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Green Nation: The Fight Against Climate Change | Transcript

Ellie Cooper: Global warming is happening now, from the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef to bush fires to the mega storm that caused a blackout across South Australia. Leading scientists say there is no time to waste in saving the planet, but Australia’s carbon footprint is anything but insignificant. We’re the world’s largest coal exporter, one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, and the largest emitter per person of any country in the developed world. With push back from government conservatives and industries that benefit from coal, how can Australia address climate change? In The Fight Against Climate Change, the first episode of the three-part Green Nation series, we investigate the importance of civil society in agitating for change. I’m Ellie Cooper, you’re listening to Not for Podcast.

Professor Will Steffen is a climate change expert and researcher at the ANU, and a councillor at the Climate Council of Australia. I asked him how serious the threat of climate change is.

Will Steffen: It’s very serious because it affects the fundamental environment in which humans have developed in, which our civilisations have developed and in which we can thrive physiologically. To put that in perspective, the earth’s climate has been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years and that’s when we humans have developed agriculture and villages, cities and civilisations. We’re now destabilising that climate at a very rapid rate and that means that unless we really get this under control fast, our grandchildren and their descendants are going to have a very, very different world they have to cope with.

EC: As you mentioned, it’s deteriorating rapidly. Are people aware of the immediacy of these risks and are they taking it seriously enough?

WS: No, not at all. I think that’s one of the big problems, is that we live now in such a fast-paced world that we only focus on what’s immediately in front of us, whether it’s on the internet or in the media or whatever, but even now we can see the impacts of climate change. A good example of that in Australia recently was the massive bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef as well as the fires in Tasmania and so on. There are a lot of reminders already here today that the climate is changing very fast.

EC: What do you think it’ll take for people to start taking this issue seriously?

WS: One of the things we need to do is to realise that the shifts in climate that we’ve seen that sound fairly innocuous, but I think we now need to make the connection that one degree change means a massive increase in the amount of energy that’s in the atmosphere, that’s in the surface ocean, and we need to connect that with things that matter for people, like the extreme events we’ve been seeing, the heatwaves, the bush fires, the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the storms in South Australia which knocked out the electricity system. All of these things now are being made worse by the fact we’ve got more energy in the climate system. This fact really hasn’t gotten out into the popular media or the popular press yet.

EC: That was professor Will Steffen. Anika Molesworth has firsthand experience of climate change.

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Her family lives on a farm outside Broken Hill in New South Wales. After the millennium drought, Anika became an advocate for climate change and was a finalist for the New South Wales 2016 Young Australian of the Year. She explains the toll climate change has had on rural Australians.

Anika Molesworth: We purchased this farm in the year 2000 so it was the start of the decade-long millennium drought and it was immediately apparent how interconnected different components of a farming system are. As we all know, when the rain doesn’t fall, less vegetation grows. We had to sell our livestock at reduced weight, crop yields were not achieved. Less money in the farmer’s pocket means they have to search for… employment and you see shops in rural towns close, and so for me, this millennium drought was the impetus for me to pursue a career in how resilience in vulnerable farming systems, the challenges we are facing now and the challenges of the future.

EC: Are you still experiencing the effects of climate change?

AM: Yes, definitely. I am now doing a PhD in agricultural science, and so some of this is looking at how a changing climate is impacting livestock and crops, not only in Australia, but also around the world. I’m doing studies in Southeast Asia, in Laos and Cambodia. And when I’m working with farmers over there, some of the world’s poorest farmers, they have no formal education yet they can tell me exactly the number of days that the dry season is extending each year, they can describe to me insects that are now eating their crops that they had never seen before. So it’s not only myself and my family, and farmers in Australia, it’s farmers right around the world which are being impacted by climate change and as I learn more about the impacts of farmers around the world, I realise how lucky we are to be farmers in Australia because some of these farmers in developing nations, they’re literally falling off the cliff face right now due to the impacts of climate change.

EC: Last year you and another young farmer crowdfunded your way to the UN talks in Paris to represent the country’s agricultural interests. Do you think that regional Australian voices have been ignored in discussions about climate change?

AM: Farming industries in Australia, they’re so extremely diverse. I mean, you’ve got extensive inland grazing systems to tropical crops in far-northern Queensland. We’re working in a geographically isolated areas, so having a unified voice is quite challenging because climate change affects each of us, each farmer, in different ways. For instance, in Far North Queensland, they might be seeing new tropical disease and pests impacting their crop, whereas alpine farmers in southern Australia might be noticing warmer temperatures. I think what has confused the more general media on this topic is that because agriculture is just so diverse, it’s impossible to have one unified voice of, “This is what is happening in the agricultural industry.”

A lot of farmers are doing a terrific job in voicing their concerns of how climate change is impacting them and their industry, and we do need to see a lot more of that. We need to see more recognition that farmers are on the frontline of a changing climate.

EC: Do you feel living in regional Australia that you’ve had enough support from the government in dealing with climate change?

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AM: Look, in various ways there are support programs here, which is great. Any support is very helpful. Farmers and rural and regional communities need the skills, the knowledge, and support structures in place to be able to adopt renewable energy, to make the changes necessary to adapt to a changing climate and to mitigate emissions from their businesses ad from their households. There’s always room to improve what we are doing and we need to continually strive to make improvements in the farming industry and in Australia as a whole nation.

EC: That was Anika Molesworth. I asked Professor Steffen what it will take to mitigate the effects of climate change.

WS: If you look at how fast the climate is changing now, the rise in Co2 is 100-times faster than the fastest increase we can see in the past. The temperature is now rising at 170-times faster than the background rate, so that’s why ecosystems are collapsing like the Great Barrier Reef and so on. We really have to understand that this is an exceptionally fundamental problem that’ll take fundamental solutions. We do have to completely revamp our energy system, our transport system, our agricultural systems to get greenhouse gas emissions out of these systems. Now, obviously that’s going to take time. You can’t redo an energy system in a couple of weeks, but we have a window of opportunity now that’s closing very fast, to start this transformation process.

It has to be completed by 2040 or 2050, so that means we have to make the decisions this decade that we are going to make this transformation. That means going to renewable energies, electrified ground transport, that sort of thing. The second thing we have to do is we have to adapt to the changes which are inevitable, and that means those of us who live in cities and the vast majority of Australians do live in cities, we need to think about urban heat island effects, about planting more trees, making our cities greener. We need to adapt our agriculture to the fact that we’ll be living in a hotter world, rainfall patterns will change. We need to think of our conservation of natural ecosystems in ways that need to change to cope with the fact that species will try to move to cooler environments.

We have to adapt to the fact that climate change is with us, and even though we do the best job possible of transformation now, we’ll still see further change out to at least the middle of this century.

EC: Who needs to be involved in driving this change? Is it up to government or does everybody have a role to play?

WS: That’s a really important question and I think a lot of people say, “Well, you can do a lot as an individual, you can drive less, you can put solar panels on your house.” But let me make it really clear. We will never solve this problem unless we get it done at the scale of countries and indeed of the entire human community.

EC: As Professor Will Steffen said, climate change requires an international response. The Paris Climate Change Agreement, where some of the world’s largest emitters pledged to reduce their carbon footprint, was set to make inroads in halting the advancement of climate change. But as Sara Bice, socio-political commentator from the University of Melbourne, explains, US president-elect Donald Trump could

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unravel the landmark deal.

Sara Bice: This is quite serious. Let’s talk about what could happen if Paris does proceed. If Paris does proceed, we’re looking at the United States making a commitment to cut their emissions by 28 per cent on 2005 level by 2025, so in less than 10 years, almost a 30 per cent cut in omissions by the world’s second largest emitter. We’re looking at China promising to make best efforts to peak energy use and emissions by 2030, and then have 20 per cent of energy needs from renewables by 2020. In Australia, we’ve seen very strong commitments. In Victoria, we’ve got a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2025. South Australia’s currently leading on renewable adoption, and the Australian Commonwealth Government, even after the Trump election, ratified the Paris Agreement.

If Paris doesn’t go ahead, we’re looking at a massive slowdown in climate change mitigation, and potentially a catastrophic situation because this is something that requires immediate action if we are to hold the temperature and not go above the two degree that the IPCC tells us is so critical.

EC: What do you think is likely to happen?

SB: Unfortunately at this stage, it’s a bit of a scary scenario because the Trump White House has said that they will be, and this is quoting Donald Trump, cancelling the Paris Agreement. Donald Trump in 2012 came out on Twitter and said that climate change was a man-made hoax created by the Chinese Government to harm US manufacturing. He wants to increase coal extraction and production in the United States, he wants to bring steel production back to America, and it’s very unlikely that he’ll be supporting renewable energy. Indeed, all of those anti-environment activities are a written part of Donald Trump’s first 100-day plan for his presidency. Are we going to see an ability to mitigate climate change within that political climate? It’s very questionable, and it’s very concerning, and that’s why I go, again, to say that I think we need global leadership on this issue.

EC: What do you make of Australia’s leadership on climate change?

SB: I think Malcolm Turnbull genuinely believes that climate change is a critical issue to be addressed. I also think that he has been very weak within his prime ministership on climate change. Back in 2009, I believe, he promised that climate change would be at the top of his agenda, no matter where his party sat on that. But ever since Malcolm Turnbull came to office, we’ve seen less stringent action and certainly some of the ministerial appointments, people who are pro-industry, have been less than exciting in terms of climate change mitigation. I hope now that Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian Commonwealth Government will step up in light of the United States very likely drawback, and indeed potential denial of climate change.

EC: Why is climate change as an issue so difficult for governments to address?

SB: Climate change is difficult to address because it is very hard to get the voters to understand that it is real and that it’s something that is going to affect everyone. Climate change is happening from a geological perspective now, very rapidly, but at the same time, it is a slow process and it’s a global process. It’s not as though you wake up one day and go, “Oh, the ice caps melted. This is terrible, we have

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to do something.” One day that will happen, but right now climate change is occurring slowly and it’s something that we’re contributing to through our regular everyday activities, and I think that until we can get very, very concerted governments and industry leadership on climate change, it will be difficult to bring along the mainstream public.

EC: Can advocacy or community organisations still play an important role in helping to address the issue?

SB: Civil society plays a critical role in assisting the mainstream public to get on board with what would otherwise be marginalised or very difficult issues. Our civil society groups in Australia are doing an amazing job of pushing the need for climate change mitigation, of raising awareness about the need to move towards renewables and how that transition might work. And it’s now a matter, I think, of forming coalitions and ensuring that those groups are very strong for lobbying both the public, but also government and industry to effect change at a time where governments may enter an environment where a former global leadership on climate change mitigation is now shifting towards climate change denial.

EC: That was Sara Bice, socio-political commentator from the University of Melbourne.

Journalist Wendy Williams explores the role the social sector has to play in the fight against climate change.

Wendy Williams: Climate change has been described as the most difficult problem human society has ever faced. There is consensus among scientists that something needs to be done, and fast, but in the face of influential vested interests and governments that seem slow to respond, where does the social sector fit in? How does civil society become a significant force in global climate change politics? What fronts should the sector be fighting on?

Victoria McKenzie-McHarg is the Australian Conservation Foundation climate change campaign manager and the director of the board for the Climate Action Network Australia. I asked her why the fight against global climate change so often falls to the charity and not-for-profit sector.

Victoria McKenzie-McHarg: There’s lots of different ways that we see that the social sector impacts climate change either directly through the way that organisations operate their own business and their own operations, but also in the way that we take on our leadership role in society and we see ourselves as active parts of the social movement for change. When we talk about the social sector, we see organisations like the environment movement whose sole job, in many ways, is to be advocating and pushing for that change, but at the other end of the social sector is organisations that are much more engaged in service delivery. At that end, as well, not only is there a really significant need to be addressing climate change through reducing pollution of operations and also adapting to the impacts of climate change, but also speaking up for people who may not be able to speak up for themselves, and the impacts that climate change will have on them unless we see the urgent action that’s necessary.

WW: Which do you think is the most effective tool for not for profits – is it conservation, education, research or advocacy?

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VMM: I don’t think we achieve large-scale, systemic change without all of those elements. That said, we’ve seen a lot of education around climate change and in the broader sense, I guess the need now has shifted very much into the need for stronger advocacy, and for stronger grassroots community organising, and leadership from different sectors. The social sector has a very, very important role to play here. That said, there are parts of our community who often get left behind in that education challenge and these are parts of the community, particularly in Australia, who will be hit first and worst by climate change and may have some of the biggest challenges in adapting to those impacts of climate change. I’m talking particularly about hard-to-reach communities, low-income communities, new migrant refugee communities, all communities whose first language is n ot English.

Certainly education still has a role, but right now, the push I suppose of many organisations at the forefront of this issue is very much around advocacy, campaigning, and building the grassroots and cross- network power for change.

WW: You mentioned there, Victoria, how important advocacy is at the moment, but there’s a lot of discussion about the tax deductible status of environmental charities amid complaints that charities such as the ACF are encouraging people to break the law and engage in political rather than environmental activity. Is this fair or is this just removing the tax benefits in attempt to silence those who care about the environment?

VMM: Oh, look it’s absolutely an attempt to silence critics and to silence advocates for our environment and we are seeing these attacks at the moment most strongly against the environmental sector and organisations who are standing up for our reefs and forests, nature and wildlife, but make no mistake, this attack is actually a much broader attack on all of civil society and we’re seeing that extended through attacks on public institutions, attacks on transparency, attacks on rights to protest. This is coming through at the state level and at the federal level and actually, this is an attack on our rights to be active and engaged citizens in many ways. It’s certainly a very significant threat to our democracy and while the environment movement is standing at the forefront of those attacks at the moment, this is something that our whole sector should be really very concerned about.

WW: The Australian Conservation Foundation is proudly independent. How important is it to maintain that level of independence?

VMM: For an organisation like ours, it’s very important. We are a community based organisation. We’ve been representing the voice of the Australian community for our environment for over 50 years and community members from all sorts of Australian backgrounds and communities make up the backbone of this organisation and our job is to empower those voices to be actually standing up for our environment and for the future that we see for healthy, thriving communities in Australia. For us, that independence, reflecting that community background is really very important. That’s not to say that that’s the case for all organisations and we certainly see very effective, passionate organisations advocating for change who are able to support themselves with a range of different funding models, and each of those were under different circumstances. But for the ACF, as a community advocate, speaking on behalf of other communities and empowering those communities to speak for themselves, that independence is

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absolutely crucial.

WW: That was Victoria McKenzie-McHarg from the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Adam Black is the senior campaigner on the Environmental Justice Team for GetUp. I spoke to him about the role the social sector has to play in the fight against climate change.

Adam Black: Climate change is the wickedest of all wicked problems, and I think the thing for me, what makes it particularly wicked is that we can’t lose. There’s too much at stake. We’re up against very powerful vested interests in the fight against climate change. The coal lobby wields a lot of political influence in Australia, but we’ve faced wicked problems before and powerful vested interests before and we have overcome them. Another fight that mirrors the fight against big goal was the fight against big tobacco, right? The tobacco industry used every dirty trick to try and muddy the waters on the science of the dangers of tobacco, and create doubt in the public’s mind, so they could keep selling illegal products.

It’s exactly the same with coal now. You have fossil fuel interests funding climate denying think tanks like the Institute of Public Affairs, you have climate deniers in parliament and in public life trying to hold back action on climate change, just so a few vested interests can keep profiting from selling a product, coal, that makes people sick, causes premature deaths, pollutes our air and water, and is cooking the only planet we have to live on.

WW: Why as a society have we failed to adequately address climate change?

AB: It’s partly human nature. Evolution hasn’t really trained us to deal with massive global long-term problems like climate change. It’s trained us to deal with more immediate and direct threats, like, “Holy crap. There’s a lion.” While climate change was perceived as a future threat, we did a very poor job of responding to it, but climate change is here now. I think the visible impacts of climate change are increasing society’s appetite to address it. The polls show people prefer renewables to coal. They want something different. The problem isn’t so much with people now, it’s with the specific people making decisions. Someone once said, “The planet’s not dying. It’s being killed,” and those who are killing it have names and addresses. That’s a more useful way to think about this because it shows us that there are specific decision makers who could make different decisions if we apply the right pressure.

WW: What are some of the challenges facing not for profits in the fight against climate change?

AB: We have a government that is so tightly entwined with the mining industry, it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The fossil fuel industry has donated about $3.7 million to political parties in the last three years, and that’s just the money we know about. In return for those donations, fossil fuel companies get about $7.7 billion every year in fossil fuel subsidies, and incredible access to MPs. While the government are doing everything they can to make life easier for their mates in the mining industry, they’re constantly trying to remove power from the community, trying to take away all the tools that everyday Australians have to challenge fossil fuel projects.

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Compounding that problem is you have a media mostly controlled by Rupert Murdoch and they’re not on the side of public interest either, and what we’ve seen recently is coordinated attacks on renewable energy from the Murdoch press, mining lobby groups, and the Turnbull government. They never miss a chance to beat up on renewables and blame them for all sorts of things, no matter how ridiculous.

WW: In the face of all that, how does GetUp motivate and educate people on the issue?

AB: GetUp gives people agency by showing them how they can engage in the democratic process to effect change on things they care about. I think the best motivation for me and for GetUp members and the broader public is winning. GetUp members collectively achieve pretty incredible things. One recent example was when the Turnbull government announced their plans to destroy Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency, and in response GetUp members took action. 3000 GetUp members emailed their MP, called their MP, and then they funded advertising to remind the relevant ministers that actually renewable energy is a lot more popular than Malcolm Turnbull, and in the end, 800 million was saved. It’s not all of it, but if all those people hadn’t spoke out, those cuts to ARENA would have quietly passed and that would have been a major blow to Australia’s renewable energy industry.

WW: As well as working with the public, should not for profits be collaborating more?

AB: Yeah, definitely. The best way to build trust is by actually working together. We’ve found that tight, focused collaborations can produce really great results and it’s good to work with diverse allies with different areas of expertise. We’re facing a big problem that affects everyone and there’s very powerful forces trying to block progress. We all need to be pushing in the right direction together.

EC: That was Wendy Williams speaking to Adam Black from GetUp.

You’ve been listening to the fight against climate change on Not For Podcast. In the next episode of Green Nation we speak to not-for-profits, social enterprises, and communities who are taking the transition to renewables into their own hands.

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