Climate Code Red Part 8

Transport.

Our aim must be to eliminate all fossils fuels from the transport sector. We already have the technology to electrify rail networks, which means we could shift freight from roads, and people from planes, using renewable energy - a zero-emission form of transport. In France, new road construction is being severely curtailed in favour of expanded rail travel that uses state-of-the-art fast-train technology. Already, this is replacing air travel on many routes, because of shorter travel times, reduced check-in security and formalities, and the convenient location of stations in city centres. The high-speed rail link between London and Paris now takes less than 140 minutes. You can end up waiting in an airport for that long when you fly. Five years of Australia's major road funding would be enough to electrify a basic national rail network for freight. A high-speed pa.s.senger service would require new infrastructure.

New car technologies are also enabling fossil-fuel reduction. Commercially available hybrid vehicles use about half the petrol of a similarly sized car, while plug-in hybrids use a quarter of the petrol. New lightweight steel subst.i.tutes have created further efficiencies, allowing a total reduction of 90 per cent in fuel use. Fully electric vehicles are now also available, and their costs will go down with increasing scales of production and with further innovation. Honda has unveiled a zero-emission fuel-cell vehicle with a top speed of 160 kilometres per hour and a range of about 430 kilometres. Electrically a.s.sisted bikes also achieve very impressive environmental performance, while a normal bicycle, which requires 99 per cent less material and construction costs than a car, is an extremely efficient option. Further changes to urban layout to create hubs, and to increase the density of buildings, would also allow cities to use walking as the princ.i.p.al means of mobility, with public transport and bicycles as dominant support-modes.

Reducing the current heating processes.

To reduce atmospheric carbon, the Earth's natural carbon sinks must be protected and strengthened. Processes that isolate and draw down, or sequester, atmospheric carbon into the ground have become of great interest to scientists. Human activity can actively expand these processes. To be effective, they must be substantial in their long-term outcome, and have a low risk of failure, or rapid or large-scale leakage.

There are a variety of measures that can enhance these natural sinks, including protecting and expanding forests.

Recently, attention has been drawn to Terra preta do indio, or 'black soil', a term that describes dark, rich Amazonian soils, some as old as 7000 years, which contain many times the amount of carbon found in the soils of the surrounding areas. Once a mystery, it is now believed that the soils were deliberately fertilised and enriched by the region's original human inhabitants, using charred waste that was buried and maintained in the Earth.

Today, 'black soil' (or terra preta) refers to land enriched with carbon, and other minerals produced from biological materials, through a process called pyrolysis. Bioma.s.s, such as crop residue or wood, is transformed into agricultural charcoal, or biochar. This carbon-rich material is buried in the soil, where it may effectively sequester atmospheric carbon for hundreds, and even thousands, of years.

Biochar has caused great excitement among climate scientists because of its ability to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and reduce greenhouse-gas concentration. Its benefits as a soil additive include mineral and microorganism enrichment, and increased water retention, and it is especially useful in countries such as Australia, where three-quarters of the soils contain less than 1 per cent carbon. Bruno Glaser of the University of Bayreuth in Germany has found that crop productivity can double in terra preta soils. The soil's increased fertility, and better ability to tolerate weather extremes, result in higher plant yields and nutritional content, and allow a move from the current dependence on industrial fertilisers to an organic method of enriching and restoring farming lands. A 1-metre-deep hectare of terra preta can hold 250 tonnes of carbon, compared to 100 tonnes from unimproved soils. This is more effective as a carbon-sequestration technique than growing forest; and, unlike forest, there is less risk of fires producing large-scale releases of the sequestered carbon.

Joe Herbertson of sustainability consultants Crucible Carbon describes his reaction when he read about biochar technology: 'The hairs went up on the back of my neck ... this is the best news on climate change I've ever heard.'

The process that generates the biochar that is used to make black soils (pyrolysis) is, optimally, an anaerobic (oxygen-free) thermal process in which bioma.s.s is baked in a kiln to produce charcoal. Useful byproducts include bio-oils and various fuel gases, such as methane and hydrogen, that can be used for combustion, or to feed fuel cells.

Today, bioma.s.s is being used in other ways for power generation, but research and development has demonstrated the feasibility of biochar sequestration as a realistic means of reducing carbon dioxide levels. The big question is whether the terra preta process is cost effective in drawing down atmospheric carbon, and whether it can be done on a large-enough scale to have a significant impact.

The practicality and economic viability of the process in reducing carbon dioxide levels to at least 350 parts per million has been explored by Michael Obersteiner of the International Inst.i.tute for Applied Systems a.n.a.lysis. He suggests that a maximum removal-rate of five billion tonnes of carbon a year would mean that, a.s.suming no other emissions take place over this period, all historical emissions could be reversed in 70 years.

Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University estimates that terra preta schemes, working with biofuel production, could store up to 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon a year - more than is emitted by all of today's fossil-fuel use. Nonetheless, as we've seen, biofuel programs today are having widespread detrimental effects, including the transfer of land from food to fuel production. The introduction of large-scale terra preta would need to be balanced with sustainability needs, so as not to become another tool for the corporate destruction of traditional farming practices, especially in the developing world.

n.o.body wants biochar to require such large areas of new monocultures that it would end subsistence farming and the use of land for pasture, which would produce a shift to industrial agriculture worldwide and turn natural forests into vast industrial tree plantations. Still, biochar has a place in developed and developing worlds, provided there are strong land-use controls. While traditional charcoal kilns are inefficient and produce harmful emissions, including black soot, modern small-scale pyrolysis units can be used appropriately with traditional agriculture. If slash-and-burn is replaced by slash-and-char, up to 12 per cent of total human carbon emissions by land-use change can be offset.

There is another benefit, too. Nitrogen fertilisers are a major source of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, but char-enriched soils have shown a 5090 per cent drop in nitrous oxide emissions, as well as reduced phosphorous runoff.

As terra preta enriches the soil, less land will be needed to produce a given amount of food. Even if we deployed only existing crop waste, we could remove about one billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year. If degraded waste and unused croplands were added, it may be possible to double that figure. In May 2007, the conference of the International Biochar Initiative was told that, as well as producing biofuel, biochar could produce a 'wedge' of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of 10 per cent, and possibly much more, of world emissions.

Biochar technology does away with the trade-off that we are witnessing with broadacre biofuel crops, which enforces a choice between fuel and food. The biochar method can use crop waste, degraded lands and, perhaps, a proportion of plantation forest residue (provided that forest regeneration is not impeded) to enrich soils, thereby increasing food production, as well as sequestering carbon. Like energy efficiency, it is a solution that more than pays for itself.

CHAPTER 22.

Can 'Politics as Usual'

Solve the Problem?

It would be unsurprising to discover that many people perceive that the gap between what is being done and what needs to be done about global warming is growing bigger. There is increasing public unease, matched by a political incapacity to publicly recognise the true scale of action that is now desperately required.

Reflecting on his experience as a young man in Britain in the late 1930s, environmental scientist James Lovelock says: [I'm] old enough to notice a marked similarity between att.i.tudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with politicians out to show that they do respond but in reality playing for time.

We have procrastinated for so long on global warming that it is now essential to move to a safe-climate economy as fast as is safe and practicable. A quick sketch of that task would include: * building the capacity to invent, plan, model, and coordinate the new economy, and encouraging research to develop and scale up the new technologies and products; * building the physical infrastructure and capacity to produce safe-climate goods and services, such as new production lines for ultra-energy-efficient home appliances, and zero-emission vehicles for public and private transport; * developing national energy-efficiency programs for building and industry, with enforceable minimum standards. a.s.sistance would be given to householders, especially those on lower incomes, to reduce energy use; * constructing large-scale renewable-energy plants and local and household energy systems to allow the closure of the fossil-fuel-fired generating industry. This may include very large solar-thermal projects and wind-energy schemes.

* upgrading and electrifying the national and regional train grid so that long-distance road and air freight can be shifted to rail; * providing safe-climate goods and services, expertise, and technologies to less-developed nations to support their transition to the post-carbon world; * providing adjustment and re-skilling programs for workers, communities, and industries affected by the impacts of global warming and by the move to the new economy; and * developing the bio-char and re-afforestation industries.

Speed is essential - the emphasis is not just on building a safe-climate economy, but on doing so as quickly as is feasible while protecting the environment and keeping the rate of temperature change at a safe level. If the world takes ten or 15 years to stop increasing the rate of emissions, and another 40 or 50 years to stabilise atmospheric carbon levels, it is very likely that the resulting warming (an increase of more than 2 degrees), and its rate of increase, will be too much for many ecosystems, and may trigger positive climate feedbacks that escalate warming beyond control.

Peak oil, in the end, may contribute to lowering emissions. As the cost of petrochemicals is driven higher, the way that we produce and consume goods will change. Rising transport costs will put downward pressure on the global distribution of lower-value goods per weight, and more goods will be produced locally, which will redistribute global manufacturing capacity and jobs. A 25 per cent increase in fuel prices produces a 10 per cent increase in freight rates, reducing international trade by 5 per cent, according to Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down. It is reasonable, then, to expect that if the price of oil doubles it would cut international trade in material goods by one-fifth. We can expect that 'food miles' and 'product miles' will influence consumption patterns, and people would be more likely to travel and holiday closer to home.

The question is: how can we make this rapid transition? Can our current political system, and the imperatives of a deregulated market economy, make this happen very quickly? To be blunt, the answer is no.

Look around for the proof. It is not happening anywhere at the necessary scale and speed. Even in countries that have worked hard to improve energy efficiency, and build renewable-energy capacity and better transport options, the human ability to invent new ways of using energy has worked against these advances: the fast-growing, high-polluting air-travel sector, the air conditioner boom, and the plasma-TV fetish are just three examples. In the West, our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial, and incremental. It is steeped in a culture of compromise that is fearful of deep, quick change - which suggests it is incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed.

Sharp changes mean disruption, and disrupting business or lifestyle is a political sin. In the developed world, 'politics as usual' places the free-market economy at the heart of its project, and governments, as a matter of political faith, are loath to intervene decisively. Even though Sir Nicholas Stern named global warming as the 'greatest market failure' in history, governments have been ideologically reluctant to act sufficiently to correct this great distortion of the market.

Over the past three decades, just as global warming has slowly become a recognised phenomenon, modern finance capital has extended its hegemony around the globe and, to a remarkable extent, set corporate activity free of national and democratic restraint. Today, the dominant political agenda is for the free market to reign and for capital to be released from government regulation. We hear the mantras endlessly: 0the public sector is bad, privatisation good; lower taxes, good, government spending, bad. However, as former US labor secretary Robert Reich argued in 2007, in his influential essay 'How Capitalism is Killing Democracy': 'free markets ... have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming'. The neo-liberal market economy, without democratic control and with a fetish for monetary growth and 'shareholder value', rather than community, has failed the test of sustainability.

At a book launch in December 2007, Ian Dunlop, former executive for the international oil, gas, and coal industries, said that the crucial issue of the next few decades would be how to 'bring runaway capitalism into alignment with the sustainability of the planet and global society, and indeed with democracy'. He noted that 'the political and corporate structures we have created render us uniquely ill-equipped to handle this emergency,' and that 'perverse [corporate] incentives have led to a paranoia with short-term performance ... organisations previously highly regarded for their long-term thinking have dispensed with that expertise, in the process losing valuable corporate memory'.

He argued that, if we are to ensure long-run sustainability, the rules must change, and he identified three important consequences: genuine sustainable development must become a cornerstone, because conventional growth is untenable; success must be re-defined according to long-term sustainability, not short-term consumption; and markets must be re-designed to enhance local and global 'Commons', a term derived from old English law describing land shared by a village and held 'in common' for the benefit of all. Today, the global 'Commons' refers to all that is central to life, and that no one person or nation should control.

The corporate agenda runs politics, as Robert Reich has articulated: Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods. Today, those tasks are increasingly being left to the market ... Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying compet.i.tion for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a compet.i.tive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries ... While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting 'responsibly' or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyone - least of all by their investors - to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and rules in the first place.

In short, 'business as usual' practices are no subst.i.tute for community-established laws and rules that are created through the state to protect the public good - in the present case, the public good being a healthy planet. Sadly, such a step seems beyond the political process, acting in its usual mode.

Carbon pollution is being turned into a product that, while enormously profitable to its private 'owners', wreaks so much public damage that it threatens to change our planet beyond recognition. Orthodox economic theory demands that the rational course of action would be to place a tax on pollution, so that the cost of the tax would equal the cost of damage being done. This is likely to be very high - Stern says it may be more than US$85 per tonne of carbon dioxide. In fact, if the cost of the marginal damage (destroying the Earth's ecosystems) is beyond value, and of infinite cost, then the abatement price (the amount we should be prepared to pay to stop it) should also be infinite. It seems that this logical conclusion, based on orthodox economics, is not a serious consideration for most people who manage the economy.

To drive the transition to a safe-climate future, greenhouse-gas pollution must be squeezed out of the economic equation. One option is to put an increasing price (tax) on the pollution, so that it becomes more and more economically attractive to use products and processes that do not produce greenhouse gases.

The other option is 'cap and auction', explained in Chapter 20, which is a fancy name for a rationing scheme that sells damage permits in decreasing quant.i.ty to polluters, until the economy achieves zero greenhouse-gas emissions.

But there is a problem with both of these solutions. We are addicted to the lifestyle that our high-impact economy allows, which means that - as we have seen with cigarettes and alcohol, which are highly taxed - you can substantially increase the price of greenhouse-gas-intensive products and people will still buy them, because they cannot, or do not, want to go without them, or they are unaware of the low-emission alternatives.

Our addiction to a high-impact lifestyle inbues greenhouse-gas emissions with something called high price inelasticity, which means that an increase in price produces a relatively small drop in demand. In these cases, simple price rises are not an effective, or fair, means for rapidly reducing consumption to zero. As an example, the demand for petrol is highly inelastic, so doubling the price of petrol only reduces demand for petrol by 10 per cent in the short-term, and 40 per cent in the longer term, as people switch to more fuel-efficient cars or other means of transport, or make lifestyle changes. In other words, to reduce the demand for petrol by just 40 per cent, governments would need to double its price, and that is equivalent to a price on carbon emissions of around A$500 per tonne. In the world of 'politics as usual', that is not going to happen.

How, then, can we make the rapid transition happen? Two examples of successful transformations suggest some strategies.

During World War II, after Pearl Harbour, the USA's military imperatives demanded a rapid conversion of great swathes of economic capacity from civil to military purposes. Within months, car production lines became tank lines. The manufacture of pa.s.senger cars ceased for the duration of the war, and new methods to ma.s.s-produce military aircraft were devised. Consumer spending was dampened by the selling of 'war bonds' to fund the cost of rapidly expanding military production and to control inflation. Having learned from the devastating experience of profiteering during the First World War, price controls were introduced, and rationing of key goods was mandated as necessary - the main result being a more egalitarian pattern of consumption, especially regarding food. The economy, real wages, and profits all grew, although many civil rights were significantly curtailed.

For a more recent example of successful, rapid transition, we can look to the 'tiger' economies of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and now China. In each case, national governments and enterprises cooperated in a plan to drive up, or change, the character of their output. In all cases, industrialisation was rapid because domestic demand was held down by state policies that favoured investing in export capacity, savings rates were high, and skills development was emphasised. This is not to glorify these development drives: in the Asian 'tiger' economies there were very significant downsides, including autocratic rule in the service of the development elites, the brutal suppression of labour and democratic rights, the fracturing of traditional rural lives, and ma.s.sive damage to the environment. Nor are these example given because they exemplify a path to rapid growth (which they do), but because they demonstrate the capacity for rapid transformation.

What is salient in all these cases is the key role of governments in planning, coordinating, and overseeing the transition - the very opposite of leaving the deregulated market to its devices and going about 'business as usual'. Voluntary measures and aspirational goals will not eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions; they will have to be squeezed out by strong governmental regulatory and investment actions. The particular nature of such a government will depend on the capacity of people to build its democratic character, and to provide national leadership when conventional politics fails to do so. It should not be a.s.sumed that strong state intervention requires an autocratic government. If, as a society, we are to engage in a rapid change, it will require the active democratic partic.i.p.ation of the population, rather than its pa.s.sivity.

Even middle-of-the-road climate targets require extraordinary action. The unsafe cap of 22.4 degrees that was promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali in December 2007 requires developed countries to cut emissions to 2540 per cent below their 1990 levels by 2020. For Australia (where emissions by 2010 will be about 10 per cent higher than they were in 1990), this would require emissions from 20102020 to be reduced by 3550 per cent, or 3.55 per cent on average per year.

When the current annual growth in Australian emissions of 1.52 per cent is added to the equation, the total turnaround on current practice would be a 57 per cent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions each year. By comparison, the best recent record for decreasing the energy intensity of a modern economy is under 3 per cent annually, set by j.a.pan after the 1970s 'oil shock', and achieved, in part, by exporting some energy-intensive industries.

In this context, we find it inconceivable that Australia could play its fair part in meeting even a 22.4-degree cap, other than by a planned, rapid transition and economic restructuring. This would necessarily have to be const.i.tuted as a climate 'state of emergency' far beyond the capacity of a society operating in its usual modes.

CHAPTER 23.

What Does an Emergency.

Look Like?

In recent public discussions about global warming, the language has started to shift from talk of a 'crisis' to one of a 'global emergency'. The popular appeal of Al Gore's film and book An Inconvenient Truth, which calls climate change a 'global emergency', has driven much of this shift. In the lead-up to the December 2007 Bali conference, the UN secretary-general also spoke explicitly of a climate emergency.

Using such language is the start of the process of recognising that the underlying reality has become more grave than we had previously realised. The climax of the process may be governments formally declaring a 'state of emergency', at which point we will know a number of things: that the authorities rate the problem as very serious, that priority will be given to resolving the crisis, that we are all in the crisis together, and that, officially, 'business as usual' no longer applies.

The declaration of a state of emergency involves official recognition that a threat to life and health, property, or the natural environment is sufficiently large that an adequate response will demand a mobilisation of resources beyond the normal functioning of the society. Such threats may be civil or military: they may be natural (like fire, flood, tsunami, or earthquake); political (like war and conflict); biomedical (like infectious disease); or the result of a combination of factors (such as famine or population displacement).

To deal with an unfamiliar emergency, it is often necessary to undertake 'crash programs' to create new capabilities. Iconic examples of such programs have been the Manhattan Project (through which the US developed the nuclear bomb) and the Apollo Program (to get astronauts to the moon). In some cases, the emergency has been so demanding that the whole economy has had to be mobilised to new purposes. Within a year after Pearl Harbour, for example, the US was able to switch from being the world's largest consumer economy to become the world's largest war economy.

In the case of climate change, however, we need to go one step further and change not only what the economy produces, but also how it produces. Here, the experience of j.a.pan, the Asian tiger economies and, more recently, China is instructive. For example, in two decades, South Korea transformed itself completely from being a poor agricultural economy to a middle-income, world-compet.i.tive manufacturing economy. These changes came with very high human and environmental costs, but they demonstrate that programs to transform the organisation of production can be implemented quickly.

Transformational programs can either focus on scaling up existing technologies or processes (to produce a result quickly), or on pursuing fundamental innovation to solve a new problem (for example, the Manhattan Project, which set out to build a nuclear bomb, even though the related nuclear industry did not exist and there was virtually no knowledge, at the start, about how to carry out the task). Some transformational programs combine aspects of scaling up and fundamental innovation (for example, the Apollo Program).

All of these very fast, large-scale transformations are characterised by a strong government role in planning, coordinating, and allocating resources, backed by sufficient administrative power to achieve a rapid response that is beyond the capacity of the society's normal functioning.

A state of emergency will likely exhibit many or most of the characteristics listed on the opposite page.

With few exceptions, the present responses to global warming are within the 'normal political-paralysis mode'. Most governments have not been brutally honest with themselves about the new climate data and its consequences, or about the severity and proximity of the consequences if present trends continue. Necessary targets and goals are being severely compromised, while the speed of our response is hopelessly inadequate, and will result in global warming worsening and moving beyond our capacity to construct practical responses. There is neither effective leadership nor bipartisanship.

We are not devoting the necessary resources to solving the problem, whether it is research and innovation, planning for a rapid transition, or scaling up production. Not only has failure become an option; it has also become the norm. On all objective measures the world is going backwards: emissions are rising at an increasing rate, events signalling more dangerous changes in the environment are occurring faster than expected, and positive feedbacks are beginning to kick in.

In short, although it is the greatest threat in human history, global warming is not being treated as an emergency.

This response stands in stark contrast to our behaviour in other emergency situations. In the case of a bush fire, for example, the normal functions of the affected community are suspended, in so far as it is necessary to save life and to devote all available resources - including mobilising them from far away - to fight the fire. The speed of the response is crucial, plans are made in advance, action is centrally coordinated, on-the-ground initiative and committed teamwork are vital, and specialist teams are ready and trained. No effort is spared, people are given leave from their regular jobs, and whole communities support the fire fighters and each other. Resources to fight the fire are not denied because it might 'hurt the economy'.

Yet, in proposing a 'crash program' to curb global warming, the response is often that drastic action is not politically possible - that it will cost too much, damage the economy, waste good capital, or be too disruptive.

Even among many who acknowledge that global warming is an urgent problem, there is a tendency to devalue the predicted impacts. Anyone who talks about living with a 3-degree rise, as some of the climate professionals do, has obviously not come to grips with actual consequences of these figures. In understating the real impacts - and, therefore, the economic damage - the cost of doing nothing, or not enough, is undervalued. At the same time, the heavy cost of action is overstated, especially since many energy-efficiency measures save, rather than cost, money.

It seems that many who are concerned about economic damage are not worried that society as a whole will be worse off by becoming more climate friendly: rather, inst.i.tutions and individuals who have made themselves dependent on activities that produce large volumes of greenhouse-gas pollution free of charge seem concerned that they will be worse off, and that long-established personal habits and cultural norms will have to change.

The historical evidence, for example, of the emergency mobilisation in the US for the Second World War indicates just how wrong fear-mongering lobbying about 'economic damage' can be. In the period from 1940 to 1945, unemployment in the USA fell from 14.6 per cent to 1.9 per cent, while GNP grew 55 per cent in the five years from 1939. Wages grew 65 per cent over the course of the war, far outstripping inflation, and company profits boomed. This was all at a time when personal consumption was limited by the sale of war bonds, some basic goods and foods were rationed and, at the height of the mobilisation, 40 per cent of the economy was directed towards the war effort.

In 1941, the American economy was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, so the switch to the war economy, with its practical need to utilise all available productive capacity, would inevitably produce improved economic statistics. But even if a climate emergency were to be declared at a time of economic health, the tasks are so challenging - building a zero-emissions economy, taking carbon out of the air, and finding the means to cool the planet - that every sc.r.a.p of productive capacity will be required.

The experience of the Second World War shows that production and technologies can be switched quickly, and on a huge scale, when there is the need and the will: from a small base of war production in early 1941, the United States was out-producing the combined Axis effort by the beginning of 1943. Merchant shipbuilding grew from a total of only 71 ships for the period from 1930 to 1936 to more than 100 in 1941 alone, and 127,000 military aircraft were produced in the four years from 1941. Output by 1944 was 28 times the rate it had been in 1939.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Inst.i.tute sums up the case for a sustainability emergency: The year 1942 witnessed the greatest expansion of industrial output in the nation's history. A sparkplug factory was among the first to switch to the production of machine guns. Soon a manufacturer of stoves was producing lifeboats. A merry-go-round factory was making gun mounts ... The automobile industry was converted to such an extent that from 19421944, there were essentially no cars [for commercial sale] produced in the United States.

This mobilization of resources within a matter of months demonstrates that a country and, indeed, the world can restructure the economy quickly if it is convinced of the need to do so. In this mobilization, the scarcest resource of all is time. With climate change, for example, we are fast approaching the point of no return. We cannot reset the clock. Nature is the timekeeper.

Human societies are able to develop emergency methods for handling familiar crises, especially when they are frequently repeated, such as floods, fires, storms, droughts and, in some societies, wars; but we have the greatest trouble with unfamiliar crises, especially if they not yet fully physically apparent.

Now that science, enhanced by its ability to prefigure alternative futures using computer models, has made it clear that a climate disaster is a realistic future, we need to take the crisis seriously. We must treat this future as a preventable fact. We need to start from the a.s.sumption that we will not fail in our efforts to prevent this future, and we need to start imagining, and acting out, a whole series of scenarios to prevent climate disaster and to take the world back to the temperature safe-zone. We need to test strategies to see which ones have the highest odds of success. This technique of 'back-casting from success' can be applied to the climate as well as to other issues that need to be tackled under a sustainability emergency.

While the challenge of avoiding climate catastrophe demands action at emergency pace and scale, what has to be done will be very different from responding to cyclones, or wars, or the human consequences of conflicts. Nonetheless, by learning from our past actions at times of emergency, we can prepare for the great task ahead of us all, rather than respond with panic and alarm when it may be too late.

CHAPTER 24.

The Climate Emergency in.

Practice

Governments declare states of emergency, or a switch to emergency mode, to signal their profound commitment to solving an urgent problem. Typically, once an emergency has been declared, action takes place at great speed, involving government services and contractors, volunteer organisations, and the active partic.i.p.ation of the affected community.

Returning to the safe-climate zone is a more challenging task than is usually faced in an emergency, but the approach to it is similar. Declaring a climate and sustainability emergency is not just a formal measure or an empty political gesture, but an unambiguous reflection of a government's and people's commitment to intense and large-scale action. It identifies the highest priority to which sufficient resources will be applied in order to succeed. Social and economic organisation, and people's everyday lives, will be changed for the duration of the emergency and to the extent necessary to resolve it.

Getting governments to recognise the climate emergency is a clear and unambiguous goal, but it will face resistance. There will be great pressure for a 'new business-as-usual' politics; governments themselves do not yet fully understand the problem or the solutions; and there is not yet sufficient public understanding of the climate and sustainability crisis, what needs to be done, and why.

One task necessary is to achieve public and government recognition of the scale of the threat, so that serious consideration can be given to the actions necessary to solve the whole problem. Until we see a realistic appraisal, for example, of the Arctic melt and the imminent threats from Greenland and the West Antarctic ice-sheet losses, we will know that political leaders don't yet understand the problem. Once they do understand, and they express the need for goals that will solve the problem, we are on the way to the emergency mode. This step will only occur with broad community education and mobilisation.

Active support will need to be built around both specific goals - for example, large-scale programs for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and restructuring transport - and the formal declaration of a climate emergency.

A street, local area, or organisation, for example, could declare a state-of-sustainability emergency, and could implement an action plan, build up support, and prepare the ground for all levels of government to follow. This would involve initially considering the pros and cons of the emergency idea (for example, by using the scenario in the Appendix), then preparing the full action plan and, finally, executing it. The ultimate goal is to get the government and the whole society to commit to tackling the climate and sutainability emergency.

One way or another, we will get to the emergency mode. The question is whether we can make it happen now, by using our foresight, or whether we have to wait for years until the problem gets so bad that panic flips governments out of their business-as-usual paralysis. How can we act to make the transition to the emergency mode happen sooner, with more chance of success, rather than later, with less chance? How can the ground be prepared to make all the steps feasible?

It is often perceived that the motivation to act strongly on environmental issues comes from a green fringe of society, but this is a simplistic notion. Some of the strongest statements and most effective communications about the climate problem are coming from international figures, such as Al Gore; Yvo de Boer, the UN's lead negotiator for the new global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol; long-time sustainability activists such as Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Inst.i.tute; Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Inst.i.tute; and many climate-advocacy groups, from the local to the global level.

We now need to substantially restructure the physical economy, in a very short time, but will the mainstream mindset opposed to radical and sudden change be an insurmountable obstacle? We think not, because there are already many people who are very switched on to the problem. In the end, even conservative governments and corporations will figure out that you cannot make money, and grow the economy, on a planet that's not fit to live on. The question is: can we work together to create the rapid transformation of the economy?