Part 6 (1/2)

It seems as if there are two great tectonic plates - scientific necessity and political pragmatism - that meet, very uneasily, at a fault line. Some examples may help to ill.u.s.trate the tensions and compromises that result from trying to balance the two factors: * In 1996, the European Union's Environment Council ignored advice from the advisory group on greenhouse of the World Meteorological Organisation, the International Council for Science, and the UN Environment Programme that an increase in the global average temperature of greater than 1 degree above pre-industrial levels 'may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage' [emphasis added]. Instead, they advocated a 2-degree cap, even though that figure was described as an upper limit 'beyond which the risks of grave damage to ecosystems, and of non-linear responses, are expected to increase rapidly'.

* The Stern Review identified a need, based on its reading of the science, for a 450-parts-per-million (or 2-degree) cap of carbon dioxide levels, but then said that this would be too difficult to achieve and advocated a 550-parts-per-million (or 3-degree) cap instead.

* In 2007, under Kevin Rudd, the Australian Labor Party's pre-election climate-policy statement effectively supported a 3-degree cap, despite data quoted in the statement itself that unequivocally demanded a much lower target.

* The IPCC has not called for climate modelling stabilising temperatures at less than 2 degrees, despite the evidence that the safe zone is much lower. Although the IPCC says its role is to simply represent the science, not to advocate policy, this seems to be a case of the IPCC allowing political norms to limit the scope of the research that it encourages or reports.

* Many climate and policy researchers, while privately expressing the view that the 2-degree cap is too high for a safe-climate world, have, nevertheless, publicly advocated less effective goals, because they perceive them to be more acceptable. Their argument is that they 'wouldn't be listened to' if they said what they really thought.

* Some climate-action advocates speak of the need to occupy the 'middle ground', or to be at least 'heading in the right direction', because 'it is always possible to go further later on'. This stance turns risk-aversion on its head by failing to consider worst-possible outcomes. At the same time, it is politically advantageous because it obviates the need to talk about preventative actions that are currently perceived to be 'extreme'. As a result, much advocacy aims for a direction-setting minimum requirement, rather than for a clear statement of what is needed.

* During 2007, the position of the Australian Conservation Foundation was that emissions should be cut '60 to 90 per cent' by 2050 (a 60 per cent cut would leave emissions in 2050 at four times the level required of a 90 per cent reduction). Yet, in a 2008 preliminary report, economist Ross Garnaut told the new government that a 90 per cent cut may be necessary, and that 60 per cent was far from enough.

In all these examples, we see a reluctance on the part of organisations and people to go beyond the bounds of perceived acceptability. The result is advocacy of solutions that, even if fully implemented, would not solve the problem. We have a sense that many of the climate-policy professionals - in government, research, community organisations, and advocacy - have established boundaries around their public discourse that are guided by a primary concern for 'reasonableness', rather than by a concern for achieving environmental and social sustainability.

Many people whose work centres on climate change have been struggling for so long to gain recognition for the problem - having had to cope with a lack of awareness, conservatism, and climate deniers - that they now have deeply ingrained habits of self-censors.h.i.+p. They are concerned to avoid being dismissed and marginalised as 'alarmist' and 'crazy'. Now that the science is showing the situation to be far worse than most scientists expected only a short while ago, this ingrained reticence is adding to the problem.

A pragmatic interdependency links many of these players in a cycle of low expectations and poor outcomes. Here is an outline of the concerns of some of these key players, based on conversations and correspondence we have had with them. The cycle is a merry-go-round, so it matters little where it starts.

Under pressure to stick to the science and avoid expressing an opinion, a climate scientist may take the view that society needs to make the judgement about what it determines to be dangerous climate change: 'It's not for me, as a scientist, to tell you what's dangerous or what the political target ought to be. I try to inform the debate by explaining what the risks actually are at these various levels, and by offering policy options that society could consider.'

Community-based climate-action groups, often lacking detailed technical knowledge, will respond by saying that they are not about to doubt the views put forward by the science professionals, which they hear from the media and from the IPCC: 'We have to trust in their abilities to lead us. They are the ones who know - we can't say things that they haven't, and we can't speculate on what a few scientists might be saying, if it isn't in the IPCC reports.'

Large climate-group and environment managers often join the conversation, suggesting that they agree with strong goals and urgent action, but they are worried that if they promote them, their lobbying wouldn't be taken seriously: 'It is more important to agree and campaign on targets that are heading in the right direction, than that we have discussions about what the targets should be. It is always possible to go further, or call for more, later on.'

The consequence is that even those politicians who are climate friendly feel constrained: 'I can't go further than the environment movement. I'd look extreme if I did.' And: 'I know our party's position will have to be strengthened because the science has changed, but that can't happen until after the next election. Our policy is now set. I wish we could go further, but some people are worried that I will look too extreme in the electorate.'

Deep inside public administration, where climate policy is processed, there is an avoidance of the political: 'Although our climate-science manager agrees with your targets ... she has to stick to using scientists, not lobbyists, and science, not policy. She needs to be persuaded that setting targets and trajectories is fundamentally a climate-science issue, not a political one. If, on the other hand, we can find a scientist to make the case for real targets that you have made, this would help a lot, but the scientists say that target-setting is political, and outside their terrain.'

Businesses, meanwhile, remain constrained by their commercial interests: 'You might well be right that 60 per cent by 2050 is not enough, but the people I talk to wouldn't believe anything tougher. Our business is one of the good ones - we know that this is a big problem, but if we are going to engage the wider business community, we can only go so far.'

It seems that everyone is waiting for someone else to break the cycle. But how can this be done? Part of the problem seems to be fear: those who might become the first to move to a tougher position are worried about becoming isolated or losing credibility. This could be overcome if a broad range of players agreed to move together. Another approach would be to start with the question, 'What do we need to do to achieve a safe-climate future?' rather than, 'How far should we move from our existing position?' To the best of our knowledge, no advocacy group, government, or political party in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Australia has ever asked scientific researchers to prepare a safe-climate scenario, or a 'what if ' plan. Such a plan would allow various climate advocacy activists and lobbyists to get a tangible feel for what needs to be done, before having to commit to a specific plan, or advocating challenging new goals for action. Once safe-climate scenarios have been developed and supported by a range of the leading climate-policy players, they can be taken to a wider audience for discussion. In this way, we can overcome the 'credibility' blockage. Without a doubt, people and organisations that are sufficiently confident in their views to raise difficult questions can more easily explore the 'what if ' strategy.

Reticence on the part of advocates to push for serious action also stems from the pervasive view in politics that everything is subject to compromise, and that trade-offs are the norm: argue less for what you really want than for what seems 'reasonable' in the give-and-take of normal political society. And when some brash advocates do argue for what really needs to be done, it is simply a.s.sumed that they are making an ambit claim: an initial demand put forward in the expectation that the negotiations will prompt a lesser counteroffer and will end in compromise.

While this mindset is widespread, there are domains from which it has been banished. When it comes to public safety, society knows that compromise and negotiable trade-offs must not apply: bridges, buildings, planes, large machines, and the like must be built to risk-averse, high standards, which are applied rigorously. If standards are not met and structures fail, corporations, governments, and regulatory bodies are held to account. We have learned from trial and error that a 'no major trade-off ' policy in public safety is necessary to avoid death or injury to our citizens.

With global warming, however, we do not have the luxury of learning by trial and error. We have left the climate problem unattended for so long that we now have just one chance to get things right by applying a 'no major trade-off ' approach without a trial run. It will be a particular challenge for decision-makers who have grown up in a political culture of compromise.

Because the last emergency mobilisation on this scale was during World War II, few people today have any direct experience of a situation like this; however, there is plenty of history from which to learn, and expertise available, to plan for such a scenario.

Because time is short, we need a 'no major trade-offs' rebuilding of the economy, and we need to quickly develop the skills and know-how to implement similar, broad-scale decision-making about climate change. Continuing to use negotiation and management methods that routinely result in major compromise and failure will not help.

Past government inaction has also habituated an acceptance of lowered expectations, which has continued to hinder serious climate action. An Australian non-government organisation (NGO) staff member, reflecting on her experiences, said that it has become increasingly clear to her how constrained the environmental organisations are: 'It's a legacy ... they've all come to expect so little environmental responsibility from government, so they don't ask for much in the hope of a small gain. [It's] a very unfortunate situation.'

Timidity, constraint, and incrementalism have, generally, characterised recent federal and state government approaches to environment issues in Australia, and the consequence is that low expectations have become embedded in the relations.h.i.+p between lobbyists and government. When opportunity knocks, or changing evidence demands urgent and new responses, imaginative and bold leaders.h.i.+p does not always emerge with solutions that fully face up to the challenge. When, in late 2007, evidence emerged of accelerated climate change, it appeared to have little impact on the climate targets advocated by most of the peak green organisations, which said that their position was 'locked in' till after the election.

Ken Ward, an environmental and communications strategist and former deputy executive director of Greenpeace in the United States, believes that the people who lead environmental foundations and organisations can play a critical part in reconstructing the issue as a climate and sustainability emergency - one that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise.

With the rapid loss of the Arctic summer ice cover, a climate catastrophe is now in full swing; but Ward says that the opportunity for these leaders to adjust their position is narrow, and this is due, in some part, to the deliberate decision, a decade ago, by environment organisations to downplay climate-change risk. He says: [They did so] in the interests of presenting a sober, optimistic image to potential donors, maintaining access to decision-makers, and operating within the constraints of private foundations, which has blown back on us. By emphasizing specific solutions and avoiding definitions that might appear alarmist, we inadvertently fed a dumbed-down, Readers Digest version of climate change to our staff and environmentalist core. Now, as we scramble to keep up with climate scientists, we discover that we have paid a hefty price.

For those who have, in the past, downplayed the risks, changing position is now a matter of urgency, because what now needs doing cannot be done incrementally. The desperate measures required to advance a functional climate-change solution at this late date, says Ward, 'can only be conceived and advanced by individuals who accept climate change realities and [who] take the less than 10-year time-frame seriously'. He believes that we need to confront the terror of the situation before we can come to a real solution. 'We are not acting like people and organisations who genuinely believe that the world is at risk. Therefore, we cannot take the measures required, nor can we be effective leaders.'

CHAPTER 18.

The Gap Between Knowing and Not-Knowing.

Why are many powerful organisations, and people in positions of power, so un-terrified, so unwilling to recognise, or advocate, the extent of action now required? The closer decision-makers get to the apex of political and bureaucratic power, the greater the public denial of the need to act at full scale and at great speed.

Much of this incapacity is simply a result of the way power is exercised in societies in which a corporate agenda is the default mode. In the most extreme cases, governments have glued themselves to the fossil-fuel lobby and done almost nothing, even as other significant sectors of business have demanded more action on climate. In his 2007 book, High and Dry, former government staffer Guy Pearce doc.u.mented the influence of the Australian coal industry and the way that big polluters and their lobbyists wrote the Howard government's climate policies to ensure that there was no real plan to reduce emissions.

In politics, 'plausible deniability' has become an art form - a process which ensures that there is no evidence to be found that a person knew, or could have been expected to know, something that may come back to haunt them. A corollary is the pressure for advisors, consultants, and administrative departments to tell a minister or senior official only what they want to hear, or to tell them only the minimum necessary to make a pragmatic decision in the short term.

How many environment or climate ministers in national governments would be able to give an informed and reasonable answer if they were asked to explain the policy relevance of the impending rapid loss of the Arctic sea-ice and its effects on Greenland and sea-level rises?

It is as though people half-recognise the problem, and then deny it if the necessary solutions are beyond their professional boundaries or their perception of 'reasonableness'.

Political leaders now accept that climate change is a problem, and now eagerly embrace small-scale schemes such as changing light globes. Taking the drastic action necessary to turn climate change around, though, is too far outside their political ambit to even consider. Policy a.n.a.lyst George Monbiot noted this limitation: 'When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist ... everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move.'

Psychological denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge the existence, or severity, of unpleasant events or thoughts and feelings: the person keeps on acting as if the event has not occurred. Generally, it is a.s.sociated with an event or thought whose memory is stressful, so that denial, as a defence mechanism, seems like a good practical strategy; the more dramatic the event, the stronger the denial.

Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, has pointed to the paradox of denial: to deny something, you first have to recognise its existence to some degree, so denial is a state of 'knowing and not-knowing'. It can take a number of forms, including outright denial; seeking scapegoats (blaming China, for example); shutting out or suppressing information (so the story is only half-recognised); denying responsibility ('Nothing we can do in this country will make any real difference.'); denying personal power ('No one else did anything, so I didn't either.'); and projecting anxiety (displacing fears onto other issues).

Max Bazerman of Harvard University has asked why societies fail to implement wise strategies to prevent 'predictable surprises' - a term he coins to describe events that catch organisations and nations off-guard, despite necessary information being available to antic.i.p.ate the event. Think of 9/11, or the failure of American strategy in Iraq. Or climate change.

Bazerman identifies five psychological patterns that help to explain the failure to act on climate: [P]ositive illusions lead us to conclude that a problem doesn't exist or is not severe enough to merit action ... we interpret events in an egocentric, or self-serving, manner ... we overly discount the future, despite our contentions that we want to leave the world in good condition for future generations ... we try desperately to maintain the status quo and refuse to accept any harm, even when the harm would bring about a greater good [and] we don't want to invest in preventing a problem that we have not personally experienced or witnessed through vivid data.

Bazerman suggests that many political leaders will not want to act until great, demonstrable harm has already occurred.

He also identifies organisational and political explanations for the failure to act on climate: organisational divisions that fail to integrate data, responsibility, and responses; the corrupting power of powerful lobbyists and political donations; and deliberate campaigns to confuse people about the evidence - a tactic long-employed by the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries.

George Marshall, founder of climatedenial.org, says that denial cannot simply be countered with information, because denial is, as Cohen described it, a normal state of affairs for people in an information-saturated society. He also says that the lack of visible public response is part of a self-justifying loop that creates a pa.s.sive-bystander effect: [People often won't] spontaneously take action themselves unless they receive social support and the validation of others. Governments in turn will continue to procrastinate until sufficient numbers of people demand a response. To avert further climate change will require a degree of social consensus and collective determination normally only seen in war time, and that will require mobilisation across all cla.s.ses and sectors of society.

A paradigm s.h.i.+ft is also required. We settle into ways of thinking and working that get the job done 'well enough'. As new ideas and changing circ.u.mstances challenge our mental model of the world, we may either adapt and change, or stick with what we know and slowly drift away from understanding the world. Even when global warming challenges conventional ways of working, a group of people working together with similar, unrevised mental models will often be able to maintain a degree of social competence and operate effectively with each other. This can be the case even though their collective behaviour no longer fits so well with the conditions of the physical world. Their other, more adaptive, option is to critically re-understand a changing environment, and start to shape and share a new social worldview.

The eminent physicist Max Planck famously observed that 'a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it'. With climate change, however, we don't have the option of waiting this long.

The complexity and seriousness of climate and sustainability problems makes our current political world of trade-offs, compromises, and decision-making obsolete, along with most of our experience about how to act effectively. This is an extraordinary challenge, because our acc.u.mulated skills in the art of compromise become less useful. Perhaps the best way through is to adopt, whatever one's age, a youthful willingness to live with uncertainty and to view the prevention of climate catastrophe as an invigorating process of innovation, learning, and imagination.

Some of the ways that we currently make decisions and plan for the future will also pose big challenges, when our aim is a safe-climate future. An example is how we think about safety itself. Our society has built administrative structures for safety at the micro level - for example, in building design and construction, and in the design and manufacture of aircraft and other vehicles - but no such structures exist for ensuring the safe 'design and development' of the economy, or of our use of resources as a whole. Rather than spending money to test actions in advance, we have considered it more efficient to wait until there are clear signs of a real problem before we take preventive or remedial action. The consequences of this approach are manifest in today's sustainability and climate crises: we fish till the fish run out, irrigate till the rivers run dry, and burn coal till the weather turns hot.