Sure, the departure of Howard had left the Liberal Party bereft of a leader who, unlike Turnbull, could listen to his backbenchers and still take the strong stance, aggressively welding his team together (the success of his wedge politics creating a cast of near-acolytes). But what might have seemed some kind of rudderless chaos for a while after the election was only the beginning of a much larger fracturing. Turnbull has gone down not merely exposing the cracks but forcing the ugly duckling out through them and into the bright light of day.

As the immediate politics of the situation played out, there were in fact few choices. Even though Joe Hockey’s idea of repackaging climate change policy as a matter of conscience seemed to fit the political mood—faith-based policy, policy on the basis of belief, not ‘rationality’ or pragmatism—it was a sign of policy weakness, as well as possibly meaning defeat for the conservative push. With the dandyish Kevin Andrews having warmed up the audience, the ‘hairy-chested’ Howard-man-man Abbott was the true heir apparent. Addicted to getting their way, impassioned about the role of markets yet hunkering down round some notion of a base culture that would provide the ‘values’ by which to live, galvanised, still, around a border politics fuelled by and fuelling fear, the conservatives recognised their man and best bet for market differentiation vis-a-vis Rudd’s moderated neo-liberalism.

Around half the parliamentary Liberal Party now looks to Abbott to aggressively pursue their climate change scepticism, a stance taken seriously nowhere in the world except the fundamentalist Bible Belt of the United States and Australia. What the other half of the Liberal Party will do is not clear. Playing politics around such a basic division, winning the numbers just either side of a fifty-fifty split on ‘matters of belief’ seems impossible for a party needing to set stable policy directions. One can’t see the party being purged of its conservatives by its liberals: the latter aren’t as good at the politics as the party Right; they were, after all, seduced by Howard, losing any moral high ground they might have occupied, and they may no longer have any ‘pull’ in the community anyway around any residual Deakinite individualism which some might wish to resuscitate. Howard and the neo-liberal market effectively trashed that tradition, but also, the electorate may be unable to understand the difference implied by this image of the true liberal or be unlikely to take it seriously as either ethical or very different from the on-the-ground individualism offered by Rudd. Whatever the liberal critique of corporatist forms of government and their suppression of strong individual moralities, which has to be given some credence in history, the guiding concern in the outlook of all the major political currents remains the individual’s relation to the market, and in the present context most people live that as the power they feel when they make an individual consumer choice.

George Monbiot is pretty effectively arguing in the Copenhagen context that the political world will split in future between the ‘restrainers’ and the ‘enlargers’; another death knell for left and right social and terminological divisions hailing from the 19th century. But the question goes also to an understanding of the individual and the nature of the social: why restrain? On what basis might we restrain? What benefits and pleasures might ‘restraining’ bring? It is not ‘just’ a question of possibly saving the planet, but of how and why our ‘humanity’ requires whatever it is the notion ‘restraint’ might be straining to signify. Is it really just ‘restraint’ that we should be aiming for? Certainly its justification should not be mere survival, nor should it signify mere sustainability. Let’s hope it doesn’t suggest a social technology to make us behave better environmentally. Let’s hope, rather, that it involves a better knowledge of ourselves qua human beings: a better knowledge of the relation we need to constitute vis-a-vis the natural world and ‘others’ of all kinds if we are to remain within the bounds of what we define as necessary to our humanity. Unfortunately, ‘restraint’ remains within the orbit of a market-dominated paradigm—where what we must give up is what we might otherwise want, or be called to want. The point is to get to that place where not only do we not want it, but it is no longer a question because a fullness of living and being emanates from elsewhere.

This is to move way too quickly beyond the woes of the Liberal Party, but the enormous gulf represented even in these few paragraphs on the politics of reaction, on the one hand, and a possible opening to something very new, on the other, only underlines the moment we have arrived at. As the small island nations are making clear at Copenhagen, as the demonstrators led by Mary Robinson have been impressing, as the science has been making clear for a long time, fundamental choices are at stake. The Liberals’ conniptions, and ultimately reactionary choice of leader and orientation, point to the significant dangers that accompany periods of social threat, even when the lineaments of change have been evident for decades; even when it has been pointed out many times that it is neo-liberalism and the market under post modern conditions that have sown the seeds of destruction of the very social practices their loudest proponents wish to protect.

Eric Hobsbawn, in Age of Extremes, describes a fundamental shift that took place between the first and second world wars. While the First World War was the first modern war—total and technologised—it was as if no one really understood the powers that fed it. Leaders, and the people, still believed that an end to war would mean a return to what had been before. At war’s end the relative peace of the previous near century, remarkable prosperity and relatively settled social arrangements were what people harked back to; world war was an aberration, never to happen again. Yet radical cultural change had been filtering into pre-consciousness through the prescient art movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just as science and industry were merging in novel ways in the first flowering of the techno-scientific paradigm (the successes of industrial chemistry and the German laboratory system). The period harked back to during the war had already been in flux. Abstract society, predicated upon a new sense of ungroundedness and a culture much less restrained by natural limits, had been felt, sometimes celebrated, certainly artistically and scientifically explored, just as fantasies of stability and rational achievement seemed to promise a return, rather than allow that the conditions of existence had actually shifted under the feet of the classes, bourgeois and working alike.

It would take another twenty years after the First World War, twenty years of preparation for war, worldwide depression, and war against Nazi reaction, for a shift in perspective facing towards the future rather than the past. For Hobsbawn, this ‘post-war consensus’ around Keynesian economics and the welfare state (broadly understood), seems to have been a period of realignment, of system catch-up, so that a more thorough, and perhaps more self-conscious modernity might emerge cognisant of the profound changes not only wrought by war but by the social and technological forces that had shaped it.

Of course, that consensus was exactly what neo-liberalism rose up against later in the century, just as the second surge of techno-scientific success supercharged the economy and produced unheard of material prosperity both in the West and beyond. We also know now that the forces and politics of material abundance, and more recently decadence, depended on environmental conditions and resources that make the ‘necessity’ of modernity and its heirs (‘necessity’ as understood in all the varieties of modernist Progress-based social theory, including Marxism) highly questionable. Taken to the brink by the latest techno-scientific surge, carried in the subject form of the hyper-individuated consumer, on the one hand, and the networked agent, on the other, the world is in fact in a very different circumstance than that described by Hobsbawn as the thirty year 20th-century war period. The need to face up to the conditions both of our humanity and a future no longer dependent on the rape of the earth presents a far greater challenge. But just as Hobsbawn outlines, with considerable delicacy, the commitments and hopes of the different groupings influential at that time, we face a period of system mismatch and cultural misunderstanding, of disorientation as the forces in play work their way through social life, and the possibility of grasping their meaning remains, as always, difficult—only to be realised within a protracted process of transformation.

Standing at the dawn of the 21st century there is no greater concern than the fate of our environment and the Earth community it supports. In response to this there is a growing recognition that our current approach to environmental law is insufficient and, as environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey notes, ‘according to every major environment statistic things are worse now than they were forty years ago’, when the first environmental protection legislation was passed. The reasons why our current system of environmental law is failing are rich and complex. However, I contend that one important reason is inherent to law itself. Indeed, in agreement with Thomas Berry, I contend that human beings have ‘rejected our role as an integral member of the earth community in favour of a radical anthropocentric life attitude’.

Anthropocentrism is defined by Albert Einstein as ‘an optical delusion of human consciousness’ where we come to regard ‘humanity as the centre of existence’. To this definition, I consider anthropocentrism as further encompassing the view that human beings are separate from the planet and all living systems, and the assumption that the universe exists to satisfy the needs and desires of human beings. The division of the world into human beings and nature forms the basis of the modern idea of property law.

Indeed, under Western law, nature is regarded as human property and by definition is a legal object that can be bought, sold, exploited and destroyed to satisfy human preferences. Nature receives its protection through the property rights of human beings, not because they have recognised value or legal rights.

Several problems flow from this framework. To begin, it may not be in a property owner’s economic interest to protect the environment; there might be disagreement over ownership, especially in regard to international waters; and the ecosystem may be unknown or of little recognised (known) value. More fundamental than these practical problems, the status of nature as property creates a fundamental disconnection between humans and the environment and, as David Suzuki notes in his 1999 book The Sacred Balance, this enables us to ‘act on nature, abstract from it, use it, take it apart; we can wreck it, because it is another, it is alien’. Property is the mechanism through which nature becomes vulnerable to human exploitation, further illustrated by Dr Paul Babie in his article ‘Private Property, the Environment and Christianity’ (Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies, 2002):

All resources are allocated or distributed among people according to the private property concept. The earth is dying, therefore, because humankind sees it as private property, capital, valuable only if exploited for economic gain. The domestic legal system of every society that invokes the private property concept uses it as a rationale and justification for an exploitative stance toward the earth’s natural resources.

The perceptions that human beings are disconnected from the environment and that nature exists for human benefit are clearly outdated and harmful ideas. On this point, psychologists James Hillman claims that ‘even to think we are separated from nature is somehow a thinking disorder … You can’t be separated from nature’ (The 11th Hour, 2007) Certainly, modern science is illustrating that human exist as part of a broader ecosystem or web of relationships. Rather than evolving to reflect this knowledge out law remains trapped in a universe that no longer exists and as Cormac Cullinan notes in Wild Law (2002) ‘we continue to govern ourselves on the basis of a discredited understanding of how the universe functions’.

The status of nature as property not only enables human beings to exploit the Earth, it provides a weak framework for environmental protection. Under this framework we are forced to adopt a regulatory approach to environment law. This means that once a company has ticked the appropriate boxes, and so long as they stay within the prescribed legislative boundaries, the activity is acceptable. In response, the great majority of work done by environmental lawyers and the most obvious form of protection offered to communities is to monitor corporate activity and check license applications. In this sense, all environmental laws regulates are environmentalists. They regulate the way environmentalists respond, and this makes us predictable. Further, any resulting legal challenge is tax deductable for the corporation and in many instances money is set aside for this contingency.

This approach is further weakened when companies have ‘indenture acts’ that permit legal override of environmental laws. The most obvious and harmful example of this is the Roxby Downs Indenture Ratification Act 1982 (SA) that exists over BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam lease and overrides the States Environmental Protection, Aboriginal Heritage, Natural Resource Management, Water Resources and Freedom of Information Acts.

In essence a regulatory framework for environmental protection is defensive in nature and is impeding our ability to protect the environment. On the other hand, ‘movements’ are driven by communities, unwilling to accept such a defensive role for themselves and move toward fixing the problems of governance that consistently shove them into that position in the first place. Indeed, people were once treated as property. In response, the abolitionists did not ask for a ‘slave protection agency’— they sought recognition of their rights in law. Securing rights means not fiddling around with regulating how that property can be used. It means changing the very framework of governance that defined those things as property in the first place.

It has been said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. In the past eight years there has been a groundswell of action in this area and communities have been driving rights for nature legislation into law. Some examples include Pennsylvania, where five municipalities (20,000 people) passed ‘rights for nature’ ordinances, saying nature has a right to exist and flourish and giving community standing to advocate the rights of nature. Further, in 2008 the constitution of Ecuador was amended to state that nature has the ‘right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its natural cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution’. To ensure these rights the government is responsible for ‘precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles’.

Berry has coined the term ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ to describe this evolution in law. Earth Jurisprudence refers to legal philosophies developed by humans that are derived from and consistent with the laws of nature. The law of nature is termed the ‘Great Jurisprudence’ and it invites the human community to ‘take its lead from the universe and not from itself when establishing laws’. By understanding and respecting these processes, Earth Jurisprudence supplies the general principles out of which practical laws can be extrapolated. Two important consequences of this the contention that our law should evolve to reflect the inherent value of nature and that human beings are deeply connected and dependant on nature. This shift has the potential to protect our environment and shift our perception of nature in a way that a regulatory approach cannot.

While Earth Jurisprudence is a major field of research and environmental law internationally, very little has been done in this field within Australia. In response, from 16–18th October 2009 Friends of the Earth Adelaide, in partnership with the Conservation Council of South Australia and the University of Adelaide, Faculty of Professions, Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion (RUSSLR), will be hosting Australia’s first conference on Earth Jurisprudence.

For more information please visit www.adelaide.foe.org.au

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

But the movement in India has one key distinction, which holds the key to its future. The environmental movements of the rich world emerged after periods of wealth creation and during their period of waste generation. So, they argued for containment of the waste but did not have the ability to argue for the reinvention of the paradigm of waste generation itself. However, the environmental movement in India has grown in the midst of enormous inequity and poverty. In this environmentalism of the relatively poor, the answers to change are intractable and impossible unless the question itself is reinvented.

Just consider the birth and evolution of the green movement. Its inception dates back to the early 1970s with Indira Gandhi’s famous words at the Stockholm conference on environment that ‘poverty is the biggest polluter’. But in this same period the women of the Chipko movement in the Himalaya showed that the poor, in fact, cared about their environment. In 1974, years before the environment became fashionable, the women of this poor, remote village stopped loggers from cutting down their forests. This movement of poor women was not a conservation movement per se, but a movement to demand the rights of local communities to their local resources. The women wanted first rights over the trees, which they said were the basis for their daily survival. Their movement explained to the people of India that it was not poverty but rather extractive and exploitative economies that were the biggest polluters.

This is because in vast parts of rural India, as in vast parts of rural Africa and other regions, poverty is not about a lack of cash, but a lack of access to natural resources. Millions of people live within what can be called a biomass based subsistence economy where the gross nature product is more important than the gross national product. Environmental degradation is not a matter of luxury but a matter of survival. In these cases, development is not possible without environmental management.

In the environmental movement of the very poor there are no quick-fix technological solutions that can be suggested to people who are battling for survival. In this environmentalism there is only one answer: to reduce needs and to increase efficiency for every inch of land needed, every tonne of mineral and every drop of water used. An environmentalism of this kind will demand new arrangements for sharing benefits with local communities so that they are persuaded to part with their resources for common development. It will demand new paths to growth.

I say this because the environmental movement of the relatively rich and affluent is still clearly looking for small answers to big problems. Today, everyone is saying that we can deal with climate change if we adopt measures such as energy efficiency and some new technologies. The message is simple: managing climate change will not hurt lifestyles or economic growth: a win-win situation where we will benefit from green technologies and new business.

Biofuel — growing fuel, not food, on land, to run the cars of the rich — is one such techno-fix. But there has been no discussion of whether biofuels, already competing for land with food crops and raising prices, will reduce emissions when vehicle numbers are increasing. With biofuels under criticism for forcing up food prices and depleting water resources, the next generation technical solution is on the cards — hybrid cars. I am not against biofuels or hybrid cars. But these are only small parts of the big change we need. The transition to a low-carbon economy is not just about technology but also about redistributing economic and ecological space. This change will hurt, as indeed climate change itself already has, with variable weather events destroying crops and hurting the most vulnerable and powerless.

Re-learning Knowledge: Water

It is also clear that these new answers will lie in learning the frugality and rationality practised by poorer societies. It will require us to re-learn certain technologies.

Take water management. For many countries of the South, water insecurity, which on the one hand leads to declining agricultural productivity and on the other to waterborne disease and death, has become the biggest limiting factor for growth. Today, water management is the starting point for getting rid of poverty in the world. Water security is the starting point for food security.

Countries of the water-stressed South need a new paradigm for water management. This will demand a realisation that water and culture go together and that water shortage is not about mere failure of rain. It is about the failure of society to live and share its water endowment. But to get our water practice right, we will first have to deal with the poverty of the professional mind, which has over time become fossilised and rigid in its outlook. We actually need a movement for water literacy to build a new understanding based on past traditions and the wisdom of our people who learnt to survive and indeed make the best use of their environment.

Take the fascinating case of ancient Rome and Edo (the ancient Japanese city on which modern Tokyo is built). The Romans built huge aqueducts that ran for miles to bring water to their settlements. These aqueducts even today are the most omnipresent symbols of that society’s water management. And many experts have praised the Romans for the meticulousness with which they planned their water supply systems.

But, no, these aqueducts represent not the intelligence but the utter environmental mismanagement of the great Romans. Rome was built on the river Tiber. The city did not need an aqueduct. But as the waste of Rome was discharged directly into the Tiber, the river was polluted and water had to be brought from long distances away. Water outlets were few as a result and the elite appropriated these using a system of slaves. By contrast, the inhabitants of Edo never discharged their waste into the rivers. Instead they composted the waste and then used it in the fields. Because they used the common and shared rivers, Edo had numerous water outlets and a much more egalitarian water supply.

Dying Wisdom: Building New Practices

Ancient Indians understood the speed with which water, the world’s most fluid substance, disappears. They understood that the mathematics of water is simple: if you harvest just 100 mm of rainfall on just 1 ha of land, you receive as much as 1 million litres of water. But on the other hand, if you don’t capture this rainfall the wettest place on Earth will have water shortages.

Research published by the Centre for Science and Environment in the mid-1990s showed that countries like India need to learn from their traditional community based water management systems so that they can build ways to the future. In today’s India it is imperative that groundwater be recharged so that the rate of extraction is not greater than the rate of water infiltration. The traditional water systems were designed to ensure that rainwater was stored in millions of disaggregated and diverse structures, which in turn led to local recharge of water into the ground. It is such distributed water harvesting that will build water security.

In other words, India must rework the paradigm of water management so that it is designed to harvest and augment local water resources so as to lead to local and distributed wealth generation. It is also clear that local and distributed water infrastructure will require new forms of institutional management, as water bureaucracies will find it difficult to manage such vast and disparate systems.

These ideas have captured the imagination of policy planners in the country. It is now well established that water management strategies will need to devolve power to local communities so that they can build structures for local water conservation and practise its use for efficiency and equity. This alternative practice and policy research has all converged into policies to build local water structures under employment guarantee schemes, where the state guarantees the right of employment to the poor. Employment is used to build water conservation structures so that drought relief can become relief against drought.

The Great Water Leapfrog

The problem becomes more intractable as India progresses — as it moves from using water in traditional sectors like agriculture to industries and urban areas. India is considered a traditional water economy that has to make the transition to a modern water economy. In other words, the water sector has to become part of the formalised economy, with formal institutions and mechanisms for its management and pricing.

The point to understand is what this modern, formal water economy means in the rest of the world and what it will mean for countries like India. In the industrialised world, industry and urban households use over 70 per cent of the water resources, while agriculture gets the remaining 30 per cent. In traditional water economies like India the reverse is true: agriculture consumes over 70 per cent and industry and urban areas the rest.

The fact is that urban areas and industrial centres in countries like India are now putting greater pressure on water resources. Cities across the country need more water for their growing populations and, more importantly, their growing affluence. Growing demand leads to pressure to source water from further and further away. The capital city of Delhi will get water from the Tehri dam, over 300 km away in the Himalaya. The software capitals of Hyderabad and Bangalore respectively will receive water from the Nagarjunasagar dam on the Krishna river 105 km away and the Cauvery, about 100 km away. The desert city of Udaipur used to draw its water from the magnificent Jaisamand Lake, but it is drying up and so the city is desperately seeking a way out of its new thirst.

The problem for the ‘informal’ water economy of rural India is that its agriculture-dependent population still exists. The economy has not transformed into a manufacturing or service sector economy. The water crisis is about the management of these competing needs — the vast rural economies, which need water for their food and livelihood security, and the newer growth economies of modern, industrial India. This water competition is leading to low-intensity conflicts between different users. For instance, when the southern city of Chennai wanted to source its drinking water from the Veeranam Lake some distance from the city, farmers agitated against it. When the Gujarat city of Rajkot needed water, farmers drew fire and were killed. In 2005, in two separate incidents in Rajasthan, farmers were killed as they rioted against water withdrawal from their neighbouring reservoir and canal for distant cities. It is for these reasons that the cities and the industries of rich India must begin to pay for the water they use. But pricing and markets will not suffice. It is equally imperative that water management paradigms and their technologies be reinvented for this poor–rich world.

On the one hand, the rich cities of the poor world will have to first invest in efficiency, so that they do not become water wasteful, then learn the science and art of efficiency. On the other hand, they will have to invest in managing and treating their waste water. Today, cities extract from cleaner upstream sources and discharge sewage and industrial effluents downstream, which in turn leads to increased problems of polluted water and ill-health for poorer users of the rivers. The capital intensity of the modern sewage system — its transportation and eventual treatment before disposal — is such that it cannot be afforded by all users, or even all urban areas. The question then is how will India’s modern cities grow without creating water waste and pollution? How will these cities innovate so that they can practise recycling and reuse even before their counterparts in the industrial world? The challenge is to re-invent the most modern waste management system that reuses every drop of water discharged, at a cost that can be afforded by all.

A country like India has to leapfrog over the modern economic paradigm, to create its own — hybrid — version of the water future. Modern water policy will have to be built on the premise that scarcity is not about the lack of resources but about being wise about their use.

Defining the Challenge of Economic Growth

Years before India became independent, Mahatma Gandhi was asked a simple question: would he like free India to be as ‘developed’ as the country of its colonial masters, Britain? ‘No,’ said Gandhi, stunning his interrogator, who argued that Britain was the model to emulate. He replied: ‘If it took Britain the rape of half the world to be where it is, how many worlds would India need?’

Gandhi’s wisdom confronts us today. Now that India and China are threatening to join the league of the rich, the environmental hysteria over their growth should make us think. Think not just about the impact of these populated nations on the resources of our planet but, again, indeed all over again, of the economic paradigm of growth that has led to much less populated worlds pillaging and degrading the resources of Earth.

Let us be clear. The Western model of growth that India and China wish most feverishly to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources and generates enormous waste. The industrialised world has learnt to mitigate the adverse impacts of wealth generation by investing huge amounts of money. But the industrialised world has never succeeded in containing those impacts: it remains many steps behind the problems it creates.

Take the example of local air pollution control in the cities of the rich world. Postwar economic growth saw these cities struggling to contain pollution. The growing environmentalism of citizens led to investment in new technologies for vehicles and fuel. By the mid-1980s the indicators of pollution, measured then by the amount of suspended air particulates, led us to believe the cities were clean. But by the early 1990s the science of measurement had progressed. Scientists confirmed the problem was not particulates as a whole, but those that were tiny and respirable, capable of penetrating the lungs and the circulatory system. The key cause of these tiny toxins was diesel fuel used in automobiles. So vehicle and fuel technology innovated. It reduced sulfur in diesel and found ways of trapping the particulates in vehicles. It believed new-generation technology had overcome the challenge.

But this is not the case. Now Western scientists are discovering that as emission-fuel technologies reduce the mass of particles, the size of the particles reduces and the number emitted goes up, not down. The particles are even smaller. Called nanoparticles (measured in the scale of a nanometer, one billionth of a metre), these particles are not only difficult to measure but, say scientists, could be even more deadly since they easily penetrate human skin. Worse, even as technology has reduced particulates, the trade-off has been to increase emissions of equally toxic oxides of nitrogen from these vehicles.

The icing on the cake is a hard fact: the industrialised world may have cleaned up its cities, but its emissions have put the entire world’s climatic system at risk and made millions living at the margins of survival even more vulnerable and poor because of climate change. In other words, the West not only continues to chase the problems it creates, it also externalises the problems of growth onto others, those less fortunate and less able to deal with its excesses.

It is this model of growth the poor world now wishes to adopt. And why not? The world has not shown any other way that can work. In fact, it preaches to us that business is profitable only when it searches for new solutions to old problems. It tells us its way of wealth creation is progress and it tells us that its way of life is nonnegotiable.

But I believe the poor world must do better. The South — India, China, and all their neighbours — has no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory. When the industrialised world went through its intensive growth period its per capita income was much higher than the South’s today. The price of oil was much lower, which meant growth was cheaper. Now the South is adopting the same model: highly capital-intensive and so socially divisive; material and energy-intensive and so polluting. But the South does not have the capacity to make investments critical to equity and sustainability. It cannot temper the adverse impacts of growth. This is deadly.

Let’s stay with the challenge of air pollution. Some years ago, the organisation I work with argued that the city of Delhi should convert its public transport system to compressed natural gas. The move to gas would give us a technology jumpstart as it would drastically cut particulate emissions. Delhi today has the world’s largest fleet of buses and other commercial transport vehicles running on gas. The result is that the city has stabilised its pollution in spite of the huge number of vehicles, poor technology, and even poorer regulatory systems. In other words, Delhi did not take a technology-incremental pathway of pollution control on the basis of fitting after-treatment devices to cars and cleaning up fuel. It leapfrogged in terms of technology and growth.

Equity Provides the Basis for Change

This is the challenge that we in India are discussing and finding ways to solve. We know that our cities are on a different developmental trajectory: people still catch buses and cycle or walk to work. In Delhi, for instance, even now 60 per cent of people use buses, which occupy less than 7 per cent of the road space, while cars, which crowd over 75 per cent of the roads, transport only 20 per cent of the people. Our cities can and must develop an alternative vision for growth.

The question is can they leapfrog from cities with few cars to cities with few cars? Can they build their mobility plans based on a mix of swanky buses, trams, bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways? In other words, can they do everything today that the modern cities of the old-rich world — from Berlin to Vancouver — want to do tomorrow?

For instance, in Delhi, policy makers are now working towards creating a new mobility model. It includes the building of a rapid transit bus system on a 15 km road in the heart of Delhi. This system creates a central lane for buses to drive along without obstruction, dividing the remaining road space between cars (two or three lanes), bicycles and pedestrians. The project is built on the premise that road space must be equitably allocated to the various road users. It is also investing in a metro and augmenting its bus system.

Climate Change: Equity is a Pre-requisite

For the past sixteen years (the first intergovernmental negotiation took place in Washington DC in early 1991) the world has been haggling about what it knows but does not want to accept. It has been desperately seeking every excuse not to act, even as science has confirmed and reconfirmed the fact that climate change is real — that it is related to carbon dioxide and other emissions, and that emissions are related to economic growth and wealth. In other words, it is human made and it can devastate the world as we know it.

The fact is that science is not just certain but ‘unequivocal’ that climate change and its devastation are now inevitable. But along with trying to understand the science, we must begin to put a human face to the climate change that is beginning all around us. We must see climate change in the faces of the millions who have lost their homes in the Sidr and Nargis cyclones that ripped through Bangladesh and Myanmar. We need to see climate change in the faces of those who lost everything in the floods caused by intense rainfall events. We need to know that the thousands of people who died in these events did so because the rich have failed to contain emissions necessary for their growth.

Energy is the Key

The world’s need for energy — to run everything from factories to cars — is the cause of climate pain. The fact is also that after years of talk no country has been able to de-link its growth from the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. No country has shown how to build a low carbon economy. No country has yet been able to re-invent its pathway to growth. This then is the challenge. After years of talk, the proportion of new renewable energy — wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels — comprises just about 1 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply.

What is tragic is that the world is hiding behind the poverty of its people to fudge its climate maths. The renewable sector is made up of the biomass combustion — the firewood, cowdung or leaves and twigs used by the desperately poor in our world to cook their food and to light their homes. It is this that is providing the world its space to breathe.

What, then, is the way ahead?

Firstly we must accept that the rich world must reduce emissions drastically. Let there be no disagreements or excuses on this matter. There is a stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, built up over centuries in the process of creating Western nations’ wealth. It is a natural debt. This has already made climate unstable. Poorer nations will now add to this stock through their drive for economic growth. But that is not an excuse for the rich world not to take on deep, binding emission reduction targets. The principle has to be they must reduce so that we can grow.

The second part of this agreement is that poor and emerging rich countries need to grow. Their engagement with any emissions targets will not be legally binding but based on national targets and programs. The question is how to find low-carbon growth strategies for emerging countries without compromising their right to develop.

This can be done. It is clear that countries like India and China provide the world with the opportunity to ‘avoid’ additional emissions. The reason is that we are still in the process of building our energy, transport or industrial infrastructures. We can make investments in leapfrog technologies so that we can avoid pollution. In other words, we can build our cities on public transport; our energy security on local and distributed systems, from biofuels to renewables; our industries using the most energy- and so pollution-efficient technologies. We know it is in our interest not to first pollute then clean up; or first to be inefficient, then save energy.

As yet, the rich world has found small answers to existing problems. It wants to keep its coal power plants (even as it points fingers at China and India). It wants to build new coal power plants. It believes it can keep polluting and keep fixing. This time, the answer it has hit upon is carbon capture and storage — to pipe the emissions underground and hope the problem will just go away. In this way it can have its cake and eat it too.

It also wants to keep its cars and add more. Or drive more. It can do this by simply growing fuel and pumping it into vehicles. It does not matter if this biofuel is a small blip in the total consumption of oil — all the corn in the United States can only meet 12 per cent of current US petrol use. It does not matter if it there is not enough land to grow food and fuel in the world. The cynics will say, after all, the corporations rule the oil and the food business. Scarcity will only increase their business. But the realists should say the ‘illusion’ of solutions is the opiate of the rich. This way they do nothing but can create an illusion of action.

The New Deal

If we know that the emerging world can leapfrog to make the transition to cleaner technology, the question is why is this not happening? Why is it that the world talks big but gives small change?

When the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated, the world decided to invent the clean development mechanism (CDM) to pay for the transition in the poorer world. But the mechanism was designed to fail. The obsession was to get the cheapest emission reduction options for the rich world. As a result the price of CERs — the certified emission reduction unit used in this transaction — has never reflected the cost of renewable and other high technology options. It is a cheap and increasingly corrupt development mechanism. It is also a convoluted development mechanism, in which rules bind governments not to think of big change. In fact, current CDM provides disincentives for governments in the South to drive policies for clean energy or production. Any policy, which is already designed for good is bad in the CDM portfolio. It will not qualify for funding.

The world must realise the bitter truth. Equity is a prerequisite for an effective climate agreement. The fact is that without co-operation this global agreement will not work. It is for this reason that the world must seriously consider the concept of equal per capita emission entitlements so that the rich reduce and the poor do not go beyond their climate quota.

Rights Based Agenda

In 1990, the Washington based World Resources Institute (WRI) published its report showing that annual greenhouse gas emissions of the developing world almost equalled those of the industrialised world and that in fact the emissions of the developing world would overtake the industrialised world’s emissions in the near future. However, the critique of the report by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) found that the methodology used by the WRI to compute the responsibility of each nation favoured the polluter.

Under the WRI methodology each nation was assigned a share of the Earth’s ecological sink, but the assignment was proportional to the nation’s contribution to the Earth’s emissions. The sinks are natural systems, like oceans and forests, which absorb emissions. Global warming is caused because emissions exceed this natural capacity of the Earth to clean pollutants. The WRI had estimated that the world produced 31,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 255 million tonnes of methane every year. It then estimated that the sinks of the Earth naturally assimilated 17,500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 212 million tonnes of methane annually. On this basis it then computed a ‘net’ emission of each nation by allocating a share of the sinks to each nation, based on its gross emissions contribution.

The CSE argued that there were two main types of sinks where carbon dioxide is reabsorbed by the biosphere: the oceans and terrestrial sinks. While terrestrial sinks, such as forests and grasslands, may be considered national property, oceanic sinks belong to humankind. They can be regarded as common global property. The CSE then apportioned the sinks of the basis of a country’s share in the world’s population, arguing that each individual in the world had the entitlement to the global commons. This allocation, based on individual rights to Earth’s natural cleansing capacity, changed the computation of the nation’s responsibility drastically. For instance, under the WRI methodology the United States contributed 17 per cent of the net emissions of the world, while CSE methodology computed that it actually contributed roughly 27.4 per cent of the net annual emissions. Similarly, China’s contribution decreased from the WRI estimated 6.4 per cent of the net annual emissions to 0.57 per cent and India’s decreased from 3.9 per cent to just 0.013 per cent.

This allocation of Earth’s global sinks to each nation, based on its population, created a system of per capita emission entitlements which, taken together, were the ‘permissible’ level of emission for each country. This, according to CSE, would create a framework for trading between nations, as any country that exceeded its annual quota of carbon dioxide could trade with those countries with ‘permissible’ emissions. This would create financial incentives for countries to keep their emissions as low as possible and to invest in zero-carbon trajectories.

We have also argued that, as much as the world needs to design a system of equity between nations, nations of the world need to design a system of equity within the nation. It is not the rich in India who emit less than their share of the global quota. It is the poor in India, who do not have access to energy, who provide us with the breathing space. India, for instance, had per capita carbon emissions of 1.5 tonnes per year in 2005. Yet this figure hides huge disparities. The urban-industrial sector is energy-intensive and wasteful, while the rural subsistence sector is energy poor and frugal. Currently it is estimated that only 31 per cent of rural households use electricity. Connecting all of India’s villages to grid-based electricity will be expensive and difficult. It is here that the option of leapfrogging to off-grid solutions based on renewable energy technologies becomes most economically viable. If India’s entitlements were assigned on an equal per capita basis, so that the country’s richer citizens had to pay the poor for excess energy use, this would provide both the resources and the incentives for current low-energy users to adopt zero-emission technologies. In this way, too, a rights based framework would stimulate powerful demand for investments in new renewable energy technologies.

This rights based agenda is critical to the resolution of the climate change challenge. The fact is that climate change teaches us more than anything else that the world is one; if the rich world pumped in excessive quantities of carbon dioxide yesterday, the emerging rich world will do today. It also tells that the only way to build controls will be to ensure that there is fairness and equity in the agreement, so that this, the biggest co-operative enterprise, is possible.

Strengthening Global Democracy

In conclusion, there is no doubt we live in an increasingly insecure world. Indeed, the state of insecurity in the world is made more deliberate, more wilful, because of the intentional and unintentional actions of nation-states and governments in the name of development and global justice. So, if the rich world is increasingly paranoid about its defence from the failed, bankrupt and despotic states of the developing world, the poor are insecure because they are increasingly marginalised and made destitute by the policies of the rich. The challenge of climate change is adding a new level of insecurity for the world’s people. It is also equally clear that the business-as-usual paradigm of growth will lead the world towards a vortex of insecure people, communities and nations.

It is here that the countries of the South face even greater challenges. They will need to rebuild security by rebuilding local food, water and livelihood security in all villages and cities of their world. And in doing this they will have to reinvent the capital- and material-intensive growth paradigm of the industrialised North, which deepens the divide between the rich and the poor. They will have to do things differently in their own backyards. But, more importantly, these countries will have to become the voice of the voiceless, so that they can demand changes in the rules of globalisation in the interest of all.

Sustainable development needs to be understood as a function of deepened democracy. Sustainable development is not about technology but about a political framework, which will devolve power and give people — the victims of environmental degradation — rights over natural resources. The involvement of local communities in environmental management is a prerequisite for sustainable development.

The South’s quest for an alternative growth strategy will have two essential pre-requisites. Firstly, a high order of democracy, so that the poor, the marginalised and environmental victims can demand change. It is essential to understand that the most important driver of environmental change in these countries is not government, laws, regulation, funds or technology per se. It is the ability of its people to ‘work’ democracy.

But democracy is much more than words in a Constitution. It requires careful nurturing so that the media and the judiciary, and all other organs of governance, can decide in the public and not private (corporate) interest. Quite simply, this environmentalism of the poor will need more credible public institutions, not less.

Secondly, change will demand knowledge: new and inventive thinking. This ability to think differently needs confidence to break through a historical ‘whitewash’, the arrogance of old, established, ultimately borrowed ideas. A break-through — a mental leapfrog — is what the South lacks the most. The most adverse impact of the current industrial growth model is that it has turned the planners of the South into cabbages — believing it has no answers, that it has only problems, for which solutions lie in the tried and tested answers of the rich world.

It is also important that this environmentalism of the poor, building bottom up, based on principles of equity and human need, must influence the world. It is essential if the world has to combat climate change that it learns from these movements about the need to share resources so that we can all tread lightly on Earth.

Sunita Narain is director of the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi. This article is an edited extract from her 2008 K. R. Narayanan Oration titled ‘Why the Environment Needs Equity: Learning from the Environmentalism of the Poor to Build our Common Future’, presented at the Australian National University. Ms Narain’s visit to Australia was supported by the Australia–India Council.

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).