Yes, the public is way ahead of the government re climate change.
And not just here in Australia, but internationally, including the US. We can celebrate An Inconvenient Truth, the School Strike for Climate, and Extinction Rebellion for raising the alarm.
However… (and here comes the big gap).
The general public has no realistic idea what to do about it. Indeed, most of the environmental-progressive movement, and faith communities who care (not Morrison’s kind), have no realistic idea of what to do about it.
Indeed, the ‘it’ is poorly conceived. Climate change is the major bugbear (US term), which makes sense given the obvious magnitude and import of climate change. However, it is not the only disastrous trend taking us to ecological catastrophe. Think of species loss, declining freshwater tables, industrial toxins in the food chain – and beyond this the mentality that drives massive investment in the military, with the ever-present possibility of the madness of nuclear war.
I produced a presentation piece called Looming Disasters. It is a tool for one-to-one conversations that bring this home to people.
And I show this cartoon, over and over:
You would be correct to point out that the prospect of changing this whole system seems overwhelming to people.
I think that I am correct to point out that unless we mobilise the public will to change this whole system, the civilisation some of us now enjoy has dismal prospects.
CANA (Climate Action Network Australia) pushes protest (Stop Adani), and 100% renewables. However, as New Zealand engineering professor Susan Krumdiek’s Transition Engineering makes clear, there is reason to suppose that at current efficiencies renewable energy, despite its appeal, cannot fully power our globalised civilisation in the style which we are accustomed.
The argument hinges on the physical reality of Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI). How much energy do you get out of a renewable system when we take into account the energy it takes to mine, manufacture, transport and dispose of the windmills and solar panels? It turns out that you do get more energy out than you put in, except for rooftop solar and local hydrogen. This is good! But the amount of surplus energy that we can actually use to power our transportation, air-conditioning, electric vehicles, manufacturing etc is not great.
In the meantime, global CO2 emissions are still going up. Species loss continues… you get the picture. We are in an ecologically emergency now.
What to do about it all?
Well, going forward, collectively we must choose materially modest lifestyles based on elegantly designed durable necessities, with little excess consumption.
This implies slowing the economy, and we would do well to do this on purpose. I envision at some point in the future when there is enough public will for such a thing, that the government of the day will convene an extended think tank – perhaps two weeks – where leaders from all political parties, large businesses, NGOs, scientists, ecologists, artists, systems thinkers, and a few stay-at-home moms think through how to make a phased descent to a steady-state economy work.
You wrote:
I think it’s time for us all to be focussing on the action – practical strategies – rather than “winning hearts and minds”: they are already won!
Yes, we need to ramp up the practical changes! Are you content to just champion that while the larger system of economic growth, population increase, and corporate control of government (as portrayed in the cartoon) – and people’s acceptance of these – continues to drive the larger economic-industrial system that is destroying the Earth?
Greta Thunberg will have reason to hope when she sees that mainstream society is committed to turning things around.
Let’s make it happen!
Andrew Gaines is the instigator of Inspiring Transition. He integrate insights from the Feldenkrais method of improving brain functioning, psychotherapy, creativity training, The Natural Step, systems thinking, DesignShops, sustainability and marketing into a new paradigm for catalysing healthy cultural evolution.
His books include Kitchen Table Conversations, Inner Work, and Creativity Games. His TEDx talk is Transitioning to a life-affirming culture.
Comments
6 responses to “The public has no realistic idea of what to do about climate change – and nor does the environmental-progressive movement”
Although 100% renewable energy is feasible for Australia and the world at the current level of economic activity, I have argued previously in P&I and elsewhere that we are unlikely to achieve it in time to avoid severe and possibly irreversible climate change, if we rely on technological change alone. So I too am against “the larger system of economic growth, population increase, and corporate control of government”. We do need to transition to a steady-state economy with throughput within Earth’s biocapacity.
Andrew, before you make sweeping statements such as “most of the environmental-progressive movement, and faith communities who care…have no realistic idea of what to do about [climate change]” and before you criticise Climate Action Network Australia and other environmental organisations for campaigning for 100% renewable energy, you should study the recent literature. Your claim that rooftop solar uses more life-cycle energy than it generates in its lifetime is incorrect! That claim was only true decades ago before solar panels were mass-produced. Since 2015 several peer-reviewed journal papers have refuted your outdated claim. A popular article of mine summarising the refutation was published in RenewEconomy of 11 May 2020. It’s based on the recent scholarly literature, including a journal paper by Diesendorf & Wiedmann (2020).
Furthermore, recent studies by others have also shown that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for coal-fired electricity is much less than previously believed, comparable with that of solar photovoltaics at medium-sunshine sites. This is mainly the result of the low energy efficiency of producing electricity by combusting coal. Typically only one-quarter to one-third of the chemical energy in the coal is converted to electricity. 100% renewable energy is feasible in terms of technologies, economics and EROI.
The Morrison government has included carbon capture and storage as one of five ‘priority technologies’ under the Technology Roadmap published in September. Bruce Mountain of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University has found that adding carbon capture and storage technologies to a new coal-fired generator could raise the levelised cost of electricity by between $90 and $125 per MWh. The study found that there were just two examples of carbon capture projects from fossil fuel power stations, and this meant there was limited available evidence on the costs of the technology. One of those has already been mothballed and the second operates far below its design capacity.
I think this article is a little too gloomy on our prospects of survival in terms of ER0EI because it assumes that today’s versions of renewable energy systems are at the peak of their development and evolution. We have only really been on the renewable energy path for about 15 years, so there’s a lot of improvement still possible. The article is not gloomy enough though on how little time we have to make this radical transformation – most governments claim to be aiming for net zero emissions by 2050 (China by 2060) but their actual policies and actions are nowhere near on-track for this ambition – they are headed for 3.5DegC of global average warming currently and that’s ignoring crossing the last 6 of Will Steffen’s 16 climate feedback thresholds (9 are already triggered) leading unstoppably to 4-6DegC of warming. We are on-track to cross these last thresholds by 2030 and there’s a 10% chance we’ve already crossed the thresholds. 4-6DegC of warming could mean that only 2Bn people can survive, civilisation as we know it will collapse and 90% of species will also be wiped out. The bottom line is, we NEED net zero by 2030, so to get there we will also need degrowth. This I think is happening anyway – there is no real growth in global economies because such a small proportion of the worlds population own almost all wealth, which they cannot possible spend. All they can do with it is speculate it – so share prices and property prices go up, whilst incomes for the majority stay stagnant. The only growth is an illusion as governments print more and money or banks invent it as credit for ordinary folk to spend until it ends up in the grotesquely rich pile again – rinse and repeat. A reckoning is coming for the grotesquely wealthy.
Several detailed studies reveal that the pre-Covid global economy has been growing in real biophysical terms, i.e. in the use of energy, materials and land, and in population. This growth is driven mainly by the rich 10%. The middle-classes of the rich countries are also driving this growth, which is caused by their/our investments as well as their/our direct expenditures. To avoid irreversible climate change, the rich countries must shift to steady-state economies with low throughput, as well as to ‘green’ technologies. Policies to restrain the expenditures and investments of the rich include progressive income taxation, wealth & inheritance taxes and carbon pricing. However, the rich use their political power to resist these policies.
Seems to me that the only growth in real biophysical terms is coming predominantly from the already very large populations of China and India moving from poverty to prosperity and consumption. However I am basing this on the good correlation between global greenhouse gas emissions (as proxy for consumption) with the economic emergence of China? The rich 10% is potentially misleading, because it includes the grotesquely rich 0.01% through to the reasonable well off in developed countries. I think that the top 1% may be getting wealthier but the rest are not.