Thomas Friedman

June 9, 2011

A new ‘happiness model’ of living will reduce environmental degradation and overconsumption to help save the planet, claims a new book.

As a consumer-driven society breaks down, happiness will prevail, writes Thomas Friedman.

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century – when food and energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes ploughed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all – and ask ourselves: what were we thinking?

How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural-resource/population redlines all at once?

”The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.

”When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists which calculates how many ”planet Earths” we need to sustain our growth rates. GFN says we are growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future.

While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker delivering water in the capital, Sanaa. Sanaa could be the first big city in the world to run out of water within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 per cent of sustainable capacity. ”If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. ”If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer.

”If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. ”In China’s thousands of years of civilisation, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s Environment Minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently.

”The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”

What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that ”the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit.”

We will not change systems, without a crisis, but we’re getting there. We’re caught in two loops: One is that population growth and global warming together are pushing up food prices – rising prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, higher food prices, and more instability.

At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed to produce more stuff. If we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, Gilding says, ”our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilising as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy in just a few short decades.” We will realise, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven model, based on people working less and owning less.

”How many people,” Gilding asks, ”lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding says he is a realist. ”We are heading for a crisis-driven choice. We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

The New York Times

Climate change action needed now

Its time we all started pulling together to do something about climate change according to Ross Gittins.

It’s a sore test of faith when people put power bills before their children’s future.

Like most people, I’m an instinctive optimist. In any case, I see no margin in pessimism. If you concluded the world was irredeemably wicked, or destined for certain destruction, what would be left but to curl up and die? Since we can never be certain the end is nigh, much better to keep living and keep plugging away for a better world.

I confess, however, I’ve needed all my optimistic instincts to avoid despair over the terrible hash we’re making of the need to take effective action against global warming. We’re showing everything that’s unattractive about the Australian character.

We pride ourselves that Aussies are good in a crisis, but until the walls start falling in on us we couldn’t reach agreement to shut the door against the cold.

This week’s report from the Climate Commission – established to provide expert advice on the science of climate change and its effects on Australia – tells us nothing we didn’t already know, but everything we’ve lost sight of in our efforts to advance our personal interests at the expense of the nation’s.

Its 70 pages boil down to four propositions we’d rather not think about. First, there is no doubt the climate is changing. The evidence is clear. The atmosphere is warming, the ocean is warming, ice is being lost from glaciers and ice caps, and sea levels are rising. Global surface temperature is rising fast; the last decade was the hottest on record.

Second, we are already seeing the social, economic and environmental effects of a changing climate. In the past 50 years, the number of record hot days in Australia has more than doubled. This has increased the risk of heatwave-associated deaths, as well as extreme bushfires.

Sea level has risen by 20 centimetres globally since the late 1800s, affecting many coastal communities. Another 20-centimetre increase by 2050 is likely, on present projections, which would more than double the risk of coastal flooding.

Third, these changes are triggered by human activities – particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – which are increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, with carbon dioxide the most important of these gases.

Fourth, this is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our children and grandchildren experience. Without strong and rapid action, there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine society’s prosperity, health, stability and way of life.

That scientists still need to repeat these long-established truths is a measure of how much we’ve allowed short-sighted and selfish concerns to distract us from the need to respond to a clear and present danger.

In this we haven’t been well served by our leaders. The Labor government’s decline dates from Kevin Rudd’s loss of nerve following the defeat of his carbon pollution reduction scheme in the Senate in late 2009, following the success of the Coalition’s climate

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/climate-inertia-shows-ugly-side-of-the-australian-character-20110524-1f2dj.html#ixzz1NJyuWrKu

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Phillip Coorey

March 18, 2011THE Greens have questioned why the government is pursuing their policy on climate change if it considers the minor party to be extreme.

Professor Ross Garnaut says that a portion of the carbon tax revenue should used to reduce taxes for and middle-income households

Tony Abbott has been rehearsing for an election campaign in which he is the champion of the stretched household budget and the working man’s job, the guy who promises to repeal a great big new carbon tax. But a campaign where he can’t afford to match a personal income tax cut for most struggling families would be something else altogether.

Lenore Taylor

March 11, 2011

SCIENTIFIC evidence of global warming has become more certain and more alarming but the public has become less convinced about it, according to the government’s expert adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut.

As debate rages over Labor’s proposed carbon tax, Professor Garnaut said the latest evidence showed global temperatures rising as predicted and sea levels rising faster than forecast in the last intergovernmental report.

In Australia the decade ending in 2010 was the warmest on record, continuing the trend of each decade being warmer than the one before.

In the latest instalment of his climate report, Professor Garnaut said he was more certain than before that the science of global warming was sound.

”’On the balance of probabilities’ would understate my current view of the likelihood that the mainstream science is correct. I would now say it is highly probable,” he said, adding that there was no ”genuine” scientific dissent from ”the main propositions of the physics of climate change”.

But he said the ”debate” under way in newspapers and blogs in Australia was often ”antithetical” to science because it had become ”divorced from scientific rigour, quality and authority” with one opinion or book being seen as just as good as another.

”If you take our mainstream media, it often seeks to provide balance between people who base their views on the mainstream science and people who don’t. That’s a very strange sort of balance, it’s a balance of number of words but it is not a balance of scientific authority,” Professor Garnaut said.

Many scientists were starting to question whether the international goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees would be enough to avoid ”dangerous climate change”, although talks had so far failed to reach an agreement to achieve even that goal.

Australia’s target of reducing emissions by at least 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020 – agreed to by both main parties – is seen as appropriate in the absence of a full international deal.

If there was a deal to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million – required to limit warming to 2 degrees – Australia’s ”fair share” would be a reduction target of 25 per cent.

Professor Garnaut said there was ”no prospect” of a tougher goal than 450 parts per million being agreed upon.

The Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, which represents companies responsible for 90 per cent of Australia’s emissions, denied reports it was calling for a delay to the imposition of a carbon price.

”We are not calling for a delay in the start date and we are certainly not asking that the tax be put on hold,” the network chief executive, Michael Hitchens, said. ”We simply want to ensure the government gets details of the scheme out in time”.

But the network did call for policy changes the government has already ruled out, including a phase out of the renewable energy target and the ability for companies to buy cheaper international permits to meet their obligations under a carbon tax.

The Coalition climate spokesman, Greg Hunt, said the opposition’s policy was that ”the science is real, confirmed and significant” but it did not justify a petrol and electricity tax.