Politicians and commentators used to speak of climate change and global warming as though they were the same.
They would interchange the terms, sometimes in the same sentence.
Are climate change and global warming the same thing?
Washing machines
The number of people with the economic ability to purchase a dishwasher will double to more than 2 billion in the next 30-40 years.
Far more will rise above what Swedish statistician Professor Hans Rosling calls the ‘washing line’; an income of US$40 per day, the threshold necessary to own and run a washing machine.
On the one hand this is a worry.
Energy is needed to manufacture and power all these devices as is a water supply to allow them to function. Policy efforts on climate change notwithstanding, the cheapest power still comes from fossil fuels. It is why China is building coal-fired power stations even as they diversify into alternative fuels because they will need the energy to run all the new white goods.
On the other hand, sales of consumer goods will drive economic growth.
This is good news for those who require GDP growth, the enshrined dogma of political success. Nothing will prevent families from buying a washing machine they can afford it, nor indeed, airplane tickets, dishwashers and cars as their wealth allows.
Couple this inevitable growth in buying power with ever more people and the growth paradigm has never looked better.
Hans Rosling has a very clever way of explaining the population and economic growth combination using Ikea boxes
What Rosling explains so simply is that it is the economic transition that is integral to the population one.
Without economic growth it is harder to see population growth slowing and eventually contracting.
Children must consistently outlive their parents for this to happen and that means needs must be met and standards of living must rise.
It seems that we have not fully embraced this reality.
No amount of environmental concern, moral imperative to preserve resources or even fear of environmental collapse is likely to trump the imperative to improve things for our families.
For this is an expression of self-preservation that is hard wired.
Rosling calls himself a ‘possibilist’ because even though the transition will happen, it can be done with a workable number at its conclusion and damage limitation along the way.
Sheep
There are 67 million sheep in Australia. This is a lot of sheep, roughly 3 for every Australian resident. Ten years ago there were enough for 6 per person, a small flock per household.
Together with cattle, the current herd grazes across 430 million hectares or 56 percent of the continent.
If averages were a useful thing to quote, then each sheep might have 6 ha each, many times the area of the average suburban housing lot. It would seem that we are happy enough to let livestock roam.
Time will come when we will rethink this decision.
How will we grow enough food?
The world population clocks tell us that there will be 7 billion people on earth sometime in the middle of 2011. Each one needs to eat at least 2,000 calories a day or starve. The question is how are we going to grow all that food?
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Why do we fear nature?
On Mother’s day 2004 on Monterey Bay, California, a group of eco-tourists were viewing migrating grey whales. Human families watched whale families as they journeyed along the coast to feeding grounds in the Arctic. Then something happened.
Read about it in my new Ezine@rticle here
Street lights on a desert highway
You would think that lights are unnecessary along remote desert highways. Vehicles have headlights after all, and in the desert there is not much wildlife on the road.
If being able to see the camel on the road at night prevents even one death, or even an accident, it might justify the expense. But there are surely higher priorities for spending that would save lives.
Not so for the company installing the lights. They say yes please. And hey, we can even provide solar power systems to tackle the carbon issue. No problem Minister and think of the export earnings.
Unnecessary development is often a problem because it is hard to argue that there is such a thing as unnecessary commerce.
Economic activity must happen, deals struck, money exchanged, and made available through purchases, wages and profits to fuel more activity. It is a relentless system that works so long as we keep making and selling things.
The Australian government has just released new modeling on the impact of a $20 per tCO2e carbon price on economic growth to 2050. Minimal effect it says. This is good news for spruikers of action on climate change. But what about economic growth of around 3% per annum for the next 40 years.
If that growth is generated by building street lights where we don’t need them and selling vast volumes of white goods, cars and miscellaneous consumer items that we probably don’t need, any carbon price will have the effect of a drop in the proverbial ocean on protecting the environment.
Remember that action on climate change is on the agenda because we are concerned about how a warming world will support us all.
The real trick will be to find things that will fuel economic activity with development that we actually need.
Historical science
I have just finished Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, germs and steel. The subtitle, A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, sums up a fascinating tale of not just our past but of the human condition. It is an extraordinary account of both the quirks of human history and the astonishing speed of our emergence to colonize and appropriate the planet.
You cannot go wrong with Diamond’s books. They are accessible, fluid and delivered, as one reviewer put it, with “a combination of expertise, charm and compassion.” The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse are popular science classics.
Although Diamond is a scientist, more precisely an evolutionary biologist, Guns, germs and steel is about history. A courageous attempt to describe and explain why in amongst all the movements of people some groups won, expanding territory and growing in number, while other groups lost, either by being overrun or exterminated.
Diamond’s science take seems to be fuelled by a sense of compassion. He flatly rejects racist explanations for success in favour of a more cause and effect analysis. The conclusions that technology (guns), the biological consequences of living in sedentary groups close to livestock (germs) and growing sufficient food to stay put long enough to work metal (steel) is convincing as it trots through 400 pages to a simple punch line.
But this is not to spoil the plot. It is the epilogue on history as a science that was the most intriguing.
Diamond leaves the detail of human occupation of every corner of the planet and makes a plea for science as knowledge. Science as a means to understanding that is more than the narrow view of controlled experimentation that is the essence of the scientific method.
His plea for historical science, an approach to history that is scientific in its logic. Only not of experimentation, for that is not possible, but for a sifting of the evidence that will allow for predictions and align cause.
This is curious because the book provides historical observation and interpretation that always suffers for want of attribution. It is odd that in an epilogue is a plea that draws attention to the core weakness in the argument. Observation is evidence but only in rare circumstances does it point to cause.
Cause must be surmised and then believed rather than proven in the way we can prove an experimental result.
Perhaps history is history, a catalogue of events and an interpretation of their meaning. And perhaps science is science only when attribution (a hypothesis) can be tested.
None of this makes Guns, germs and steel a lesser book, for the evidence and conclusions Diamond draws need to be read and heeded by us all.
Spongy attribution may explain why such books have only limited influence.
Can I save the planet?
There are thousands of ideas on how to save the world. It can be hard to decide if any of them will work.
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Can you be too green?
Back in 2009 the Australian Greens helped the opposition to vote down the then Labour governments Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation. They said that it was weak on emission reduction targets; the proposed 5% was too distant from the minimum 25% the Greens wanted.
Now, as a much weaker carbon-tax-to-trading-scheme hybrid proposal is debated, they are prepared to compromise. The Greens propose to accept a modest carbon price prior to a ramp up later. This is the very same approach they previously rejected. The fundamental premise of a cap-and-trade system is to manipulate supply and demand in a way that changes behaviour. The only difference with the current proposal is it begins with a clunky and hugely unpopular new tax.
After years of delay that has seen debate erode policy options and scarify public support, the Greens are agreeing to an option that is even less likely to achieve the outcomes they support.
It is time to call them on this blunder. Back in 2009 their inability to see that effective climate change policy is a long play, tipped the result over to inaction. Structural economic transitions never happen overnight. Economies adjust, they do not jump, and any policy that forces change too rapidly risks collapsing the system. Wise policy recognizes this and finds a more gentle and expedient path. The rough edges of a CPRS are a compromise worth taking to achieve smooth transition.
In 2009 the Greens missed this reality. The risk they take this time is to botch it again. They may accept the tax now only to balk again at the emission targets set in any subsequent trading scheme. Do so and decades of hard work progressing the environment into the public psyche and onto the political agenda will be undone.
Politicians of all hues need to understand that climate change policy is a once in a millennium opportunity. And for the Greens a carbon market will inject serious funds into the environment and begin the long and necessary process of business accounting for environmental costs. How else, other than through a market approach, will we see manufacturing, development and energy accounting for natural environmental services.
Perhaps when oil hits US$300 a barrel and our continued carbon intensity cripples our exports we will look back to 2009 and say, if only. Let’s hope the same will not be said of 2011.
Lest we forget
April 25 each year is a public holiday down under and every Australian knows why. It is ANZAC day, a time to remember the brave and courageous soldiers who lost their lives in war. Many thousands attend dawn services across the country come rain or shine.
Australians also know about the Easter and Christmas holidays when many a shrimp finds its way onto a barbie. A fair number also know the religious significance that prompts these days of leisure.
Earth Hour is not a holiday but it is a similar sort of homage, this time to the environment. It began in Australia and is now a global gesture toward restraint in our appetite for energy. There is not a holiday for the environment though. So World Environment Day (5th June) passes without notice; as do the minor events such as World Tree Day (18th September).
There is strong public opinion that the environment is important. Not long after the 2006 release of the documentary movie, The Inconvenient Truth, that went on to make over US$50 million worldwide, action on climate change was palpable. People in Australia took to the streets, “take action,” they said.
Since that time there has been policy paralysis.
Unable to handle lobby group pressure, fearful of what might happen to a carbon intense economy fueled by minerals revenue and coal-fired energy, and an unwillingness to take the real issues to the public, the politicians have achieved nothing.
Initially there was goodwill. Australia signed up to the Kyoto protocol in Bali and there was bi-partisan talk of a market mechanism to price carbon. But the greens said it was not enough and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was voted down. An odd call that.
The topic was rested.
Then there was failure in Copenhagen, little more in Cancun and deathly quiet over the prospects for Johannesburg. Leverage for the true believers has faded. The vacuum has been filled in part by skeptics, not about the science per se, but about the need to do anything about emissions. And the public seem to have forgotten what all the calls for policy initiatives were about.
We don’t remember that the idea was to become less emission intensive through energy conservation and shifts to alternative energy sources; perhaps even sequester some carbon into the landscape. It has also been convenient to forget that, given the way our economy works, a trading scheme was a handy mechanism to achieve these goals.
We also see to have forgotten that signing up to Kyoto means setting an emission reduction target. As at 2007 emissions were 597 million tCO2e or 77 million tCO2e more than the 5% reduction on 1990 levels. And emissions will, notwithstanding economic slowdowns, rise and grow the actual tonnage of reductions required in the absence of a policy to reverse the trend. Or, of course, Australia could renege on even a modest target.
The noise over a carbon tax is just a smokescreen, a handy way to keep the real policy issues hidden. Perhaps this is because a focused debate, something that talks about what was asked for, would remind us of what we may have forgotten. That a few short years ago most people wanted something done about the challenge of climate change.
Perhaps we should have a climate day, make it a holiday and then we will not forget.
Alloporus 