‘He can visualise our world in fifty years, and this vision haunts him’: Tim Flannery’s ‘Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?’1 Issue 9, December 2008 | David Hodgkinson If human beings follow a business-as-usual course, continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without reducing carbon emissions or capturing and sequestering them before they warm the atmosphere, the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilization developed and flourished during the past several thousand years. - Professor James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Earth Institute, Columbia University2 Until a few years ago Tim Flannery was best known for his book The Future Eaters,3 an ecological history of Australia. The Future Eaters is, in part, about the subtle interaction that makes an ecosystem work. It also presents an argument for sustainability, and climate change in a sustainability context has been the focus of Flannery’s work ever since. He was the Australian of the Year in 2007. In September 2008 Flannery appeared on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, and Denton said to him: ‘Australian of the Year is not supposed to be political in his or her comments. Was it perhaps a useful place to put you, where you couldn’t be political?’4 He responded: ‘it might have been, but I sort of made it clear on the day that I got the Award that I wasn’t going to shut up. And it was funny, you know, because there we were in front of this crowd who were just, they were enjoying a beer and enjoying the sun and enjoying the music and I gave a little 100 word speech. In it I just said something like, ‘as Australian of the Year I just have to keep on being relentless in, you know, pointing out the faults that I see in the system.’ And all of a sudden the audience erupted. It was kind of scary because there was just this all of a sudden this cheer ... I didn’t think people were really listening [to me]’.5 People are listening to Tim Flannery now. His most important book dedicated to climate change, The Weather Makers,6 was an international bestseller. And now there’s ‘Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia,’ a 2008 Quarterly Essay7 which has generated correspondence and debate in Australia and around the world.8 http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/new-critic 1 The climate problem - ‘We will need to learn very fast: learn, indeed, on the job’9 Flannery’s essay draws on a lot of previous material – he’s talked before, of course, about the climate change problem, sustainability, agricultural policy, and coal – but there is much here that is new. And he’s much more pessimistic. In a review of Flannery’s essay and some other recent climate change books, Clive Hamilton in ‘Six Degrees of Apocalypse’10 says that at times in the essay Flannery seems to accept the possibility that civilisation and perhaps the human species will be wiped out11 – a theme borrowed from James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia12 (a horror story if ever there was one), and a theme of which Flannery makes much. While Flannery (and others) ‘ seem[s] to believe that it is politically possible’ to ‘cut emissions within two decades sharply enough to avoid the worst effects’ of climate change, Hamilton ‘get[s] the sense that [Flannery has] ... to work hard to remain convinced.’13 In the essay Flannery writes that, through the latter part of 2007 and into 2008, he found it increasingly hard to read the scientific findings on climate change without despairing. Perhaps the most dispiriting developments are occurring at the North Pole.14 He is clearly affected by the World Wildlife Fund’s decision to no longer try and protect the Arctic because ‘it’s too late.’15 The WWF believes that the Arctic’s first summer completely free of ice may arrive before 2013, and the director of its International Arctic Programme ‘admits to having no idea what the Arctic might look like in 2050.’ 16 Flannery begins the essay with sustainability, recognises difficulties with definitions, and views earth – referencing Lovelock’s Gaia – as a self-regulating, evolving system with humans as a part. His enquiry into sustainability is: as much a philosophical and moral discussion as a scientific one; for sustainability pertains to us – our innate needs and desires – as much as it does to the workings and capacities of our planet. A real search for sustainability involves a broad vision...17 The section of his essay entitled ‘The Climate Problem’ and what he refers to as ‘a new Dark Age’ is the most confronting – although I actually wonder for how long one can continue to be confronted by this kind of information. He puts the matter this way: There is one problem facing humanity that is now so urgent that, unless it is resolved in the next two decades, it will destroy our global civilisation: the climate crisis. It seems almost superfluous to say it, but the warming trend is real and accelerating, and it’s our pollution that is responsible. All but the most ignorant and biased of sceptics now admit this truth, and it’s underlined by the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [the IPCC].18 The IPCC is, as Flannery notes, ‘painfully conservative,’19 and its standard projections, it seems from scientific studies over the last few months, confirm this. Indeed, the worst projections of the IPCC should, it appears, be regarded as the most likely outcomes, and that tipping points which would cause sea- level rise of several metres, rather than the IPCC’s centimetres, are no longer statistical outliers but likely events.20 http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/new-critic 2 Further, a study published in April 2008 found that the IPCC projections of 2007 underestimated by two-thirds the extent to which emissions need to be reduced.21 At the moment the proportion of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is about 385 parts per million (ppm) by volume. Professor James Hansen (who Flannery and others recognise as the world’s leading climate scientist) has been arguing that 385 ppm is already too high. Hansen says: Humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate. If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels to feed a growing appetite for energy-intensive life styles, we will soon leave the climate of the Holocene, the world of prior human history. The eventual response to doubling preindustrial atmospheric CO2 likely would be a nearly ice-free planet, preceded by a period of chaotic change with continually changing shorelines. Humanity’s task of moderating human-caused global climate change is urgent. Ocean and ice sheet inertias provide a buffer delaying full response by centuries, but there is a danger that human-made forcings could drive the climate system beyond tipping points such that change proceeds out of our control... Paleoclimate evidence and ongoing global changes imply that today’s CO2 levels, about 385 ppm, are already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted... 22 The problem is that with more than 1 degree of warming (relative to the year 2000, or 1.7 degrees relative to pre-industrial times), I understand it’s hard to avoid irreversible ice sheet and species loss. 1 degree of warming implies CO2 levels of 450ppm. Flannery believes that ‘[h]umanity can probably cope with a warming of less than 2 degrees.’23 Professor Garnaut had stated that it is in Australia’s interest to see major reductions in global emissions towards a level of 450 ppm. Subsequently, however, he concluded that the 450ppm target was not possible at this time, and recommended a target of just a 10% reduction in emissions on 2000 levels by 2020 – that is, a level of 550ppm, with later global negotiations aiming at 450ppm.24 Yet, as the Climate Institute makes clear, referencing a study of pollution trajectories conducted in 2007 by the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency and Potsdam Institute, ‘there are no pathways that initially follow 550 ppm… and [that] can turn into a 450 ppm pathway later on.’25 ‘By 2020, no Australian polluter will live in poverty’26 It’s said that a practical global strategy requires a rising global price on CO2 emissions (or, put another way, a market) and the phase-out of coal. For the Rudd Labor government, that means an ETS – the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)27 – to begin on 1 July 2010. It’s a cap-and- trade scheme, like that (more or less) which operates in the European Union, and like that which will operate in the United States. The abatement target is just 5%. Forget the 5% to 15% target ‘range’ – it’s 15% only in the event of a global agreement between major economies (including developing countries) to reduce emissions. As detailed in the CPRS White Paper,28 it means up to 90% free permits for large emitters, for emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries, and assistance to strongly affected industries like coal-fired electricity generators (based on a carbon price of between AUD 23 and 25 a tonne) – and, with little incentive to reduce emissions, it fails to achieve its main objective.