The think tank idea that the world can still make a gradual transition to a low-carbon world by tweaking neoliberalism is totally unrealistic. We need to undertake a massive risk management task, the first step of which must be a brutally frank assessment of the challenge we face. It is something that business, finance and politics continues to avoid. Achieving net zero emissions by 2050, is totally inadequate. It must be reached as soon as possible, ideally by 2030.
The downsides of neoliberalism have never been so obvious than in the irresponsible debate over climate and energy policy. For three decades, industry, particularly the fossil fuel industry, and its peak bodies, have maintained a steady drumbeat of climate denial.
Initially, it was hard denial that human-induced climate change even existed. As that stance became ever less credible in the light of burgeoning climate damage, it became soft denial, accepting that climate change was happening but using predatory delay to prevent implementation of any serious climate policy.
Even now after last year’s bushfires, conservative thinktanks are on hand to “prove” that climate action will “destroy the economy and our international competitiveness”, with nary a mention of the infinitely greater cost of doing nothing.
Covid-19 has again thrown neoliberal deficiencies into stark relief. Both the pandemic and climate change were created by the unconstrained economic growth that neoliberalism demands. The former from increased contact between humans and wildlife in previously pristine natural environments, leading to zoonotic disease transmission, compounded by species migration and increased temperature resulting from climate change.
Yet neoliberalism is incapable of tackling these problems because solutions require the common good to take precedence over the individual. Fortunately, in the Australian pandemic, politicians were forced to break with neoliberal principles, reverting to Keynesian stimulus and appropriate constraints on individual freedom, so far averting a domestic, Trumpian, Covid disaster.
The pandemic is climate change on fast forward, and there are many lessons to be learnt in planning for the far greater challenges of climate change that lie ahead. The threat of immediate, large-scale, pandemic mortality is credited with forcing a backdown from the excesses of neoliberalism, with the lack of a similar immediate threat cited as a primary reason climate action has been so slow. However, three decades of political inaction, leading to accelerating climate impact and mortality, have removed that excuse.
The emergence of a new line of thinktanks, such as the Coalition for Conservation and the Blueprint Institute, inter alia designed to encourage conservatives to become more attuned to environmental and climate change concerns, is a case in point.
It is refreshing to see new conservative thinking intent upon cutting through “tired ideologies” and dogma. However, if it refuses to understand and tackle the real challenges and risks we face, it is just trying to put a more palatable face on denial.
For example, Blueprint recently opined that meeting a net zero emissions by 2050 target could not be achieved by technology alone as proposed by Minister Angus Taylor. Rather, incentives in the form of some market mechanism were essential. Which completely ignores the inadequacy of the 2050 target itself.
It is high time economists in these thinktanks accepted Herman Daly’s observation that “the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse”. And if the environment is in big trouble, as Graeme Samuel’s EPBC Review, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment and the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity confirm, so are we.
Scientists and institutional leaders globally, along with communities, are demanding emergency action on climate change and the environment more widely.
The thinktank idea that the world can still make an ordered, gradual transition to a low-carbon world by tweaking neoliberalism is totally unrealistic. We have left it too late, and neoliberal economic growth is incompatible with a sustainable future. In essence, addressing climate change and environmental decline means, akin to wartime, the suspension of business-as-usual to do whatever it takes to resolve these crises. There is no higher priority.
This does mean massive societal and cultural change, and fundamental reframing of virtually every policy arena; climate, environment, energy, foreign affairs, defence, health, immigration, agriculture to name but a few. That requires an all-encompassing commitment to an emergency transition. Certainly there will be costs, but the costs of ignoring climate change and wider environmental concerns will be far greater.
If the new thinktanks genuinely want to create a sustainable world, all to the good, but there must be fundamental change, away from their current magical thinking. Of that so far, there is little sign.
As Sir David King, former UK Chief Scientists said at the National Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne last week:
“What we do in the next 3-4 years will determine the future of humanity”.
The latest climate science indicates that the lower Paris limit of 1.5oC global average temperature increase, relative to pre-industrial levels, will occur around 2030, irrespective of any action taken in the interim. The 2oC upper limit is now likely prior to 2050, absent emergency action, with 3oC early in the second half of this Century. “Hothouse Earth”, non-linear, irreversible, self-sustaining warming may be triggered within the 1.5 – 2.0oC Paris range. There is a risk that such climate system tipping points may have already moved beyond our influence.
Global warming in 2020, at 1.3oC, is dangerous; 2oC would be extremely dangerous; 3oC would be catastrophic. Australia in 2020 was already 1.5oC. In these circumstances, the current fashion in business and finance, to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, is totally inadequate. It must be reached as soon as possible, ideally by 2030.
But in addition to rapid emission reduction, atmospheric carbon concentrations must be drawn down from the present level of 416 ppm CO2, toward a more stable level of below 350 ppm CO2. No technologies currently exist at scale to do that, further exacerbating our climate risk.
Hence the need for precautionary steps to avoid the worst outcomes, possibly including geoengineering to buy time, by cooling areas of the planet, before other initiatives take effect.
A massive risk management task, far beyond anything currently contemplated officially, the first step of which must be a brutally frank assessment of the challenge we face. Something business, finance and politics continue to avoid.
What matters is action in the next decade, for climate change is now an existential threat to civilisation as we know it. Aspirations for 2050 are nothing less than soft denial.
Ian Dunlop was formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a member of the Club of Rome and Chair, Advisory Board, Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. Executive Committee member of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group.
Comments
9 responses to “The pandemic is climate change on fast forward”
Interesting and parallels with an article from DeSmog Canada about similarities apparent between politics, science denialism, recommended actions about climate change and Covid19 responses; all seem to be about more delay to preserve present and future income streams for legacy industries (aka BigTech vs. NewsCorp et al. rentiers using the LNP govt. as their proxy). From DeSmog 10 August 2020:
‘How the UK’s Climate Science Deniers Turned Their Attention to COVID-19…….. For those who have watched the decades-long efforts to slow climate action, this was a familiar phenomenon. And the coronavirus pandemic seemed to give fresh ammunition to some familiar faces.
A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.
Why?
“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.
“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: you have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”
Till Australia can return to politics, media and national government that represents society, environment and science (vs. rentier capitalism, Christianity, nationalism and ‘owned’ government), no substantive policies will be enacted or allowed to functionally survive. However, the likes of the EU and the ‘Brussels Effect’ (like other trading agreements and related climate treaties e.g. new Biden administration) may make it easier for citizens vis a vis our inert ‘owned’ government to compel the latter to take action e.g. EU’s planned carbon tariffs (while fossil fuel sector and supporters cry ‘socialism’ and a loss of ‘sovereignty’).
Great analysis Thanks Ian Dunlop. We all have to try to save this planet together. We have to have agreed good governance which in turn has to be guided by appropriate scientific knowledge. Governments need to treasure human lives much more than thinking of making money all the time. Economy is important but when come to saving lives, we all have to make some sacrifices like in the pandemic of Covid 19. Hope you have pointed a path for all governments under United Nations to follow.
You only have to look at Mauna Loa’s Co2 emissions monitoring to see that even though international transport and much of industry has been affected through lockdowns around the world, that it has had little effect on emissions.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
It just demonstrates how much change we have to make given that the Coronvirus has significantly slowed our ‘business as usual’ approach. And for much of the media all they want is a return to ‘normal’.
Radical changes in consumer society are needed but the capitalist and neoliberal driven dream continues.
“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on
Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced
from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likelyless than that.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126
Where now at 415 ppm.
We just saw – 22 degrees in Texas caused in a good part to changes to the polar vortex brought on by climate change. – 37 degrees in Lincoln, Nebraska.
It wasn’t even reported as such in Australia, but it was in the US. If it is that cold in Texas, it is most certainly warming up in the northern polar regions once again. Untold quantities of methane are, and will continue to be released due to this effect. It is a far more dangerous gas.
I fully agree with Dr Andrew Glikson that the ‘gas led recovery’ is a complete folly. And now they have that put in place, the Nationals want coal back on the menu. We are seriously living an unsustainable dream in the Australian bubble.
George, once the atmospheric level of CO2 has risen to and above current levels it triggers amplifying feed backs including: (1) warming ocean water absorb less CO2 from the atmosphere; (2) drying and burning vegetation release CO2; (3) methane leaks from melting permafrost and sediments, and so on. To attempt to stem this loop large scale CO2 draw down would be required – possibly the biggest project ever undertaken by “sapiens” to protect life on its planet. So far they appear more inclined to sink their $trillions into the military-industrial complex and consequent wars.
That’s presented in a very easy way to understand, thank you.
I agree about the military industrial madness.
One of the worst untruths propagated is that of “Gas led recovery”, which gives an impression of “recovery” (economic and from COVID-19). In effect such “recovery” extends the methane leaks from the Arctic permafrost to methane leaks all over the gas extraction fields (The Methane Time Bomb”, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021830136X ),
as follows:
“Another example of the effect of human activity on methane release is the venting of methane from underground coal mines in the Hunter region of New South Wales has led to an atmospheric level in the region of 3,000 ppb, with methane levels of 2,000 ppb extending to some 50 km away from the mines. Thus Kelly et al. [2015] states: “In the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, open-cut coal mining district we mapped a continuous 50 km interval where the concentration of methane exceeded 1800 ppb. The median concentration in this interval was 2020 ppb. Peak readings were beyond the range of the reliable measurement (in excess of 3000 ppb). ”
Kelly B.F.J., C.P. Iverach, D. Lowry, R.E. Fisher, J.L. France, E.G. Nisbet (2015)Fugitive methane emissions from natural, urban, agricultural, and energy-production landscapes of eastern Australia. EGU General Assembly (2015). Vienna, Austria
Please remember, if you have not, that there is currently a consultation on the Gas lead Recovery, which is taking submissions….
https://consult.industry.gov.au/energy/gas-fired-recovery-plan/consultation/
for what it is worth, my short submission is at:
https://cmandchaos.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/quick-submission-to-the-inquiry-into-the-gas-fired-recovery-plan/
Thanks JM. In so far as those who decide the outcome of this inquiry place mega-profits ahead of nature and species, I feel discouraged from preparing a detailed submission. In so far as your submission has not yet been finalized you may like to add a reference of the paper:
The Methane Time Bomb”: by A.Y. Glikson https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021830136X
Thank you.
I will be interested to read your paper as well 🙂