Action on climate change continues to challenge everyone. As Australia inches closer to a price on carbon Annabel Crabb (ABC's Chief Online Political Correspondent) asks six leading Australian's if anyone really has the courage to act.
Senator Penny Wong takes on this challenge. She was Australia's Climate Change minister through our first two attempts to introduce a carbon trading scheme. Now the finance minister, she talks about how climate change exposes the shortcomings in our political system. We need to cooperate for the long term. The facts about climate change are obvious... yet they've become irrelevant. Watch her short opening pitch.
The full line up is Niki Vincent (Leaders Institute) introducing the forum and talking about the adaptive leadership challenge we face. She highlights "climate change means giving up on some things . But in such a shift there are many opportunities for liberation and creativity"
Andrew Stock (Origin Energy) is the first panellist to take on the challenge. He has no doubt that our society can tackle climate change head on. Previously the Marshall Plan rebuilt whole countries. Imagine what we can do like this to address this problem.
David Klingberg (Centrex Metals) focuses, in part, on the need to fund adaptation. We urgently need to review our funding priorities. He's followed by Senator Wong "hardest action for politician is to ask people to act now to make tomorrow better" (video above).
Professor Mike Young (Environment Institute) highlights how counter intuitive we are about climate change. "Why would any nation go out and subsidise the destruction of the planet?" he asks. And we perversely almost ignore more significant price impacts, e.g. from much larger currency exchange price movements.
David Knox (Santos) puts forward the numbers on change. Santos action demonstrates the potential as does his own. As the company CEO he is nevertheless in part motivated and challenged by his children to make a difference.
Stephen Yarwood (Lord Mayor Adelaide) finishes the 2 minute leadership summaries with a another personal perspective. Am I being authentic? Ask your children, ask your parents. That's why he drives an electric car and supports a carbon tax.
The full panel dissuasion with audience questions is also online - watch to the end of question time for a most pertinent and apt pacific island summary. Climate change is already impacting the questioner's islands. People are currently already losing their land and culture as a result.
I get the last say summarising some of our panels discussion and some of paradoxes - do we really have the leadership courage? While other countries talk about green growth and deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts in Australia we are fractured. We have a highly polarised and divisive community debate.
While other countries talk about green growth and deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts in Australia we are fractured. We have a highly polarised and divisive community debate.
Our question - what leadership is needed to act on climate change?
The common thread on the night was vision - holding it, enabling it, moving our society to focus more on the future. However, the fact that we don’t currently have this is quite a paradox. It is manifestly in our common self-interest to act on this issue. Yet the fear and pain that people may feel seems quite out of proportion to the common explanation – financial costs.
We are all going to have to give some stuff up. And I don’t mean the equivalent of the cost of a cup of tea in a café a day - or any of the other common economic measures about climate change.
The theme is picked up by Andrew Stock (Origin Energy). He highlights on climate change we experience news dominated by fear. At the same time we have 1,000 MW of solar installed by households across Australia. These are people acting from their hip pocket.
It's a classic confusion. Stephen Yarwood (Lord Mayor Adelaide) illustrates it from the perspective of a business worried about action on climate change. The business person put to him that this means reducing car parking spaces and potentially trade (fewer shoppers). But, what the businesses really want is more people walking past shops, something you don’t necessarily get with more car parks and traffic.
Professor Mike Young (Environment Institute) also highlights this disproportionate fear. Changes in the Australian exchange rate, and costs caused by it for exporting industries, are massive compared to the very small (one to two per cent) climate price impact. But one is hot button topic and the exchange rate is almost disregarded.
This bizarre disjunction is mirrored with the business community and perspectives of big business attitudes. David Knox (Santos) talks about there being far more common ground between business and government than people are led to believe.
And all this is going on while we’re clearly feeling the impacts of climate change – now, as David Klingberg (Centrex Metals) points out.
But it is very hard to translate this knowledge and transcend the fears. As Senator Penny Wong explains:
It’s very hard for politicians to argue ‘people should act now for the benefit of the future’
Senator Wong also reminds us about the fragility of reform and consensus. It should never be underestimated how easy such consensus can fail. Annabel Crabb (ABC and the forum’s facilitator) ably illustrates this reflecting on how in just 4 years Australia has moved from both major political parties agreeing to, ‘a pile of political roadkill, a confused and hostile electorate’.
The common call from the whole group is to make time to dream, to vision, to talk about the future.
This work needs to be continuous to enable such change.
In Australia, we struggle to get the climate change discussion past immediate hip-pocket lines. Our public debate isn’t about the sort of future we want. Rather it’s much more around the fear of change and potential pain.
Tonight (Thursday 29 September 2011) some leading voices from South Australia try to step out of the immediate, lead our thoughts to possible futures, engage our hopes and potentials and, help think through the leadership needed to answer this pressing challenge.
On climate change, this nation [Australia] essentially had consensus in 2007; our politicians applied themselves diligently to the situation and four short years later we've got a pile of political roadkill, a confused and hostile electorate and two protagonists who nobody likes, shouting themselves hoarse while their offsiders go through each others' bins...
So how do we get past this? Panelist Senator Penny Wong says:
We have to continue to talk to the Australian people, talk with the Australian people about why action on climate change is important, why we can't just let this go, why we can't just say, ‘Let's leave this for someone else to deal with.’
I resent the government typecasting emitters as polluters; if you want collaboration it is not the right way to go about it. … In some ways I’m providing leadership by supporting what the Commonwealth has done with some modifications, the problem is with the industry there are a lot of people with vested interests.
In these quotes - and the longer articles they come from - there are many paradoxes. Conflicting positions that seemingly defy logic. Niki Vincent from the Leaders Institute of SA (which is organising tonight’s forum along with the Environment Institute) helps us to step through some of these issues.
Climate change is an adaptive problem – not a technical problem. Adaptive problems are tangled, complex, and involve multiple systems. Solving them requires new learning, creativity, innovation and new patterns of behaviour – changes of hearts and minds. Painful adjustments.
Another paradox is we have compelling evidence that action is in our interests. But our society is seemingly cognitively avoiding connecting with this evidence. We would say that we want a better life. But we don’t act to create it at anything like the rate that makes rational sense.
These conflicts and contradictions are inherent to any complex problem. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t solve them even though we will make many mistakes while doing so.
When Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote the Death of Environmentalism, controversy raged. They argued - after interviewing more than 25 of the US environmental community’s top leaders, thinkers and funders - people need to search beneath symptoms, that appear to be causes, for deeper issues.
For example, the cause of global warming is too much greenhouse gas. Which leads to action; lets legislate to cut emissions.
So what's stopping us and this solution? They asked us to consider obstacles like:
Our failure to articulate an inspiring and positive vision.
The radical right’s control of all three branches of the US government.
Trade policies that undermine environmental protections.
Overpopulation.
The influence of money in American politics.
The inability to craft legislative proposals that shape the debate around core American values.
Poverty.
The point is not, just, that there are many barriers. But the solutions we seek to implement depend on how we frame the problem. That is, how deeply we look beneath, while still including, the initial causes like greenhouse emissions.
Death of Environmentalism was written in 2004. Fast forward to today and we want to be picking policy winners. The best solutions are those that we can implement now and for the future. Not the most perfect, ideal, cap and trade system (or other mechanism) if they never becomes law.
In today's terms it also means standing in other's shoes - people who don't believe action on climate change is important. This could vitally avoid a schism like the USA abortion debate - a climate-action fracture Bryan Walsh outlines here.
Communicating science is vital, difficult and challenging. Just how do we effectively talk about probability and likelihood of increased impacts on humans with climate change? Science, communication and psychology has a big role to play.
Just one example to illustrate the point. The Fear Won't Do It study looks at what we commonly see with climate issues - the risk of destruction to ice caps, the Barrier Reef, coral bleaching, increased severity of dangerous storms and, likelihood of more/longer heat waves etc. While this might grab people's attention it is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement.
Research like this argues we should be engaging people's personal concerns. And understanding environmental leadership.
While Japan struggles to shift mountains of debris and deal with human tragedy from the gargantuan tsunami, the ongoing Fukushima nuclear accident is seeing some significant mind shifts.
George Monbiot's change of heart has the highest profile. A widely regarded environmental advocate, Fukushima has taught him to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power. He says:
On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power...
(But) there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power...
Not shifting is Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountains Institute. He finds nuclear so slow and costly that building plants reduces and retards climate protection.
Here's how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"), and renewable energy...
Who's right? Barry Brook makes the base case for nuclear safety and why we need it here. Amory Lovins for efficiency, distributed power generation and why nuclear is out of date here.
Image: Fukushima Daiichi March 14 2011
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