Part 8 (1/2)

Transport.

Our aim must be to eliminate all fossils fuels from the transport sector. We already have the technology to electrify rail networks, which means we could s.h.i.+ft freight from roads, and people from planes, using renewable energy - a zero-emission form of transport. In France, new road construction is being severely curtailed in favour of expanded rail travel that uses state-of-the-art fast-train technology. Already, this is replacing air travel on many routes, because of shorter travel times, reduced check-in security and formalities, and the convenient location of stations in city centres. The high-speed rail link between London and Paris now takes less than 140 minutes. You can end up waiting in an airport for that long when you fly. Five years of Australia's major road funding would be enough to electrify a basic national rail network for freight. A high-speed pa.s.senger service would require new infrastructure.

New car technologies are also enabling fossil-fuel reduction. Commercially available hybrid vehicles use about half the petrol of a similarly sized car, while plug-in hybrids use a quarter of the petrol. New lightweight steel subst.i.tutes have created further efficiencies, allowing a total reduction of 90 per cent in fuel use. Fully electric vehicles are now also available, and their costs will go down with increasing scales of production and with further innovation. Honda has unveiled a zero-emission fuel-cell vehicle with a top speed of 160 kilometres per hour and a range of about 430 kilometres. Electrically a.s.sisted bikes also achieve very impressive environmental performance, while a normal bicycle, which requires 99 per cent less material and construction costs than a car, is an extremely efficient option. Further changes to urban layout to create hubs, and to increase the density of buildings, would also allow cities to use walking as the princ.i.p.al means of mobility, with public transport and bicycles as dominant support-modes.

Reducing the current heating processes.

To reduce atmospheric carbon, the Earth's natural carbon sinks must be protected and strengthened. Processes that isolate and draw down, or sequester, atmospheric carbon into the ground have become of great interest to scientists. Human activity can actively expand these processes. To be effective, they must be substantial in their long-term outcome, and have a low risk of failure, or rapid or large-scale leakage.

There are a variety of measures that can enhance these natural sinks, including protecting and expanding forests.

Recently, attention has been drawn to Terra preta do indio, or 'black soil', a term that describes dark, rich Amazonian soils, some as old as 7000 years, which contain many times the amount of carbon found in the soils of the surrounding areas. Once a mystery, it is now believed that the soils were deliberately fertilised and enriched by the region's original human inhabitants, using charred waste that was buried and maintained in the Earth.

Today, 'black soil' (or terra preta) refers to land enriched with carbon, and other minerals produced from biological materials, through a process called pyrolysis. Bioma.s.s, such as crop residue or wood, is transformed into agricultural charcoal, or biochar. This carbon-rich material is buried in the soil, where it may effectively sequester atmospheric carbon for hundreds, and even thousands, of years.

Biochar has caused great excitement among climate scientists because of its ability to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and reduce greenhouse-gas concentration. Its benefits as a soil additive include mineral and microorganism enrichment, and increased water retention, and it is especially useful in countries such as Australia, where three-quarters of the soils contain less than 1 per cent carbon. Bruno Glaser of the University of Bayreuth in Germany has found that crop productivity can double in terra preta soils. The soil's increased fertility, and better ability to tolerate weather extremes, result in higher plant yields and nutritional content, and allow a move from the current dependence on industrial fertilisers to an organic method of enriching and restoring farming lands. A 1-metre-deep hectare of terra preta can hold 250 tonnes of carbon, compared to 100 tonnes from unimproved soils. This is more effective as a carbon-sequestration technique than growing forest; and, unlike forest, there is less risk of fires producing large-scale releases of the sequestered carbon.

Joe Herbertson of sustainability consultants Crucible Carbon describes his reaction when he read about biochar technology: 'The hairs went up on the back of my neck ... this is the best news on climate change I've ever heard.'

The process that generates the biochar that is used to make black soils (pyrolysis) is, optimally, an anaerobic (oxygen-free) thermal process in which bioma.s.s is baked in a kiln to produce charcoal. Useful byproducts include bio-oils and various fuel gases, such as methane and hydrogen, that can be used for combustion, or to feed fuel cells.

Today, bioma.s.s is being used in other ways for power generation, but research and development has demonstrated the feasibility of biochar sequestration as a realistic means of reducing carbon dioxide levels. The big question is whether the terra preta process is cost effective in drawing down atmospheric carbon, and whether it can be done on a large-enough scale to have a significant impact.

The practicality and economic viability of the process in reducing carbon dioxide levels to at least 350 parts per million has been explored by Michael Obersteiner of the International Inst.i.tute for Applied Systems a.n.a.lysis. He suggests that a maximum removal-rate of five billion tonnes of carbon a year would mean that, a.s.suming no other emissions take place over this period, all historical emissions could be reversed in 70 years.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University estimates that terra preta schemes, working with biofuel production, could store up to 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon a year - more than is emitted by all of today's fossil-fuel use. Nonetheless, as we've seen, biofuel programs today are having widespread detrimental effects, including the transfer of land from food to fuel production. The introduction of large-scale terra preta would need to be balanced with sustainability needs, so as not to become another tool for the corporate destruction of traditional farming practices, especially in the developing world.

n.o.body wants biochar to require such large areas of new monocultures that it would end subsistence farming and the use of land for pasture, which would produce a s.h.i.+ft to industrial agriculture worldwide and turn natural forests into vast industrial tree plantations. Still, biochar has a place in developed and developing worlds, provided there are strong land-use controls. While traditional charcoal kilns are inefficient and produce harmful emissions, including black soot, modern small-scale pyrolysis units can be used appropriately with traditional agriculture. If slash-and-burn is replaced by slash-and-char, up to 12 per cent of total human carbon emissions by land-use change can be offset.

There is another benefit, too. Nitrogen fertilisers are a major source of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, but char-enriched soils have shown a 5090 per cent drop in nitrous oxide emissions, as well as reduced phosphorous runoff.

As terra preta enriches the soil, less land will be needed to produce a given amount of food. Even if we deployed only existing crop waste, we could remove about one billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. If degraded waste and unused croplands were added, it may be possible to double that figure. In May 2007, the conference of the International Biochar Initiative was told that, as well as producing biofuel, biochar could produce a 'wedge' of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of 10 per cent, and possibly much more, of world emissions.

Biochar technology does away with the trade-off that we are witnessing with broadacre biofuel crops, which enforces a choice between fuel and food. The biochar method can use crop waste, degraded lands and, perhaps, a proportion of plantation forest residue (provided that forest regeneration is not impeded) to enrich soils, thereby increasing food production, as well as sequestering carbon. Like energy efficiency, it is a solution that more than pays for itself.

CHAPTER 22.

Can 'Politics as Usual'

Solve the Problem?

It would be unsurprising to discover that many people perceive that the gap between what is being done and what needs to be done about global warming is growing bigger. There is increasing public unease, matched by a political incapacity to publicly recognise the true scale of action that is now desperately required.

Reflecting on his experience as a young man in Britain in the late 1930s, environmental scientist James Lovelock says: [I'm] old enough to notice a marked similarity between att.i.tudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with politicians out to show that they do respond but in reality playing for time.

We have procrastinated for so long on global warming that it is now essential to move to a safe-climate economy as fast as is safe and practicable. A quick sketch of that task would include: * building the capacity to invent, plan, model, and coordinate the new economy, and encouraging research to develop and scale up the new technologies and products; * building the physical infrastructure and capacity to produce safe-climate goods and services, such as new production lines for ultra-energy-efficient home appliances, and zero-emission vehicles for public and private transport; * developing national energy-efficiency programs for building and industry, with enforceable minimum standards. a.s.sistance would be given to householders, especially those on lower incomes, to reduce energy use; * constructing large-scale renewable-energy plants and local and household energy systems to allow the closure of the fossil-fuel-fired generating industry. This may include very large solar-thermal projects and wind-energy schemes.

* upgrading and electrifying the national and regional train grid so that long-distance road and air freight can be s.h.i.+fted to rail; * providing safe-climate goods and services, expertise, and technologies to less-developed nations to support their transition to the post-carbon world; * providing adjustment and re-skilling programs for workers, communities, and industries affected by the impacts of global warming and by the move to the new economy; and * developing the bio-char and re-afforestation industries.

Speed is essential - the emphasis is not just on building a safe-climate economy, but on doing so as quickly as is feasible while protecting the environment and keeping the rate of temperature change at a safe level. If the world takes ten or 15 years to stop increasing the rate of emissions, and another 40 or 50 years to stabilise atmospheric carbon levels, it is very likely that the resulting warming (an increase of more than 2 degrees), and its rate of increase, will be too much for many ecosystems, and may trigger positive climate feedbacks that escalate warming beyond control.

Peak oil, in the end, may contribute to lowering emissions. As the cost of petrochemicals is driven higher, the way that we produce and consume goods will change. Rising transport costs will put downward pressure on the global distribution of lower-value goods per weight, and more goods will be produced locally, which will redistribute global manufacturing capacity and jobs. A 25 per cent increase in fuel prices produces a 10 per cent increase in freight rates, reducing international trade by 5 per cent, according to Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down. It is reasonable, then, to expect that if the price of oil doubles it would cut international trade in material goods by one-fifth. We can expect that 'food miles' and 'product miles' will influence consumption patterns, and people would be more likely to travel and holiday closer to home.

The question is: how can we make this rapid transition? Can our current political system, and the imperatives of a deregulated market economy, make this happen very quickly? To be blunt, the answer is no.

Look around for the proof. It is not happening anywhere at the necessary scale and speed. Even in countries that have worked hard to improve energy efficiency, and build renewable-energy capacity and better transport options, the human ability to invent new ways of using energy has worked against these advances: the fast-growing, high-polluting air-travel sector, the air conditioner boom, and the plasma-TV fetish are just three examples. In the West, our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial, and incremental. It is steeped in a culture of compromise that is fearful of deep, quick change - which suggests it is incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed.

Sharp changes mean disruption, and disrupting business or lifestyle is a political sin. In the developed world, 'politics as usual' places the free-market economy at the heart of its project, and governments, as a matter of political faith, are loath to intervene decisively. Even though Sir Nicholas Stern named global warming as the 'greatest market failure' in history, governments have been ideologically reluctant to act sufficiently to correct this great distortion of the market.

Over the past three decades, just as global warming has slowly become a recognised phenomenon, modern finance capital has extended its hegemony around the globe and, to a remarkable extent, set corporate activity free of national and democratic restraint. Today, the dominant political agenda is for the free market to reign and for capital to be released from government regulation. We hear the mantras endlessly: 0the public sector is bad, privatisation good; lower taxes, good, government spending, bad. However, as former US labor secretary Robert Reich argued in 2007, in his influential essay 'How Capitalism is Killing Democracy': 'free markets ... have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming'. The neo-liberal market economy, without democratic control and with a fetish for monetary growth and 'shareholder value', rather than community, has failed the test of sustainability.

At a book launch in December 2007, Ian Dunlop, former executive for the international oil, gas, and coal industries, said that the crucial issue of the next few decades would be how to 'bring runaway capitalism into alignment with the sustainability of the planet and global society, and indeed with democracy'. He noted that 'the political and corporate structures we have created render us uniquely ill-equipped to handle this emergency,' and that 'perverse [corporate] incentives have led to a paranoia with short-term performance ... organisations previously highly regarded for their long-term thinking have dispensed with that expertise, in the process losing valuable corporate memory'.

He argued that, if we are to ensure long-run sustainability, the rules must change, and he identified three important consequences: genuine sustainable development must become a cornerstone, because conventional growth is untenable; success must be re-defined according to long-term sustainability, not short-term consumption; and markets must be re-designed to enhance local and global 'Commons', a term derived from old English law describing land shared by a village and held 'in common' for the benefit of all. Today, the global 'Commons' refers to all that is central to life, and that no one person or nation should control.

The corporate agenda runs politics, as Robert Reich has articulated: Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods. Today, those tasks are increasingly being left to the market ... Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying compet.i.tion for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a compet.i.tive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries ... While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting 'responsibly' or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyone - least of all by their investors - to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establis.h.i.+ng such laws and rules in the first place.

In short, 'business as usual' practices are no subst.i.tute for community-established laws and rules that are created through the state to protect the public good - in the present case, the public good being a healthy planet. Sadly, such a step seems beyond the political process, acting in its usual mode.

Carbon pollution is being turned into a product that, while enormously profitable to its private 'owners', wreaks so much public damage that it threatens to change our planet beyond recognition. Orthodox economic theory demands that the rational course of action would be to place a tax on pollution, so that the cost of the tax would equal the cost of damage being done. This is likely to be very high - Stern says it may be more than US$85 per tonne of carbon dioxide. In fact, if the cost of the marginal damage (destroying the Earth's ecosystems) is beyond value, and of infinite cost, then the abatement price (the amount we should be prepared to pay to stop it) should also be infinite. It seems that this logical conclusion, based on orthodox economics, is not a serious consideration for most people who manage the economy.

To drive the transition to a safe-climate future, greenhouse-gas pollution must be squeezed out of the economic equation. One option is to put an increasing price (tax) on the pollution, so that it becomes more and more economically attractive to use products and processes that do not produce greenhouse gases.

The other option is 'cap and auction', explained in Chapter 20, which is a fancy name for a rationing scheme that sells damage permits in decreasing quant.i.ty to polluters, until the economy achieves zero greenhouse-gas emissions.

But there is a problem with both of these solutions. We are addicted to the lifestyle that our high-impact economy allows, which means that - as we have seen with cigarettes and alcohol, which are highly taxed - you can substantially increase the price of greenhouse-gas-intensive products and people will still buy them, because they cannot, or do not, want to go without them, or they are unaware of the low-emission alternatives.

Our addiction to a high-impact lifestyle inbues greenhouse-gas emissions with something called high price inelasticity, which means that an increase in price produces a relatively small drop in demand. In these cases, simple price rises are not an effective, or fair, means for rapidly reducing consumption to zero. As an example, the demand for petrol is highly inelastic, so doubling the price of petrol only reduces demand for petrol by 10 per cent in the short-term, and 40 per cent in the longer term, as people switch to more fuel-efficient cars or other means of transport, or make lifestyle changes. In other words, to reduce the demand for petrol by just 40 per cent, governments would need to double its price, and that is equivalent to a price on carbon emissions of around A$500 per tonne. In the world of 'politics as usual', that is not going to happen.

How, then, can we make the rapid transition happen? Two examples of successful transformations suggest some strategies.

During World War II, after Pearl Harbour, the USA's military imperatives demanded a rapid conversion of great swathes of economic capacity from civil to military purposes. Within months, car production lines became tank lines. The manufacture of pa.s.senger cars ceased for the duration of the war, and new methods to ma.s.s-produce military aircraft were devised. Consumer spending was dampened by the selling of 'war bonds' to fund the cost of rapidly expanding military production and to control inflation. Having learned from the devastating experience of profiteering during the First World War, price controls were introduced, and rationing of key goods was mandated as necessary - the main result being a more egalitarian pattern of consumption, especially regarding food. The economy, real wages, and profits all grew, although many civil rights were significantly curtailed.

For a more recent example of successful, rapid transition, we can look to the 'tiger' economies of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and now China. In each case, national governments and enterprises cooperated in a plan to drive up, or change, the character of their output. In all cases, industrialisation was rapid because domestic demand was held down by state policies that favoured investing in export capacity, savings rates were high, and skills development was emphasised. This is not to glorify these development drives: in the Asian 'tiger' economies there were very significant downsides, including autocratic rule in the service of the development elites, the brutal suppression of labour and democratic rights, the fracturing of traditional rural lives, and ma.s.sive damage to the environment. Nor are these example given because they exemplify a path to rapid growth (which they do), but because they demonstrate the capacity for rapid transformation.