Part 9 (1/2)

John Paul Lederach is a leader in the field of conflict transformation and peace building, and is the author of Building Peace: sustainable reconciliation in divided societies.

For a large-scale social challenge in which the whole society needs to move, despite past and current divisions, Lederach argues that change needs to be catalysed at three levels: the population at large; the managerial-cultural-and-innovation elites; and the controlling elite.

In the case of climate, change needs to be occurring at all three levels, and between them. The controlling elite, as a whole, doesn't yet grasp the full seriousness and urgency of the situation, but peer-advocacy from within this level can be very powerful. The other two levels need to direct advocacy to the top, while also making things happen on the ground. Advocacy from members of the managerial elite, including senior administrators and scientists, is important, because they are close to, and provide expertise and management capability to, the controlling elite. Advocacy from the community at large is important, too, because it creates the democratic mandate. While large-scale infrastructure spending and macro-economic management is driven by the elites, initiative and autonomy at the community, workplace, and small-business level is crucially important in changing people's behaviours and activities.

Lederach believes that it is essential to find people who can see the need for change from the perspective of their sector, but who will work across sectors to create cooperation across the fault-lines of conflict.

Because we have not faced a human-caused climate crisis before, there is no complete sustainability emergency package that is ready to be put to use. We need to experiment to find the best way to act, building on our safe-climate message and goals. In creating ideas and imagining the best way to act to make the emergency response a political reality, we can also look around the world to find the most practical and most suitable initiatives.

There are a number of starting points to initiate action on the emergency.

Mobilising community networks Transforming politics from conventional to emergency mode will be strongly resisted by those who see a short-term benefit in opposing change. The climate emergency will be resolved only with the active support of the broad community: from community-action groups, unions, and churches to neighbourhoods, schools, and local government; and from political parties to corporate elites. As one expression of this need, in February 2008, partic.i.p.ants at a community climate-action conference in Melbourne, Australia, organised by Friends of the Earth and the Sustainable Living Foundation, proposed and set up the Climate Emergency Network (munity climate groups across Melbourne and regional Victoria now support this project, which will initiate community mobilisation for strong and effective action on climate change and the declaration of a sustainability emergency. Building democratic partic.i.p.ation is one key to achieving emergency action.

Building deliberative democracy People and organisations need the opportunity to look at all the issues in depth and over time, in a supportive social environment. Because the worst climate impacts are still to come, full-strength, effective action must arise from an act of informed imagination, and we need to help large numbers of people do this. The techniques for doing so fall under the concept of deliberative democracy.

The Victorian Women's Trust provided an inspiring example of deliberative democracy with their Watermark Australia project. The project engaged 2000 people, across Australia, in 200 discussion groups that met for two periods of three to five months each. Discussion groups were the core of the program because many people learn better and become more motivated to take action when involved in a group. In the first period, the groups discussed how the water system works, or does not work, in Australia. They looked at a range of issues - including what is happening to rainfall, how water is used and could be better used, how society and the economy interact with water issues, and what water's environmental role is. In the second period, partic.i.p.ants developed ideas for action on the key issues.

The process included a two-way exchange between program partic.i.p.ants and water-issue experts. The results were drawn together into the book Our Water Mark, which had more than 37,000 copies distributed across Australia.

A similar in-depth engagement of a significant proportion of the community would be an a.s.set in developing responses to global warming. Repeated interaction of this sort would ensure that the community is fully engaged, that governments gain a specific democratic mandate for emergency-scale action, and that politics becomes a process that engages people constructively with tough issues that need strong responses.

Deliberative democracy can build awareness of the sustainability emergency and create the political s.p.a.ce that governments need to act. Far from the emergency causing democracy to suffer, it could be a decisive factor in making the democratic process work more effectively.

Figuring out how it can work Because no region has ever declared, or tackled, a sustainability and climate emergency, advocates and organisations are uncertain about what is involved and how to best proceed. In part, this can be overcome through forming, or strengthening, existing non-government research bodies, or think-tanks, that are open to expertise from across society. They would study all the detailed problems related to the emergency and make their insights available to community groups, businesses, and unions, as well as provide advice to advocates, lobbyists, and government. Their investigations could include the administration of the emergency, proposed legislation, action plans, solutions to the political obstacles, economic policy and management, and how to drive innovation. Research would aim for the very best possible model to run the sustainability emergency - one capable of delivering a fast return to a safe climate while enhancing democracy by treating all parties fairly and with respect.

Experiencing the climate options While we need to understand the implications of dangerous climate change rationally in order to think about the possible solutions, our ability to act decisively on the sustainability emergency will be a.s.sisted by a capacity to also 'feel and see' it - to empathise with where our planet is headed, and to be able to think about how different it might be.

One way to do this is to 'virtually' experience climate catastrophe and alternative futures. Books such as Mark Lynas' Six Degrees and Fred Pearce's With Speed and Violence are important. Science fiction books like Kim Stanley Robinson's climate-change trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting help us to imagine living in dangerous climates that experience abrupt change.

If this a.s.sisted imagining is to be helpful, it must also enable us see and feel what it would be like to take action to rescue the planet now, while we have the best chance of success, and well before widespread catastrophe hits or becomes unavoidable. We need stories not just of heroes living in the future, and making desperate, perhaps futile, last-ditch attempts to head off a disaster in the face of imminent doom, but of a world in which climate turnaround is achieved, despite distractions, inertia, and vested interests in the here-and-now - an interesting challenge for sustainability strategists, writers, and movie-makers.

Creating a radical innovation program Transforming society to achieve a safe climate is a complex task requiring a high level of innovation. A trial of a landmark approach, supported by five government ministries, took place in the Netherlands during the 1990s, and the results were published in the book Sustainable Technology Development.

The Dutch Sustainable Technology Development Program found that a 9598 per cent improvement in eco-efficiency was required to reduce the environmental impact of production, taking into account the current, too-large levels of damage and waste, and the projected population and economic growth. It was realised that normal innovation, dominated by incremental change to existing technologies, would not be able to deliver the required level of improvement. The solution was to go back to basics and identify the human and environmental needs that had to be met and then, from first principles, invent new technologies that could meet all these needs efficiently. A series of case studies showed how this approach could be applied successfully to a range of human needs, including the demand for high-quality protein, water services, clothes-cleaning services, provision of chemical feedstock, and mobility. The most dramatic success was a redesign of ways of providing high-quality food protein, which saw a 99 per cent improvement in eco-efficiency.

Faced with a climate emergency, we need to be innovative to deliver eco-efficient technologies that change how we live and how we produce goods. One stream would have to involve a 'crash program' to deliver large results quickly; another stream would include fundamental research to find increasingly efficient and effective ways to meet human needs and the environmental needs of 'all people, all species, and all generations'.

The 'crash program' stream could learn from the Apollo Program experience and the rapid industrial transformations of the tiger economies.

The 'fundamental innovation' stream could help the crash programs avoid options that have long pa.s.sed the point at which they can make a positive contribution to a safe-climate program. An example is the idea of replacing coal with natural gas (which causes continuing high levels of carbon emissions) as a long-term generator of electricity, when what we need to do is to drive down emissions to zero.

Developing a public computer-modelling agency We now have powers that run far ahead of our capacity for foresight. When figuring out solutions to restore a safe climate, it is very hard to work out the unintended consequences or the exact impact of various plans.

Climate scientists have sophisticated models to help their research, but these are not available to the general public. It is not possible to find answers to many pressing issues unless you have enough money to commission research, or are lucky enough to find a research inst.i.tution that has already answered your question.

In preparing this book, there were many questions to which we could not find a ready answer. How much would the complete loss of the Arctic sea-ice raise regional and global temperatures? We learned that no specific modelling has been done on this question, even though complete sea-ice loss now seems imminent. How much greenhouse gas would need to be taken out of the air to trigger sufficient cooling to get the summer Arctic sea-ice back? What would a safe-climate emissions scenario look like? What is our capacity to produce biochar, using existing waste bioma.s.s?

Establis.h.i.+ng a public utility for modelling changes in climate, the environment, and the economy, at least in outline, would allow us to answer such questions. We could find the answers to politically inconvenient questions that government, universities, or other inst.i.tutions may be tempted to self-censor or avoid. The impacts of alternative policies, programs, or products could be explored. Models need to be accessible to everyone so that people and organisations can test their policy or development ideas. Arguably, the modelling capacity should be available free, or so cheaply that everyone can make use of the facility, which would allow public discussion to be concrete and proposals to be more thoroughly tested.

We do not pretend to have a detailed roadmap for tackling the sustainability emergency. The ideas presented here are simply an outline of plans and actions that are necessary and workable.

CHAPTER 25.

The Safe-Climate Economy.

We have gone too far. The planet is already too hot. There is too much carbon dioxide in the air, the Arctic will soon be ice-free in summer, and the world is committed to more than 3 degrees warming if it continues along the present energy path.

We are not standing on the threshold of dangerous climate change; we pa.s.sed through that doorway decades ago. Will we take action, at great speed, to rescue ourselves and the other species with whom we share this planet, or will inadequate action condemn the living Earth to catastrophe?

The rescue will be no small task. We must cool our planet by changing our energy systems and the way we move, work, and produce. This requires the redirection and reinvention of much of the economy in the shortest possible time. If we value life, the time has come to incorporate climate-change objectives into the structure of economic management.

In 1929, much of the world was plunged into economic depression and ma.s.s unemployment. In previous economic collapses, unemployment was treated as a personal tragedy for the individual, because the downturn was accepted as a natural feature of the economy. During the Great Depression, unemployment became an issue to be consciously dealt with by economic management. New economic theories (most famously, those of John Maynard Keynes) and the rising power of organised labour demanded action to restore jobs and economic balance.

While the Depression gave birth to macroeconomic management, the Second World War drove the development of many of the tools. There was an imperative to harness the entire industrial economy to the war effort. Systems of national accounts and indicators such as Gross Domestic Product were refined, and methods for enlarging and steering the productive capacity of the economy were created.

The climate and sustainability emergency presents a remarkably similar challenge. The behaviour of a world economy that has been unconcerned with environmental costs is the princ.i.p.al cause of the emergency; but the solution lies in harnessing its productive capacity to build climate-safe infrastructure and macroeconomic governance which ensures that such severe problems never arise again.

The relative prices of raw materials, energy, environmental capacity, and ecosystem services must be set so that, socially and privately, the most profitable action coincides with protecting the environment and conserving resources. Two important tools are eco-taxation and rationing, the latter setting a declining limit on environmentally adverse economic activities by auctioning permits. The revenue raised can be used to make changes in infrastructure, industry sectors, and regional economies to deliver goods and services in new ways. This is the domain of industry policy and regional-development policy. New policies are also needed to build skills and capabilities, and to foster innovation and strategic management.

Plans to reduce greenhouse emissions must be comprehensive. We could virtually eliminate climate pollution from most aspects of our lives, but if just one sector - transportation - were to be overlooked, our efforts would be undone.

Air travel as a sector, for example, is the fastest-growing producer of global greenhouse emissions. Aircraft emissions from high in the atmosphere have an effect 2.7 times as great as the same carbon dioxide pollution at ground level. There are few readily available low-impact fuel subst.i.tutes. In Australia, taking into account the projected increases, total air-travel emissions by 2020 will have an impact equivalent to two-thirds of a tonne of carbon per person. Air travel alone will be enough to blow a sharply declining carbon budget.

The total quant.i.ty of all greenhouse emissions would be best controlled by rationing, rather than by standard eco-taxation. Existing 'cap and trade' schemes are generally deficient: they include only some emissions, they give away permits, they legitimise rorts, and they fail to deal with cross-border problems.

There are, however, some good rationing models that have been proposed. An approach that has been considered by the British government, and that seems well suited to the demands of the sustainability emergency, is the introduction of personal carbon allowances (or rations) to guarantee that the national greenhouse emissions budget is achieved.

The system could work in an Australian context as part of a safe-climate strategy. An authority independent of government, like the Reserve Bank, would set up a national greenhouse-emissions budget each year. The amount of emissions would be decreased each year, through a series of downward steps (to zero), in accordance with a rapid transition plan. Because households (in Australia) are directly responsible for about one-quarter of emissions (generated princ.i.p.ally by household energy use and private travel), one-quarter of the carbon budget would be made available free of charge to each citizen as an equal 'carbon credit' (or ration), via an electronic swipe 'carbon card'. The card would be used to draw on an individual carbon-credit balance each time household gas and electricity, petrol, and air tickets were paid for. Unused credits could also be sold. For the energy embedded in purchased commodities, such as food and personal services, the carbon ration would already have been for paid by the manufacturer, and its cost would be built into the consumer price. If a person lacked the greenhouse-emissions credits to cover a purchase, or they were an overseas visitor without an ent.i.tlement to emissions credits, they could buy credit at the point of sale.

The balance of three-quarters of the national emissions budget would be auctioned to business and government in an emissions-credit market, where the price of emissions would rise over time as the quant.i.ty was progressively reduced. Businesses or individuals would also be able to sell excess emission credits. Because individuals and businesses would be able to trade their credits within the overall limit set by the national greenhouse-emission target, there would be a financial incentive to make a rapid switch to low-emissions technologies. If a new technology required less of an individual ration compared to the technology it replaced, it would be more attractive, so businesses would have an incentive to make long-term low- and zero-emissions investment decisions.

Rationing is feasible and was used very effectively during the Second World War and for some years afterwards. Studies in Britain showed that war rationing was accepted because it was seen as both necessary and fair. There was a booming black market, in which rations were bought and sold informally, because goods were in short supply and ration cards could not be officially traded. But in response to shortages of some goods - because war needs were a higher priority than consumer demand, or because precarious merchant s.h.i.+pping could not carry the volume of imports required for normal market trading - the population accepted the argument that, for basic necessities such as fuel, some foods, and clothing, it was fairer to get an equal ration than to restrict demand by raising the price. This contrasted with the very unhappy experience in the First World War, in which the free market had operated and there was rampant profiteering in the face of shortages.

British feasibility studies suggest that perceived limitations of a carbon rationing system could be resolved; for example, concern about the capacity to efficiently administer and track people's carbon allowances is unfounded. The transaction costs of using a personal carbon 'smart card' would not be overwhelming and, in practice, would be less demanding than systems like Australia's Medicare health care scheme.

We are already seeing the rising cost of energy, water, and food to households and consumers, for reasons including the increasing price of oil, international compet.i.tion for secure energy supplies, and rising energy costs. These rises also reflect, in part, the higher cost of water, which is used in large quant.i.ties in coal-fired generators. One manifestation of the sustainability crisis that we can see today is increasing fuel poverty in lower-income households. Carbon rationing could exacerbate fuel poverty, but all measures that put a price directly on carbon, such as taxes, create this problem. Studies in the UK show that carbon allowances would be more progressive than a carbon tax. Even if the revenues from a carbon tax were recycled through the tax system as effectively as possible through targeted increases in benefits to low-income households, carbon rationing would still produce a fairer outcome.

Either way, there is a need for government to mandate and provide resources for upgrading the energy efficiency of domestic and commercial buildings, and goods and services, so that people on low incomes do not face unmanageable costs. Such programs are well established in countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.