Part 8 (2/2)

What is salient in all these cases is the key role of governments in planning, coordinating, and overseeing the transition - the very opposite of leaving the deregulated market to its devices and going about 'business as usual'. Voluntary measures and aspirational goals will not eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions; they will have to be squeezed out by strong governmental regulatory and investment actions. The particular nature of such a government will depend on the capacity of people to build its democratic character, and to provide national leaders.h.i.+p when conventional politics fails to do so. It should not be a.s.sumed that strong state intervention requires an autocratic government. If, as a society, we are to engage in a rapid change, it will require the active democratic partic.i.p.ation of the population, rather than its pa.s.sivity.

Even middle-of-the-road climate targets require extraordinary action. The unsafe cap of 22.4 degrees that was promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali in December 2007 requires developed countries to cut emissions to 2540 per cent below their 1990 levels by 2020. For Australia (where emissions by 2010 will be about 10 per cent higher than they were in 1990), this would require emissions from 20102020 to be reduced by 3550 per cent, or 3.55 per cent on average per year.

When the current annual growth in Australian emissions of 1.52 per cent is added to the equation, the total turnaround on current practice would be a 57 per cent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions each year. By comparison, the best recent record for decreasing the energy intensity of a modern economy is under 3 per cent annually, set by j.a.pan after the 1970s 'oil shock', and achieved, in part, by exporting some energy-intensive industries.

In this context, we find it inconceivable that Australia could play its fair part in meeting even a 22.4-degree cap, other than by a planned, rapid transition and economic restructuring. This would necessarily have to be const.i.tuted as a climate 'state of emergency' far beyond the capacity of a society operating in its usual modes.

CHAPTER 23.

What Does an Emergency.

Look Like?

In recent public discussions about global warming, the language has started to s.h.i.+ft from talk of a 'crisis' to one of a 'global emergency'. The popular appeal of Al Gore's film and book An Inconvenient Truth, which calls climate change a 'global emergency', has driven much of this s.h.i.+ft. In the lead-up to the December 2007 Bali conference, the UN secretary-general also spoke explicitly of a climate emergency.

Using such language is the start of the process of recognising that the underlying reality has become more grave than we had previously realised. The climax of the process may be governments formally declaring a 'state of emergency', at which point we will know a number of things: that the authorities rate the problem as very serious, that priority will be given to resolving the crisis, that we are all in the crisis together, and that, officially, 'business as usual' no longer applies.

The declaration of a state of emergency involves official recognition that a threat to life and health, property, or the natural environment is sufficiently large that an adequate response will demand a mobilisation of resources beyond the normal functioning of the society. Such threats may be civil or military: they may be natural (like fire, flood, tsunami, or earthquake); political (like war and conflict); biomedical (like infectious disease); or the result of a combination of factors (such as famine or population displacement).

To deal with an unfamiliar emergency, it is often necessary to undertake 'crash programs' to create new capabilities. Iconic examples of such programs have been the Manhattan Project (through which the US developed the nuclear bomb) and the Apollo Program (to get astronauts to the moon). In some cases, the emergency has been so demanding that the whole economy has had to be mobilised to new purposes. Within a year after Pearl Harbour, for example, the US was able to switch from being the world's largest consumer economy to become the world's largest war economy.

In the case of climate change, however, we need to go one step further and change not only what the economy produces, but also how it produces. Here, the experience of j.a.pan, the Asian tiger economies and, more recently, China is instructive. For example, in two decades, South Korea transformed itself completely from being a poor agricultural economy to a middle-income, world-compet.i.tive manufacturing economy. These changes came with very high human and environmental costs, but they demonstrate that programs to transform the organisation of production can be implemented quickly.

Transformational programs can either focus on scaling up existing technologies or processes (to produce a result quickly), or on pursuing fundamental innovation to solve a new problem (for example, the Manhattan Project, which set out to build a nuclear bomb, even though the related nuclear industry did not exist and there was virtually no knowledge, at the start, about how to carry out the task). Some transformational programs combine aspects of scaling up and fundamental innovation (for example, the Apollo Program).

All of these very fast, large-scale transformations are characterised by a strong government role in planning, coordinating, and allocating resources, backed by sufficient administrative power to achieve a rapid response that is beyond the capacity of the society's normal functioning.

A state of emergency will likely exhibit many or most of the characteristics listed on the opposite page.

With few exceptions, the present responses to global warming are within the 'normal political-paralysis mode'. Most governments have not been brutally honest with themselves about the new climate data and its consequences, or about the severity and proximity of the consequences if present trends continue. Necessary targets and goals are being severely compromised, while the speed of our response is hopelessly inadequate, and will result in global warming worsening and moving beyond our capacity to construct practical responses. There is neither effective leaders.h.i.+p nor bipartisans.h.i.+p.

We are not devoting the necessary resources to solving the problem, whether it is research and innovation, planning for a rapid transition, or scaling up production. Not only has failure become an option; it has also become the norm. On all objective measures the world is going backwards: emissions are rising at an increasing rate, events signalling more dangerous changes in the environment are occurring faster than expected, and positive feedbacks are beginning to kick in.

In short, although it is the greatest threat in human history, global warming is not being treated as an emergency.

This response stands in stark contrast to our behaviour in other emergency situations. In the case of a bush fire, for example, the normal functions of the affected community are suspended, in so far as it is necessary to save life and to devote all available resources - including mobilising them from far away - to fight the fire. The speed of the response is crucial, plans are made in advance, action is centrally coordinated, on-the-ground initiative and committed teamwork are vital, and specialist teams are ready and trained. No effort is spared, people are given leave from their regular jobs, and whole communities support the fire fighters and each other. Resources to fight the fire are not denied because it might 'hurt the economy'.

Yet, in proposing a 'crash program' to curb global warming, the response is often that drastic action is not politically possible - that it will cost too much, damage the economy, waste good capital, or be too disruptive.

Even among many who acknowledge that global warming is an urgent problem, there is a tendency to devalue the predicted impacts. Anyone who talks about living with a 3-degree rise, as some of the climate professionals do, has obviously not come to grips with actual consequences of these figures. In understating the real impacts - and, therefore, the economic damage - the cost of doing nothing, or not enough, is undervalued. At the same time, the heavy cost of action is overstated, especially since many energy-efficiency measures save, rather than cost, money.

It seems that many who are concerned about economic damage are not worried that society as a whole will be worse off by becoming more climate friendly: rather, inst.i.tutions and individuals who have made themselves dependent on activities that produce large volumes of greenhouse-gas pollution free of charge seem concerned that they will be worse off, and that long-established personal habits and cultural norms will have to change.

The historical evidence, for example, of the emergency mobilisation in the US for the Second World War indicates just how wrong fear-mongering lobbying about 'economic damage' can be. In the period from 1940 to 1945, unemployment in the USA fell from 14.6 per cent to 1.9 per cent, while GNP grew 55 per cent in the five years from 1939. Wages grew 65 per cent over the course of the war, far outstripping inflation, and company profits boomed. This was all at a time when personal consumption was limited by the sale of war bonds, some basic goods and foods were rationed and, at the height of the mobilisation, 40 per cent of the economy was directed towards the war effort.

In 1941, the American economy was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, so the switch to the war economy, with its practical need to utilise all available productive capacity, would inevitably produce improved economic statistics. But even if a climate emergency were to be declared at a time of economic health, the tasks are so challenging - building a zero-emissions economy, taking carbon out of the air, and finding the means to cool the planet - that every sc.r.a.p of productive capacity will be required.

The experience of the Second World War shows that production and technologies can be switched quickly, and on a huge scale, when there is the need and the will: from a small base of war production in early 1941, the United States was out-producing the combined Axis effort by the beginning of 1943. Merchant s.h.i.+pbuilding grew from a total of only 71 s.h.i.+ps for the period from 1930 to 1936 to more than 100 in 1941 alone, and 127,000 military aircraft were produced in the four years from 1941. Output by 1944 was 28 times the rate it had been in 1939.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Inst.i.tute sums up the case for a sustainability emergency: The year 1942 witnessed the greatest expansion of industrial output in the nation's history. A sparkplug factory was among the first to switch to the production of machine guns. Soon a manufacturer of stoves was producing lifeboats. A merry-go-round factory was making gun mounts ... The automobile industry was converted to such an extent that from 19421944, there were essentially no cars [for commercial sale] produced in the United States.

This mobilization of resources within a matter of months demonstrates that a country and, indeed, the world can restructure the economy quickly if it is convinced of the need to do so. In this mobilization, the scarcest resource of all is time. With climate change, for example, we are fast approaching the point of no return. We cannot reset the clock. Nature is the timekeeper.

Human societies are able to develop emergency methods for handling familiar crises, especially when they are frequently repeated, such as floods, fires, storms, droughts and, in some societies, wars; but we have the greatest trouble with unfamiliar crises, especially if they not yet fully physically apparent.

Now that science, enhanced by its ability to prefigure alternative futures using computer models, has made it clear that a climate disaster is a realistic future, we need to take the crisis seriously. We must treat this future as a preventable fact. We need to start from the a.s.sumption that we will not fail in our efforts to prevent this future, and we need to start imagining, and acting out, a whole series of scenarios to prevent climate disaster and to take the world back to the temperature safe-zone. We need to test strategies to see which ones have the highest odds of success. This technique of 'back-casting from success' can be applied to the climate as well as to other issues that need to be tackled under a sustainability emergency.

While the challenge of avoiding climate catastrophe demands action at emergency pace and scale, what has to be done will be very different from responding to cyclones, or wars, or the human consequences of conflicts. Nonetheless, by learning from our past actions at times of emergency, we can prepare for the great task ahead of us all, rather than respond with panic and alarm when it may be too late.

CHAPTER 24.

The Climate Emergency in.

Practice

Governments declare states of emergency, or a switch to emergency mode, to signal their profound commitment to solving an urgent problem. Typically, once an emergency has been declared, action takes place at great speed, involving government services and contractors, volunteer organisations, and the active partic.i.p.ation of the affected community.

Returning to the safe-climate zone is a more challenging task than is usually faced in an emergency, but the approach to it is similar. Declaring a climate and sustainability emergency is not just a formal measure or an empty political gesture, but an unambiguous reflection of a government's and people's commitment to intense and large-scale action. It identifies the highest priority to which sufficient resources will be applied in order to succeed. Social and economic organisation, and people's everyday lives, will be changed for the duration of the emergency and to the extent necessary to resolve it.

Getting governments to recognise the climate emergency is a clear and unambiguous goal, but it will face resistance. There will be great pressure for a 'new business-as-usual' politics; governments themselves do not yet fully understand the problem or the solutions; and there is not yet sufficient public understanding of the climate and sustainability crisis, what needs to be done, and why.

One task necessary is to achieve public and government recognition of the scale of the threat, so that serious consideration can be given to the actions necessary to solve the whole problem. Until we see a realistic appraisal, for example, of the Arctic melt and the imminent threats from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice-sheet losses, we will know that political leaders don't yet understand the problem. Once they do understand, and they express the need for goals that will solve the problem, we are on the way to the emergency mode. This step will only occur with broad community education and mobilisation.

Active support will need to be built around both specific goals - for example, large-scale programs for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and restructuring transport - and the formal declaration of a climate emergency.

A street, local area, or organisation, for example, could declare a state-of-sustainability emergency, and could implement an action plan, build up support, and prepare the ground for all levels of government to follow. This would involve initially considering the pros and cons of the emergency idea (for example, by using the scenario in the Appendix), then preparing the full action plan and, finally, executing it. The ultimate goal is to get the government and the whole society to commit to tackling the climate and sutainability emergency.

One way or another, we will get to the emergency mode. The question is whether we can make it happen now, by using our foresight, or whether we have to wait for years until the problem gets so bad that panic flips governments out of their business-as-usual paralysis. How can we act to make the transition to the emergency mode happen sooner, with more chance of success, rather than later, with less chance? How can the ground be prepared to make all the steps feasible?

It is often perceived that the motivation to act strongly on environmental issues comes from a green fringe of society, but this is a simplistic notion. Some of the strongest statements and most effective communications about the climate problem are coming from international figures, such as Al Gore; Yvo de Boer, the UN's lead negotiator for the new global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol; long-time sustainability activists such as Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Inst.i.tute; Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Inst.i.tute; and many climate-advocacy groups, from the local to the global level.

We now need to substantially restructure the physical economy, in a very short time, but will the mainstream mindset opposed to radical and sudden change be an insurmountable obstacle? We think not, because there are already many people who are very switched on to the problem. In the end, even conservative governments and corporations will figure out that you cannot make money, and grow the economy, on a planet that's not fit to live on. The question is: can we work together to create the rapid transformation of the economy?

<script>