climate change? Right now, he writes,
you'd have to say no.
- Mark
Diesendorf, Deputy Director of the Institute
of Environmental Studies, UNSW exposes the gap
between rhetoric and reality in the Rudd Government's
climate change policies.
- Paul
Gilding, climate activist and writer, revisits a paper
he co-wrote with Jorgen Randers, pointing out that behind
the drone of the day to day political negotiations, what we
are facing is nothing short of a global emergency. He
contends it's not too late (yet!) - if we have the political
will to mobilise resources and human ingenuity - to keep
temperatures below a 1oC rise by reducing CO2 concentrations
below 350ppm.
And reflecting on the
deeper implications of responding to climate change for the
way we organise our society, we have today published an essay
on Cooperation, Community & Climate Change
by Rob
Salter that explains why better relationships are the key
to successful action on climate change. Read
it online or download the pdf here.
I hope you enjoy this bumper Copenhagen edition of
Thinking
Points, and look forward to working with you to make
sustainable economic ideas matter in 2010.
All the best
for the holidays,
Miriam Lyons and the
team at the Centre for Policy Development
P.S. Please forward this on to a friend to read over
summer and ask them to also subscribe
to get great ideas in their inbox in 2010.
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Points by RSS
We want your ideas too. Click through to the CPD
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think. Or you can write
for CPD.
Rupert
Posner | Hope shifts to a treaty in 2010
Copenhagen is finally over. So, did
it achieve what we expected?
There had been so much
hype leading up to it and expectations were high. It attracted
record attendances including well over 100 heads of state –
and we thought that surely this boded well for a strong
outcome for the environment. But good attendance didn’t
necessarily mean a good outcome.
Indeed, there were so many people
attending COP 15 that the organisation of the conference
really became a bit of a farce. Delegates, including
scientists, had to wait in queues for up to 10 hours in
freezing conditions simply to get their accreditation to enter
the conference centre. Once they finally did, organisers
simply changed the rules and locked them out; meaning that
many who had attended COPs for years couldn’t even
participate. Many simply changed their tickets and flew home,
wasting time and sometimes thousands of dollars.
But
success isn’t about the frustrated tens of thousands, it is
about what changes will happen and whether greenhouse gas
emissions will finally peak and decline to a safe level.
I,
like many others who believe we need to swiftly restructure
our economy, am disappointed with the outcome. It has not put
us on the path the scientists tell us we must embark on. It is
clear that most political leaders do not yet fully realise
that taking action is not only necessary, but that if they act
swiftly, it will also be good for their economy and their
citizens. If they did, they would act without the precondition
of others doing the same.
But the glass is just as much
half full as it is half empty. Last week we had historic
participation by world leaders and the strongest recognition
yet that we need to take action. We also have the clearest
indication that a global agreement might happen. We need to
get over the hurt of not getting all we wanted and make sure
that 2010 is the year we deliver the ratifiable treaty the
planet so desperately needs. Comment
online
Peter
Colley | Just Transition not yet a priority at
Copenhagen
Participation by trade
unions in international climate negotiations has grown from
very little (around 13 people at Kyoto in 1997) to over 300
people in Copenhagen for COP15 (the fifteenth Conference of
the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)
- still very small relative to environmental and business
NGOs.
Even with over 300 delegates from unions
present, it’s hard to make a difference among some 25,000 NGOs
- covering the spectrum from big business to international
green groups and even Girl Guide Associations. There’s an
argument that the COP process has grown too unwieldy to
achieve the necessary rate of progress in making and
implementing decisions on climate change. UN forums are
themselves unwieldy, with over 190 nations present, and a
reliance on consensus to make decisions. Throw in thousands of
interest groups and NGOs using every trick in the book to
affect the process, and progress is very, very
difficult.
Trade unions argue that making
the change to a low carbon society and economy is going to
require huge transformations in which working people will be
both the main mechanism for change and among the most affected
by the change. If addressing climate change is seen simply as
the application of technologies and of economic tools (e.g.
taxes and emissions charges) it will fail, because it won’t
mobilise workers and communities to embrace and implement the
massive changes required.
The trade
unions present in Copenhagen vary widely in their
understanding of the issues and the membership they represent.
Heavy industry unions want to see their industries cleaned up,
not shut down or relocated to countries without emissions
reduction targets. White collar unions see more upside in new
technologies and skills, but also see that there will be major
social upheaval with rising energy and transport
costs.
The CFMEU is keen to see progress
on carbon capture and storage (CCS), as the necessary suite of
technologies to clean up not only coal use, but also gas-fired
power generation, iron and steel, cement making, and other
heavy industries such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals, pulp
and paper and food processing. All create large amounts of
carbon dioxide. We are very concerned that big business and
institutional investors are not willing to invest in CCS (or
most renewables for that matter) unless governments guarantee
their profits. When things get very risky, business and
investors expect the public sector to shoulder the
burden.
All unions agree on the need for a
new climate treaty to include a 'Just Transition' – basing the
restructuring that will occur on recognition of the fact that
it is fundamentally a social process, in which the costs and
benefits of change need to be shared and borne equitably. It
may seem a simple and fair idea, but it has rarely happened in
the past – the cost of most restructuring has been borne
disproportionately by particular workforces and
communities.
For heavy industry unions,
Just Transition is about transforming our industries into low
emission industries, not shutting them
down.
Just Transition has been proposed in
the negotiating texts in Copenhagen. But it is by no means
certain that most developed or developing nations will support
it. Equity and social justice seem to be regarded as a
distraction by many nations and NGOs.
At
Copenhagen everything is up for grabs, including our common
future.
Comment
online
Miriam
Lyons | Difficult, but not diabolical
In October this year the UN named
Tinker Bell its ‘Honorary Ambassador of Green’. A cynic might
conclude that her appointment was sadly appropriate, given
that a binding international agreement to replace Kyoto
currently seems as elusive as Never-Neverland.
There’s
something strangely fitting about treating JM Barrie’s
green-eyed fairy as a metaphor for climate action. The fate of
human civilisation now depends less on technical innovation
than it does on trust: the level of trust that citizens of the
world have in our scientists, our governments and each other
to do the right thing. This means that defeatist rhetoric can
do material damage. The naysayers and doomsdayers who
disbelieve in the potential for individuals and their
communities to act altruistically, or who dismiss
science-based action as politically unfeasible, actually have
the power to kill the climate action fairy. And those of us
sitting on the sidelines chanting “I do believe in concerted
international climate action based on the latest science, I
do, I do!” won’t know if our efforts are making any difference
until a decent agreement finally splutters into
life.
Climate change is a problem which requires us to
marshall the best of science and faith, simultaneously. But
it’s hard to have faith without knowing what to have faith in
- a vision of what a transition to a sustainable economy would
look like in practice. This is why we need the work of people
like Paul Gilding, whose ‘1 degree war’ describes a set of
steps that could limit global warming to 1 degree, and Rob
Salter, whose essay on ‘Cooperation, Community and Climate
Change’, outlines the cultural shift involved in serious
climate action, and the social benefits that will go with it.
Thinking happy thoughts won’t be enough to make COP16 fly, but
we do need a vision of the future that we can be happy with.
This is why CPD is planning to spend 2010 researching options
for sustainable industry policy and the measures needed to
track whether such policies deliver genuine social and
environmental progress.
Ben Eltham cites Ross Garnaut’s
description of climate change as a "diabolical" policy
problem, but just how diabolical is it? Across history and
around the world people have laid down their lives to protect
their families or to defend an ideal. While the Garnaut
report’s recommendations were deemed too demanding by the Rudd
Government, even its most challenging option would have barely
made a dint in the lifestyles of most Australians.
As
Peter Colley points out, a 'Just Transition' for the people
who will be most affected by climate action is essential. We
must also be careful not to focus so much of our attention and
energy on the potential losers from the shift to a sustainable
economy that we miss the enormous opportunities that come with
it. Even the most fundamental and disruptive change presents
opportunities for social and economic progress. In the US
during the Second World War, up to half of the total economy
was diverted towards military activity within a few years. Yet
despite this massive transformation, and despite the fact that
personal consumption was rationed, the economy was not
devastated - quite the reverse. Wages grew 65% over the course
of the war, company profits rose, GNP grew sharply, and
unemployment fell. (See pages 227 and 252 of Climate
Code Red)
And it’s not all about sacrifice.
Buildings designed to be energy efficient through the use of
natural light are more pleasant to work in. Cities designed
around sustainable transport have cleaner
air and healthier populations. Companies which put the
planet before short-term profits can end up with a better
bottom line than their resource-hungry competitors when costs
go up. The New Economics Foundation’s ‘Happy Planet Index’
(which tracks self-reported life satisfaction, life
expectancy, and economic sustainability) demonstrates that it
is possible for a country to have a very high quality of life
with vastly lower environmental impact than the Western
average (Costa Rica is a standout example, with MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt
from "cpd.us1.list-manage.com" claiming to be
higher life expectancy than the US and an environmental
footprint of 2.1, compared to the US’ 9.5).
Comment
online
Ben
Eltham | Act now or the planet pays later
Just how serious is climate
change? Ross Garnaut called it one of the most "diabolical"
policy challenges ever faced by humanity – and he's right, of
course.
“The costs of doing something about
it come early,” he told
the ABC's Mark Colvin last week “The benefits come
later.”
“It's hard also because this problem requires
cooperation across countries of a more complex kind than the
human species has ever managed before,” he continued. “There's
no precedent.”
History suggests that humanity does
not cope well with the cognitive challenges of climate change.
The changes occurring in the earth's atmosphere may be
astonishingly rapid on a geological time-scale, but in
political terms they're happening slowly. After all, the very
worst consequences won't be felt until long after current
governments have left office and most of the negotiators at
Copenhagen are dead.
Because climate change is so big, it
challenges the way we see the political landscape. In the
1970s and 1980s, there was a level of bipartisan understanding
of climate science; Margaret Thatcher (a former industrial
chemist) was a famous early supporter of action on climate
change. But in the 1990s, particularly in the US, the
influence of the culture wars saw many on the right begin to
attack climate science in overtly political terms, as a trope
of the supposedly extreme left-wing ideology of
environmentalism. Subsequently, conservative politicians in
the US, Canada and Australia opted to abandon any serious
commitment to the rational observation of scientific evidence,
and instead embraced the seductions of junk science and
climate denialism. The end result of this trend was the recent
split in the Liberal Party over climate change.
Even for decision-makers who do
believe that the world is warming and that this is a problem,
there are utterly rational motives for countries to stall,
cheat and prevaricate at Copenhagen. This is in fact exactly
what John Howard's government did at Kyoto in 1997: after
negotiating a generous carbon emissions target by threatening
to pull out at the last minute, the Howard Government then
went back on the deal, refusing to even ratify the agreement.
To those who support action on climate change, it was a
betrayal. The hard-heads in Howard's cabinet portrayed it as
sensible hard bargaining in the national
interest.
This disconnect between national and
global interests is one insight of the branch of mathematical
logic known as game theory. Game theory is often used to model
political and strategic situations, and when applied to the
climate change policy challenge, it helps us understand why
international cooperation is so difficult.
From a game theory perspective, a
strong agreement on cutting emissions at Copenhagen was always
going to be highly unlikely. The only way global emissions can
be reduced effectively is if the majority of the world's big
polluting nations sign up. But in such a process, there are
huge temptations for countries to refuse to participate, to
cheat, or to insist that they shouldn't commit until everyone
else does (this is the Liberal Party position in Australia).
This is the very heart of the conundrum.
One of the world's best known game
theorists is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. He
predicted that Copenhagen would be "a bust", arguing
that "today's emerging powerhouses like Brazil, India, and
China simply won't stand for serious curbs on their emissions,
and the pro-regulation crowd in the United States and Europe
won't be strong enough to force their hands."
If that is the case, then we may well
be locked into a world four, five or perhaps six degrees
warmer than now: a calamity for our children — and especially
our grandchildren.
Another influential analyst,
Australian
scientist Barry Brook, believes that action will
eventually be taken – but only after climate change becomes a
looming emergency obvious to all. He points out that under the
existential threat of invasion in the Second World War, many
countries nationalised major sectors of their economies and
re-tooled their entire industrial base to armaments production
in a matter of a few years (a very costly response, although
one that had a positive effect on employment and
GDP).
Tragically, we may see the worst of
all possible outcomes: catastrophic climate change, wrenching
industrial transformation and perhaps even climate-caused
wars. Gwynne Dyer's chilling book Climate
Wars models the possible threats to
international stability posed by climate change, and predicts
that wars will be fought in the 21st century over
issues like unilateral climate engineering (for existence,
risky and speculative climate-cooling sulfur dioxide
injections into the upper atmosphere).
Even if the world eventually adopts
some kind of concerted action to cut greenhouse gas emissions,
dangerous climate change is now locked in. The challenge for
all of us – governments, scientists, industrialists and
citizens – is to finally face up to the reality in all its
frightening uncertainty and complexity.
It's going to be a hotter, drier,
scarier, more drought-prone and more fire-prone future. Get
used to it.
Comment
onlineRead more of Ben Eltham's analysis of
Copenhagen and climate policy at New
Matilda.
Mark
Diesendorf | The Australian Government is undermining Climate
Action
The Australian government is posing as an
active proponent of climate action both at Copenhagen and at
home. But, behind the fine words, symbolic gestures and
(mostly unfulfilled) 2007 election promises, its actual
strategies and policies are serving the Greenhouse Mafia, that
is, the vested interests in coal, oil, centralised electricity
generation, aluminium, steel, cement, motor vehicles, forestry
and agriculture.
In Copenhagen the government’s
negotiators advocated rule changes entailing that land use
changes that produce carbon pollution are not counted, while
land-based carbon sinks are. This would mean that most of
Australia's reduction targets could be met through changes to
agricultural practices rather than reductions in fossil fuel
use.
At home the government has been
trying to push through Parliament an emissions trading scheme
(ETS) that would lock-in dirty coal-fired power stations and
an expansion of emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE)
industries (notably aluminium) for at least another decade,
while rewarding these greenhouse-intensive industries with
billions of dollars of tax-payers’ money. This scheme is
unlikely to achieve any emission reductions in Australia,
since the few greenhouse polluters that would have to purchase
emission permits could buy cheap offsets overseas from schemes
of dubious effectiveness.
With the support of the Coalition,
the government has succeeded in passing through Parliament an
expanded Renewable Energy Target (RET) designed in such a way
that it cannot achieve its stated goal of 20% renewable
electricity by 2020. This is because the RET allows solar and
electric heat pump hot water, and ‘phantom’
(non-existent) residential solar electricity systems created
under the Solar Credits Scheme, to count towards the
target. The immediate result has been a collapse in the price
of Renewable Energy Certificates (which provide a subsidy for
residential renewable electricity and hot water) and a RET
that in effect squeezes out large-scale renewable electricity.
Already the manufacturers of wind turbine components, such as
Keppel Prince, are on the point of laying off hundreds of
workers, and the bio-electricity power stations at Condong and
Broadwater are heading for bankruptcy.
The solutions to these problems
should be obvious:
• Either
reform the ETS by strengthening the target, requiring all
emission permits to be auctioned and disallowing overseas
offsets, or replace the ETS with a carbon tax with border tax
adjustments for EITE industries.
• Either reform the RET to
become a genuine renewable electricity target, by
removing solar and heat pump hot water and phantom solar
electric systems from it, or replace it with national gross
feed-in tariffs for renewable electricity systems of all types
and scales.
• Even if the RET is reformed as suggested
here, it would only assist wind, bio-electricity and
residential solar electricity. National feed-in tariffs are
still needed for the more expensive renewable electricity
sources of high potential, such as large-scale solar and
geothermal power.
• Solar hot water should be assisted by
state governments, by removing all local government
requirements for planning permission for these systems.
•
Sources and sinks of emissions from land-use change should be
accounted for separately from fossil fuel emissions, which can
be measured accurately.
Comment
online
Paul
Gilding | Time to prepare for the one degree
war
While the media and political
worlds are focused on Copenhagen as 'the most important
meeting in history', the science tells us a very different
story. The reality is that there is nothing on the table in
Copenhagen that would get us remotely to where the science
tells us we have to be to stabilise the global climate. This
actually makes Copenhagen just a training exercise. Amidst the
noise of the day-to-day debates, we have lost sight of the
simple logic of the advice coming from the world’s top climate
scientists. Despite the uncertainties in the details, the
science carries one underlying message from which we can draw
only one rational conclusion: it is time to declare a global
emergency and mobilise all available resources, political will
and human ingenuity towards one task – to reduce the risk of
catastrophic climate change to an acceptable level.
The real action will begin when the world ends its
denial and accepts that we need to bring CO2 concentrations
below 350ppm, and that means eliminating net greenhouse gas
emissions from the economy, probably in about 20 years. The
objective will then be to ensure the global temperature is
stabilised at around 1 degree above pre-industrial levels.
This will require a war-like mobilisation across the global
economy.
We are completely capable of such a response, but
only when we decide that failing to do so puts the future of
global civilisation at risk – which it does. Then remarkable
things will happen. We're not ready yet, but we soon will be.
In the meantime observe the training exercise for a taste of
what's to come.
Professor Jorgen Randers and I have recently released
a paper detailing our response to this conclusion. ‘The One
Degree War Plan’ began to take form a few years ago, the
product of a challenging conversation between Jorgen and
myself. Jorgen, a lifelong advocate for action on
sustainability, rose to prominence in 1972 as one of the
original authors of the Club of Rome’s famous 'Limits to
Growth', the bestselling environmental book of all time – over
30 million copies in 37 different languages.
Jorgen and I had both accepted the scientific reality
and were discussing the question it posed – what would a
rational response to the climate science look like? If you
stripped away all the politics and debate and took a fresh
look, what would be the logical action plan?
In 2008, after many more such conversations, we
decided that we needed to articulate our answer to that
question, in detail and on paper.
We started by considering what the science meant, in
human terms. This was the simple part, as the peer-reviewed
climate science is very clear on the level of risk. There is a
high degree of certainty that humanity will face severe
disruption to the global economy and society, with widespread
economic damage, geopolitical instability and human suffering.
Perhaps more importantly, there is a lower but still
significant risk of catastrophic collapse – of tipping points
being passed that would lead to the effective collapse of our
current civilisation and economy. Once this was understood, we
could begin to consider what a logical response to this level
of risk would be.
But before we got there, we made another initial but
fundamental conclusion: that the momentum in the climate
system is now so great that the world will, before long, wake
up to a threat of this magnitude. It will recognise that
despite the remaining uncertainties, we cannot afford to risk
the collapse of the global economy and civilisation. Thus an
appropriate response – one that recognises the science and the
true scale of the risk – will occur.
When this emergency response is designed, we
concluded that it would need to aim to bring warming below 1
degree, and therefore, CO2 concentrations below 350ppm.
Anything less would leave civilisation at too great a risk of
catastrophe, and would therefore be irrational. Our remaining
task was then to develop a plan of action that was capable of
achieving this outcome.
This
paper is the result. It has taken over a year of
development and research, including considerable feedback from
colleagues and modelling by C-Roads, the climate simulator
developed by MIT, the Sustainability Institute and Ventana
Systems.
We were actually surprised by the outcome of our
work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm
possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It
certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with
a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII,
but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we
called our paper The One Degree War Plan. It is a plan that
shows what humanity can achieve – and we believe will achieve
– when it develops a rational response to the climate
threat.
We are releasing our paper for public reaction and
comment, because we recognise that this is not an intellectual
exercise. A response like the One Degree War Plan, if it is to
be implemented, is going to require years of development by
global experts across many disciplines. It will also require
strong public support globally if our political leaders are to
have the courage to adopt such an approach. This in turn will
only happen if many millions of people engage and decide that,
in the end, we are a rational species and this is the way
forward we consciously choose to take.
Building a robust plan and the support to implement
it is of course an enormous task. So we think now is a good
time to start. We encourage you to consider this paper, to
circulate it amongst your networks and to help us together build the courage we
need to face reality.
Comment
online
Download Paul Gilding and Jorgen
Randers 'The
One Degree War Plan' here
MailScanner has detected
a possible fraud attempt from "cpd.us1.list-manage.com"
claiming to be
Rob Salter |
Cooperation, Community and Climate Change
The failure of the world’s
governments to agree on firm commitments to adequately address
the dire threat posed by climate change means that a major
rethink is necessary, and it may require basic changes to the
way we live – including in unexpected areas of our
lives.
In a new paper, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt
from "cpd.us1.list-manage.com" claiming to be
Cooperation, Community & Climate Change,
Robert Salter argues that better relationships are the
key to successful action on climate change. As whole
societies, we cannot respond adequately to the enormous
challenge the climate change threat poses until we achieve
greater internal cohesion, and until we focus less on being
wealthier and more on being happier. He contends that progress
toward both goals requires us to build richer, more effective
relationships in all areas of our lives.
The author outlines a range of practical measures that
would allow us to simultaneously work towards these goals
while also taking the technical steps necessary to achieve a
low-carbon future. They entail moving toward societies in
which there is:
- greater equality
- stronger communities with more self-reliant local
economies
- more satisfying workplaces, with staff having a greater
share in decision-making and ownership
- more effective efforts to include the currently
marginalised as fully participating members of society
- new approaches to education, town-planning, transport
policy and the role of local organisations that enhance
community and cooperation.
The proposals are bold, but Robert Salter argues that
anything less risks a more-of-the-same response to the massive
threat we face.
Read
the full essay and comment online.
READ
more Thinking Points online
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