Pacific leaders are meeting in Cairns today for the Pacific Island Forum. In recent years the agenda has been dominated by issues of regional stability including the intervention in the Solomons and more recently the troubling political events in Fiji. But with the forum happening in Australia for the first time in over a decade, and climate change at the top of the international political agenda, other issues are set to dominate.
Pacific Islands are literally on the front line of climate change. The Prime Minister of Tuvalu has raised the prospect of having to relocate their entire country because of rising sea levels and other climate impacts. The Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), which includes the Pacific Islands, has become the moral conscience of the international climate negotiations, set to conclude in Copenhagen in December. Their calls for developed countries such as Australia to cut emissions by over 40% within the next decade put Australia’s low and highly conditional target (5-25%) into stark relief.
Australia too is vulnerable to climate change, but it is expected that Kevin Rudd will carefully manage relations during the Forum to keep any strong climate statements out of the Forum Communiqué. There will be some heavy diplomatic manoeuvrings going on behind the scenes to keep climate of the agenda and real emission cuts off the table.
Australia’s growing coal exports coupled with low emissions targets and the relentless push for loopholes and exemptions in the international climate negotiations put the Rudd Government’s climate position on a collision course with the Pacific. While our neighbours are fighting for their survival, Australia is rapidly doubling our coal export capacity and entrenching our position as the world’s biggest carbon pusher.
Despite all of the wrangling and economic fear mongering over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, any reductions in greenhouse pollution through even a 25% target (the very top end of the Government’s proposal) will be undone many times over by the increased coal exports from NSW and Queensland.
Climate change remains confusing so long as the debate continues to be fixed on numbers, statistics and complex economic instruments. But when you come back to the bottom line, it’s really quite simple. We need to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. To do this we need to stop digging up and burning fossil fuels - and coal is the biggest problem. If we are burning more coal (regardless of where it is burnt), we are making climate change worse.
Having grown up in Central Queensland, I understand the role that coal plays in Queensland and indeed in the national psyche. My father spent his entire working life in the coal industry and as a graduate engineer I spent my first few years out of university building equipment for coal mines. But time moves on. Computers replaced the abacus, mobile phones replaced carrier pidgeons, and renewable energy will replace coal.
It will take a serious effort to make the transition from coal to clean energy in a way that supports coal dependent communities and workers, but the economic impact of moving away from coal will be far less than most people imagine. In Queensland, tourism employs far more people than the entire mining sector and will be hard hit by climate change. But perhaps the biggest surprise is the royalty payments.
This year, the Queensland Government received around $1.5 billion in royalty payments from the coal industry. In the same breath, $1.3 billion of public money was spent on coal infrastructure – 90% of the total royalty payments. So much for private enterprise. And if you factor in the costs of the negative health and environmental impacts of coal mining the net economic contribution of the industry starts to look even less appealing.
We need to choose whether we want to continue to be a quarry economy, or if we are ready to move into the twenty first century and embrace the renewable energy revolution that is slowly but surely building momentum. At the moment, Rudd and Bligh are still backing the coal industry, with only a token hedge on renewables.
Climate politics in Australia is a struggle over vested interests. For their part, Pacific countries do not have a domestic fossil fuel lobby running full-page ads in national newspapers threatening job losses if we take serious action on climate change. They don’t have a greenhouse mafia whose web of influence entraps politicians at all levels of Government. It means that they can speak the truth about climate change, and call for what is actually required to protect both their future and ours.
In the absence of real honesty or leadership from our own political leaders, the Pacific are our moral conscience on climate change.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
The power of doubt
I caught a snippet of a beautiful poem whilst listening to the radio the other day. On being right. And being certain. And on the beauty and importance of doubt.
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never bloom in the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard, and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined house once stood.
Yehudah Amichai
.
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never bloom in the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard, and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined house once stood.
Yehudah Amichai
.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Climate of civil disobedience
First published on Crikey's environment blog - "Rooted"
“If you disobey a police directive, there is a risk you will be arrested and charged with trespass,” I explained gently to countless groups of people as they lined the front of Parliament House yesterday.
Around two and half thousand people of all ages and from all over Australia gathered to encircle federal Parliament on the first sitting day of 2009 to demand urgent action on climate change. It was the culmination of the three day ‘climate action summit’ which saw over 150 community climate change groups meet for the first time to develop a national campaign strategy.
Some faces showed thinly disguised fear at the prospect of disobeying police instructions. Others had travelled for hours to link hands all the way around Parliament House and nothing was going to stop them. “But it’s our Parliament! – there’s no way the police can stop this many people!”
After the Kevin Rudd’s appalling capitulation to the big polluters and his announcement of a pathetic 5% emissions reduction target, the organisers of the Climate Action Summit applied to The Usher of the Black Rod for permission to form a human chain all the way around Parliament. It was to be a symbolic protest about the capture of our politicians by the big polluters and the need for urgent action in response to the climate emergency.
The request was denied. We said that we were going to do it anyway. They said they couldn’t let us do it because it would create a precedent and that we had to stay on the protest lawn out the front. We said we were going to do it anyway. They offered us a compromise to form a chain across the front of Parliament. We said we were going to do it anyway, and that if they wanted to arrest people we would co-operate fully to help minimise disruption. So when we arrived at Parliament yesterday morning, it was a standoff.
The crowd started to gather from around 7:30am. A hot Tuesday morning in Canberra, outside of school holidays…it was a big ask. We were hoping for at least a thousand people – just enough to stretch the 1.6km distance. But the stream of red just kept on coming. Busses from Sydney, Melbourne, and around NSW, people on bikes, pedestrians, a constant stream of red shirts and red banners until we had up to two and half thousand people milling around the front of Parliament.
Mums, dads, grandparents, young children, babies, teenagers, from all walks of life and from all over Australia. It was truly inspiring to see the diversity of the climate change movement that had gathered to raise their voices. The police didn’t stand a chance.
When the call went out, the crowd slowly started moving from the front of Parliament around the sides. Some walked boldly, heads held high as though they owned the place (which we do). For others, their trepidation slowly turned to grins of delight as they saw the police step aside and let us pass. Ten minutes later, the two ends of the line joined up at the far end of Parliament – mission accomplished! Cheers went up around the perimeter. You could tell people could sense of their own power. Over two thousand people had stared down the politicians, bureaucrats and police and had participated in civil disobedience to stand up for something they believe in. They did it peacefully and creatively, together with their friends and family, and they had a wonderful time doing it.
If you’ve ever been involved in direct action protest with your community, you will know that it is one of the most empowering and inspiring things you can ever do. And if you’ve studied history, you will know that we owe many of our basic rights and freedoms to people doing civil disobedience.
Climate change poses such a profound threat to our future, and our Government is failing so comprehensively, that people are left with little choice but to start taking direct action themselves, and to start building a social movement to turn politics on it’s head. These past few days have been an important step in that journey. And it’s only going to grow from here.
“If you disobey a police directive, there is a risk you will be arrested and charged with trespass,” I explained gently to countless groups of people as they lined the front of Parliament House yesterday.
Around two and half thousand people of all ages and from all over Australia gathered to encircle federal Parliament on the first sitting day of 2009 to demand urgent action on climate change. It was the culmination of the three day ‘climate action summit’ which saw over 150 community climate change groups meet for the first time to develop a national campaign strategy.
Some faces showed thinly disguised fear at the prospect of disobeying police instructions. Others had travelled for hours to link hands all the way around Parliament House and nothing was going to stop them. “But it’s our Parliament! – there’s no way the police can stop this many people!”
After the Kevin Rudd’s appalling capitulation to the big polluters and his announcement of a pathetic 5% emissions reduction target, the organisers of the Climate Action Summit applied to The Usher of the Black Rod for permission to form a human chain all the way around Parliament. It was to be a symbolic protest about the capture of our politicians by the big polluters and the need for urgent action in response to the climate emergency.
The request was denied. We said that we were going to do it anyway. They said they couldn’t let us do it because it would create a precedent and that we had to stay on the protest lawn out the front. We said we were going to do it anyway. They offered us a compromise to form a chain across the front of Parliament. We said we were going to do it anyway, and that if they wanted to arrest people we would co-operate fully to help minimise disruption. So when we arrived at Parliament yesterday morning, it was a standoff.
The crowd started to gather from around 7:30am. A hot Tuesday morning in Canberra, outside of school holidays…it was a big ask. We were hoping for at least a thousand people – just enough to stretch the 1.6km distance. But the stream of red just kept on coming. Busses from Sydney, Melbourne, and around NSW, people on bikes, pedestrians, a constant stream of red shirts and red banners until we had up to two and half thousand people milling around the front of Parliament.
Mums, dads, grandparents, young children, babies, teenagers, from all walks of life and from all over Australia. It was truly inspiring to see the diversity of the climate change movement that had gathered to raise their voices. The police didn’t stand a chance.
When the call went out, the crowd slowly started moving from the front of Parliament around the sides. Some walked boldly, heads held high as though they owned the place (which we do). For others, their trepidation slowly turned to grins of delight as they saw the police step aside and let us pass. Ten minutes later, the two ends of the line joined up at the far end of Parliament – mission accomplished! Cheers went up around the perimeter. You could tell people could sense of their own power. Over two thousand people had stared down the politicians, bureaucrats and police and had participated in civil disobedience to stand up for something they believe in. They did it peacefully and creatively, together with their friends and family, and they had a wonderful time doing it.
If you’ve ever been involved in direct action protest with your community, you will know that it is one of the most empowering and inspiring things you can ever do. And if you’ve studied history, you will know that we owe many of our basic rights and freedoms to people doing civil disobedience.
Climate change poses such a profound threat to our future, and our Government is failing so comprehensively, that people are left with little choice but to start taking direct action themselves, and to start building a social movement to turn politics on it’s head. These past few days have been an important step in that journey. And it’s only going to grow from here.
Escalating climate action in 2009
Opening plenary address by John Hepburn to Australia's Climate Action Summit, Canberra, 31st Jan 2009.
Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Ngunnawal people. I’d also like to thank the organisers of the summit, who I know have been working tirelessly for months to make this event happen.
I’m going to talk briefly about where we have come to, and what I think are some of the key lessons from the climate movement thus far. And then I’m going to outline some thoughts for where we need to head over the next couple of years.
This is an important moment in history. This summit, at the start of the 2009 Parliament, marks the failure of the Australian political system to respond to climate change. A Government, elected with a mandate to take action on climate change, has comprehensively failed to take meaningful action. Both major parties are failing.
Yes we need action from within the corporate sector. Yes we need bureaucrats lobbying for incremental gains. Yes we need more research into the science. But far beyond all of that, we need a movement that is going to make action on climate change a political necessity. We need a movement that will make it impossible for Kevin Rudd to stand up and announce a 5% emissions reduction target. And we need a movement that will make it impossible for a corporate CEO to stand up in public and call for delays.
It is up to us.
Take a look around this auditorium. These are the people who are taking leadership on climate change. It’s you. It’s the person sitting next to you. And it’s the people that you’ll spend the next few days working with to create plans for what may be the most important struggle in human history.
There’s been a lot of talk about the failure of the climate movement. A lot of soul searching, a lot of despair, and a lot of hope. Looking back on 2008, did the climate movement fail?
On one level, sure, we failed. The Rudd Government caved in to the big polluters. We have an emissions trading scheme that will do nothing to reduce emissions, and that will lock in the right to pollute so that it will be much more difficult and costly to cut emissions in future. More than anything, the CPRS is designed to uphold the right to pollute and to enable compensation if this supposed right it denied.
The white paper is a profound failure. But is it a failure of the movement? I don’t think so. I’ve been getting a sense that people think we failed to protect something that we had won previously. But I don’t agree. When we say to the media, that Rudd has betrayed his promise, it’s politics. Yes he betrayed his promise, but if anyone actually thought his election promise was for anything more than 5-15% cuts then I think they’d be guilty of optimism.
But after 10 years of Howard it was always going to be difficult to dampen the optimism for Rudd to take action on climate change. As a result, there was always a risk that the movement would stagnate while we gave Rudd the opportunity to fail. Rudd was never going to deliver what is required. A Labor Government was always going to be just as, if not more beholden to the vested interests of the big polluters than the coalition.
We didn’t build our power after the election, we sat back and let it wane. We didn’t sustain pressure on MP’s even though we knew it was required. We didn’t diminish the power of the vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, we allowed it to flourish.
In August, when the Business Council started calling for stabilisation by 2020, we should have had 50 people at their office the next day, serving them an eviction notice from this country for acting against the public interest. When the chairman of BHP came out and slammed the Government for threatening the economy, the headquarters of BHP should have been occupied the next day, talk back lines should have been running hot and the letters pages brimming with vitriol from people angry that a corporate leader could so openly threaten our future. Instead, we rolled with the punches.
Basic Political economy tells us that climate change is a struggle over vested interests. The Government will do what is required on climate change, when the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of action. At the moment, the vested interests in the coal, gas, aluminium, cement, steel and oil industries are more powerful than we are. Our challenge is to build our own power, while dismantling theirs.
In terms of this power equation, 2008 was a year where the big polluters were forced to show some of the power that we have known they have always had. From our side, with a few notable exceptions we failed to build our power and we didn’t express that power that we have until after the announcement was made.
So what did we do well in 2008? Two moments stand out in my mind.
There was this great lobbying meeting where someone from one of the big NGO’s had this really great briefing paper that made a really clear argument about the need for action, and they were really passionate, and they had done this great research report showing how we can achieve at least 25% reductions in greenhouse emissions by 2020 based on 1990 levels. And they made this really compelling case and they were lobbying this MP who said – ‘If I’m not going to lose my seat over it, I couldn’t give a shit’.
So they went to climate camp instead.
On 17th July, over a thousand people took part in an act of civil disobedience to peacefully block the Newcastle coal port for a day. We stopped coal trains going through to the port for the entire day, over sixty people were arrested and charged with trespass, and a hundreds of people had one of the most inspiring and rewarding days of their lives. When I got back to camp after the action, people just had this glow about them. And these big beaming smiles.
During the debrief, people were saying that they had been trying to stop the expansion of the coal industry for years but had never been part of anything like this – and when is the next one so I can bring all of my friends. People felt empowered because they refused to do what they were told. They stood up for what they believed in. And by the end of the day they had helped delay thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions. And through the media, they had told a powerful story to the rest of Australia that climate change is too serious and too urgent for people to just sit back and watch.
And for me, the really interesting thing about climate camp was that the next day, a group of three students from Brisbane, who had never done any kind of direct action before, decided that they wanted to shut down the coal rail line again. They had a meeting at 11 o’clock to decide what they were going to do, and then around 1 o’clock they jumped over the fence, waved down a coal train, tied themselves to the tracks and stopped coal transport for another couple of hours.
When that starts happening every week, all over the country. That’s when we’ll start to get real action on climate change.
The second thing that we did really well was the response to the white paper announcement. We created a backlash that was much angrier and much louder than I think anyone expected and I think we made it pretty damned clear to most people in this country that Kevin Rudd caved in to the big polluters. This was an important moment to set us up for this year – and I think we did well. Thanks in part to the brilliant and courageous intervention of three women - George Woods, Annika Dean and Naomi Hodgeson - who stood up in the national press club and said “No, it’s not good enough”, and told it how it was.
The kind of courage and determination that these three women showed is what we need for this movement to create the change that we need. When we have thousands of people standing up all over the country, and showing the courage and conviction of these three women, we’ll start to see real action.
So where do we go from here? We need to do four things: Polarise, Organise, Escalate, and Focus.
1. Polarise
It’s difficult to communicate issues that are not clear-cut. We live in a world of short attention spans and a lot of media noise. If something isn’t clear, it doesn’t cut through. Nobody notices, or if they do, they don’t remember what you said.
For too long our public demands have been vague fluff. The problem has been that our movement demands have largely been constructed by policy wonks rather than by effective communicators. A couple of examples...
80% cuts by 2050 based on 1990 levels has told the story that climate change is something that has to be dealt with in the future, and that it’s only a partial change so some greenhouse pollution is ok. What on earth were we thinking?
Actually, climate change is an emergency. We need urgent action now. Not in 2020 and not by 2050. It’s clear and simple. We need to urgently shut down the entire coal industry and replace it with 100% renewable energy. Starting tomorrow.
Another example is emissions trading. The Government’s Green paper on emissions trading had major flaws. It was clear that the business lobby was exerting far more influence than the environmental movement or the community sector. But, almost without exception, our public positioning was that it needed substantial improvements in several key areas etc. etc.
This told the story that the proposal was disliked by environment groups (which everyone knows will never be satisfied anyway) but that it was basically heading in the right direction. This was profoundly unhelpful.
Try instead…The proposed emissions trading scheme is dangerous, and should be opposed completely. It will enshrine the right to pollute in law and make emissions cuts much more difficult and costly in the future. It is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be reformed. The Government needs to go back to the drawing board.
I’m going to elaborate on this because it’s probably the most important strategic decision we face over the coming months.
If the emissions trading scheme proposed in the white paper is made into law, it will do virtually nothing to cut greenhouse pollution. The recession will probably result in greater than 5% cuts in emissions. But what the ETS will do, and what the big polluters have fought so hard to get, is that it will turn pollution permits into a right to pollute. The white paper is explicit about this.
This will mean that if any future Government want to cut emissions more than 5%, taxpayers will need to compensate the big polluters for the loss of their right to pollute. This is absolute madness.
Historically high pollution rights should bestow responsibility not rights. These companies should be fined or dismantled, not rewarded.
Then you’ve got the other issues of unlimited banking of permits, the ability to buy as many permits, as we want on the international market – thereby avoiding the need to cut emissions in Australia at all. And then there’s the issue that Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute has been raising for months that the ETS will impose a cap on emissions reductions. So any voluntary action to cut emissions by households or businesses will just mean that the big polluters get to emit more.
The Emissions Trading Scheme is dangerous and should be opposed outright by the entire movement. The day that it goes to the floor of parliament there should be an outcry around the country with protests at every MP’s office demanding that the scheme be scrapped and replaced with real action to cut emissions.
2. Organise
The climate movement has grown in size and diversity and this summit is testament to that. We have over a hundred different groups represented here. We need to share information, share strategy, build our collective power, and then focus that power where it counts.
We need vastly more political power than we have, and to get there we need to organise a lot more people to be active. You don’t need 50% of the population to create a revolution and we won’t need 50% of the population to be active to solve climate change. What we will need is the majority of people supporting change, and we pretty much have this level of public support now. And then we need 5-10% of the population getting actively involved in agitating for change.
We need to broaden our movement. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it is an issue of survival. Everyone has a stake in it. Church groups, unions, students, farmers, everyone.
We need to create a national network from this summit, and we need to build broad support in the community, as well as creating strong alliances with unions and workers demanding green jobs. We aren’t going to build our power by osmosis. We need to have simple demands, clear arguments and we need to be organising relentlessly in communities to build support for these demands and to build our capacity to apply pressure for change.
3. Escalate
We have to stop being so polite. The earth is dying. We are facing a climate emergency that threatens much of the life on this planet. It’s true. We need to say it like we mean it. And if we aren’t acting like it’s an emergency, how can we expect that anyone else will?
When the laws of society are killing us and threatening our future, we have a moral obligation to ignore those laws and to do what is right. It’s called self-defence. If the worst predictions of runaway global warming are realised, we’re talking about an existential threat and the possibility that this earth may become uninhabitable for humans. Are we going to say to our kids, ‘I tried to do something but the politicians wouldn’t listen?’
What kind of pathetic excuse is that? It’s not good enough. We need to make them listen, and when they don’t, we need to take direct action ourselves. We simply don’t have any choice.
Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen have both been publicly calling for people to get involved in civil disobedience to stop the construction of new coal plants. Not only do we need to do this, but we need to start getting involved in civil disobedience to close existing coal plants.
In 2008, over 160 people were arrested whilst participating in climate change protests around the country. 160 people decided that they think that action on climate change is more important than whether or not they have a trespass conviction recorded against their name. There are an awful lot more people who understand the science, who feel passionate, and who are willing to take direct action. For those of you that have studied history, you will know that civil disobedience is effective in achieving profound social change. For those of you that have been involved in direct action protests in your community, you will know that it can be one of the most empowering, liberating and beautiful things you can ever do. For those of you that haven’t, this year is your opportunity.
In 2009, we need to see the police having to arrest literally thousands of peaceful protestors to keep a dirty polluting coal plant open. I want to see them having to arrest climate scientists, Clive Hamilton, you, me, Kylie Minogue, Margaret Fulton, Tim Flannery, John Butler, Missy Higgins and my mum.
We need Members of Parliament to have to call the police to manage groups of women and children who have been holding a picnic in their electoral office. We need the AGM’s of coal companies to have to be so heavily guarded against protests that their anti-social industry is exposed to the world.
And we need to do all of this peacefully, in a calm, dignified manner, and to enjoy it so that everyone else in this country sees it and says, “I’m with them”. Direct action for all, not just the radicals.
4. Focus
We need to be building a broad and deep movement for that is demanding fundamental change. As well as that, we need to make sure that we focus the power that we have so that we are as effective as possible in 2009 in the lead up to the Copenhagen meeting in December, as well as in the lead up to 2010.
If we can delay the passage of the emissions trading scheme until 2010, Rudd will be going into an election year with one of his key promises unfulfilled. And the only counter we have to the immense power of the vested interests is the power of the Australian public – and elections remind politicians of that.
So far the ALP have shown remarkable unity, on climate change as well as other issues. This is likely to change as the memory of ten years in opposition fades gradually into the distance, but we really need to force the issue on climate change. There are quite a number of MP’s who are deeply concerned about climate change. When you meet them, they can quote the science better than most people here. But they won’t speak out against the policies of the Government that they are part of. And it simply isn’t good enough. We need to force the progressive voices within the ALP out into the public.
There are two cabinet ministers who are in Green marginal seats. Anthony Albanese (Infrastructure Minister) in inner city Sydney, and Lindsay Tanner (Finance Minister) in inner city Melbourne. When they realise they are about to lose their seat at the next election, they will begin screaming for more action on climate change within Cabinet. Anyone who lives in or near their electorates needs to start organising now to make this happen.
2009 needs to be a year of relentless organising and relentless protest. We simply do not have any choice.
Sometimes, when you look at the power and money of the big polluters, it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed and disempowered. They have virtually limitless funds, an army of lobbyists and access to whichever politicians they choose. But they are motivated fundamentally fear and greed. And we have something that they will never have. We have a vast network of people across this land that are driven by a deep love of life, and who will work tirelessly, for no pay, to defend what they love. And in the end, hope will always triumph over fear.
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The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Fredrick Douglass, letter to an abolitionist associate.
Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Ngunnawal people. I’d also like to thank the organisers of the summit, who I know have been working tirelessly for months to make this event happen.
I’m going to talk briefly about where we have come to, and what I think are some of the key lessons from the climate movement thus far. And then I’m going to outline some thoughts for where we need to head over the next couple of years.
This is an important moment in history. This summit, at the start of the 2009 Parliament, marks the failure of the Australian political system to respond to climate change. A Government, elected with a mandate to take action on climate change, has comprehensively failed to take meaningful action. Both major parties are failing.
Yes we need action from within the corporate sector. Yes we need bureaucrats lobbying for incremental gains. Yes we need more research into the science. But far beyond all of that, we need a movement that is going to make action on climate change a political necessity. We need a movement that will make it impossible for Kevin Rudd to stand up and announce a 5% emissions reduction target. And we need a movement that will make it impossible for a corporate CEO to stand up in public and call for delays.
It is up to us.
Take a look around this auditorium. These are the people who are taking leadership on climate change. It’s you. It’s the person sitting next to you. And it’s the people that you’ll spend the next few days working with to create plans for what may be the most important struggle in human history.
There’s been a lot of talk about the failure of the climate movement. A lot of soul searching, a lot of despair, and a lot of hope. Looking back on 2008, did the climate movement fail?
On one level, sure, we failed. The Rudd Government caved in to the big polluters. We have an emissions trading scheme that will do nothing to reduce emissions, and that will lock in the right to pollute so that it will be much more difficult and costly to cut emissions in future. More than anything, the CPRS is designed to uphold the right to pollute and to enable compensation if this supposed right it denied.
The white paper is a profound failure. But is it a failure of the movement? I don’t think so. I’ve been getting a sense that people think we failed to protect something that we had won previously. But I don’t agree. When we say to the media, that Rudd has betrayed his promise, it’s politics. Yes he betrayed his promise, but if anyone actually thought his election promise was for anything more than 5-15% cuts then I think they’d be guilty of optimism.
But after 10 years of Howard it was always going to be difficult to dampen the optimism for Rudd to take action on climate change. As a result, there was always a risk that the movement would stagnate while we gave Rudd the opportunity to fail. Rudd was never going to deliver what is required. A Labor Government was always going to be just as, if not more beholden to the vested interests of the big polluters than the coalition.
We didn’t build our power after the election, we sat back and let it wane. We didn’t sustain pressure on MP’s even though we knew it was required. We didn’t diminish the power of the vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, we allowed it to flourish.
In August, when the Business Council started calling for stabilisation by 2020, we should have had 50 people at their office the next day, serving them an eviction notice from this country for acting against the public interest. When the chairman of BHP came out and slammed the Government for threatening the economy, the headquarters of BHP should have been occupied the next day, talk back lines should have been running hot and the letters pages brimming with vitriol from people angry that a corporate leader could so openly threaten our future. Instead, we rolled with the punches.
Basic Political economy tells us that climate change is a struggle over vested interests. The Government will do what is required on climate change, when the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of action. At the moment, the vested interests in the coal, gas, aluminium, cement, steel and oil industries are more powerful than we are. Our challenge is to build our own power, while dismantling theirs.
In terms of this power equation, 2008 was a year where the big polluters were forced to show some of the power that we have known they have always had. From our side, with a few notable exceptions we failed to build our power and we didn’t express that power that we have until after the announcement was made.
So what did we do well in 2008? Two moments stand out in my mind.
There was this great lobbying meeting where someone from one of the big NGO’s had this really great briefing paper that made a really clear argument about the need for action, and they were really passionate, and they had done this great research report showing how we can achieve at least 25% reductions in greenhouse emissions by 2020 based on 1990 levels. And they made this really compelling case and they were lobbying this MP who said – ‘If I’m not going to lose my seat over it, I couldn’t give a shit’.
So they went to climate camp instead.
On 17th July, over a thousand people took part in an act of civil disobedience to peacefully block the Newcastle coal port for a day. We stopped coal trains going through to the port for the entire day, over sixty people were arrested and charged with trespass, and a hundreds of people had one of the most inspiring and rewarding days of their lives. When I got back to camp after the action, people just had this glow about them. And these big beaming smiles.
During the debrief, people were saying that they had been trying to stop the expansion of the coal industry for years but had never been part of anything like this – and when is the next one so I can bring all of my friends. People felt empowered because they refused to do what they were told. They stood up for what they believed in. And by the end of the day they had helped delay thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions. And through the media, they had told a powerful story to the rest of Australia that climate change is too serious and too urgent for people to just sit back and watch.
And for me, the really interesting thing about climate camp was that the next day, a group of three students from Brisbane, who had never done any kind of direct action before, decided that they wanted to shut down the coal rail line again. They had a meeting at 11 o’clock to decide what they were going to do, and then around 1 o’clock they jumped over the fence, waved down a coal train, tied themselves to the tracks and stopped coal transport for another couple of hours.
When that starts happening every week, all over the country. That’s when we’ll start to get real action on climate change.
The second thing that we did really well was the response to the white paper announcement. We created a backlash that was much angrier and much louder than I think anyone expected and I think we made it pretty damned clear to most people in this country that Kevin Rudd caved in to the big polluters. This was an important moment to set us up for this year – and I think we did well. Thanks in part to the brilliant and courageous intervention of three women - George Woods, Annika Dean and Naomi Hodgeson - who stood up in the national press club and said “No, it’s not good enough”, and told it how it was.
The kind of courage and determination that these three women showed is what we need for this movement to create the change that we need. When we have thousands of people standing up all over the country, and showing the courage and conviction of these three women, we’ll start to see real action.
So where do we go from here? We need to do four things: Polarise, Organise, Escalate, and Focus.
1. Polarise
It’s difficult to communicate issues that are not clear-cut. We live in a world of short attention spans and a lot of media noise. If something isn’t clear, it doesn’t cut through. Nobody notices, or if they do, they don’t remember what you said.
For too long our public demands have been vague fluff. The problem has been that our movement demands have largely been constructed by policy wonks rather than by effective communicators. A couple of examples...
80% cuts by 2050 based on 1990 levels has told the story that climate change is something that has to be dealt with in the future, and that it’s only a partial change so some greenhouse pollution is ok. What on earth were we thinking?
Actually, climate change is an emergency. We need urgent action now. Not in 2020 and not by 2050. It’s clear and simple. We need to urgently shut down the entire coal industry and replace it with 100% renewable energy. Starting tomorrow.
Another example is emissions trading. The Government’s Green paper on emissions trading had major flaws. It was clear that the business lobby was exerting far more influence than the environmental movement or the community sector. But, almost without exception, our public positioning was that it needed substantial improvements in several key areas etc. etc.
This told the story that the proposal was disliked by environment groups (which everyone knows will never be satisfied anyway) but that it was basically heading in the right direction. This was profoundly unhelpful.
Try instead…The proposed emissions trading scheme is dangerous, and should be opposed completely. It will enshrine the right to pollute in law and make emissions cuts much more difficult and costly in the future. It is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be reformed. The Government needs to go back to the drawing board.
I’m going to elaborate on this because it’s probably the most important strategic decision we face over the coming months.
If the emissions trading scheme proposed in the white paper is made into law, it will do virtually nothing to cut greenhouse pollution. The recession will probably result in greater than 5% cuts in emissions. But what the ETS will do, and what the big polluters have fought so hard to get, is that it will turn pollution permits into a right to pollute. The white paper is explicit about this.
This will mean that if any future Government want to cut emissions more than 5%, taxpayers will need to compensate the big polluters for the loss of their right to pollute. This is absolute madness.
Historically high pollution rights should bestow responsibility not rights. These companies should be fined or dismantled, not rewarded.
Then you’ve got the other issues of unlimited banking of permits, the ability to buy as many permits, as we want on the international market – thereby avoiding the need to cut emissions in Australia at all. And then there’s the issue that Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute has been raising for months that the ETS will impose a cap on emissions reductions. So any voluntary action to cut emissions by households or businesses will just mean that the big polluters get to emit more.
The Emissions Trading Scheme is dangerous and should be opposed outright by the entire movement. The day that it goes to the floor of parliament there should be an outcry around the country with protests at every MP’s office demanding that the scheme be scrapped and replaced with real action to cut emissions.
2. Organise
The climate movement has grown in size and diversity and this summit is testament to that. We have over a hundred different groups represented here. We need to share information, share strategy, build our collective power, and then focus that power where it counts.
We need vastly more political power than we have, and to get there we need to organise a lot more people to be active. You don’t need 50% of the population to create a revolution and we won’t need 50% of the population to be active to solve climate change. What we will need is the majority of people supporting change, and we pretty much have this level of public support now. And then we need 5-10% of the population getting actively involved in agitating for change.
We need to broaden our movement. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it is an issue of survival. Everyone has a stake in it. Church groups, unions, students, farmers, everyone.
We need to create a national network from this summit, and we need to build broad support in the community, as well as creating strong alliances with unions and workers demanding green jobs. We aren’t going to build our power by osmosis. We need to have simple demands, clear arguments and we need to be organising relentlessly in communities to build support for these demands and to build our capacity to apply pressure for change.
3. Escalate
We have to stop being so polite. The earth is dying. We are facing a climate emergency that threatens much of the life on this planet. It’s true. We need to say it like we mean it. And if we aren’t acting like it’s an emergency, how can we expect that anyone else will?
When the laws of society are killing us and threatening our future, we have a moral obligation to ignore those laws and to do what is right. It’s called self-defence. If the worst predictions of runaway global warming are realised, we’re talking about an existential threat and the possibility that this earth may become uninhabitable for humans. Are we going to say to our kids, ‘I tried to do something but the politicians wouldn’t listen?’
What kind of pathetic excuse is that? It’s not good enough. We need to make them listen, and when they don’t, we need to take direct action ourselves. We simply don’t have any choice.
Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen have both been publicly calling for people to get involved in civil disobedience to stop the construction of new coal plants. Not only do we need to do this, but we need to start getting involved in civil disobedience to close existing coal plants.
In 2008, over 160 people were arrested whilst participating in climate change protests around the country. 160 people decided that they think that action on climate change is more important than whether or not they have a trespass conviction recorded against their name. There are an awful lot more people who understand the science, who feel passionate, and who are willing to take direct action. For those of you that have studied history, you will know that civil disobedience is effective in achieving profound social change. For those of you that have been involved in direct action protests in your community, you will know that it can be one of the most empowering, liberating and beautiful things you can ever do. For those of you that haven’t, this year is your opportunity.
In 2009, we need to see the police having to arrest literally thousands of peaceful protestors to keep a dirty polluting coal plant open. I want to see them having to arrest climate scientists, Clive Hamilton, you, me, Kylie Minogue, Margaret Fulton, Tim Flannery, John Butler, Missy Higgins and my mum.
We need Members of Parliament to have to call the police to manage groups of women and children who have been holding a picnic in their electoral office. We need the AGM’s of coal companies to have to be so heavily guarded against protests that their anti-social industry is exposed to the world.
And we need to do all of this peacefully, in a calm, dignified manner, and to enjoy it so that everyone else in this country sees it and says, “I’m with them”. Direct action for all, not just the radicals.
4. Focus
We need to be building a broad and deep movement for that is demanding fundamental change. As well as that, we need to make sure that we focus the power that we have so that we are as effective as possible in 2009 in the lead up to the Copenhagen meeting in December, as well as in the lead up to 2010.
If we can delay the passage of the emissions trading scheme until 2010, Rudd will be going into an election year with one of his key promises unfulfilled. And the only counter we have to the immense power of the vested interests is the power of the Australian public – and elections remind politicians of that.
So far the ALP have shown remarkable unity, on climate change as well as other issues. This is likely to change as the memory of ten years in opposition fades gradually into the distance, but we really need to force the issue on climate change. There are quite a number of MP’s who are deeply concerned about climate change. When you meet them, they can quote the science better than most people here. But they won’t speak out against the policies of the Government that they are part of. And it simply isn’t good enough. We need to force the progressive voices within the ALP out into the public.
There are two cabinet ministers who are in Green marginal seats. Anthony Albanese (Infrastructure Minister) in inner city Sydney, and Lindsay Tanner (Finance Minister) in inner city Melbourne. When they realise they are about to lose their seat at the next election, they will begin screaming for more action on climate change within Cabinet. Anyone who lives in or near their electorates needs to start organising now to make this happen.
2009 needs to be a year of relentless organising and relentless protest. We simply do not have any choice.
Sometimes, when you look at the power and money of the big polluters, it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed and disempowered. They have virtually limitless funds, an army of lobbyists and access to whichever politicians they choose. But they are motivated fundamentally fear and greed. And we have something that they will never have. We have a vast network of people across this land that are driven by a deep love of life, and who will work tirelessly, for no pay, to defend what they love. And in the end, hope will always triumph over fear.
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The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Fredrick Douglass, letter to an abolitionist associate.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Climate changed
When Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson join forces with Al Gore and Chevrolet in the fight to save the earth, you’ve got to wonder what is going on. We are all environmentalists now, as celebrities and business leaders jostle to establish their green credentials. For those who’ve been campaigning to put climate change onto the public and political agenda for the past 30 years, the dramatic mainstreaming of the issue in the past 12 months has been a long awaited and hard fought success. But, with this success comes a number of challenges.
First and foremost is how to translate widespread concern into real political action. As yet, there hasn’t been much positive correlation between public and media interest in the issue, and actual policy change. Neither of Australia’s major political parties have policies to cut greenhouse pollution at anywhere near the rate required, and the chasm between rhetoric and policy reality continues to widen.
The climate change debate can be confusing at the best of times, and it has become even more so with the arrival of a plethora of new commentators. This raises another key question over the role of activists and NGO’s who, in some cases, are finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of a crowded media and ideas marketplace.
This article aims to explore these questions, as well as other tensions in the environmental movement as it once again goes through a resurgence – of sorts. It is a useful time to reflect on the lessons of the past 30 years and to look forward to the future.
The death of environmentalism?
In many ways, climate change is the mother of all environmental problems. It is likely to exacerbate many existing local and regional environmental impacts and threatens the health of the global ecosystem. For this reason, it is now the focus of much of the attention and effort of environmentalists the world over. And if the impacts are myriad and complex, so too are the causes. While burning coal and oil are the obvious culprits, their use is so widespread and ubiquitous in our economy that nothing short of an energy revolution is required to wean us off the addiction.
In 2004, a group of major environmental funders commissioned a strategic think-piece to analyze why the environment movement was ‘failing’ to win the climate change campaign. Written by two US based consultants Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism” provoked considerable debate within green NGO’s globally. One of the key observations of the paper was that climate change isn’t actually an environmental issue as such, and that the green movement’s continued ‘ownership’ of the issue was limiting the potential for other sectors to effectively engage. Climate change can be seen as a health issue, a social justice issue, an economic issue, a geopolitical strategic issue, and a basic issue of survival – none of which require an environmental worldview. The paper argued that for climate change to become mainstream, it would need to be actively engaged by these other interest groups to lift it out of the ‘green ghetto’. The implication being that the environmental movement had to either reframe the issue or get out of the road.
Since that time, the climate change debate has been well and truly reframed and has been actively engaged by everyone from the Pope to the Pentagon. The insurance industry were early business movers and have now been joined by a host of businesses that see financial opportunities in climate action, or financial risks from inaction. The economic case was most convincingly put by Sir Nicholas Stern in his 2006 report to the UK Government in which he argued that the economic cost of doing nothing would far exceed the cost of taking preventative measures to cut greenhouse pollution. The Pentagon issued a report in late 2005 that identified climate change as a major risk to US security interests and global geopolitical stability. Elements of the religious right in the US have begun calling for renewable energy, and development agencies are pushing for climate refugees to be considered under the UN refugee convention.
The issue that was for so long the domain of environmentalists is now mainstream, and has many new champions, including an unlikely white knight in the form of Al Gore. His film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ arrived at exactly the right time to act as a tipping point in public consciousness. But while most of the public now understands the seriousness of the issue, this concern is yet to translate into substantive action. Greenhouse emissions continue to soar. Australia is massively expanding its export coal industry and there are a plethora of proposed new coal fired power stations on the drawing boards. Both the Coalition and ALP went to the November 24 election with policies that would see a massive increase in greenhouse emissions over the next decade.
The era of false solutions – divide and conquer
While powerholders can no longer ignore the issue, they can certainly delay action through obfuscation and false solutions. And surprisingly, nearly all of the distractions and false solutions proposed by government or industry have been embraced by parts of the environmental movement.
The Nuclear industry has used the urgent threat of climate change as a platform to stage an attempted renaissance and they’ve received support from some surprising quarters. James Lovelock, renowned author of the Gaia hypothesis, has argued that nuclear waste, while not ideal, is a lesser risk to the planet than runaway global warming. It isn’t a practical argument given that even a massive adoption nuclear power would not have any significant impact on cutting greenhouse emissions within the required timeframe. Bizarrely, the argument seems to be based on a distortion of the same precautionary principle that has underpinned the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power and other risky technologies for the past fifty years. The issue of nuclear waste is as unresolved as ever, as is the question of where to put the reactors.
Howard started talking up nuclear power as a surefire way of creating division within the ALP but went silent on the issue in the run up to the election when it became clear that most Australians don’t want a reactor in their backyard. Nonetheless, he successfully created confusion and division over climate change solutions.
The other big technological red herring is so called ‘clean coal’. It’s a clever marketing device because it doesn’t really have a definition, doesn’t exist and is therefore difficult to critique in any real sense. If the various technologies proposed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) actually work, they will come online far too late to make the cuts that are required within the next decade. And it’s a very big if.
The thing that both nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal’ have in common is that they are both technological solutions that employ the same 1950’s style, centralised, linear thinking that has got us into the problem in the first place. Dig it up, burn it, bury the waste and shift the problem to future generations. The flipside of this paradigm is the continued failure to understand and embrace renewable energy. How can an inherently decentralized technology that doesn’t directly involve mining or the creation of waste possibly work? Facts and the experiences from other countries are conveniently ignored to fit the story.
Voluntary action?
Another red herring, and one which much of the environment movement has embraced with enthusiasm, is the call for voluntary action. Take the case of incandescent light bulbs. On one hand, you can run expensive, time consuming education campaigns to encourage the uptake of more efficient light bulbs through voluntary, market based mechanisms. On the other hand, you can just ban inefficient bulbs. Much of the mainstream environmental movement did the former, while Malcolm Turnbull, a wealthy Liberal MP and a free-market ideologue, did the latter. Strange times indeed. It paints a disturbing picture of the politics and strategic approach of much of the mainstream environmental movement.
Encouraging people to take personal, voluntary action is great at one level, but it is no where near sufficient to bring about any where near the changes required within an ever closing time frame. And it brings the risk of de-politicising the issue by shifting focus onto individual consumers rather than powerholders. Of course, there is the argument that once people have their own backyard in order they’ll be a lot more willing to call for others to change. And voluntary, lifestyle action can often be an important stepping-stone along a journey of political development, but it’s a very roundabout way of trying to get change – particularly if you’re in a hurry and the stakes are this high. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntary seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler and far more effective to simply ban new coal fired power stations or put a tax on carbon than it is to convince 10 Million households to voluntarily buy green power.
The split between lifestyle activism and political activism has divided the environmental movement since the 1970’s, and has often been expressed as ongoing, low level sniping between the ‘back to the land’ permaculturalists vs city based activists. While the context is different, the debate is just as fruitless now as it ever was. It is admirable and important for people to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, and we do need inspiring examples of how to live in harmony with the earth, but we’re also running out of time. It is clear that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legally binding emission reduction target, we need to start phasing out the coal industry, and we need targets and massive incentives for renewable energy. These are political solutions that require political action.
From rhetoric to revolution - how does change happen?
In his analysis of contemporary social movements, Bill Moyer identified a series of phases that movements go though which he articulated in his ‘Movement Action Plan’ (MAP). What Moyer found is that a situation of ‘business as usual’ is followed by what he described as ‘ripening conditions’, where the problem becomes increasingly obvious and official channels for resolving the problem fail. Some kind of ‘trigger event’ will then catapult the issue into the mainstream of public consciousness. However, while public understanding of the problem increases, public opposition to powerholder’s policies lags somewhat and this often results in a sense of ‘activist failure’, where it seems as though things should be changing a whole lot faster than they are. If you look back on the civil rights movement, anti-war movements and so on, this pattern can be seen clearly.
So according to this one map of how social movements progress, we’ve been here before. We’ve had some major trigger events and it’ll just take some time (and a lot of hard work) for people’s opposition to powerholder’s policies and for support for movement alternatives to catch up with the level of awareness and concern on the issue. The problem is that we don’t have time to wait.
The high stakes political game that is being played by those in power is to try to delay serious action on climate change for at least another five or so years – just long enough to enable the next generation of coal fired power stations and coal mines to be built in order to lock in the next 30 years of profits. From the other side, it is to ensure the transition to clean, renewable energy starts now so that we can make significant cuts in greenhouse pollution within the next 10 years – which is what the science tells us is required if we’re to avoid catastrophic, irreversible global warming.
Raising social costs
The issue clearly isn’t about winning the arguments and rational debate. It’s about power, and about overcoming the massive, vested interests of the fossil fuel and dependant industries. One of the clearest articulations of change making that I’ve seen is in Michael Albert’s book “The Trajectory of Change” in which he describes the ‘logic of dissent’. He writes: Short term we raise social costs until elites agree to implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions while working towards transforming society's defining relations.
In trying to figure out how to get change on any issue you need to ask a couple of simple questions. Who can give you what you want? What do they care about (what motivates them)? How do we get them to give us what we want? Or in Albert’s terms, how do we raise social costs?
As a general rule, the main thing that politicians care about is getting elected. The main thing that corporations care about is making money – it is essentially their reason for existence.
When Bob Hawke announced that he would stop the construction of the dam on the Franklin River, he made a calculation that it would help him win the election. Sure, there were moral arguments, and he probably liked the idea of doing the right thing, but ultimately it was a calculated political decision. He found a legal justification for the intervention and the rest is history. Anyone who has been involved in winning a campaign knows that this is how the business is done. It’s about power. Winning on climate change will be no different. Politicians will enact laws to radically cut greenhouse pollution when the political costs of them not doing so are higher than the costs of maintaining the status quo.
In 2003, over half a million people took to the streets in protest against the proposed invasion of Iraq. Howard surveyed the political landscape (no doubt with the aid of a lot of polling and focus groups) and he stared the movement down. In the equation of political cost vs benefit, the movement wasn’t powerful enough and, as a consequence, we went to war. Howard’s ability to ignore the biggest movement in recent history was partly dependant on the lack of any clear political opposition from the ALP, but also on other cultural factors. Howard knew that once we went to war, Australians would rally behind the diggers. Greenpeace got crucified in the media for protesting the departure of the HMAS Sydney because it was seen as an attack on the troops.
The challenge for the leadership of the peace movement was to figure out how to escalate the social and political costs associated with the war, whereas once the war started, the movement radically de-escalated. Similar challenges of escalation face the movement for climate action.
Polarising the issue
In the lead up to the 2007 election we had the vast majority of Australians in support of serious action on climate change and the issue was high on the political agenda. Both major political parties were responding to the issue, but doing it in a way that largely involved re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic of our fossil fuel dependent economy. A small handout here, a token gesture there.
One of the things that has changed significantly in recent years is the advent of poll driven politics in Australia. Where, politicians used to rely on their gut feel, now they increasingly rely on endless focus groups and polls to understand the nuances of the electorate. They know that people are concerned about climate change, but they also know that people are confused about what to do about it and it is difficult for punters to tell the difference between spin and substance. A 30% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020? What does that really mean to the average person? What was that percentage again? And how on earth do you accurately measure greenhouse emissions anyhow? Even the environment movement is divided on the solutions and has many competing policy positions and demands which just become a swirling mess of gobbledygook when you start adding things like carbon trading into the mix.
If you look back at every successful environmental campaign of the past 30 years, the demands were clear, simple and compelling. It is impossible to win public campaigns if the issues are grey and confused. There needs to be a problem and a solution, a good guy and a bad guy.
One of the limitations of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, is that it fails to identify a target or even a coherent demand. It leaves the public feeling that we have a climate crisis that, inexplicably, is all of our fault, and that we all need to work together to solve it. So while the film was spectacularly successful at raising awareness and profile, it’s framing of the issue was profoundly unhelpful from a campaigning point of view.
How about this instead… We have a crisis that is caused by burning fossil fuels. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This means no new coal or oil projects and rapid shift to renewable energy. The fossil fuel industry are the bad guys. The renewable energy industry are the good guys. We need to make burning more fossil fuels socially, politically and economically impossible.This means raising the costs (social, political and economic) for the fossil fuel industry and any politicians or financiers who support them - until we keep fossil carbon in the ground. End of story.
Instead we have endless policy analysis about carbon trading and incomprehensible market mechanisms. We have demands for something percent cuts in some immeasurable quantity of something that people really don’t understand by some far-flung future date that is really beyond our comprehension.
A sheep in wolf’s clothing?
So why isn’t the environmental movement cutting through with hard edged, clear campaigns that demand what is required? Three weeks out from the Federal Election, the industry group Environmental Business Australia (with members including Woolworths, BP and the Commonwealth Bank) released a climate change pledge calling on political parties to support a range of policy measures that were almost identical to the policy demands of the peak environment groups (ACF, Conservation Councils, Greenpeace etc).
This is no doubt partly due to the lowest common denominator consensus process that has plagued the environment movement for at least the last decade, but there are also other factors at play. After ten years of the Howard Government, many activist organizations are feeling beaten up around the edges. It feels as though our vision has been reduced. We’ve become more ‘realistic’ - too scared of being accused of extremism. The terms of allowable debate have been narrowed and we’ve found ourselves somehow complying – talking about things we never wanted to talk about, in ways that we never imagined. There is a fine line between ‘appealing to the mainstream’ and becoming so bland as to become irrelevant.
The environmental movement has always been a middle class movement in Australia, and has long suffered from being too nice, (nice, of course, is an acronym for Not Insightful or Critical Enough) but the climate change movement has taken things to an extreme. Invariably, NGO climate strategy meetings end up spending more time getting bogged down in some minutia about how a hypothetical carbon trading market might work than actually discussing campaigns that will have impact. And it is the assumptions of these discussions that are most disturbing – as though the global justice movement had never existed and market mechanisms are all we have left.
The carbon trading debate has so far been dominated by economists and policy wonks and has seen little public discussion of the big political issues surrounding what is essentially the privatisation of the atmosphere and the world’s carbon banks. In the European emissions trading scheme, the well accepted principle of ‘polluter pays’ was turned on it’s head, with the big polluters receiving billions in public handouts without actually having to cut emissions. We shouldn’t feel obliged to be nice about this. We should be angry. Not only is our planet being destroyed, but we’re paying the corporations who are doing it.
Re-imagining the movement
Over recent months there has been a subtle shift. The mild consensus is cracking. Questions are being asked. Some of the exciting vision, ideas and hope of the global justice movement have begun to appear, providing a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead. Recent direct actions by students against the coal industry in Victoria and NSW are an encouraging sign that the status quo is becoming unacceptable. Projects like ‘Cheat Neutral’ are emerging to ridicule false solutions and the words ‘climate change’ and ‘capitalism’ were even used in the same sentence at a recent Sydney rally.
I’m confident that social movements will rise to the challenge of climate change in the years to come, but it won’t be the movement of professional NGO’s that have dominated climate politics to date. Sure, they’ll still be part of the landscape and will have an important role to play, but the real people’s movement that will rise up to transform our society is still only barely discernable. It’s still just a sparkle in that student’s eye. It’s politics are still being scratched out on the back of beer mats in pubs all over the country. It’s tactics are being re-imagined – the bastard children of the Franklin, North East Forests, James Hardy and Jabiluka campaigns. The movement has reinvented itself before, and it will do so again, as the tide of public opinion turns once more.
First and foremost is how to translate widespread concern into real political action. As yet, there hasn’t been much positive correlation between public and media interest in the issue, and actual policy change. Neither of Australia’s major political parties have policies to cut greenhouse pollution at anywhere near the rate required, and the chasm between rhetoric and policy reality continues to widen.
The climate change debate can be confusing at the best of times, and it has become even more so with the arrival of a plethora of new commentators. This raises another key question over the role of activists and NGO’s who, in some cases, are finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of a crowded media and ideas marketplace.
This article aims to explore these questions, as well as other tensions in the environmental movement as it once again goes through a resurgence – of sorts. It is a useful time to reflect on the lessons of the past 30 years and to look forward to the future.
The death of environmentalism?
In many ways, climate change is the mother of all environmental problems. It is likely to exacerbate many existing local and regional environmental impacts and threatens the health of the global ecosystem. For this reason, it is now the focus of much of the attention and effort of environmentalists the world over. And if the impacts are myriad and complex, so too are the causes. While burning coal and oil are the obvious culprits, their use is so widespread and ubiquitous in our economy that nothing short of an energy revolution is required to wean us off the addiction.
In 2004, a group of major environmental funders commissioned a strategic think-piece to analyze why the environment movement was ‘failing’ to win the climate change campaign. Written by two US based consultants Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism” provoked considerable debate within green NGO’s globally. One of the key observations of the paper was that climate change isn’t actually an environmental issue as such, and that the green movement’s continued ‘ownership’ of the issue was limiting the potential for other sectors to effectively engage. Climate change can be seen as a health issue, a social justice issue, an economic issue, a geopolitical strategic issue, and a basic issue of survival – none of which require an environmental worldview. The paper argued that for climate change to become mainstream, it would need to be actively engaged by these other interest groups to lift it out of the ‘green ghetto’. The implication being that the environmental movement had to either reframe the issue or get out of the road.
Since that time, the climate change debate has been well and truly reframed and has been actively engaged by everyone from the Pope to the Pentagon. The insurance industry were early business movers and have now been joined by a host of businesses that see financial opportunities in climate action, or financial risks from inaction. The economic case was most convincingly put by Sir Nicholas Stern in his 2006 report to the UK Government in which he argued that the economic cost of doing nothing would far exceed the cost of taking preventative measures to cut greenhouse pollution. The Pentagon issued a report in late 2005 that identified climate change as a major risk to US security interests and global geopolitical stability. Elements of the religious right in the US have begun calling for renewable energy, and development agencies are pushing for climate refugees to be considered under the UN refugee convention.
The issue that was for so long the domain of environmentalists is now mainstream, and has many new champions, including an unlikely white knight in the form of Al Gore. His film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ arrived at exactly the right time to act as a tipping point in public consciousness. But while most of the public now understands the seriousness of the issue, this concern is yet to translate into substantive action. Greenhouse emissions continue to soar. Australia is massively expanding its export coal industry and there are a plethora of proposed new coal fired power stations on the drawing boards. Both the Coalition and ALP went to the November 24 election with policies that would see a massive increase in greenhouse emissions over the next decade.
The era of false solutions – divide and conquer
While powerholders can no longer ignore the issue, they can certainly delay action through obfuscation and false solutions. And surprisingly, nearly all of the distractions and false solutions proposed by government or industry have been embraced by parts of the environmental movement.
The Nuclear industry has used the urgent threat of climate change as a platform to stage an attempted renaissance and they’ve received support from some surprising quarters. James Lovelock, renowned author of the Gaia hypothesis, has argued that nuclear waste, while not ideal, is a lesser risk to the planet than runaway global warming. It isn’t a practical argument given that even a massive adoption nuclear power would not have any significant impact on cutting greenhouse emissions within the required timeframe. Bizarrely, the argument seems to be based on a distortion of the same precautionary principle that has underpinned the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power and other risky technologies for the past fifty years. The issue of nuclear waste is as unresolved as ever, as is the question of where to put the reactors.
Howard started talking up nuclear power as a surefire way of creating division within the ALP but went silent on the issue in the run up to the election when it became clear that most Australians don’t want a reactor in their backyard. Nonetheless, he successfully created confusion and division over climate change solutions.
The other big technological red herring is so called ‘clean coal’. It’s a clever marketing device because it doesn’t really have a definition, doesn’t exist and is therefore difficult to critique in any real sense. If the various technologies proposed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) actually work, they will come online far too late to make the cuts that are required within the next decade. And it’s a very big if.
The thing that both nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal’ have in common is that they are both technological solutions that employ the same 1950’s style, centralised, linear thinking that has got us into the problem in the first place. Dig it up, burn it, bury the waste and shift the problem to future generations. The flipside of this paradigm is the continued failure to understand and embrace renewable energy. How can an inherently decentralized technology that doesn’t directly involve mining or the creation of waste possibly work? Facts and the experiences from other countries are conveniently ignored to fit the story.
Voluntary action?
Another red herring, and one which much of the environment movement has embraced with enthusiasm, is the call for voluntary action. Take the case of incandescent light bulbs. On one hand, you can run expensive, time consuming education campaigns to encourage the uptake of more efficient light bulbs through voluntary, market based mechanisms. On the other hand, you can just ban inefficient bulbs. Much of the mainstream environmental movement did the former, while Malcolm Turnbull, a wealthy Liberal MP and a free-market ideologue, did the latter. Strange times indeed. It paints a disturbing picture of the politics and strategic approach of much of the mainstream environmental movement.
Encouraging people to take personal, voluntary action is great at one level, but it is no where near sufficient to bring about any where near the changes required within an ever closing time frame. And it brings the risk of de-politicising the issue by shifting focus onto individual consumers rather than powerholders. Of course, there is the argument that once people have their own backyard in order they’ll be a lot more willing to call for others to change. And voluntary, lifestyle action can often be an important stepping-stone along a journey of political development, but it’s a very roundabout way of trying to get change – particularly if you’re in a hurry and the stakes are this high. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntary seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler and far more effective to simply ban new coal fired power stations or put a tax on carbon than it is to convince 10 Million households to voluntarily buy green power.
The split between lifestyle activism and political activism has divided the environmental movement since the 1970’s, and has often been expressed as ongoing, low level sniping between the ‘back to the land’ permaculturalists vs city based activists. While the context is different, the debate is just as fruitless now as it ever was. It is admirable and important for people to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, and we do need inspiring examples of how to live in harmony with the earth, but we’re also running out of time. It is clear that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legally binding emission reduction target, we need to start phasing out the coal industry, and we need targets and massive incentives for renewable energy. These are political solutions that require political action.
From rhetoric to revolution - how does change happen?
In his analysis of contemporary social movements, Bill Moyer identified a series of phases that movements go though which he articulated in his ‘Movement Action Plan’ (MAP). What Moyer found is that a situation of ‘business as usual’ is followed by what he described as ‘ripening conditions’, where the problem becomes increasingly obvious and official channels for resolving the problem fail. Some kind of ‘trigger event’ will then catapult the issue into the mainstream of public consciousness. However, while public understanding of the problem increases, public opposition to powerholder’s policies lags somewhat and this often results in a sense of ‘activist failure’, where it seems as though things should be changing a whole lot faster than they are. If you look back on the civil rights movement, anti-war movements and so on, this pattern can be seen clearly.
So according to this one map of how social movements progress, we’ve been here before. We’ve had some major trigger events and it’ll just take some time (and a lot of hard work) for people’s opposition to powerholder’s policies and for support for movement alternatives to catch up with the level of awareness and concern on the issue. The problem is that we don’t have time to wait.
The high stakes political game that is being played by those in power is to try to delay serious action on climate change for at least another five or so years – just long enough to enable the next generation of coal fired power stations and coal mines to be built in order to lock in the next 30 years of profits. From the other side, it is to ensure the transition to clean, renewable energy starts now so that we can make significant cuts in greenhouse pollution within the next 10 years – which is what the science tells us is required if we’re to avoid catastrophic, irreversible global warming.
Raising social costs
The issue clearly isn’t about winning the arguments and rational debate. It’s about power, and about overcoming the massive, vested interests of the fossil fuel and dependant industries. One of the clearest articulations of change making that I’ve seen is in Michael Albert’s book “The Trajectory of Change” in which he describes the ‘logic of dissent’. He writes: Short term we raise social costs until elites agree to implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions while working towards transforming society's defining relations.
In trying to figure out how to get change on any issue you need to ask a couple of simple questions. Who can give you what you want? What do they care about (what motivates them)? How do we get them to give us what we want? Or in Albert’s terms, how do we raise social costs?
As a general rule, the main thing that politicians care about is getting elected. The main thing that corporations care about is making money – it is essentially their reason for existence.
When Bob Hawke announced that he would stop the construction of the dam on the Franklin River, he made a calculation that it would help him win the election. Sure, there were moral arguments, and he probably liked the idea of doing the right thing, but ultimately it was a calculated political decision. He found a legal justification for the intervention and the rest is history. Anyone who has been involved in winning a campaign knows that this is how the business is done. It’s about power. Winning on climate change will be no different. Politicians will enact laws to radically cut greenhouse pollution when the political costs of them not doing so are higher than the costs of maintaining the status quo.
In 2003, over half a million people took to the streets in protest against the proposed invasion of Iraq. Howard surveyed the political landscape (no doubt with the aid of a lot of polling and focus groups) and he stared the movement down. In the equation of political cost vs benefit, the movement wasn’t powerful enough and, as a consequence, we went to war. Howard’s ability to ignore the biggest movement in recent history was partly dependant on the lack of any clear political opposition from the ALP, but also on other cultural factors. Howard knew that once we went to war, Australians would rally behind the diggers. Greenpeace got crucified in the media for protesting the departure of the HMAS Sydney because it was seen as an attack on the troops.
The challenge for the leadership of the peace movement was to figure out how to escalate the social and political costs associated with the war, whereas once the war started, the movement radically de-escalated. Similar challenges of escalation face the movement for climate action.
Polarising the issue
In the lead up to the 2007 election we had the vast majority of Australians in support of serious action on climate change and the issue was high on the political agenda. Both major political parties were responding to the issue, but doing it in a way that largely involved re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic of our fossil fuel dependent economy. A small handout here, a token gesture there.
One of the things that has changed significantly in recent years is the advent of poll driven politics in Australia. Where, politicians used to rely on their gut feel, now they increasingly rely on endless focus groups and polls to understand the nuances of the electorate. They know that people are concerned about climate change, but they also know that people are confused about what to do about it and it is difficult for punters to tell the difference between spin and substance. A 30% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020? What does that really mean to the average person? What was that percentage again? And how on earth do you accurately measure greenhouse emissions anyhow? Even the environment movement is divided on the solutions and has many competing policy positions and demands which just become a swirling mess of gobbledygook when you start adding things like carbon trading into the mix.
If you look back at every successful environmental campaign of the past 30 years, the demands were clear, simple and compelling. It is impossible to win public campaigns if the issues are grey and confused. There needs to be a problem and a solution, a good guy and a bad guy.
One of the limitations of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, is that it fails to identify a target or even a coherent demand. It leaves the public feeling that we have a climate crisis that, inexplicably, is all of our fault, and that we all need to work together to solve it. So while the film was spectacularly successful at raising awareness and profile, it’s framing of the issue was profoundly unhelpful from a campaigning point of view.
How about this instead… We have a crisis that is caused by burning fossil fuels. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This means no new coal or oil projects and rapid shift to renewable energy. The fossil fuel industry are the bad guys. The renewable energy industry are the good guys. We need to make burning more fossil fuels socially, politically and economically impossible.This means raising the costs (social, political and economic) for the fossil fuel industry and any politicians or financiers who support them - until we keep fossil carbon in the ground. End of story.
Instead we have endless policy analysis about carbon trading and incomprehensible market mechanisms. We have demands for something percent cuts in some immeasurable quantity of something that people really don’t understand by some far-flung future date that is really beyond our comprehension.
A sheep in wolf’s clothing?
So why isn’t the environmental movement cutting through with hard edged, clear campaigns that demand what is required? Three weeks out from the Federal Election, the industry group Environmental Business Australia (with members including Woolworths, BP and the Commonwealth Bank) released a climate change pledge calling on political parties to support a range of policy measures that were almost identical to the policy demands of the peak environment groups (ACF, Conservation Councils, Greenpeace etc).
This is no doubt partly due to the lowest common denominator consensus process that has plagued the environment movement for at least the last decade, but there are also other factors at play. After ten years of the Howard Government, many activist organizations are feeling beaten up around the edges. It feels as though our vision has been reduced. We’ve become more ‘realistic’ - too scared of being accused of extremism. The terms of allowable debate have been narrowed and we’ve found ourselves somehow complying – talking about things we never wanted to talk about, in ways that we never imagined. There is a fine line between ‘appealing to the mainstream’ and becoming so bland as to become irrelevant.
The environmental movement has always been a middle class movement in Australia, and has long suffered from being too nice, (nice, of course, is an acronym for Not Insightful or Critical Enough) but the climate change movement has taken things to an extreme. Invariably, NGO climate strategy meetings end up spending more time getting bogged down in some minutia about how a hypothetical carbon trading market might work than actually discussing campaigns that will have impact. And it is the assumptions of these discussions that are most disturbing – as though the global justice movement had never existed and market mechanisms are all we have left.
The carbon trading debate has so far been dominated by economists and policy wonks and has seen little public discussion of the big political issues surrounding what is essentially the privatisation of the atmosphere and the world’s carbon banks. In the European emissions trading scheme, the well accepted principle of ‘polluter pays’ was turned on it’s head, with the big polluters receiving billions in public handouts without actually having to cut emissions. We shouldn’t feel obliged to be nice about this. We should be angry. Not only is our planet being destroyed, but we’re paying the corporations who are doing it.
Re-imagining the movement
Over recent months there has been a subtle shift. The mild consensus is cracking. Questions are being asked. Some of the exciting vision, ideas and hope of the global justice movement have begun to appear, providing a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead. Recent direct actions by students against the coal industry in Victoria and NSW are an encouraging sign that the status quo is becoming unacceptable. Projects like ‘Cheat Neutral’ are emerging to ridicule false solutions and the words ‘climate change’ and ‘capitalism’ were even used in the same sentence at a recent Sydney rally.
I’m confident that social movements will rise to the challenge of climate change in the years to come, but it won’t be the movement of professional NGO’s that have dominated climate politics to date. Sure, they’ll still be part of the landscape and will have an important role to play, but the real people’s movement that will rise up to transform our society is still only barely discernable. It’s still just a sparkle in that student’s eye. It’s politics are still being scratched out on the back of beer mats in pubs all over the country. It’s tactics are being re-imagined – the bastard children of the Franklin, North East Forests, James Hardy and Jabiluka campaigns. The movement has reinvented itself before, and it will do so again, as the tide of public opinion turns once more.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Howard spins into hotter water
After ten years of being a climate sceptic, John Howard begrudgingly pronounced himself a climate change realist. But while the rhetoric has changed, Government policy hasn’t. Australia’s greenhouse pollution continues to soar as the renewables industry slowly but surely packs its bags and heads overseas. Meanwhile the coal industry continues to expand with the help of massive public subsidies.
With APEC over and the federal election looming, Howard is behind in the polls. With climate change still a hot button issue, he has a simple choice: He can either do something serious to tackle climate change and win voter confidence, or he can somehow try to take climate change off the political agenda. His trick will be to figure out how to appear to be doing the former, while actually doing the latter - and this is exactly what the Government’s $23 million climate change advertising campaign attempts to do.
Inviting individuals to ‘Be Climate Clever’, the ad urges Australians to take responsibility where the Government is not. The campaign is craftily designed to deflect attention away from the need for policy change. By embracing an increasingly concerned community, Howard is gambling that he can convince voters that they don’t need to worry about climate change; as long as they do their bit at home the Government will take care of the rest.
Without irony, the ad insists that “Together we can be Climate Clever.” It’s as if we each have equal responsibility: You, me, Mum, Cam and Pru next door, and the Howard Government - working shoulder to shoulder to solve the climate crisis. In a sense it is true. We all do need to be part of the solution. Most of us can reduce greenhouse emissions in our own homes. But in another sense, it is a sophisticated manipulation.
Howard knows that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legislated emissions reduction target and we need targets and incentives for renewable energy. These are policy solutions that require political leadership. Deflecting the need for climate action back to individual households is a great ploy to delay the necessary action by at least another few years.
Don’t get me wrong, personal, voluntary action is great - but it is not sufficient. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntarily seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler to ban new coal fired power stations than it is to convince 20 million people to voluntarily buy green power. It’s easier and cheaper to simply legislate for high energy efficiency standards than it is to voluntarily change 50 million lightbulbs – one at a time. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how many energy efficient lightbulbs you install if the Government continues to approve new coal fired power stations and coal mines. It doesn’t matter how good you are at turning off your computer if our Government continues to undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto protocol.
While the Howard Government tries to distract us all with appeals for ‘aspirational’ targets, voluntary action, and the myth that coal can be clean, the reality is that we’re going to need more than words if we’re to avoid climate chaos.
The only really honest statement in the ad campaign is that “Climate change affects us all”. We are all in it together, and we can all be part of the solution, but the key role for individuals is to hold our Government accountable and force them to take real action. We need a legally binding target to reduce emissions by at least 30% by 2020. We need to stop building coal fired power stations and coal mines, and we need a massive investment in renewable energy. Anything else is not climate clever, it’s just more hot air.
With APEC over and the federal election looming, Howard is behind in the polls. With climate change still a hot button issue, he has a simple choice: He can either do something serious to tackle climate change and win voter confidence, or he can somehow try to take climate change off the political agenda. His trick will be to figure out how to appear to be doing the former, while actually doing the latter - and this is exactly what the Government’s $23 million climate change advertising campaign attempts to do.
Inviting individuals to ‘Be Climate Clever’, the ad urges Australians to take responsibility where the Government is not. The campaign is craftily designed to deflect attention away from the need for policy change. By embracing an increasingly concerned community, Howard is gambling that he can convince voters that they don’t need to worry about climate change; as long as they do their bit at home the Government will take care of the rest.
Without irony, the ad insists that “Together we can be Climate Clever.” It’s as if we each have equal responsibility: You, me, Mum, Cam and Pru next door, and the Howard Government - working shoulder to shoulder to solve the climate crisis. In a sense it is true. We all do need to be part of the solution. Most of us can reduce greenhouse emissions in our own homes. But in another sense, it is a sophisticated manipulation.
Howard knows that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legislated emissions reduction target and we need targets and incentives for renewable energy. These are policy solutions that require political leadership. Deflecting the need for climate action back to individual households is a great ploy to delay the necessary action by at least another few years.
Don’t get me wrong, personal, voluntary action is great - but it is not sufficient. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntarily seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler to ban new coal fired power stations than it is to convince 20 million people to voluntarily buy green power. It’s easier and cheaper to simply legislate for high energy efficiency standards than it is to voluntarily change 50 million lightbulbs – one at a time. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how many energy efficient lightbulbs you install if the Government continues to approve new coal fired power stations and coal mines. It doesn’t matter how good you are at turning off your computer if our Government continues to undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto protocol.
While the Howard Government tries to distract us all with appeals for ‘aspirational’ targets, voluntary action, and the myth that coal can be clean, the reality is that we’re going to need more than words if we’re to avoid climate chaos.
The only really honest statement in the ad campaign is that “Climate change affects us all”. We are all in it together, and we can all be part of the solution, but the key role for individuals is to hold our Government accountable and force them to take real action. We need a legally binding target to reduce emissions by at least 30% by 2020. We need to stop building coal fired power stations and coal mines, and we need a massive investment in renewable energy. Anything else is not climate clever, it’s just more hot air.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Cheat Neutral
Having problems being faithful? Why not offset your infidelity by paying someone else to do the right thing? This very funny and biting project exposes the absurdity of carbon offsets.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Seeing through the APEC police state
It would seem that the battle lines are drawn. On one side are thousands of highly trained police with batons, tazers and a brand spanking new water canon. On the other side are the people of Sydney. Hang on a minute. Isn’t there something wrong here? In an era of anti-terrorist hype, it is all too easy for beefcake politics to trample over democracy and for the issues to be obscured by hyperbole and shows of police strength.Quite simply, John Howard is trying to use the APEC summit to further undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol. So of course people are going to protest. And so we should.
When the laws are unjust or are destroying our future, and when official channels continue to fail, people of conscience have a responsibility to act. We have a responsibility to take to the streets to hold our elected decision makers accountable. Whether it be your State MP that is supporting a new coal fired power station, your Federal MP who is refusing to support renewable energy, or our PM who is trying to wreck the international framework for greenhouse gas reductions.
Peaceful direct action and civil disobedience are a fundamental part of our democracy. The reason we have weekends is because of labour movement protests. Women have the vote because the Suffragettes took to the streets. The anti-slavery movement, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all used civil disobedience to win fundamental freedoms that we now take for granted.
When your children ask you about climate change and about the future, can you honestly look them in the eye and tell them that it’ll be ok? And that you’re doing enough to protect their future?
Climate change is already resulting in more extreme weather events, displacing people from their homes, and is expected to cause massive problems of starvation, not to mention extinction. It’s time to move beyond the endless rhetoric and posturing of our political leaders. We need to massively cut greenhouse pollution and we need to start doing it now. Howard’s APEC agenda is basically to take us in the opposite direction by undermining the Kyoto process and pushing for non-binding, aspirational targets. In other words - more hot air and no action.
So amid the inevitable discussions about violence on the street, it’s important to remember the overwhelming moral imperative that is driving people to protest. And the serious violence that needs to be exposed is the violence on the people and the planet that will be unleashed if Howard succeeds in his attempt to use APEC to undermine Kyoto and climate change reaches tipping point.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
APEC - Australia Pushing Export Coal
The leaders of the 21 nations of APEC will decend upon Sydney in a matter of weeks. It would appear that Sydneysiders are greeting the meeting with an appropriate level of indifference. Our lives will be disrupted by the security, and our common sense will be assuaulted by the hyperbole that will no doubt eminate from our good Prime Minister.
The Agenda is supposed to be about driving action on climate change but, it's really about positioning in the lead up to the federal election. Greenpeace was leaked a copy of the draft declaration on climate change that is due to come out of the meeting.
The document is long on rhetoric, and short on substance. Typical for Howard, it stresses voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reduction, that can then be changed later on if they get too hard. What kind of a target is that?
It is clear that the real agenda behind Howard's posturing at APEC is to undermine the Kyoto protocol in the lead up to the second commitment period. Sure, Kyoto is highly problematic becuase it doesn't go far enough - which is why it needs to be seriously improved and tightened up - not further undermined.
Australia managed to win significant concessions in the negotiation of the first commitment period under Kyoto - which made it seem odd that we then didn't ratify it. The only obvious explanation for our continual undermining of Kyoto is that it if it is effective in driving down greenhouse pollution in other countries, it will have a big negative impact on the Australian export coal industry. In this context, APEC might well be renamed from 'Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation' to 'Australia Pushing Export Coal'.
The Agenda is supposed to be about driving action on climate change but, it's really about positioning in the lead up to the federal election. Greenpeace was leaked a copy of the draft declaration on climate change that is due to come out of the meeting.
The document is long on rhetoric, and short on substance. Typical for Howard, it stresses voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reduction, that can then be changed later on if they get too hard. What kind of a target is that?
It is clear that the real agenda behind Howard's posturing at APEC is to undermine the Kyoto protocol in the lead up to the second commitment period. Sure, Kyoto is highly problematic becuase it doesn't go far enough - which is why it needs to be seriously improved and tightened up - not further undermined.
Australia managed to win significant concessions in the negotiation of the first commitment period under Kyoto - which made it seem odd that we then didn't ratify it. The only obvious explanation for our continual undermining of Kyoto is that it if it is effective in driving down greenhouse pollution in other countries, it will have a big negative impact on the Australian export coal industry. In this context, APEC might well be renamed from 'Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation' to 'Australia Pushing Export Coal'.
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