Part 6 (2/2)
Paradoxically, the more that a society is committed to innovation and to increasing economic output, the more it needs effective processes to ensure sustainability; otherwise, the economy just becomes a machine for testing what we can endure, and we discover what we can't endure only when it is too late to prevent disaster.
Our discussion has been confined to proposing some of the structural and social reasons that people and organisations simultaneously 'know' about the global-warming challenge, but 'don't know' about the speed and depth of action required. This incapacity may be manifested in what we have termed 'blocking': in beliefs that stand in the way of developing necessary solutions. Here are six sets of 'blocking' responses that we have encountered while engaging with people about the sustainability emergency.
The first set that we have often experienced in response to our emergency proposition includes claims that there is no point in taking action, because the climate situation is already a lost cause. Claims include: it's too late, the changes can't be made fast enough, people are too selfish and won't put the needs of others ahead of their own needs, or vested interest will block the necessary action. Other variations include the view that it's hopeless, because our efforts are a drop in the bucket or are insignificant; that people won't change their lifestyles; that governments won't do what is needed; and that people won't accept the government telling them what to do. Finally, there is the view that to succeed we must have action from China, India, Russia, and the US - and since they won't change, we shouldn't either.
These are absolutist arguments: they a.s.sume knowledge that n.o.body can have until after the event. We cannot know whether a mode of action will fail until it is tested, but these propositions, all based on the theme that trying is a lost cause, cut off all possible avenues of success on the basis of vague a.s.sumptions rather than detailed knowledge. In fact, recent international examples give the lie to this approach. We reacted quickly and we weren't selfish when the tsunami hit Asia in 2006, or when Burma and China were devastated in May 2008. Why is dealing with climate change more of a 'lost cause'?
The fact is that even vested interests have to operate on the same planet as the rest of us, and vested interests still have children, partners, lovers, friends, and grandchildren. All countries and all people will have reason to act, because climate change will damage them, as well as everyone else. India and China, for example, will suffer from rising sea levels; and the loss of the Himalayan glaciers will be highly disruptive to water supply, through the large rivers that support much of the agriculture in both countries. There is evidence, in other words, to dismantle the credibility of each of these a.s.sertions.
A second set of 'not-knowing' responses has been heard many times from leaders of organisations. These include their argument that they can't advocate a comprehensive safe-climate policy because they would lose credibility if they were to 'go out on a limb', or they would not be 'taken seriously' and would, thereby, become ineffective; or that they are 'too busy' to take action on the issue. One Australian non-government environmental organisation recently pioneered a useful way out of this dead end by adopting a two-strand approach. In its public advocacy, it aims for goals and targets that would result in a safe climate as fast as possible. When dealing with governments, though, or other bodies which have demonstrated that they can't yet relate to the safe-climate approach, the organisation will push these inst.i.tutions as far as they will go. Both strands are acknowledged publicly, and explained. The ultimate objective, with regard to government, is to help them get to a safe-climate goal, too.
In any case, the cost of being forthright is falling. The world's accelerating slide into demonstrably dangerous climate change is now creating new, more favourable dynamics for advocacy and leaders.h.i.+p. These days, if one takes a stand that is well based on climate science but which is currently seen as 'extreme', it will be only months, or a year or two at most, before consequences from the real world will show it to be reasonable and necessary. So we can expect that the uncomfortable feeling of being too far ahead of the pack will pa.s.s, before too long.
A third form of blocking centres around the proposition that, until we have complete certainty, we shouldn't act pre-emptively. But when time is running short, and the stakes are high, we simply have to take a risk-management approach and decide to act, despite the uncertainty.
A fourth set of blocking responses is to claim that we can't follow the emergency strategy until other people, or organisations, change their position. But other people and organisations are already changing their positions - as witnessed by the increasingly alarmed comments of public figures around the world.
A fifth set of responses revolves around the proposition that a solution to global warming is possible, but only after an unacceptable prior step - in other words, that without change in other significant parts of the system, the level of action required is impossible. Yet there are many examples, including countries going into war, or responding to large natural disasters, which demonstrate that most political systems can switch to an emergency mode when they perceive an urgent need to do so. Variations on this theme include sentiments such as, 'We'd need a huge disaster to happen before people would act', and 'We can't tell the whole truth: we mustn't disempower people.'
Rescuing the planet and getting back to a safe climate will require a huge deployment of physical and economic resources; so, for the duration, keeping jobs and the economy going should not be a problem. And we do not have to wait for a catastrophe - people in many parts of the world are already facing climate disaster. The issue is not whether people have the capacity to engage in powerful acts of the imagination, or foresight, but whether they will apply this capacity in the short amount of time left. Waiting for a climate disaster big enough to motivate action beyond the conventional mode is very dangerous, because by then it may be too late to prevent catastrophic events.
A sixth type of obstacle is the view that a full solution is not possible, so we just have to live with partial failure and partial success. To this end, we've effectively been told: 'The perfect is the enemy of the good - your ideal 'safe-climate' strategy will not only fail but, if it is pursued as the main strategy, it will also block a less desirable, but feasible, outcome.' We are not aware of any credible evidence that a full solution is not possible, or that an attempt to achieve a full solution will make a partial solution impossible. The evidence suggests that the Earth is very close to a period of run-on warming, at which point any partial solution will, fairly rapidly, deteriorate into a much worse state; so, going for the apparently harder safe-climate target now, rather than later, looks like the only practical option.
All these forms of blocking lead to society accepting inaction, or insufficient action, as a solution to the problem. The alternative - to imagine, and plan for, a great transformation of our society in a way that is consistent with a safe-climate future - may be unsettling and challenging. It will require us to change the way we live and how we understand the relations.h.i.+p between our actions and our future on this fragile planet. But it is the only practical option.
CHAPTER 19.
Making Effective Decisions.
In seeking to overcome the advocacy dilemma - the gap between what is reasonable to propose and what needs to be done - four approaches stand out that are relevant not just to policy-makers and lobbyists, but to all of us when thinking about, talking about, and taking action to have the climate crisis recognised as an emergency.
Pursuing double practicality.
The actions that are proposed must be capable of being implemented and, when fully implemented, of fully solving the problem. For example, a 3-degree cap may be achievable logistically, but it will not solve the problem of climate safety; rather, it is very likely to result in global warming that is catastrophic and that would escalate beyond our capacity to control or reverse it.
If the world's political leaders work toward a goal that cannot deliver a safe climate, we face a serious environmental disaster. Investments made in good faith in new industrial, urban, and rural systems would also have to be abandoned partway through their economic life, to be replaced by another set of investments made at a time when the environment will be breaking down and the economy will, consequently, be in decline. At such a late stage, the second round of investment could well fail to rescue the situation. The 3-degree cap clearly fails the test of 'double practicality'.
Let's take another example: the idea that we should retrofit coal-fired power stations to run on gasefied goal as a long-term strategy to lower emissions. If a necessary goal for a safe climate is also the complete decarbonisation of electricity generation, this does not fully solve the problem, because it involves building new, large-scale infrastructure that will continue to emit carbon for its investment life. Similarly, proposing to replace gas hot water with gas-boosted solar hot water is not a full solution: greenhouse-gas emissions will still occur when the sun's energy is not enough to keep the water hot and the gas kicks in (on cloudy days, for example). A doubly practical alternative when replacing conventional hot-water systems would be to install a solar unit boosted by electricity from renewable sources.
At a broader level we recognise that, with today's high levels of technical innovation and economic growth, any problem that remains partly unsolved will simply be amplified as the economy grows. So the more committed a society is to economic development, the more it must be committed to fully solving environmental problems in an antic.i.p.atory way.
Facing brutal facts.
Problems cannot be solved completely if they are not understood completely. When a problem has trivial consequences, a misunderstanding will not matter. But a problem like climate change, which has life-and-death implications, must be understood fully, un.o.bscured by wishful thinking. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister during World War II, understood this. He knew that his strong and charismatic style of leaders.h.i.+p might inhibit people from telling him the truth about the progress of the war, so he set up an independent agency, the Statistical Office, to feed him the brutal truth in a constantly updated and completely unfiltered form. Equipped with an unshakeable goal, and a stark understanding of exactly how grim the situation was from moment to moment, Churchill rejected all wishful thinking: 'I ... had no need for cheering dreams,' he wrote.'Facts are better than dreams.'
The purpose of facing the facts is not to wallow in anguish, but to inform the creative process so that we can come up with solutions that have the maximum chance of solving the problems, no matter how bad they are. The worse a problem is, the more vitally important it is to know its real nature.
Moreover, we should face all the facts even if we don't, at the start, have all the answers. We do not need a final plan to justify urgent climate action, any more than we would expect a rescue team to have a finalised plan, or a guarantee of success, before they considered attempting a rescue.
Management researcher Jim Collins found companies that survived enormous challenges and continued to thrive were, without exception, the ones that not only had the knack for facing the reality of their situation, but were also driven by an enormously strong will to survive. This led them to develop creative solutions that were equal to the problems.
Collins drew lessons from the experience of Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking US military officer in the 'Hanoi Hilton' prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Observing his own strategies for survival, and those of his fellow prisoners, Stockdale concluded that 'you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be'.
This approach combines strategic optimism with tactical pessimism. There is a dogged determination to work for a positive outcome, coupled with an a.s.sumption that any number of things can go wrong, unless they are actively prevented.
Collins asks: How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn't motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision? The answer, surprisingly, is, 'No.' Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time ... If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events ... Yes, leaders.h.i.+p is about vision. But leaders.h.i.+p is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted.
Collins' finding is central to climate-policy advocacy: one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.
To leave people who are facing a serious situation uninformed - when there is a possibility that preventive, or even adaptive, action could be taken - is to leave them living in a fool's paradise. If we do not allow people in on the secret that climate change, if left uncorrected, is going to have disastrous impacts, we get caught in a democratic trap. If political leaders keep problems quiet, they cannot put forward effective policies to solve them. It is doubly impossible for the bigger political parties to provide effective leaders.h.i.+p if many scientists, the main sources of objective information, do not emphasise the full range of possibilities, and if environmental and climate lobbyists propose policies that cannot solve the climate problem.
Fortunately, the digital age has helped counter these tendencies by enabling citizens to educate themselves about climate change with a wide array of online resources including dedicated reporting by newspapers and magazines, scholarly papers, videos, and blogs.
Failure is not an option.
When Apollo 13 mission-control flight director Gene Krantz insisted to his ground staff that 'failure is not an option', the meaning was unambiguous: get the imperilled crew home alive, solve every problem faced by the astronauts, and never give up on any life-threatening issue, even when they encountered a dead end. The more difficult a problem, the more effort and creativity needed to be applied, with every conceivable possibility explored until a breakthrough was achieved.
In the case of global warming, the mantra of 'failure is not an option' relates to a broader goal - achieving a safe climate to protect all people, all species, and all generations. Still, the approach is the same. No matter how difficult the problems, society must find a way back to a safe climate. The UK Government's 2006 Stern Review established a powerful justification for this approach when it found that the threat from climate change would become so large that no matter how much it might take to solve the problem, the cost of not controlling it was going to be worse.
Ultimately, this is a moral issue, because the fate of most people, and most plant and animal species, hangs in the balance -determined by whether we can devise and implement a path to a safe climate. We have to find a way to enable the economy to be physically transformed, in the shortest time possible, to safely bring our greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero, to strip excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and to take measures to cool the Earth directly, until a sufficient natural cooling is established. There is no other option that holds out realistic hope of achieving a safe climate.
Putting the science first.
In the case of climate change, facing the facts with brutal honesty requires us to put the science first - which means fully facing up to the ecological impacts of our actions.
Currently, climate policy has been framed as the task of solving the impa.s.se between 'the science' and what is 'politically possible' (which means: what is economically acceptable to governments around the world, who are largely captured by corporate and bureaucratic interests).
The mantra of the former Australian prime minister John Howard was that he would do nothing on climate change that would 'harm the economy', and that it was 'crazy and irresponsible ... to commit to a target when you don't know the [economic] impact'. He seemed not to understand that a failure to act would cook the planet. Asked about the impact of rising temperatures, Howard told an ABC interviewer that an increase of 46 degrees would be 'less comfortable for some than it is now'. This was a remarkable way of talking about catastrophic climate change. We have a clear responsibility to make politicians put the science first, in the process of framing goals to achieve a safe climate.
Compounding the reticence to take action now is our faith that technology will be able to solve all our problems, including global warming. Post-enlightenment delight at the progress and capacity of technology has produced a cultural impediment to climate action: a technological overoptimism, or determinism, that clouds our understanding that human behaviour needs to change, too.
Thinking beyond 'business as usual'
One of the things that makes 'business as usual' such a powerful mode of operation is the widely shared a.s.sumption that things will go on as they always have. However, given that history has seen many crises - including past climate change, wars and conflict, and the need to build and rebuild economies and societies - it is obvious that things don't always stay the same and that, indeed, we are capable of breaking out of our usual practices when we need to.
When our society has responded effectively to great threats and crises in the past, it has put aside the partial measures and limited possibilities of 'business as usual' and confronted enormous challenges with brutal honesty, finding feasible solutions and pursuing them with single-minded determination. Our preparedness to do so again, when we are confronted with the greatest threat in human history, will determine our success or failure.
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