By that time many aspects of it had been determined by the previous two books. I needed it to be in Orange County, California; I needed it to be fifty years in the future; and I needed to include the old man who had also been a character in the other two stories, so that he would have three lives, each radically different — this was the triptych’s way of illustrating the way our individual lives are greatly influenced by the history we live in.

Through the previous sixteen years I had read all kinds of utopian literature. What emerged as most important for my novel was the utopian non-fiction of the 1970s, books which I think were a manifestation of the hippie generation growing up, beginning to have kids and trying to plan how to live the ideals of the revolutionary sixties. These books made quite a bookshelf: The Integral Urban House, Progress as if Survival Mattered, Small is Beautiful, Muddling Toward Frugality, Appropriate Technology and so on. They are still worth reading, but they were all unaware of the coming Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution, which would render them largely irrelevant in the following decade. It would be nice to have a publishing series that reprinted them all, for they would still be full of interesting ideas, even if their technologies have been sometimes superseded. They would make a portrait of the hopes of that era similar to the portrait created by the era’s science fiction; the two literatures would be complementary.

These non-fiction utopian writers, plus alternative economists like Hazel Henderson and Herman Daly, were the main influences on my third California volume, Pacific Edge. These influences were not particularly radical politically, but they did outline ideas that I thought could be realistically postulated for a US culture only fifty years off. Despite their help, I found it an extremely uneasy experience to write a utopian novel, and when I was done with it I sent it out into the world with a sigh of relief, thinking, ‘I’ll never do that again’. I couldn’t quite articulate the source of my unease, but it felt like some kind of category error.

Then my friend Terry Bisson was talking to me about the book, and he asked me, ‘How did your utopia come about, Stan? What’s the history that explains it?’ Well, I had made gestures towards an explanation in the book’s italicized sections; I had even written an italicized section in which Tom Barnard suggested ten or twelve different ways his internal utopia could come about, as a way of admitting how hard it was to imagine such a history. I had cut that section, but as I began to rehearse my various historical explanations to Terry, he shook his head. ‘But Stan,’ he said, ‘there are guns under the table’.

At that point the Mars Trilogy began in my head. I was struck by the truth of Terry’s remark, and in fact it makes for one of the better chapter titles in Red Mars. I thought: ‘OK, granted there are guns under the table. Utopia is not going to come easily. We therefore have to try the story again elsewhere, invent a utopian history, maybe give it 200 years to develop rather than fifty, and tell the whole thing explicitly’. So one of the many motivations for the Mars Trilogy was to somehow fix the previous book, which of course is not really possible. And yet I find I often write in order to explain or correct unsatisfactory things in novels I’ve finished.

The Mars novels therefore described three revolutions, because I felt that in Pacific Edge I had dodged the necessity of revolution, however broadly conceived. And yet I was not comfortable with the idea of re-invoking the violent revolutions of theeighteenth and twentieth centuries; they didn’t seem appropriate to Mars, or to our current world either. The classic revolutions had often been failures, in the sense of causing such violent backlashes that they made more problems than they solved, principally by institutionalizing violence. I also felt very uncomfortable about being a first-world person stating that revolutions were necessary in third-world countries, when first-world weapons systems would then be used against them. Revolution itself needed to be reconceptualized, I felt; and indeed in the various velvet revolutions of 1989 I had just seen different models for rapid change in the social order. These new images for revolution became one of the central preoccupations of the Mars novels. We’re still stuck with this problem, of course, because we still need a revolution or two.

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution.[i] This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we’re not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

So if science itself was to be my utopian way, and Antarctica was famously called ‘the continent for science’, then maybe that was the place on Earth that was already the most utopian space. It was worth having a look; besides I like wilderness, mountains, glaciers and so on, and Antarctica is nothing but those things. Because of my Mars books, the US National Science Foundation was willing to send me south as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program. Thus Antarctica eventually came out as a step along my way: I wanted to show what a continent run by scientists for scientists is actually like. That book was a lot of fun to research. As far as you can tell when you’re there, the continent runs using a non-monetary economic system, where food, clothing, shelter and fuel are all provided by the community; and at the same time you get to do what you want in terms of your project. It was a limited version of utopia, but interesting as a kind of laboratory experiment, a brief experience of how it might feel to live in a different social order. It was not exactly Orwell in Barcelona, but exhilarating in a different way. And it was very useful in my attempt to combine utopian and wilderness thinking, also to bring all these things closer to home than Mars.

Then came The Years of Rice and Salt, which at first I thought of as a break from utopia. But when I was trying to imagine a world history with Europe taken out of the picture by a very fatal Black Death, I quickly discovered what I felt was a problem. I didn’t want to make that alternative world worse than the one we’re in, because that would be racist and unwarranted. I didn’t want to make it better than our world, because that would be reflexively politically correct, and also unwarranted. But I couldn’t make it equal to our world either, because that would be boring — pointless in narrative terms. So my alternative history couldn’t be worse, it couldn’t be better, and it couldn’t be equal. My options seemed kind of limited. But what came to me as my solution was simply the idea of the future, and of utopia again. In the novel, at the equivalent of our year 2002 (the book’s date of publication), my alternative world would be, I decided, roughly equivalent in its goodness to our own, reached by its different history; but it would then continue past our moment some seventy years into the future, and we would then see them finally make a good job of things. This gave the novel a utopian ending that I hoped would exist as a challenge to our world: could we, starting from roughly the same position, do as well as this fictional world without Europe? This late utopian element got me past the better/worse/same conundrum, and added a little sting to the book’s tail.

At this point it felt like I had developed a kind of habit. But it was not the time to try to break it. In the previous years I had spent a fair amount of time at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC, and it seemed to me more than ever that this institution, and science more generally, represented a kind of proto-utopian space. I felt that the scientific method, and scientific institutions in our world, were under-theorized utopian attempts to change the world, made by people who would rather not think about politics, yet would very much like to do some good. These impressions led me to the trilogy I call Science in the Capital. I wanted to imagine the first step toward utopia, starting in our world now. If we could make a bridge across the Great Trench to utopia, what would be the first footing? I wanted to think about how utopia might start from our current conditions; to describe, in effect, the start of a scientific revolution. Not the Scientific Revolution of the early modern period, but rather a new revolution, enacted by scientists in the world we live in now.

I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.

Having written that book, describing science as a crucial utopian force, I began to ask myself: but what is science? And how did it start? That led me to Galileo, as some kind of ‘first scientist’, and thus eventually to my most recent novel, Galileo’s Dream (2009). It is not a utopian novel, I am relieved to say, but it is a novel about science and history, and their interaction; and it is a science fiction novel.

So that’s my account of this aspect of my career; how, despite my uneasiness concerning utopia as a literary genre, I have nevertheless been writing them for a long time. I am one of the very few serial offenders, you might say, at least in modern times. It has been a source of stress to me, I admit, for there is no doubt in my mind that a ‘utopian novel’ is a strange project, a bastard form — an amalgam of two genres which are in many respects not at all compatible. It’s like saying, ‘Let’s make a new genre — we’ll throw together architectural blueprints and soap operas’. That’s obviously a bad idea. And yet there it is: that absurd hybrid is the utopian novel.

But the problem really is even worse than that. It involves a version of David Hume’s ‘is–ought problem’: there is the world as it is, and the world as it ought to be. It is difficult to see how they connect, which is Hume’s concern; but the novel, it seems at first glance, is about the world as it is. So if you want above all to write good novels, then what is should be the subject matter; it’s a matter of fidelity to the real. So realism becomes the default preferred form for the novel. And it’s the novel that matters to me; I don’t care about utopia per se — it’s literature that I love, and the novel in particular. So for a long time I experienced the utopian imperative that I somehow put on myself as a burden, because I felt the reason we read novels, indeed the reason we love all art, is that it gives us the real. I knew this was philosophically difficult territory, but my love of literature had to do with a sense of recognition — the moment of reading when you say, ‘Yes that’s right; that’s the way the world is; this book has illuminated the real’. To hold a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet says to the players. That’s what art seems to be for.

Instead of this recognition of what is, the utopian novel hopes to create a vision of the way things ought to be. It’s a profound shift of focus, which has often created in me the feeling of working across the grain of my hopes. It has taken a lot of years of worrying about this to pull apart the notion of what realism might be — to understand that there is never a mirror — to see that the moment you start to write sentences, you’re portraying something that ought to be. All novels are utopian in this respect: they propose that life means something. And meaning itself is a utopian wish. So, if the novel is about what life means, and if it concerns itself with individuals in their society, then whether that society is portrayed as better, worse or the same as ours is not the important point. All portrayed societies are stylized and hypothetical, a projection of the writer’s wishes and ideology. Seen in that way, a utopian novel is only a tiny bit less realistic than the most naturalistic realist novel out there. Or put it in reverse: a realistic novel is a kind of utopia in disguise.

Or so I have tried to reassure myself. However, I must say that when I read the part of Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) that speaks of the impossibility of imagining utopia,[ii] I found the notion comforting. ‘Ah ha!’ I cried. ‘I was trying to do something impossible!’ It explained a lot.

Ultimately, however, I think this notion that we cannot imagine utopia is mistaken. We can imagine utopia; it’s as easy as pie. The constraints are very slack, and our imaginations strong. We are quite capable of taking the present situation, and all history too, and ringing every possible physical and logical change in our ideas to make something new; and some of these newly invented systems could be declared viable, even though radically different from the current moment. It’s not quite like imaging a new colour or a tenth dimension. It has more to do with justice, a very archaic primate concept, a concept that predates humanity itself. A better political order, even a truly good political order? No problem!

Of course there is a problem, and that’s the getting from here to there. But let me come back to that later. First let’s briefly contemplate some of the utopian descriptions and blueprints out there today. Take the work of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, for example, their ‘Participatory Economics’, which they also call ‘parecon’ in a neologism worse than any science-fiction writer’s. Despite that tone deafness, it’s an interesting system: a non-capitalist co-operative society in which people band together in small collectives, and then, instead of buying and selling things like a company, they fill out lots of requisition forms, somewhat in the style of a Chinese work unit or even a soviet. You fill out a form for what your group is going to make that year, you fill out a form for what your group is going to need that year to make what it will make, and so on. It resembles the situation Francis Spufford describes in his novel Red Plenty (2010), in which Soviet cyberneticists in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s desperately attempt to invent computers powerful enough to run the Soviet economy in top-down, non-market fashion, before the system collapses — something they never managed. Now, with much more computing power than it would actually take to run such a non-market society, the idea is there to be contemplated again. Possibly such a society would feel a bit like Antarctica does now under the National Science Foundation. When I tried to imagine the continuous form-filling required, I confess I began to think, ‘Well maybe money isn’t so bad after all’. Possibly it would not be a very appealing utopia to live in, but we don’t know; and in any case it’s fully worked out, an alternative system that with modern supercomputers could very possibly work. Maybe the computers could even fill out the forms. An algorithmic artificial intelligence economy; it’s worth considering.

The problem, however, with this and all other utopian alternatives, is that we can’t imagine how we might get there. We can’t imagine the bridge over the Great Trench, given the world we’re in, and the massively entrenched power of the institutions that shape our lives — and the guns that are still there under the table. Indeed right on the table. The bridge itself is what we can’t imagine — and maybe that’s what Jameson means: but then it’s not utopia we can’t imagine, but history. Future history, the history yet to come. And that makes sense. History has been so implausible that there’s no reason to suspect that we will ever be able to accurately prophesy or describe the history that will come next.

Therefore the main project of all science fiction — that of imagining future histories — is impossible. Imagining a positive history which gets us to a better state is perhaps even more impossible, but in any case very difficult, and now more than ever, now that it’s clear we are entering an era of climate change and population overshoot which will impose radical physical stresses on both human and natural systems. This aspect of things now refuses to be kept out of the picture. Climate change is inevitable — we’re already in it — and because we’re caught in technological and cultural path dependency, we can’t easily get back out of it. The example of the ocean liner that can’t be turned around in less than ten miles is actually a very simple metaphor for the kinds of path dependency we are caught in; the infrastructures we build have lifetimes that last decades, sometimes centuries, and changing them necessarily takes time. We’re probably not going to be able to cap the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at less than 450 parts per million, and 560 parts per million is quite possible. At that point we will be living on a quite different planet, in a significantly damaged biosphere, with its life-support systems so harmed that human existence will be substantially threatened. It has become a case of utopia or catastrophe, and utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.

Climate Change and the Necessity of the Utopian Project

So let’s shift gears now, and consider utopia not as my literary problem but a shared social vision, with this extra burden laid on it: not just that the present is bad, but that the future will inevitably be worse in environmental terms. In fact it is worth discussing first this question: is it even possible at this point to avoid a catastrophic crash of human and natural systems? Or are we already in a kind of Wile E. Coyote moment, that moment when he’s chasing the roadrunner and goes over the cliff, and looks at the audience, legs spinning, to only then discover he’s out there in space, though gravity has not yet caught him? Are we indulging in a fantasy if we imagine that we could recover from this path we are on, if we were to do something?

Well, this is the kind of question that is worth asking the scientists who study these problems in a quantitative ecological sense, analysing it as a problem in global energy flows. The Socolow wedge diagrams out of Princeton suggest that yes, it is still possible for us to ratchet back from the edge of catastrophe by decarbonizing quite rapidly, which means applying every single method contemplated as soon and as fully as possible. We’re about at the moment where we’re leaving the cliff’s edge, but that’s better than running the numbers and finding you’re already out in space.

There are well-articulated plans to get back to solid ground coming from many places, including Lester Brown and his Worldwatch Institute; their ‘Plan B 3.0’[iii] is a fairly detailed plan of action. Indeed many government agencies and NGOs and institutions around the world are busy articulating these plans, and it’s reassuring to think that we’re not living in an utter fantasy of salvation. Practical plans have been proposed, and there really still are grounds for hope. But we have to act.

So the question of history returns. How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.

When thinking about this situation, this moment that simply has to change, those of us in the developed world, the privileged world, tend very naturally to ask: even if we do survive — to accomplish that — will it be bad for us? Will we be unhappy? Will we lose our privileges? As Jameson observes at one point in his long essay on utopia, people are anti-utopian not necessarily because they’re political reactionaries, but because utopia might change them utterly.[iv] And such a profound change is a fearful thing, almost like reincarnation: if you come back as someone else you’re not really you, so in fact you haven’t come back at all. Utopia would be as pointless as heaven, if you were no longer you. And you are your habits, or so it usually feels. So what would happen to prosperous first-worlders in a utopia of survival, where everyone had an equal share of the Earth’s ‘natural capital’? For it’s very commonly said, by quite mathematically sophisticated people, that if we tried to spread human and natural wealth equally over the entire seven billion of us, then everyone would be poor.

This too is an interesting question to run the numbers on. The Swiss, being prosperous and practical, have already started to run those numbers: one result of that inquiry is the 2000 Watt Society. Their notion is that if the total amount of energy available to humans right now were equally distributed among the entire seven billion of us, each person would have the use of about 2,000 watts.[v] It isn’t a lot of energy, but it’s not negligible either. Some Swiss have decided to run an experiment living on that much, and now there are people in Basel and Zurich trying it. The Swiss have some local advantages in this experiment: they live in a small country in Europe, a continent with an amazingly rich infrastructure, built partly with the spoils of their colonialist plundering of the rest of the world. You can therefore live on 2,000 watts in Europe and be quite comfortable. There’s public transport, there are efficient small apartments, and so on. While this living experiment doesn’t give all the answers, it is nonetheless suggestive. It looks like a huge amount of our energy burn right now is pure waste in terms of improving the quality of our lives, assuming that quality is conceived in terms of health, happiness and sustainability. Much that is burned is simply wasted. Right now the average Swiss citizen uses 5,000 watts, Europe as a whole averages 6,000 watts, America 12,000, China 1,500, India 1,000 and Bangladesh about 300. You get a sense of the range. And right now we live in an extremely dirty and inefficient technology, a kind of global Stalinist Cheylabinsk-56. What has been invented and designed already to replace this crude old tech would by itself make an immense improvement in energy efficiency and carbon burn, and more could come after that. The realizable goal is a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative civilization. This swapping out of our energy technology is part of the necessary work of the twenty-first century, but it can also mean full employment, population stabilization, and eventually more watts for everybody equally.

This vision of an overarching social project makes it possible to say more to young people in the first world than, ‘Sorry, we torched the world and now you have to live like saints and suffer’. That’s not a great message to take to the young, and also it’s not correct. We in the hyperconsuming first world are actually experiencing our extra carbon burn as more of a burden than an enhancement. It measurably degrades our physical and mental health; it cocoons us in crap — we’re not fully there in the world. So we need to burn less carbon for ourselves as well as our home; it’s not a matter of puritan renunciation, but rather becoming more clever and healthy. There is a comfortable way forward for all, in other words, if comfort is conceived of as a sense of achievement. There’s a utopian spark in that thought, a spur to action.

I wrote a bit about this notion in the Science in the Capital Trilogy — that a decarbonized life might bring us more alive than we are now in our thick, dirty technoshell. I have sometimes called this utopian vision ‘the Palaeolithic plus good dental care’, hoping to suggest that since we’re still genetically the same creatures we were 100,000 years ago, we could become again those same animals, living fulfilled and complex existences, without capitalist hyperconsumption — but with the best parts of modern technology conserved, to reduce suffering and thus increase happiness. What the human sciences are telling us now is that the closer you live to a Palaeolithic lifestyle — with good dental care — the better off you are. This is another utopian thought, coming straight out of the latest scientific findings: we are happiest when we are healthiest, and we are healthiest when we live a life that engages us in the physical world in a rather low-carbon-burn way. Walking around outdoors a lot, talking, the occasional dash or tumble, making a meal together, and so on. These low-carbon activities are often felt as the best part of the day, and that’s no coincidence.

This description can be given to young people in particular as a possible life project worth doing. Young first-world secular citizens exist in a crisis of meaning: they know life needs to be about more than hyperconsumption, but what that ‘more’ might be is not clear. Meaning has never been priced and thus it is confusing. This existential crisis is very real; we need meaning to go forward, and yet capitalist society doesn’t provide it. Now, at the beginning of the climate-change era, the start of the Anthropocene, that meaning is simply evident in the world — really it’s forced on us by the situation — we have to decarbonize, which means changing everything, which means utopia, all for survival and for our descendants. This is a life project with a sense of accomplishment in it. With the idea that you could do things smarter and thereby have more fun, capitalism as it stands now begins to look not only morally obese, but also unskilful, even a little bit stupid.

The project, for all of us alive today, then breaks down into practical reformist strategies, like supporting social democracy and the various green political movements, while keeping more radical further goals in mind. And when people bring up geo-engineering, one can say, ‘Yes, we’re doing that already by accident, and really the smartest geo-engineering we have is swift de-carbonization’. One can promote a notion Jameson has mentioned once or twice, that of full employment. Full employment would get needed work done, and it is also a paradigm buster for capitalism, which needs unemployment to get ‘wage pressure’, meaning fear in more and more workers. So we have structural unemployment; yet just by asserting that everybody deserves a job as a human right, the system is challenged. Full employment also suggests the idea of a living wage, therefore poverty reduction, which is in itself a powerful climate-change technology. This needs to be insisted on, to make sure that climate change action doesn’t somehow become a merely technological question, with the implication of some kind of silver bullet solution out there that will allow everything else to go on as it’s going now. That’s not going to happen. So changes that dismantle some of the fundamental injustice of capitalism while helping the climate situation are a stranded double good.

Always in this, supporting science is a necessary part of the project. It isn’t the same as supporting capitalism, as some critics seem to assume. We need to de-strand those two, and recognize that science is our ability to increase our ability to understand the world, and then to manipulate it for our collective good.

While I support science as the best name for our species’ life-support system, I also recognize that many scientists are like the character Beaker in The Muppets, geeking their way through life, their education deep but narrow, making them often naively unphilosophical, to the point where they think that what they do is straightforward and non-political. It’s the humanities’ job to disabuse them of that mistaken notion, by way of fully supportive lessons in history, philosophy, political theory, rhetoric and literature. The humanities need to educate the sciences rather than attack them; this education is not an option, if you want to be aware of how the human world works.

The humanities’ stereotypical attack on scientists looks like this: take the Monopoly game figure of the Capitalist, with his top hat and round belly, and imagine that he pays Beaker from The Muppets to invent a gun, and then he seizes the gun and puts it to Beaker’s head and says: ‘Make me more guns and make me more toys’. Beaker’s eyes are round as he complies. Those of us in the humanities, watching this scene and imagining we’re somehow not already implicated, say, ‘Damn it Beaker, I see you’re part of the problem. You even invented the atom bomb!’ And Beaker whispers to us, ‘There’s a gun to my head. And there’s a gun on you, too. Can’t you see it? Why are you blaming me?’

Yet we do; we go on blaming science for something that is not the scientists’ problem but rather our general problem as citizens. Scientists need both our support and our ability to give them a political education, pointing out their own potentiality, their embodiment of a utopian effort that has continued for centuries now. The various components of the scientific method, and the structure of scientific institutions, are simultaneously both a method for discovering nature and a utopian political program. But who knows this; who admits this; who works with this knowledge?

I think it helps to think of this large social project, which we must now accept as ours, in terms of the concept of scaffolding. James Griesemer of Univeristy of California Davis shared with me his notion of the human generations’ efforts as each building a scaffold for further work by descendants, who work at some kind of higher level. It has been about 400 generations since the end of the last Ice Age, so we can put ourselves in that long succession, and imagine that our generation is building a scaffold on the shoulders of the many generations that came before. A coral reef isn’t a bad analogy either: you build your level; you can’t leap to heaven — if you try you will crash back down, maybe even crash a few scaffolding levels below you. So here, facing climate change, proposing utopia as in effect the only solution that will work, we still need to think of the project as a transgenerational thing that will take generations to accomplish. We can’t panic, nor can we give up just because we can’t do it all in our lifetimes. We face an ecological emergency; but even here, all we can do is work on our present reality, and build what we can. I’m aware that I’m arguing conservatively here, but I’m arguing for reforms so numerous and systemic that ultimately they will add up to revolution — to post-capitalism, to utopia — but some generations down the line. We can’t imagine the details of how this will happen, but the general outlines of the project are clear enough from here to make a start. And the necessity is clear. Hopefully, we’ll get there as fast as we can, and meanwhile we can throw ourselves into our moment of the project.

Let me finish by quoting from Voltaire, the somewhat ominous but ultimately practical final sentence of Candide: ‘Keep a garden’.

[i] R. Williams, Towards 2000, London, Chatto and Windus, 1983, pp. 267–9.

[ii] F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York, Verso, 2005, pp. 231–3.

[iii] Plan B 3.0 is available for free as an ebook at <www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3>, accessed 22 March 2011.

[iv] F. Jameson, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, New Left Review, second series, no. 25, 2004, pp. 51–2.

[v] Technical details of the actual numbers are available at <www.novatlantis.ch/en/2000-watt-society.html>, accessed 22 March 2011.

Tim Jackson asks, through a critique of the core commitments of society to economic growth, how it might be possible to build a sustainable economy that can avoid climate catastrophe. Among a large range of concerns, he pursues this question by asking how we might come to radically different concepts of ‘flourishing’ for individuals and communities, notions of flourishing that contrast with those offered by the apparently limitless consumption lifestyles of contemporary global social institutions. His portrayal of the utter disaster that awaits us if we proceed down the road of what is now called ‘Recovery’ is comprehensive and disturbing. He knows any answer will take time and emerge out of practical endeavour, but a visceral need to commence a process urgently is in the foreground of his thinking. For those who attended, this is where it is at.

In Perth in the same week our leading mineral entrepreneurs led demonstrations against a resource tax proposed by Kevin Rudd, a tax that would be used to help reduce government deficits resulting from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and related stimulus programs introduced to ensure Recovery. Neither the entrepreneurs nor any of our political leaders—other than Bob Brown—would seem to be on the same planet as Jackson’s Melbourne audience. At the centre of their political and entrepreneurial concerns is the pursuit of economic growth and profit—and more generally the core assumption that expansion is good—the same way of life that Tim Jackson convincingly tells us is doomed and can have no medium-term future. Rather, the official political debate in Australia, excitedly promoted by the media, is a stoush between combatants over the distribution of the spoils from toxic economic expansion. What might be sustainable over time could not be further from their thoughts.

The tunnel vision that characterises mainstream Australia takes a different form in Europe and the United States, where Recovery is far from certain. In Australia the dependence on China, and to a lesser extent India, is stark and anxiety provoking, but for the time being makes Australia look ordered and relatively prosperous. In Europe and the United States the levels of state indebtedness has flown out of control. Arguably such indebtedness can be managed over time with a regime of economic growth. But in our times at best this could only be a solution at great cost. The powerful states of the capitalist heartlands stand vulnerable and could not sustain themselves in the face of another shock. But we have entered an era where shocks are the order of the day.

The shock of debt crisis in Greece in past months is one kind of experience. The Greek government was forced by the institutions of the EU and the IMF to slash welfare, public spending and workers conditions generally to reduce deficits and maintain EU membership. This association of Greece and the EU had mostly generated positive consumption benefits until the crash. Suddenly in the aftermath of the GFC expansion and consumption growth had inverted into debt, unemployment and the collapse of social security. The resulting turmoil on the streets made headlines around the world. But one would be hard put to portray these events as those of a public seeking to live another way. No doubt there are sectors of the Greek polity that would take up this concern. And there are other features of the situation in Greece that are quite specific. Nevertheless expressions of consumer frustration were to the fore in these events.

Where people have been drawn into the world of the consumer oriented to commodities and have lost their sense of mutuality with others—or think mutuality can be found on Facebook—they respond in ways consistent with that hyper-individual formation. We can expect similar responses over the coming period in many a city in the West. As Mark Lilla argues in The New York Review of Books (May–June 2010) in a discussion of the rise of the ‘Tea Party Jacobins’, there is a new populism at large. Quite unlike the populisms of the past, it is based in the new individualism which is constituted in the experience of the consumption lifestyle.

But the loss of mutuality is more complex than this. ‘Facebook mutuality’ is real but it cannot distinguish between technologically facilitated presence and presence based in place, the senses and tangibility. And this distinction lies at the core of the emerging ‘two worlds’. For the importance of locality, regional economy, generational knowledge of others, together with the critique of the global transport of people and commodities, compose some core elements of the emerging critique of global development. To see this as an advocacy of a return to forms of domination and hierarchy embedded in history—a return, say, to an aristocratic conservatism—is to misunderstand the nature of the contradiction that now faces us, one that has been discussed for many years in Arena Magazine and Arena Journal.

On the other side of the world another drama is shockingly underlining the contradictions of our times—the massive eruption of oil 1500 metres below the surface of the ocean off the coast of Louisiana. Far larger than the Exxon-Valdez spill and still not controlled, it will foul the fisheries and the coastline of the immediate East Coast—possibly much of the East Coast—of the United States. Ways of life and pristine environment will be ruined on a monumental scale. Various causes have been identified: corruption and cost-saving inside the corporations, poor technology and inadequate regulation. But most parties, and especially the media, ignore the dependence of the global economy and way of life intimately, in endless detail on oil—from transport to food, from packaging to building. If high tech frames the global Behemoth, oil plays a central role in its growth. For at least ten years it has been known that our world of cheap energy is coming to an end. Dogmatic deniers aside, those who have investigated its future availability come up with the same answer: it has no future. Heedless, a way of life desperate to maintain itself nevertheless launches into dangerous exploration in the deep sea, with what many see as predictable outcomes. One scientific commentator, feeling compelled perhaps to step outside his disciplinary strictures, declared we have opened mythological doors and that nature is now releasing its dark, uncontrollable underside. This is by no means the only underside of the global juggernaut.

While President Obama is signalling (unconvincingly) that the oil spill marks the end of US dependence on fossil fuels, barely believably but illustrative of the social divisions that are emerging, others in the eastern states of the United States are seeking to put aside the temporary ban on off-shore oil drilling because it is causing unemployment in the industry.

Two social worlds are forming. There are many spectators for the time being, but enough people now know that global development is calling into being the stuff of collective nightmares.

Capitalism has encountered a number of social and cultural movements that sought to block its general development. There was Romanticism in the early and mid 19th century, socialism in the mid and late 19th century through well into the 20th century, fascism and Nazism in the early 20th century, and the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It adds little to say that they all failed, but all have nevertheless had effects and continue to influence social thought. They all have to be learnt from in one way or another.

In these instances there would have been no movements of substance without a ferment developing in the universities and institutions of learning. Leading through broad debates about cultural choices, the universities made a crucial contribution to practical transformation. Are there signs of a ferment in the universities emerging today?

The first thing to say is that Tim Jackson is himself a sign of an emerging challenge within the institutions. That he bridges the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences is important. But, to be precise, he comes out of the ecological sciences, where a ferment that has been developing over decades. This gathering ferment in the first instance is not especially socially oriented. Rather it expresses profound dismay at the implications of what has been discovered about the environment and climate change under the impact of growth-oriented Homo sapiens.

The second thing to say is that while this could support a more general ferment in the arts, humanities and social sciences, it has not done so as yet. It may be bubbling away and could well suddenly take form. One can readily advocate such because it is hard to see how there will be a sufficiently challenging social movement without such a development responding to the rising concerns of the general population.

The third thing to say is that our universities have changed compared to the past and that this change is almost certainly at the centre of contemporary quietism in the face of fundamental challenges. (In this issue of Arena Magazine see Rod Beecham and Simon Cooper for a discussion of some of the issues.) During the upheavals of the 1960s, especially in the United States, the humanities and social sciences were outspoken while in the background the hard sciences—or, more accurately, their practical derivative the techno-sciences—together with university authorities were quietly developing relations with industry and government—with capital. This relationship was founded in the new cornucopia that was promised in and emerging from the techno-scientific revolution. Two generations on, it is this relationship that typifies the university. In other words the university as institution has become a central player with capital in the practical development of the global economy and culture—to the point where capitalism per se is no longer an adequate description of contemporary society. The endless cornucopia of material goods and individual lifestyles that lies at the heart of the contemporary crisis is, unlike any earlier social crisis, closely interwoven with the university, and with this shift there has been an inversion of institutional traditions and relations of power and influence.

Every academic working in a university today knows in intimate detail what this has meant for the institution and how it impacts on them as thinkers. It does not mean that they are necessarily contained as individuals by this development but practically speaking, to this time, this has been the collective effect. Tim Jackson will testify to the way this has worked to encourage silence. Until there is a ferment that begins to target this core developmental relationship it will be especially difficult to agitate for a different cultural and economic course into the future.

If there are signs of two worlds developing on the cultural stage, they have not yet taken a mature form within the universities. The need could hardly be more pressing.

John Hinkson

In the last section of the book, entitled ‘Climate Change: The Urgent Challenge’, essays by Ian Lowe and Guy Pearse do begin to address growth, limits to growth or the particular modes of consumption and production of energy resources that lead to atmospheric and climate degradation. Yet even there, the particular sources of today’s unprecedented reconstitution of production together with its vast expansion of globalising processes are not directly related to climate change. The way of living that produces climate change is still taken to be another variant of the capitalist process. The possibility that this way of living may only be one aspect of a far more deep-seated transformation is not entertained.

Is the absence of a sufficiently developed theoretical framework that can begin to address the actual sources of the new found conjunction of the more abstracted technosciences with capital a source of this failure?

Is the challenge this presents to what we take to be the foundations of our being the actual source of the denial and passivity of our response to the prospect of environmental disaster?

The actual response to changing circumstances among the remaining contributors to this volume is a slewing away from any line of enquiry which considers more basic issues. Instead they offer a focus on the global financial crisis and the way in which the discrediting of ‘market fundamentalism’ and the excessive greed and individualism integral with the neo-liberal ideology opens the way for a return to a social democratic polity. Even given that redirection to the active regulation of capital, there is an astonishing absence of any explicit discussion of just how more favourable conditions for tackling climate change might prevail within a social democratic order. Perhaps one should assume that Manne, McKnight, Rudd or Quiggin simply take this for granted. As if in backhanded confirmation of his own ethical assumptions, Robert Manne deplores ‘the destructive role played by neo-liberalism in inhibiting an effective response to climate change’.

While the new post-capitalist conjunctionof capitalism with the technosciencesmay be seen as radically deepening a climate crisis, there is little reason to believe that a simple renewal of social democratic concern for the common good can provide an effective answer. This is by no means to dismiss the genuine significance of that concern. Rather it is to suggest that a social democratic polity is not, by itself, a likely source of the necessary level of resolve.

One main reason for that conclusion is that the history of the ethical resolve to democratically regulate capitalism ‘from within’ is one of failure. As a system it both out-produced and made its own limited ideological contribution to the self-destruction of the revolutionary socialist alternative. Social democracy, at least in its beginnings, was the parliamentary path to much the same concern for the common good as revolutionaries pursued: that of ending capitalism. Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, social democracy retained its name but changed its objective. The Keynesian answer to the capitalist cycle of growth and collapse was not to reject capitalism but to regulate it. Finally, the neo-liberal period of unprecedented growth produced the certitude that no further crisis could eventuate  open-ended growth and the prescriptions of supply-side economics were held to provide a final solution. Nevertheless the crash occurred and any effective answer must surely move beyond ‘more of the same’: a return to social democracy.

A democratic answer now may be slow in the making, but first and foremost it must generate a practical response that begins to move beyond the far too limited response of regulating capital. That practical engagement depends first of all upon renewed movement among those same intellectually related groupings who have been drawn into a conjunction with capital. Would anyone deny that their engagement and support has been a necessary condition for the surge of productivity and the individualist enchantments that have defined the recent period of neo-liberal ascendancy?

The practical movement to which I am referring is grounded in a relatively basic, as if spontaneously given, form of social interchange. It expresses a sensibility which begins to become more explicit in many contexts: in politics most readily seen in the Green movement. It is practical first of all in the sense that seemingly spontaneous acts are often experienced as if they do not have conscious intent. They appear to be grounded in a taken-for-granted sense of the relative permanence of our being in its relation to the natural world. That sense of permanence can readily feed into a rejection of changes that undermine our basic sense of being. It can begin to prompt an alternative to the mainstream impetus to half-blindly enter a process of transformation that introduces a break in the continuity of the human condition.

Given its intellectually related formation, the challenge to continuity presented by the technosciences can more readily ground a reflective awareness among those who more actively enter the practice of reconstitution: those same intellectually related groupings which, for the present, are in thrall to capitalist ‘growth’. Among them some begin to articulate a response that recognises that the significance of growth, of progress as well, if pursued blindly in the name of individualised freedom, begins to pass beyond the limits of what most people still take to be the relative permanence of the human condition. Set now within the conjunction of a capitalism and a relation to reality which breaks with these still prevailing assumptions of relative permanence, a reconstitutive practice can work towards a different order of being.

That particular sense of the natural order of being has been ‘contained’, as it were, even for millennia. Throughout the history of class societies the more abstracted powers of the intellectually related practices have elaborated interpretations of ultimate meanings which often legitimated domination by those whose privileges depend upon the labour of others.

Interpretation has been the primary activity of intellectuals; that is, until the intellectually related practices also began to play a major role in the reconstruction of labour as such. First, that is, in its rationalised mechanisation under industrial capitalism and then in the actuality of the transformational break mediated by the reconstitutive practices of the technosciences.

* * *

There is no space in this short comment to cover ground already traversed in earlier articles in Arena Magazine concerning the distinctive form of life of the intellectually related grouping. However, it is of some interest to note that, in some implicit register, the project of social democratic renewal may itself be displaying hints of a break from the limitations of its own commitment to capitalist continuity.

In their introduction to this volume, editors Manne and McKnight join Rudd and several other contributors in their over-endorsement of the role of ideas, of political ideologies especially, in the formation of social realities. The reconstitutive transformation we are facing now cuts deeper than ‘ideas’ alone can encompass. At least at the level of apprehension, Rudd himself suggests a certain discomfort with the strictures of the continuity which his own ideology imposes. Listen to the portentous ring of his opening passage as reprinted here, following its first publication in the recently declared social democratic organ The Monthly!

From time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place.

This is the language of discontinuity, not that of regulating yet one more convulsion within capitalism, or even one more reversion to well-intentioned attempts to reform or regulate it in the name of the common good.

So, by way of an endnote, are we actually saying Goodbye to All That?
The history of this title hardly encourages optimism.

Only a few among the present generation would recognise that these words previously served as the title chosen by the English poet Robert Graves as he worked towards personal regeneration following the immersion of his own generation in the slaughterhouse of World War I. At least in an historical sense it was a distinctly temporary departure. It was no more than an au revoir to All That. Maynard Keynes recognised that the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of the war, also sowed the seeds for the renewal of conflict in the conflagration which commenced in 1939.

That war ended in 1945 at Hiroshima in an event which, as mediated by intellectual practices, reconstituted war making. It replaced the mechanised conflict of armed men by deploying the product of a physics laboratory. Was it also of truly seismic significance—a ‘turning point between one epoch and the next’, of far more general significance than even this particular event of nuclear war could encompass? Was it a portent of a shift towards the possibility of a reconstituted reality? That is, a reality in which nuclear power is only conceivable as integral with that more abstracted mode of engagement typifying the intellectually practices.

The front cover of Goodbye to All That? symbolises the great financial crash of neo-liberal capitalism by depicting a jet aircraft standing on its nose while displaying only the slightest denting. It certainly looks as if it could fly again!

At least in the immediate sense nothing said about the limitations of this collection of essays should deflect recognition of the reality that no sudden break from post-capitalism is possible. The post-capitalist process has now so worked its way through every institution that even the institutions of intellectual formation have lost much of their once quasi-independent status. Drawn into the role of direct support to the powers, their instrumentally rational expression in the technosciences becomes the main source of a post-human trajectory. Within that trajectory climate change may be seen again as only one among its potential consequences for the human condition.

If ‘some rough beast now slouches towards Bethlehem’ its present course can be redirected. In a major degree that prospect depends on an enhanced understanding among the intellectually related groupings. Their distinctive and more abstracted mode of engagement with reality co-exists with their openness to that same spontaneous sense of erosion of their own basic humanity that affects their peers. For them, most radically, it also allows a critical reflection upon the present dominant trajectory. That power of reflection above all requires them to form a new and far more active constituency within a ‘social democracy’ which helps to draw its now shortsighted forerunner into the practice of actually constituting a more viable way of living. In their distinctiveness they must stand up more vigorously than ever before; in the name of an enlarged sense of the common good, they must break the bonds of dedicated service to the existing powers.

Over the past year, I’ve been visiting communities in the Pacific islands, to ask people about their concerns on climate change and to find out what they’re doing to respond to the adverse effects of global warming.  From renewable energy initiatives and community-based vulnerability training to advocacy at international meetings, islanders are actively engaged in responding to the climate emergency.  But the enormity of the environmental impacts already locked into the ecosystem means that some people are debating whether they’ll need to leave their homelands.

You can’t help but focus on the human impacts when visiting low-lying islands in the Pacific.  The potential hazards are obvious on atolls like South Tarawa in Kiribati, a narrow strip of land 40 kilometres long but only 50–100 metres wide.With land areas just metres above sea-level, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages of storm surges and more intense cyclones.  Facing salt water inundation of agricultural land and fresh water supplies, these threats to coastal villages tend to concentrate the mind about the powers of the elements.  For low-lying atoll nations in Polynesia and Micronesia, the potential failure of the Copenhagen negotiations and delays in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to forced displacement.  However, the current intergovernmental Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change (PIFACC), developed by the Forum member countries, makes no mention of displacement or migration.

In spite of this, some Pacific island governments like Kiribati, Tokelau and Niue are openly discussing issues of relocation and resettlement due to climate change.  In July 2007, a joint statement from Pacific environment ministers to the Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) noted: ‘The potential for some Pacific islands to become uninhabitable due to climate change is a very real one.  Consequently some in our region have raised the issue of their citizens becoming environment refugees … Potential evacuation of island populations raises grave concerns over sovereign rights as well as the unthinkable possibility of entire cultures being damaged or obliterated’.

In August 2009, the outgoing chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Premier of Niue Toke Talagi, says it may be time for the regional organisation to formally consider the issue of resettlement of people affected by climate change.  Speaking at the official opening of the 2009 Forum leaders meeting in Cairns, Talagi stated, ‘While all of us are affected,the situation for small island states is quite worrisome.  For them, choices such as resettlement must be considered seriously and I wonder whether the Forum is ready to commence formal discussion on the matter’.  Across the Pacific, there are a number of examples where people from low lying islands are considering relocation after being affected by extreme weather events, tectonic land shifts or climactic change that damages food security and water supply.

The case of the Carteret Islands in Bougainville is well known, where Ursula Rakova and the local NGO Tulele Peisa are assisting families to resettle on church-donated land on the main island of Buka.  There are similar problems looming in other outlying atoll communities, such as the Duke of York atolls (a number of small low-lying islands in St.George’s Channel near Rabaul in Papua New Guinea) or the Mortlock Islands in Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia.  In the Solomon Islands, tectonic plate movement and sea-level rise may lead to the displacement of people in outlying atolls like Ongtong Java (Lord Howe) or artificial islands like Walande in Malaita Province.

But what will resettlement involve? To hear about the experience of people who’ve already been forced from their homes, I visited the islands of Western Province in the Solomon Islands, which were hit by a tsunami in April 2007.  More than two years after the tsunami, many people on the main island of Gizo are reluctant to return coastal villages, and are still living in improvised housing up in the hills and mountain ridges.  At Titiana, one of the coastal villages on Gizo that bore the brunt of the tsunami, you can see the damage to community infrastructure.  Villager Orau Mote shows us where the school, church and pastor’s house were swept away—all that remains is a pile of concrete and steel rods.  Children in Titiana have been using large tents as their school rooms, provided by UNICEF and the Ministry of Education.  Titiana’s United Church pastor Motu Tarakabu told me that many residents are still traumatised by the disaster.  ‘Only about 20 per cent of residents have come back to the village after the destruction of the tsunami.  Many others have decided to stay away and remain up in the hills—they have fear in their heart.  People are still strong that they won’t come back to the village.’

Driving up the mountain ridges, you meet people from the coast who are refusing to resettle in their former homes and are building new houses to replace the tents and tarpaulins supplied after the disaster.  Some villagers are rebuilding on land provided by clan relatives, but many are squatting on government land alongside roads and logging tracks.  Orau Mote explains that a number of people of Micronesian heritage were relocated from the Gilbert  Islands to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate during the era of British colonial rule.  For these migrant communities, displaced again by the tsunami, there are new problems—people of Melanesian heritage often have clan and community links that can assist with resettlement.  For non-Indigenous communities, even those who have lived in the Solomon Islands for decades, it is harder to find access to land and resources.

The villagers have sought support from Oxfam and the Solomon Islands Red Cross for provision of water tanks, corrugated iron for water catchment and housing, and other support services.  But conditions remain difficult for the displaced communities, in spite of their resilience.  Sale Sam, who lives in Tiroduke camp up on the ridges above Gizo town, said, ‘Until Oxfam provided water tanks, we had to cart water for miles.  The hill tops are very exposed—the wind blows from all directions, unlike the village which was sheltered’.  Children from lower grades are attending classes up in the hills, but for senior grades the children need to trek down to the coastal villages each day, travelling kilometres to school.  On the coast, women used to go out on the reef at low tide to collect crabs, shellfish and other seafood—an important source of protein to add to food grown in village gardens.  But now it’s harder to easily access this vital food supply.  ‘Our diet is changing now that we live on the higher ground’, said one camp resident.  ‘The men still go down to the coast to go fishing, but we don’t go out so much on the reef.’

Although in his sixties, Sale Sam still works to support his daughter Jocelyn, who relies on a wheelchair for mobility as they make a new home.  For me, the resilience of this young woman, living in a wheel chair on a mountainside in the Solomon Islands, symbolises the larger challenge—what will displacement mean for the many thousands of people who face relocation in coming decades because of climate change?

Refugee or migrant?

In recent years, there is a growing academic literature on climate change, forced migration and conflict, but a mixed response to the concept of ‘climate refugees.’  The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) argues that the term ‘environmental refugee’ is not appropriate, as the definition of refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention and international humanitarian law has particular limits, covering people who are seeking protection because of a well-founded belief of persecution related to their religion, ethnicity, political beliefs etc.  Signatories to the 1951 Convention have specific legal responsibilities to people who reach their territory and claim asylum and protection, and refugee advocates are reluctant to see these state obligations watered down.

As noted in an October 2008 UNHCR briefing paper Climate change, natural disasters and human displacement: UNHCR has serious reservations with respect to the terminology and notion of  ‘environmental refugees’ or ‘climate refugees’.  These terms have no basis in international refugee law.  Furthermore, the majority of those who are commonly described as environmental refugees have not crossed an international border. Use of the terminology could potentially undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees and create confusion regarding the link between climate change, environmental degradation and migration.

Part of the problem is that key UN agencies responsible for displaced people have no formal mandate to address the climate issue.  UNHCR does not cover people who are displaced internally or seek refuge overseas because of environmental causes.  However, because of its practical experience in dealing with large scale forced movement of people, UNHCR staff and resources have increasingly been allocated to support operations in the aftermath of major natural disasters (such as the 2004 Asian tsunami, 2005 South Asian earthquake, 2006 floods in Somalia and 2008 floods in Burma, amongst others).

UNHCR is worried that its existing responsibility for refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people will be overwhelmed by the tens of millions of people potentially displaced by climate change.  However the numbers of people who meet the definition of ‘environmental refugee’ are also contested.  Studies have cited global figures ranging from 200 million (researcher Norman Myers) to over 1 billion potential refugees (a 2007 Christian Aid report).  But migration specialists have questioned these numbers, arguing that people affected by environmental impacts will not necessarily cross international borders to seek refuge.

An important 2008 study on forced migration and climate change from the Norwegian Refugee Council, Future floods of refugees, raises crucial qualifications on the term refugees:  There seems to be some fear in the developed countries that they, if not flooded literally, will most certainly be flooded by ‘climate refugees’.  From a forced migration perspective, the term is flawed for several reasons.  The term ‘climate refugees’ implies a mono-causality that one rarely finds in human reality.  No one factor, event or process, inevitably results in forced migration or conflict.  It is very likely that climate change impacts will contribute to an increase in forced migration.  Because one cannot completely isolate climate change as a cause however, it is difficult, if not impossible, to stipulate any numbers.  Importantly, the impacts depend not only on natural exposure, but also on the vulnerability and resilience of the areas and people, including capacities to adapt.  At best, we have ‘guesstimates’ about the possible form and scope of forced migration related to climate change.

Agency and choice

When they look at international rather than domestic impacts, climate advocacy groups in Australia and New Zealand have highlighted the issue of ‘Pacific climate refugees’ in their campaigning.  Many have argued that Australia and New Zealand, as the largest members of the Pacific Islands Forum, have particular responsibilities to their island neighbours.  But do people debating the issue ever ask those most affected what they really want? It may seem trite to see people in developing countries as actors rather than victims in this global emergency, yet much of the climate literature presents the Pacific’s only contribution to the climate debate as a loud ‘glug, glug, glug’ as the islands sink beneath the waves.

The issue of displacement raises a number of practical, emotional and political responses.  In interviews with people around the Pacific, different opinions came from the elderly compared to younger people who have more flexible skills for migration.  As one old man in the Solomon Islands told me, ‘They talk about us moving.  But we are tied to this land.  Will we take our cemeteries with us?  For we are nothing without our land and our ancestors’.  Community activist Annie Homasi from Tuvalu says the slow pace of action by large industrialised countries has the potential to cause uncertainty and even division in the local community, for people who are fearful they may have to relocate from their homes.

‘There’s quite a debate at home, maybe even a division, between the older generation and the young people.  Because they go overseas for school, the young ones say, “Yeah, we have to move”.  But the older ones say, “This is me, my identity and my heritage—I don’t want to go”.’

There are also complex cultural responses in the Pacific, with many religious people stating that God will not forsake them.  Some old people deny any long term threat from floods and rain, citing Biblical injunctions like God’s promise to Noah after the Flood: ‘neither will I ever again smite everything living as I have done’ (Genesis 8:21).

Most Pacific governments are still reluctant to focus resources on displacement issues, because they feel this will acknowledge defeat and undermine negotiating positions at the international level, as they press for stronger targets in the Copenhagen negotiations.

Government leaders from Kiribati and Tuvalu continue to stress that increased mitigation efforts by industrialised nations should be the focus of activity.  Speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 2008, Tuvalu Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia stated: We strongly believe that it is the political and moral responsibility of the world, particularly those who caused the problem, to save small islands and countries like Tuvalu from climate change, and ensure that we continue to live in our home islands with long-term security, cultural identity and fundamental human dignity.  Forcing us to leave our islands due to the inaction of those responsible is immoral, and cannot be used as quick fix solutions to the problem.

Open borders

Most of the discussion of climate displacement in Australia focuses on the need for Pacific Rim countries to change their migration policies.  But the language of the debate revives past fears about being ‘swamped’ by immigrants or asylum seekers.  Concerned activist groups stress Australia’s moral obligations to open its doors while conservatives respond with refrains that echo John Howard’s infamous dog whistle, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

Environmental groups have argued that Australia’s existing humanitarian immigration quotas should not be allocated to climate- related refugees and that an additional category is required.  The Migration (Climate Refugees) Amendment Bill 2007 advanced by the Australian Greens proposed the creation of a new visa class to formally recognise climate refugees, but lapsed without support from the major parties.  Other options could involve an expanded system of free migration as already exists between Australia and New Zealand, which enjoy shared migration rights of free access and permanent residence.  New Zealand’s Pacific Access Category, which provides migration quotas for citizens from Tuvalu, Kiribati, Fiji and Tonga, provides a de facto window for migration from climate affected countries, even though the New Zealand government has not explicitly recognised this as an option dedicated to people affected by environmental impacts.

In contrast, some Pacific leaders have suggested that it may be more appropriate to call for Australian and New Zealand financial support for the resettlement of people to other Pacific islands, to provide agricultural land and a suitable cultural context for displaced rural communities.  A key feature of environmental displacement in the Pacific is that much of the movement is internal, rather than across international boundaries, which places extra burdens on national government budgets as well as host communities who accept people from other areas.

But money is not enough.  A worrying feature of the debate about ‘climate refugees’ is that the bald predictions of forced relocation give little agency or choice to the affected communities.  Compared to a rapid natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, the ravages of climate change will mount over time, so people can be engaged in discussing the options.  We must  learn from the failure of past resettlement projects in developing countries, which comes not just from inadequate inputs of resources but from the inherent complexity of this as a social process involving human beings with hopes, dreams, aspirations and especially memories.  Relocation and resettlement is not simply a material infrastructure process—it is also a social process and there are a number of issues of co-operation, voice and justice that need to be addressed.  How do you promote resettlement with respect for equality and equity?

Moving to a new location within a country or across international borders is just the first step, and there are a host of political as well as technical dilemmas for communities on the move:

• Do displaced people have a say in the design and construction of new communities (for example, site selection that can provide water, arable land and other resources; culturally appropriate housing in terms of size, design, spacing and materials; settlement design to allow social and cultural interaction)?

• Are people being compensated for need or loss (that is what they need for survival or for what they feel they’ve lost)?

• Can you be compensated for intangibles, such as the grief of losing a home, or loss of political and cultural identity?

• Will the wealthy leave early, and leavebehind those with fewer resources?

• Will displaced people be better serviced by donors than existing members of the new host community, causing inter-communal tensions?

• Should old power relations and systems of chiefly rule be recreated, or are they tied to past relationships with the lost land?

This raises the core question of whether funding for adaptation and relocation will be allocated without the engagement and consent of affected communities.  Is planning for relocation being done with people or for people?  The potential for displacement because of climate change needs extensive community participation and debate, as noted by Betarim Rimon of the Kiribati Ministry of Environment: ‘In Kiribati, we are talking about relocation over time rather than forced displacement.  We think about relocation as a long, thought out, planned process.’  Kiribati President Anote Tong stressed this in his address to the opening session of the 2008 UN General Assembly: The relocation of 100,00o people of Kiribati, for example, cannot be done overnight.  It requires long term foward planning and the sooner we act, the less stressful and less painful it will be for all concerned.  This is why my Government has developed a long-term merit-based relocation strategy as an option for our people.  As leaders, it is out duty to the people we serve to prepare them for the worst-case scenario.

Australia refuses to plan ahead

In ‘Engaging our Pacific Neighbours on Climate Change’ – Australia’s latest climate policy statement issued in August 2009 – the Rudd government notes: ‘The potential for climate change to displace people is increasingly gaining international attention.  Australians are aware of and concerned about this issue.’  But we need more than awareness and concern.  Successive Australian governments have failed to engage in foward planning involving communities and governments around the region, to address the issues of displacement from a rights-based approach.

For many years, Pacific Rim governments have been reluctant to publicly address this issue.  In October 2006,the then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone stated that her Department had not made any plans to deal with people displaced by environmental or climate change, arguing, ‘There’s no such thing as a climate refugee’.  In November 2006, Secretary of the Department of Immigration Andrew Metcalfe told a Senate estimates hearing that the Australian Government had done no planning on how people movement caused by climate change in the Asia-Pacific region might affect Australia.  Since then, however, the debate has been flourishing amongst security analysts and strategic think tanks, which have focused on border protection and the potential for conflict overland and resources.  In 2007, the then Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty sparked a political debate when he argued that climate change will turn border security in Australia’s biggest policing issue this century.  He stated that climate change could increase displacement and migration in our region.  ’In their millions, people could begin to look for new land and they will cross oceans and borders to do it.  Existing cultural tensions may be exacerbated as large numbers of people undertake forced migration.  The potential security issues are enormous and should not be understated.’

The securitisation of the debate has also been highlighted in Force 2030 – the May 2009 Defence White Paper issued by the Rudd government.  This is the first the climate issue has been discussed in a Defence White Paper, but it does not really reflect a shift in focus from ‘national security’ to ‘human security’.  In the paper, action on climate changed in reframed through the prism of border security:  The main effort against such developments will of coarse need to be undertaken through co-ordinated international climate change mitigation and economic assistance strategies…should these and other strategies fail to mitigate the strains relating to climate change and they exacerbate existing precursors for conflict, the Goverment would probably have to use the ADF as an instrument to deal with any threats inimical to our interests.

Will people displaced by global warming be redefined as ‘threats inimical to our interests’?  Social justice activists need to reframe the debate, to highlight the right to development for affected communities wherever they are, rather than just focussing on the need for mitigation rights.

]]> http://www.arena.org.au/2009/11/losing-paradise/feed/ 3 http://www.arena.org.au/2009/02/reading-climate-change/ http://www.arena.org.au/2009/02/reading-climate-change/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:33:15 +0000 christopherscanlon http://www.arena.org.au/?p=6 The vagaries and deep uncertainties resulting from the global financial meltdown of October 2008 continue to dominate the media and preoccupy individuals and the business world. If raw survival is not quite the issue, financial ruin is now a real threat for many. Simultaneously, on quite another level, feelings of disturbance and dismay about the prospects for the future, even near future, arising out of climate change are widespread. In terms of practical action these two broad influences tend to work against each other: after all, we have been told many times that economic growth means that the cost of responding to climate change is only a minor burden. However, a response when there is no economic growth is a complete unknown, throwing government policy into disarray.

Nevertheless, the background concerns about a natural world that can no longer be taken for granted continue to gain momentum. While the significance of empirical evidence is never straightforward, massive transformations in the broader environment, like the dramatic collapse of the Arctic ice-sheets, in place for millions of years, have an immediacy of meaning compelling for many people. Many scientists agree. Similarly, the increasing occurrence of extreme events such as the recent Victorian bushfires are calling into being a new awareness of what the world and Australia may face over coming decades. The likelihood that developments such as these will have significant, if not entirely predictable, consequences for our future world generates deep foreboding. If the global financial collapse disturbs our sense of certainty, climate change now eats away at the grounds of our being.

In 2007 the Rudd Labour government was elected on a platform that contradicted the denialist stand of John Howard. No one could really know at the time what this commitment meant. The term ‘climate change’ does exist as media rhetoric, requiring little substantial understanding of the phenomenon, and we know that Kevin Rudd does know how to manage the media. But even if it were so that a serious understanding of the phenomenon supported the policy shift, this could only ever be a starting point. After all, serious concern can issue in a superficial view that a new mix of policies will quickly restore balance. Isn’t it so that if we focus our intelligence and our technical resources any problem can be managed?

The larger question, usually ignored, has always been how climate change relates to social assumptions. This is not merely a matter of assumptions about energy, as important as they are. The relevant distinction is between processes that can be manipulated through policy responses and those that work at the deeper level of our core assumptions about social life. While there is no doubt that policy is important, it is also limited, especially if it ignores a fundamental change in the conditions of policy formation.

A focus on assumptions that might lead in the direction of destructive climate change must reach down into the cultural assumptions that we feel, but barely ‘know’. Where these assumptions are ignored or merely re-shaped a little within a broad approach to social life that goes unquestioned — the use, say, of solar rather than gas heating, electric rather than oil-fueled cars — climate change is being treated merely as a phenomenon that requires technical change: lifestyle modifications, limited costs and new policies. It will be argued that this approach will be disastrous in a number of ways, especially in seeming to respond to the ‘problem’, easing public anxiety while locking society into a deepening crisis. Even the understandable tendency to turn the debate into a consideration of whether we should aim for 350, 450 or 550 ppm of carbon in the biosphere — a matter that surely must have an answer — easily and usually deflects the debate into a series of technical strategies that leaves untouched the realm of deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life which it has now become imperative to question. The question of ‘What is to be done’ is pursued within the terms of the society that we have; not only is large-scale social change off the agenda, the type of society that we have is not brought into the foreground.

This absence of social interpretation is a familiar tendency in environmental writing. The question of the social conditions of environmental destruction is hardly ever raised. We must of course be grateful for the insights environmentalists and scientists continue to bring to the climate change question but this does not preclude coming to terms with the limits of current perspectives. The tendency is to concentrate on what is happening in ‘nature’ and not on how social assumptions structure our relations with it. Examples of this treatment of assumptions could easily be multiplied. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse the social only appears in the broad brush-stroke sense of ‘society’ making choices. Because there is nothing distinctive about the social assumptions that lead to the choices; those choices are, implicitly, forms of stupidity or mistakes. In George Monbiot’s Heat, a non-specific notion of ‘society’ is at work in those choices that encourage air travel — a choice that from the standpoint of global emissions is disastrous. But what is the distinctive nature of such a society, why does it so privilege air travel, both taking it for granted and treating it as essential? This level of understanding is typically ignored in environmental perspectives and this absence has the unintended effect of privileging policy and technological solutions over deeper cultural and social institutional solutions. Given the significance of climate change this hiatus predictably will have tragic effects.

Three recent publications illustrate different implications of this tendency to neglect the social world most people too readily take as given. They are Ross Garnaut’s The Garnaut Climate Change Review, David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. Anyone who reads these books will learn from them. They contain a diversity of important information and reflect the maturing of empirical research and debate about climate change over the last five years. But they also contain a level of assumption — one deficient in understanding — that they also share. Arguably, such assumptions lie at the heart of barriers to significant action to combat climate change today.

The Garnaut Report is a report to government. It represents an enormous effort that combines an exhaustive compendium of various developments relating to climate change with modelling for different policy possibilities. It is by definition a policy document, addressed to Kevin Rudd and the Labor government in Canberra. It has been widely criticised by environmentalists and others, especially when the Rudd government adopted a minimalist response with respect to the level of emissions reduction by 2020. The basis for this policy was laid at the feet of the Garnaut Report, although it would be unfair to suggest that this is what Garnaut had intended.

Garnaut’s passion is not at issue. The Report shows every sign of being written by a person determined to take the immensity of the climate challenge seriously. It takes up a great variety of developments now discussed in environmental circles and is both informative and well-informed. However, given it is infused with a belief that all the necessary choices can be made through the policy realm and that these will make the difference that matters, it ignores the underlying conditions of policy formation. Hence it collapses into a series of compromises that indicate its broad, unreflective commitment to the contemporary global order. It is structured around a contradiction. All of its policy proposals to tackle climate change occur within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation. This is a direct consequence of treating climate change as a straight-forward policy issue that assumes that a series of strategies — even radical strategies — will constitute an adequate response. Many people from various standpoints have been highly critical of Garnaut, but no one has really discussed how his given framework, with its focus on policy, shapes what it discusses and proposes.

The problem with Garnaut’s (and with Rudd’s) emission trading scheme (ETS) generally is its central belief: that neo-liberal globalisation is capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. For Rudd and his many supporters (for example, David McKnight), this is simply another case of the need for government intervention in an instance of market failure, not unlike what is needed to handle the global financial crisis. Rather than accept this view as a rejection of neo-liberalism, it will be argued that this is in fact a massive contradiction: the core institution that is called upon to respond to climate change by sending out appropriate ‘signals’ — the market — is actually the main driver of the climate change crisis. Garnaut’s focus is upon the level of emissions and what policy strategies can be adopted to reduce them and bring them under control. But if the explicit signals to reduce emissions are promulgated by the market, an institution in its present form that calls out by its very structure further consumption of resources and expansive lifestyles, he has settled for a ‘solution’ that will predictably fail. No doubt, some worthwhile changes may be possible, but they will not be the main story. Amazingly, even a crash program to renew power generation via renewable energy has been put aside. This is to be left to ETS modifications to the market, the market as dominant institution being non-negotiable.

In part this can be understood as a consequence of Garnaut’s own contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, he is deeply concerned about and committed to a significant reduction of greenhouse emissions; on the other, he is a significant architect of the global order through his practical advocacy of institutions devoted to global free trade, in turn legitimised by the pursuit of global growth through expansionist trade. In his book Heat, George Monbiot convincingly argues that the growth of global travel is inconsistent with any serious attempt to control emissions. But he fails to come to terms with how this is an implicit critique of the global order itself. And he does not generalise his work on air and shipping travel to the world of trade. But it is able to be generalised and it amounts to a significant critique of the core institutions of the globalisation process.

Trade and travel on varying scales are activities that have been typical of most societies throughout history. However, under conditions of contemporary globalisation, trade and travel take on qualities that do not compare with past circumstances. They become key institutional expressions of a society that has fundamentally changed its structure: a change in balance from social relations that are predominantly local and face to face to a new social principle where relations maintained at a distance better typify its core qualities. Other technological supports to these social relations where the other person is largely unavailable at a face-to-face level — such as computerised communications and the media generally — are also crucial institutional spheres in such societies. But the social institutions associated with trade and travel are perhaps the clearest illustrations of how social assumptions bear on climate change.

There are serious questions about how trade (or travel) can occur on anything like the scale required in a radically globalised society in the future simply because of the growing shortages of fuel needed to sustain it. But quite apart from that, trade — the lifeblood of an order that expands through global exchange — is a symbol of practical activity that feeds global emissions. No doubt many put their faith in the magic of a technological solution, and this can never be entirely ruled out. But it is a hope that resembles past hopes of a perpetual motion machine. In clinging to this hope there is a refusal to consider the proposition that the social assumptions that drive society towards globalisation are core problems leading to destructive climate change.

There are many reasons for questions around social assumptions in destructive climate change being ignored. For a start, the critique of capitalism from a social standpoint has typically addressed social assumptions as set within class relations. Such approaches have never offered much insight into relations with nature and the environment. This is to say that social interpretation, like practical capitalism, has taken relations with nature for granted. Nature is always implicitly ‘there’ to serve social needs. But this attitude is no longer viable. Society not only ravages what is left of nature but, crucially, also treats it as radically malleable — as able to be reconstituted by scientific technique.

The assumptions inherent in neo-liberal thought that bear on nature and the environment are now widely assumed and are not easily put a side. As is all too evident in the work of that key figure of neo-liberal thought, F. A. Hayek, the central tenets of the contemporary order, supported by the market, are rampant individualism and growth. The glorification of expansion — not only of economy, but also population — is a central legitimation of the neo-liberal idea. Supported by a ‘spontaneous’ background structure — the market — and recently supercharged by high technology, neo-liberalism has unleashed a growth machine that consumes and transforms the world around us. While temporarily constrained by a global financial crisis it is, short of a basic and radical challenge, seen to be the only trajectory available to any process of renewal. Rudd’s response to the neo-liberal global financial crisis, to pose government as an indispensible sector in addition to the market, is of little help. It takes on board neo-liberalism’s own self-understanding which poses the choice between market and state as the crucial, defining issue. His ‘radical’ move is to simply seek a ‘balance’. While a role for government in social affairs is not at issue, Rudd’s response lacks insight into the social processes that bring neo-liberalism into being, as well as how it affects social relations. Nor will any technological strategy be capable of challenging this complex of neo-liberal commitments. It is the main social trajectory, and how it is situated within people’s assumptions, which is the question.

In these circumstances, the consequences for the environment of ignoring social assumptions are beyond calculation. There can be no serious response to climate change without a serious response to what counts as development: the endless elaboration of strategies of social expansion that typify what is called globalisation. Climate change as a policy response needs to be displaced by a response that bites more deeply into what we assume and how we act as social beings.

The recent book by David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, is highly critical of the Garnaut Report as well as Rudd’s policies. It is a much more political book than Garnaut’s could ever be. In fact it is a mixture of argument about the latest developments in climate change and arguments about how to turn climate change perspectives into a handbook for political activism. Like Garnaut, but in a more focused and economical way, it contains many discussions of practical developments in environmental thinking and analysis that a reader can learn from and even be inspired by. It is infused with a sense of desperation about lack of action on climate change, which would be shared by many people knowledgeable about the findings of climate science. But it takes this desperation into territory that, while understandable, is ultimately wrongheaded and even counterproductive.

The organising idea of the book is the concept of the ‘state of emergency’. As I understand it, this idea as related to climate change first came from James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, where he argues that the situation of the world, combining climate change with various other environmental concerns, is such that an emergency in the form of a war economy is justified and necessary. As a way of signifying the seriousness of the state of the world this seemed like a justifiable strategy to focus people’s attention — to jolt them out of normality. Spratt and Sutton take this idea up with zeal, showing how a political emergency could work as a practical response to the challenge of climate change. While Kevin Rudd would certainly disagree with this one-eyed emphasis upon state action because he seeks a balance between state and market, Spratt and Sutton’s proposal shares with Rudd the idea that the proper focus of practical action lies between the institutions of state and the market. This is a consequence, as was argued in relation to Garnaut, of climate change basically being a policy issue that leaves way of life questions unexplored — although the idea of a more powerful state is an important addition in the case of Climate Code Red.

This emphasis has the consequence of turning climate change responses into political strategies of a rather narrow kind. The whole idea of the political emergency has a long history, one which, as in conditions of war, can readily set in place processes that lack empathy for others and respect for democratic rights. It assumes that the process of renewal is largely known and only requires right action. That the crisis may require a more complex consideration of assumed cultural attitudes and social expectations does not really fit the method. It is true that we have an emergency. It does not follow that we need a political emergency. It is true that if our politicians continue to mouth rhetoric and do nothing of any real substance they may call into being a political emergency. But the hard work lies elsewhere.

Climate change must have a politics, but one that captures the distinctive qualities grounded in what we have previously assumed in our relations with nature. Those qualities are cultural, in the sense of deep assumptions leading us on to a variety of (unintended) practical outcomes. To focus on the complex of commitments within neo-liberalism may allow a little more insight into how we have been drawn into a development nightmare, but to do so it is necessary to go beyond neoliberalism’s self-understanding. For it has no insight into how even Hayek’s recommendations have come to have new meanings under the influence of a cultural revolution that has made our globalised world and drawn society down a blind alley or, perhaps more to the point, onto an unsustainable developmental path.

But this unsustainability has a much larger frame of reference than environmental processes. Whether responding to climate change, resource shortages, food shortages, overpopulation or the global financial crisis — the list is near endless — it is essential to come to terms with a new social force in the world. Neo-liberalism captures some of this social complex, but the way society and the market have been transformed over the last twenty-five years requires a deeper understanding than the reference points celebrated by adherents of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal market is actually a ‘hyper-market’ when compared with the one with which Adam Smith was familiar. There would be no globalisation, no global financial revolution, no global financial melt-down, no Margaret Thatcher or John Howard without the social process that has issued in various technologies such as the silicon chip and the communications revolution more generally. This social process is typically treated as though it were a natural phenomenon, simply taken as fact; as just ‘being there’. But to leave it there is to ignore the distinctive qualities of global culture and related social forces.

There will be no comprehensive understanding of the kind of society that has taken shape since the early 1980s without a grasp of the emergent role of intellectual practice that issued in the high-tech revolution. For the first time in history the intellectual practices shaping the high sciences have engendered a practical revolution in core social relations, productive economy and culture that has changed the relation of society to nature fundamentally. This relation is now a more abstract one because high technology supports new forms of relations mediated by technology and thereby the emergence of a radical extension of sociality, an enormous expansion of social relations with little reference to place — the global. Without this radically enhanced sphere largely ‘situated’ in cyberspace, there would be no experiments in global finance and expanded levels of growth. Nor would there be that overwhelming sense of omnipotence vis-à-vis all prior societies that is so typical of global culture. And climate change, while issuing from forces with a longer history, would not be running haywire at nearly the same rate. Nor would science be contemplating projects to respond to climate change that threaten to carry us into a post-human world.

There are two broad responses to climate change apart, that is, from trying to deny it. The first and most common response is to find ways of reducing global emissions. But there is another approach that is now being taken seriously in various circles that arises from a view that the world cannot easily pull back from disaster in coming decades and that to avoid these it will be necessary to geo-engineer Earth.

This possibility is forthrightly discussed in Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. This book too is environmentally well-informed. It constructs scenarios of possible futures for different parts of the world if no serious response to climate change emerges very quickly. Needless to say, the scenarios are grim. If it is thought that we are already experiencing a global refugee crisis, read Dyer’s account of the abandonment of southern Europe by European culture, because lands around the equator have become intolerable under the influence of rising temperatures, and their displacement by desperate peoples from Africa. Or if China seems all-powerful because of recent levels of economic growth, read his account of the decimation of the core productive lands of middle-China within decades, with consequences so dire one feels real reluctance to reproduce them in print. It is a fine line, but perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

It is the attitude of Dyer towards geo-engineering Earth that I wish to place most emphasis on because it raises key contradictions inherent in the present crisis. Geoengineering is about various practical ways in which science might protect the Earth from the consequences of excessive carbon, for example, projecting large quantities of sulphates into the atmosphere to shade the planet. But the larger point is that the high sciences are now taking on this strategy as a project. The argument in this essay has been that environmental writing should not ignore the social assumptions that lie behind climate change; that social assumptions are major causes of climate change outcomes. In the case of geo-engineering the issues are somewhat different. Here it is a question of how climate change may call out the massive powers of high technology to generate a response to it.

Dyer has come to the conclusion that geo-engineering in one form or another is required for us to survive the next few decades. Here there is considerable agreement with a range of commentators that we do indeed face an emergency. Dyer also shares with Spratt and Hutton the view that society is already engaged in geo-engineering by emitting carbon on a scale that is shaping and transforming the Earth. But this use of the term geo-engineering normalises its meanings, suggesting that unintentional causes and the highly intentional act of bringing planetary-scale high-tech solutions into play are one and the same.

To go down this road of geo-engineering in today’s world requires a shift from climatology to general science or physics. It requires a shift from a practical science that transforms particular matters on Earth in a manner consistent with its conquest, to taking Earth as its object with a view to re-constituting it (as Geoff Sharp argued in ‘There are Limits to the Unexamined Life’, Arena Magazine no. 98). This is the project of the high sciences, one first initiated in the splitting of the atom and the making of the Atomic Bomb. Now the full range of high technologies shape new worlds as a matter of course, while humanity loses touch with its place in the world. The re-constitution of the species, the concern of bio-technology, will be matched by the project of geo-engineering Earth. In both cases the sciences will draw on massive forces never before available to humanity and the dangers of moving into a post-human realm devoid of all familiar reference points presses ever closer. If the fears called into being by climate change point to the end of our taken-for-granted Holocene world, what irony if our social responses ensure that outcome.

The global institutions that make up the neo-liberal world represent one of the choices possible after that fundamental shift that ushered in the world of high technology. This particular choice harnessed high-tech to the world of capitalism and as such opened up the possibilities of a post-capitalist order (in the sense used by Geoff Sharp, Arena Magazine 98) that no longer restricts humanity and the Earth to given limitations. This is a world that can only continue in a post-human form, together with a geo-engineered climate.

A world that accepts the high-tech revolution but also works within the limitations of the species and responds to climate change by preserving the natural world is possible. It could be both diverse and complex and in turn would be constrained by a reflexive knowledge of social assumptions. It will need to be more circumspect than what we associate with radical globalisation, with a greater emphasis on local cultures and modest ways of living. The social and individual excitements of expansionist culture and economy will be displaced by the real and concrete joys (as well as hatreds) of social relations significantly grounded in the face to face. When combined with technologies that are emission-free, the real challenge to climate change will have begun.

The books referred to in this essay are: Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review (Cambridge University Press, Australia, 2008); David Spratt and Philip Hutton, Climate Code Red, The Case for Emergency Action (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008); and Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008).

There was trouble everywhere with words in this terrible experience. The existential terror, such awe-struck horror: they are visceral and bodied; description failed many a correspondent, while their wavering, or panicked voices conveyed the truth of it.

But ‘mother nature’ especially seemed all wrong, even in the mouths of those who used the idea. The usage carried a fatalistic sense of the force involved — like the capriciousness of older gods — and yet the old chaps who referred to her on TV or radio seemed really to want to embrace her too, to feel the love of the bush that had been reciprocated to them as they had lived in it and experienced her benevolence.

‘Mother nature’ for us today just doesn’t seem to sit well with the ‘fiery chariot’ image. Overall, if the term is used at all, she seems to be softer and giving: the font of life rather than the screaming fury. It seemed the reference points and contrasts were all at sixes and sevens. Many people did not want to believe that the bush they loved could have done what it did, even if some level of dangerousness was accepted by most. It was disbelief that the world could transform ‘just like that’, ‘before their very eyes’, into total, unforgiving, inhuman chaos where none of one’s dearest assumptions might hold.

Various essais at common sense have been made by commentators, and almost everything coming from the mouths of politicians and people on the ground seems to be pressing in the direction of a full recovery of it. That is, where the language used can assume a community of meaning; where the dreadful is shared in communal mourning, and yet is set aside for the common good; where gutsy determination kicks in to rebuild, to recommit, to move on, but not move out. It does indeed fit with everything we have ever been taught about determination, will and spirit.

But there is something that is also disturbing about this emerging push. Not only does this kind of practical common sense appear as an essential prop to some kind of recovery for individuals, families and communities, the language of blame and responsibility too builds on recognisable ‘figures’ around which positions and action, a mighty salve, can be taken. Premier Brumby has right from the start offered an open, broad-ranging Royal Commission that will leave no stone unturned, and his statement of a non-political interest in this pursuit of the truth is wholly appropriate to the nature of the disaster. And yet one fears that not only will immediately practical questions like burning off, building materials and warning systems fulfill much the same function as the Australian will to get up off the ground and start again, but that a blame game around systems of command, the rooting out of arsonists (ideal for pre-emptive profiling), and the demonising of ‘environmentalists’ around prescribed burning could take centre stage.

The last is highly ironical, on several counts. First, the contrast of farmers and ‘ordinary folk’, many of them the suburban dwellers in country areas, with ‘environmentalists’ cannot do the work some wish it to. On the question of prescribed burning, the really hot issue here, there seems to be widely differing points of view among environmentalists themselves. Some do seem to have held back the hand of government in undertaking to prescribe burn to the government’s own recommended levels; others argue for it vehemently as a reproduction of the form of ‘land management’ practised by Aborigines over forty thousand years. In any case, many who argue against it are not just romanticising the bush, as some would have it (not least Miranda Devine, who thinks they should all be lynched), but give (non-aesthetic) reasons related to real underlying land degradation and future burn potential for not doing so.

Second, it is hard to believe that Australians’ popular love affair with the bush, which has seen not only the building of isolated eyries in remote, bush-surrounded locations but also the building of suburbia on the edge of state forests in recent years, has not been at least in part inspired by the trickling down of an environmental consciousness, even if some whose lives have been shaped by it effect to despise it. Environmentalism has, after all (for good or for ill is not readily answered when fires like these hit), reformed and broadened White Australia’s historical attitude to the perception of its home as ‘alien’.

Third, while all this practical talk goes on about a world in which we can control the impact of fire, where we call on tried and true values to do with spirit and will and ingenuity to ‘rebuild’, it is deeply ironical that much broader, deeper issues of climate change in all likelihood fuelled the fires, and their provenance is only known through a form of knowledge and related political consciousness that sees the world in its vast interconnections. We were warned. We have been thoroughly warned, and it wasn’t our practically oriented governments, farmers or suburbanite tree-changers who told us. In the best and the dumbest of Australianisms, commentators and victims who have been telling government not to ‘buggerise around’ with issues like climate change (alas, Germaine Greer did just this) and to ‘put people first’ (overwhelmingly the attitude of every newspaper and media outlet in the immediate aftermath of the fires) have conveyed a willingness to tarry with outmoded outlooks on our connection to Earth, which essentially wish to remain blind to what is happening.

How will climate change be built into the Brumby government’s Royal Commission? This is a crucial question, and surely it must be part of the Commission’s remit. The Greens must push for this aspect of the investigation to be fully considered; to be taken seriously as the real backdrop to any more practical or immediate solutions to the mere phenomenon of fire.

Of course, not even the best of broad-ranging Royal Commissions is likely to take the further step recommended in this issue of Arena Magazine by John Hinkson and Del Weston. Writing on climate change and responses to it — the Rudd government’s hopelessly inadequate carbon trading scheme and recent interventions in the public arena by environmental writers — they argue for a reconsideration of the deepest kind of our way of life and the structures that support it. Without a reconsideration of our assumptions of what makes for the good life, a moral life vis-à-vis human and non-human others, quite apart from the question of planetary survival, we are doomed to remain in the grip of an immoral system: an amoral system of production and distribution, and a structured system of assumptions that understands itself as virtuous, but which has long ceased to examine its sources and its limitations.

Of course I am talking about the neo-liberal market and the consumption values that keep it afloat. But even the ideas of ‘will’ and ‘spirit’, and the comforting notion that ‘ingenuity’ or the practical attitude will get us out of any mess, seem false and shaky at present. Are they really ideals, or are they a mirage? Are they perhaps no more than the deep constructs of our own sense of self-esteem, the last defence of a way of life against furies none wish to face up to? So what if there is ‘human spirit’, a comforting term used massively in recent weeks, if it is blind?

When ‘Nature’ first made its appearance in the cultural history of the West, it was an idea set apart from ‘Culture’. It had connotations of female capriciousness that carried on earlier notions of a female nature, but it had a still stronger derogatory and destructive implication, as historians of science know well. It was conceived as a great passive resource to be mined and plumbed in the service of a rationality devoted to transparent knowledge and practical control. Strangely, today, even ‘nature’, let alone ‘mother nature’, is an archaic idea. As nature has been de-sexed over the recent centuries of Western development, the whole paradigm of control has moved towards a different paradigm of scientific rationality, which as John Hinkson points out in the article mentioned above, has made neo-liberalism what it is: a supercharged growth machine that not only eats up Earth but poisons her as well. Today, she is not only conquered but, as a mere object for the transformational consciousness of the high sciences, it is on the verge of becoming unrecognisable to us all, if only we could see.

These may seem like big leaps — between markets and fires, Western consciousness and a desire just to get on with life. But they are rich seams for exploring where we come from as a people and a culture, and while Royal Commissions must focus on many practical questions, we can always hope that a philosophical restatement of who we are in relation to the bush, and the larger systems of life that offer it to us, may be considered as a crucial guide for real change.

Alison Caddick

This may seem unfair in relation to climate change. Rudd has set in place a developmental process focusing on significant goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and processes of emission control. But even in relation to climate change it has developed a policy that amounts to nothing more than an administrative tool. Formed in the campaign to defeat Howard, and influenced by opinion polls that in no way reflect the reality of the on-the-ground costs of responding to climate change, it attends to the global threat as merely an aspect of normal governance.

The political effort is to normalise climate change: both in terms of policy and in the minds of voters. Whether our way of life might contribute to climate change, and what might count as a serious response at this level of thinking and action is marginalised because administration looks after an assumed way of life. The Garnaut Report is already being placed in cotton wool. Garnaut has made it clear that his investigations require responses more radical than ever before contemplated. Rudd now responds that Garnaut will merely be one of the sources government will consider.

The Limits of the Administered State

But what if the responses required go far beyond normal administration? The current debate on oil pricing is perhaps a guide as to how this will be handled.

All of the main elements of the oil price crisis have been coming to the surface for years. The four elements are: background problems associated with producing a finite resource (recent reports argue that in 2007 oil exports actually fell); destabilisation of states and regions that produce oil, usually caused by Western pressures and assumptions; the rise of developing states and their rapidly expanding consumption needs; and profligate consumption by the West to satisfy grossly excessive ways of living and producing. The only new aspect – a fifth element affecting prices – is speculation; but rather than march speculators around in handcuffs we should ask what else could be expected given the first four fundamentals of this volatile situation. Rather than begin a process of debate and education that addresses these elements forthrightly as fundamental questions about life expectations, the Rudd government settles for an utterly limp set of childish proposals: a fair market price scheme; a threat to pull OPEC into line by means of the blow-torch, and contradictory appeals to OPEC to consider our car drivers.

Administrative strategies that suggest all is well, except for a few hiccups, are matched in other areas of government. The neo-assimilationist assumptions of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities, instigated by John Howard, retain a surprising degree of appeal for the Rudd administration. It seems to fit its general approach to political affairs. In this view sexual abuse, the distribution of pornography and drugs, individual health and problems of everyday life are matters calling for good administration. They certainly call out a ‘moral’ reaction, often populist and lazy, but administration remains the answer – an attempt to go beyond Left and Right, in the limited sense of bi-partisan strategy. The intervention appears to be gaining momentum and may even be generalised outside of Indigenous issues, once again encouraged by newspaper campaigns. If children are not being properly cared for or, more generally, if there appears to be a moral hazard (as the market economists would call it), government must intervene. Will this prove the claim that the Northern Territory intervention is not racist?

At first glance these new interventions seem similar to previous forms of welfare (the Leviathan state concerned for its citizens), but there is a new momentum at work, one certainly not uncovered by any newspaper campaign.

The administrative approach to climate change, to the politics of oil and to interventions in the remnants of communal life have two things in common: they all are ‘beyond Left and Right’; they all take contemporary society and its way of life for granted. We don’t have to refer to the ‘good old times’ of a familiar capitalism to recognise that economy and society have been fundamentally transformed. The old adage that capitalism always changes allows us to avoid the reality that neo-liberal globalisation is not simply ‘capitalism’; and that this emergent form brings with it problems never before faced by human communities. In particular, the high technologies amplify and transform aspects of life once protected from the market. Today, inflated expectations of the self, even the denial that there is a self, the new role of the university, the assault upon nature, the market in its global form, the possibilities of techno-embodiment, the infinite wants of the consumer, all appear to confirm that the possibilities are limitless. High-tech processes amplify our world and draw us away from any notion that it might be finite.

In respect of families, and what Rudd has begun to call ‘little children’, we can see the effects of high-technologies in the thinning out of the social fabric. The multi-faceted media that accompany the globalisation of social life radically undermine community-based and generation-based settings. Relatively rich face-to-face local and neighbourhood social relations are thinned out and displaced by technological mediums, putting in their place conditions that underpin both moral panics and interventions. These moral panics do not simply arise out of media campaigns. They have a basis in the new social order now administered in the name of a politics beyond Left and Right.

Ignoring these processes of social transformation allows the question of how we should live also to be avoided. Gradually new circumstances of life have been set in place that undermine community settings. Problems of community and family can then be taken up simply as empirical realities needing an administrative response. The same can be said for the problem of oil prices as well as climate change. But taken simply as an empirical fact, the anger in the community about oil pricing can have only one ‘rational’ outcome: growing conflict potentially leading to neo-imperial ‘adventures’. Indeed new sites of international conflict could be said to be the only likely outcome unless the fundamental issues can be properly addressed.

To treat oil pricing as an empirical or technical problem ignores how neo-liberal globalisation affects the felt needs of individuals. As it breaks apart the social world of local communities and sets them in motion as global social connections without limit, excessive consumption demands are naturalised. Crucially, finite oil symbolises to us how neo-liberal globalisation demands a world of infinite need and striving, one embodied in global trade and ever-expanding demands on global transport, a world that will never be satisfied. And what can be said about oil can be multiplied many times over in relation to climate change. Market-based emission schemes seek to protect and conceal the society they implicitly support. They seek to shift production into more acceptable directions while preserving the world of economic growth and global free trade, the very world that will eternally call into being excessive demand and must itself be restructured.

Neo-liberal globalisation is now encountering a world that it believes should not exist: the finite world. The strategy of turning all problems into administrative problems conceals from view the need to reconstruct societies across the board by re-invigorating regionalised production and distribution, as well as regional communities. Rudd is fond of claiming that we must face the costs of emission controls now rather than later. But it is the many questions implicit in this more basic restructuring that has to be addressed, now.

John Hinkson is an Arena publications editor.

For the past two hundred years we have been blindly building our own asteroid. It is called climate change. Since 1990, despite increasing knowledge of the consequences, we have been adding to its size at a frenzied pace. Launched at Earth, there is no chance it will miss us without equally frantic activity to avert it. If it hits with full force, the consequences for life on this planet are likely to be as profound as those following earlier collisions. To date, we have failed to grasp the risk posed by our own asteroid.

What Climate Science is Telling us Now

Scientists increasingly believe that global warming of 2oC above pre-industrial levels significantly increases the chance of ‘dangerous’ climate change, during which abrupt and dramatic shifts in climate may occur, with catastrophic social, ecological and economic consequences (Schnellnhuber et al. 2006). So what should we aim for — in terms of cutting emissions, and stabilising the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases?

Recent modelling exercises suggest that, with atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 ppm CO2 equivalent (CO2-e), we will have between a 25 per cent chance and an 80 per cent chance of global average warming exceeding 2oC above pre-industrial levels (Figure 1). Here’s the first bit of bad news. We are roughly at that point now – at around 450 ppm CO2 equivalent.

Figure 1

We are adding, globally, around 2.5 ppm (CO2 -e) each year and, with industrialisation in China and India proceeding apace, the rate of accumulation has increased over the past decade. Now the second bit of bad news. Without substantial and rapid cuts to global emissions, we will not only ‘overshoot’ 450ppm CO2e but remain well above this level for a long time, given the time greenhouse gases remain in the air.

And here’s the third bit of bad news. The risks and levels of extinction increase as global greenhouse gas levels – and temperatures – rise. Rapid warming beyond 2oC is unacceptable for ecosystems and many species. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report indicates that approximately 20 per cent to 30 per cent of land-based plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction by 2100 as global mean temperatures exceed a warming of 2oC to 3oC (Fischlin et al. 2007: 213), and up to 50 per cent of species (Stern 2006:57) once temperatures rise well beyond 3oC. Moreover, ecosystems and species appear at increased risk not only because of warming, but because of the increased range, frequency, intensity and duration of climatic extremes and extreme events (storms, fires, floods, etc).

However a globally averaged notion of ‘dangerous climate change’ has little meaning for those regions, ecosystems and species sensitive to even slight temperature increases – including low-lying coasts and islands, coral reefs, alpine systems, and the polar caps. Up to 80 per cent of biota in some regions face an increasingly high risk of extinction by 2100 as global mean temperatures exceed a warming of 2oC to 3oC (Fischlin et al. 2007: 213).

How does Australia fare? Preston and Jones (2006) provide a succinct summary of Australian studies which suggest that even 2oC is too high for certain Australian ecosystems and species (Table 1). Warming of 1-1.5oC will lead to significant losses of core habitat for endemic plant, reptile, bird and animal species (and likely extinctions) in Queensland’s Wet Tropics; frequent bleaching episodes on the Great Barrier Reef, and substantial losses and extinctions among its endemic coral and fish species; and a further loss of between 13 per cent and 27 per cent of flow in the Murray Darling even by 2030. The higher we go, the worse it gets.

Table 1: Projected impacts to Australian ecosystems

In addition, most climate studies only report on the relatively ‘immediate’ impacts of global warming – up to 2100. This diminishes consideration of the catastrophic medium to longer term impacts of even ‘modest’ global warming. Current atmospheric concentrations of GH gases may lead to the permanent loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic within five years – a loss that even three years ago (see, for instance, Steffen 2006: 23) was not expected to occur until the end of this century. However current levels also will cause the loss, over the next 200-1000 years, of much or all of Greenland’s ice cover, leading to increases in sea level of some 7 metres, consequent loss of highly valued cultural and natural coastal sites, and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

These changes will also greatly enhance the ice-albedo feedback effect and accelerate autonomous global warming. Hansen et al (2007) argue that global warming must be confined to 1oC to avert the permanent loss of the planet’s major ice sheets. In addition, Hansen et al (2008) argue that the doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric GHG concentrations (560ppm CO2), while leading to 3oC warming or more by 2100, will result in much higher stabilised global temperatures of around 6 oC once long-term feedbacks are taken into consideration.

In other words, the notion of ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ climate change really depends on where you are, who you are, what you are, and when you are live. If you are Tuvaluan, at 2oC your island will have been inundated and your links to country and culture irreversibly destroyed. By the time we hit 2oC, we will have lost most of the Great Barrier Reef and threatened a wide range of Australian species with extinction. If you run diving tours on the Great Barrier Reef, or farm in the Murray-Darling Basin, 2oC is not safe for your enterprise or lifestyle. ‘Dangerous’ climate change for Australia starts well before 2oC. This understanding must condition our thinking about global and local emissions targets that Australia champions, locally and in international negotiations.

Thinking about Targets

For the last decade and a half, Australian debate about climate change has been captured by a narrow discourse. It was framed in 1996 by John Howard as defining the ‘the national interest’. This discourse has reduced the key questions for consideration to: ‘How much will it cost?’ (defined in narrow economic terms and immediate changes to GDP) and ‘How will it affect us NOW?’ (defined in terms of present dollar impacts). The thought that has dominated the Australian climate debate – even since the Stern Report – has been: ‘What is the least we have to do to change our lifestyles and disrupt the economy in order to protect our existing individual or corporate interests?’

Yet the emissions targets we choose should depend on answering two different and prior questions. First, what will we accept as ‘safe’ for our planet, and our continent, and our immediate lives – what do we want to pass on to our children and future generations? And second, what are the likely risks and ecological and social consequences of adopting particular targets?

Having defined what we want, and with an understanding of the risks and consequences of different targets, we are then in a position to determine which target we will support. It is this understanding of desires, risks and consequences that is still lacking in the present debate.

We are yet to have public discussion about the purpose of targets, about what our collective goals should be – and what we are prepared to lose. If we decide that we want to avoid a high risk of species extinction, and the associated degradation or loss of economic and social systems, we will choose tough targets. In this sense, even severe emissions cuts can be ‘economically achievable’. While the immediate adjustments will be somewhere between hard to harsh, the longer term costs will be proportionately easier to bear. By contrast, trying for a ‘soft landing’ in the short term will certainly lead to a crash landing in the longer term, and permanent hardship for us, and most other surviving species. In Australia, the informed and accepting response to urban water regulations during the present (and continuing) water ‘crisis’ shows we are not so much unwilling to take tough self-limiting actions as ignorant of the consequences of government climate policy and our own inaction.

There is also a second line of argument we need to consider. The issue is NOT (simply) which targets we choose but the emissions reduction pathways or trajectories we adopt. As Stern recently noted, ‘it is the stock of atmospheric GHGs, measured in terms of atmospheric concentrations, that causes the rise in global temperatures and changes in climate’ (Stern 2008: 9; emphasis added). We should be as – indeed perhaps more – worried about the increase in the stocks of atmospheric greenhouse gases than targets per se, given their long and damaging life once released into the air. The deeper, earlier and faster the cuts in emissions, the less the damaging stock of excess greenhouse gases will linger over time.

Climate Risk, Politics and Policy

If I were to announce that I was prepared to burn my house down, with my partner and child and all our possessions inside, depending on the result of a toss of a coin – heads I light the match, tails I don’t – I would probably be regarded as a dangerous gambler and a certifiably insane pyromaniac. Yet, puzzlingly, this is practically the approach of most climate policy makers and negotiators to the risks of ‘dangerous’ climate change.

We eagerly insure our houses against a much slighter chance of theft or fire or accident. Planes and nuclear reactors are designed to a very high level of mechanical safety (around 1:100,000 years for the latter) because of concerns about the risk of catastrophic failure. Most industrialised countries – including Australia – fund substantial health and defence expenditure on the basis of deterrence and risk minimisation. Yet in the realm of climate change politicians and policy makers appear prepared to accept a much higher level of possibility of catastrophic failure.

The latest IPCC report estimates that emissions reduction of between -25 per cent and -40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 by developed nations (Table 2), and reductions of between -80 and -95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, will lead to stabilised atmospheric concentrations of around 450ppm CO2 -e and warming of 2.0-2.4oC. As noted earlier, this would still leave between a 25 per cent and an 80 per cent chance of exceeding 2oC.

Table 2: IPCC WG3 Rpt (2007) – Emissions allowances and concentration levels

The IPCC infers that to stay below global warming of 2oC requires developed countries to cut their emissions by more than 40 per cent by 2020. However, it is highly likely that the IPCC has underestimated the chance of tipping points emerging at lower than this temperature and has failed to consider long-term feedback effects that would take warming to higher levels. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) does not include modelled estimates of the impacts of recent gross increases in industrial emissions, or scientific publications from late 2006 onwards. Each of these factors makes the IPCC (4AR) targets conservative. Reductions of risk, and of warming outcomes, require tougher targets that those outlined by the IPCC.

We improve our chances of keeping global mean temperature below 2oC only by ensuring atmospheric GHG concentrations return rapidly to below 400 ppm CO2e (around or below 350ppm CO2). At 400 ppm CO2e, we have a 66 per cent and a 90 per cent chance of remaining below that 2oC global warming threshold (Meinshausen 2006b:3).

Labor’s Climate Policy and its Implications

During the last election, Labor campaigned hard on climate change and clearly differentiated itself from the Coalition in its willingness to rejoin the global community by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, and by articulating a long-term emissions reduction target for Australia. There is a public expectation that Labor will do all it can to solve the problem. The Rudd Government currently supports proposed emissions cuts by developed (Annex 1) countries of between -25 per cent and -40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as agreed at in Bali last year. It has also enshrined in Labor policy an Australian national emissions reduction target of -60 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050. Labor has not yet adopted a short-term emissions target. This will be determined when caps are set for the national emissions trading scheme. There has been loose public discussion of an interim target of between 13-15 per cent by 2020 (Warren 2008).

Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) calls for

stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Given what long-term targets as weak as -60 per cent by 2050 would deliver if taken up by all Annex 1 (industrialised countries), it seems clear that Labor currently supports a domestic climate policy that leads, de facto, to the destruction or profound damage to many of our continent’s iconic ecosystems and species. This is in breach of Article 2 of the UNFCCC, and also of commitments under the World Heritage Convention, the Biodiversity Convention, the RAMSAR Convention, and a number of other more specific international treaties and associated domestic legislation requiring Australia to do all it can to protect listed sites (including the Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, Fraser Island, the wet tropics of Queensland, and Kakadu National Park) and listed endangered species.

Meanwhile, Article 3.1 of the Convention states that Parties ‘should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof’. In signing and ratifying the UNFCCC, developed countries like Australia also accept the need for an additional emissions reduction burden that reflects their disproportionate historical contribution to the global warming problem. This is reflected in the IPCC’s view that Annex 1 countries should aim to cut emissions by between -80 per cent and -95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Equal per capita emission rights, distributed internationally using some version of a contract and converge scenario, offer the most equitable formula for the distribution of future emissions capacity. For Australia to accept an internationally equitable emissions quota using such a formula, Australia’s current per capita emissions of around 26 tonnes of CO2 will need to be reduced to a global average of approximately 1.5 tonnes per person (based on estimated global population of 9 billion by 2050). In other words, our reductions must be higher – between -90 per cent and -95 per cent below 1990 levels – for a globally equitable distribution of per capita emissions rights to occur. It seems clear, then, that Labor, with its -60 per cent by 2050 target, may also have breached Article 3.1 of the UNFCCC, by supporting inequitable global climate outcomes.

Deflecting that Rock

The emissions targets that Australia adopts nationally, and champions internationally, must reflect what we as Australians choose as the risk of unacceptable – or ‘dangerous’ – climate change. These targets should be, to recapture and recycle John Howard’s infamously misused term, what we regard as being ‘in the national [ecological] interest’. This is not the case at present for Australian climate policy, where chasms exist between what scientists are telling us about the chances of dangerous and abrupt climate change, what policy makers and politicians support as viable targets and outcomes, and what most people understand these targets will deliver. The public has not been given the chance to consider its options and to choose what it regards as a ‘safe’ level of climate risk. And so, in the meantime, we continue to build that asteroid.

Labor now has to choose between being a climate leader or a climate laggard. Leadership is the right stance if we believe in ‘first mover economic advantages’ and, critically, in minimising climate risk. Only international agreement among developed countries to ensure deep, rapid and early cuts to greenhouse emissions – beginning with a reduction of over -40 per cent by 2020, the national target Germany adopted last year – will begin to deflect our own asteroid. To help move negotiations to that point, Labor must first adopt such targets at home and then champion them overseas, for safety’s sake, if we are to deflect that rock hurtling towards us.

Peter Christoff teaches climate policy at the University of Melbourne and is Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

References

Fischlin, A. et al. (2007) ‘Ecosystems: their properties, goods and services’, in IPCC WG (Working Group) II (2007) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Hansen, J. et a.l (2007) Atmos. Chem. Phys. Vol 7. 2287.

Hansen, J. et a.l (2008) ‘Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?’, submitted to Science, April 2008 (http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126)

Meinshausen, M. (2006a) ‘What does a 20C target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates’, in Schnellnhuber, J.S. et al (eds) Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Meinshausen, M. (2006b) ‘< 20C Trajectories – a Brief Background Note’, Kyoto Plus Papers (Berlin, Boll Stiftung/Wuppertaler Institut/ WWF/ European Climate Forum).

Preston, B.L. and Jones, R.N. (2006) Climate Change Impacts on Australia and the Benefits of Early Action to Reduce Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. A consultancy report for the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change February (CSIRO).

Schnellnhuber, J.S. et al (eds) Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (2006: Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Stern, N. (2006) The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Stern, N. (2008) Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change (London: London School of Economics and Politics).

But what constitutes a serious response can’t be taken for granted. The issue did not even ‘make the cut’ at the 2020 summit in Canberra. The response of the IMF and World Bank, largely ignored by its member countries, has been to seek aid for the poor. While it seems that urgent aid must indeed be given, this could only be an adequate response if shortages and pricing problems had been caused by short-term events. But there are good reasons to see this situation as the product of a deeper, structural shift.

There have been warnings for decades that food shortages were a real prospect because of population growth and a growing shortage of agricultural land and water. They were either ignored or brushed aside as gloom and doom accounts that ignored the developmental growth prospects of the new global order. But the situation has now become much more complicated. The present crisis, which includes the issues of population growth, land and water, is also related to a complex of other developments, especially the dual forces of climate change and growing shortages of oil and gas. These lend a more serious element to attempts to interpret food shortages. But even these actually give, at best, partial insights. For as is evident in all of the recent newspaper reports on food riots, these matters are at best taken up simply as policy issues.

Policy, of course, cannot be ignored. It is a crucial way to bring an idea or a perspective into practical reality. But policy and ideas can also conceal broader assumptions. For example, at the 2020 summit it was clear that all the ideas to be considered were set within definite parameters: they all assumed the broad continuation of global neo-liberalism. Every idea and policy assumes something, so in itself this is to be expected. But the problem with the 2020 summit was that this was an assumption that could not be questioned. Today, this is much more than a mistake or a flaw in the policy-making process: it goes to the very basis of the validity of any perspective on the future.

Accounts of the food riots elaborated simply in terms of empirical facts with limited connections made to rising oil prices or problems with availability of water, serve a particular broad political purpose: to close off discussion of deeper structural and ethical questions.

It is not possible to consider food production properly today without considering the dominance of the global market in both the production and distribution of food. Food is a global phenomenon. Apart from other things, this means that local food production has been systematically discouraged for decades in favour of the (temporarily) cheaper, ‘factory’ produced or agri-business global product. The key to understanding today’s food riots is to see that water shortages, shortage of land, population growth, climate change and peak oil are all related to the emergent society that continues to call these problems into existence, with ever expanding force. This society — or more to the point, the way of life — has almost entirely displaced the socialist idea, and even moved beyond the constraints of an older capitalist form, to emphasise growth and development at all costs, through its new high-tech capacities to transcend nature. It will take much more than a policy to address the people’s unconscious commitment to this way of life structured around commodity consumption and individual global lifestyles.

Food riots are better understood as a symptom of a broader crisis — the coming apart of this global strategy. This is evident in climate change directly, as drought and higher temperatures affect both land and sea. And this intersects with the growing pressure on oil supply, for the moment reflected in higher pricing. In turn, higher pricing of oil and gas flows on to put upward pressure on fertiliser costs and food prices. In the meantime, the availability of land for food production comes under the dual pressures of deteriorating climate and the switching of land use to the production of bio-fuels to sustain western consumption patterns, including global travel and global trade.

If this is now emerging as a systemic crisis, what will happen when oil and gas production goes into decline in the near future? These are not isolated events, they are structural and can be read as the tip of the iceberg of the melt-down of neo-liberalism’s untenable social order. To merely argue for aid as a response to food riots is simultaneously to defend that social order.

John Hinkson is an Arena Publications editor