Empty rhetoric.  That’s the verdict on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS ) from Geoff Bertram of the Institute of Policy Studies and Simon Terry, Executive Director of the Sustainability Council, in their searching book The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

They present a picture of governmental processes captured by powerful groups pursuing their own interests at the expense of the rest of the community. Large industry and agriculture have won for themselves exemptions and delays of such an order as to make significant emissions reduction impossible in the first commitment period (CP1) of the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time the costs have been loaded disproportionately on to households and small industry. Those responsible for 30% of emissions will carry 90% of the cost. Agriculture with 49% of emissions will pay 3% of the costs.

The authors don’t accept the claim of the agricultural sector that there are few options open to them to reduce emissions. In fact they claim agriculture offers by far the biggest set of low-cost abatement opportunities. There are a number of options that are not only commercially available but profitable to undertake. They instance means for reducing nitrous oxide emissions – nitrification inhibitors, stand-off pads, new grasses, supplementary maize feed, improved soil drainage.  Selective breeding offers the possibility in due course of some reduction of methane as does the supplementary feeding of various plant matter. The processing of casual effluent from milking sheds through bio-digesters cuts both carbon dioxide and methane. Improved carbon storage in soils through pasture management appears possible as does sequestration through biochar burial. Meanwhile agriculture’s exemption from the ETS bolsters higher land prices. Nice for landowners, but subsidised by the community at large.

In the longer run the ETS exemption is against farmers’ own best interests. It is shielding them from likely winds of change in world markets. The authors instance large companies in other countries seeking low-emissions milk, as Cadbury is doing in the UK,  and point to the likelihood that New Zealand will surrender first-mover advantage to such countries if we continue with our present dogged denial.

There is self-defeat for large industry, also, in the favoured position they have gained for themselves. The ETS opens the possibility of production subsidies for high-emission industries by focusing on the intensity rather than the overall quantity of emissions. It is likely, for example, that Solid Energy would be entitled to subsidies for the manufacture of urea from South Island lignite, even though it would be the country’s biggest single industrial emitter of greenhouse gases after the Huntly power station. By this provision New Zealand could provide a welcoming environment for industries relocating from other Annex I countries, via ‘carbon leakage’ from those economies. Such production subsidies will invite tariff retaliation from other countries and could shut New Zealand exports out of key markets.

New Zealand will emerge from CP1 with a level of emissions considerably higher than the 1990 benchmark to which we are expected to have returned. The role of forestry as a carbon sink to offset the country’s emissions is the subject of close investigation in the book, which warns of the reckoning which must be faced when the trees are cut down. Potentially enormous costs could be faced by the next generation when the final accounting is made. Indeed, the costs may be so high as to raise questions about the country’s ability to meet them. This prospect may see other nations disallowing the plantation forest offsetting practice in successor arrangements after CP1. Permanent forests are a different matter, and the authors see these as a real key to balancing the country’s future carbon budgets. They lament the uncertainties and potential retrospective taxation the forestry sector faces by comparison with the government response to demands from large industrial operations.

The book’s discussion of forestry, as of many other aspects of the ETS, is complex and demanding for the general reader. But the ETS itself is highly complex and often difficult to follow. I can well understand the authors’ claim that it’s a reasonable guess that no more than a handful of MPs understood the detail of what they were voting on in 2008 and 2009. I often found myself struggling to get a proper hold on the ramifications of the various processes the book explores, even though the authors have been exemplary in the patience and thoroughness of their explanations.

It is the exhaustive care they bring to their task which makes the reader respectful of the summary statements which emerge from time to time in the course of their discussion, such as this one:

“The ETS has not been designed to promote economically efficient abatement.  It has been designed firstly to protect and promote the position of vested interests that are unwilling to shoulder asset write-downs required to recognise a price on carbon, and secondly to transfer the costs of this to future generations.”

However there are countervailing forces at work against the formidable clout wielded by agricultural and other major emitter lobbies. The authors nominate three domestic factors which could upset the current political equilibrium. One is the possibility that the lack of trust in the forestry regulatory regime may deter new planting in general and permanent afforestation in particular; this would increase pressure for reform of the ETS.  The second is that sections of the population and the economy will become more concerned about climate change and the lack of any effective action at home to reduce emissions. The third is that the recognition of the size of the carbon debt we are passing to future generations by using forest credits to cover excess emissions may become a moral issue.

They also point to international factors which will put our ETS under pressure. One is the pressure we will come under if international emissions targets move towards being set more on a per capita basis. It would be very risky for us to go forward with gross emissions far above any we could hope to defend in a global commons debate.  Another is the possibility mentioned above of changes to the rules relating to forestry in a CP2 period. A third is the risk of border taxes and other adjustments we could well face from other governments and from private-sector firms if our climate change policy is shown to be incapable of matching the climate change objectives it espouses.

In the ETS we have shied away from the present costs involved in serious action to reduce emissions. But in doing so we have laid up for ourselves the far greater costs which will be the result of doing nothing now. That is the basic warning of the book. New Zealand is part of the developed world and will not be able to escape its fair share of responsibilities as we appear set on trying to do.

“How long can these people go on talking about the future as if climate change isn’t going to be part of it, let alone a determining factor?“  That is a question I often enough exasperatedly mutter to myself when listening to politicians or a variety of policy experts discussing the shape of the future with never a mention of the impacts of climate change.

Behind the scenes it may not be as bad as it looks. Gwynne Dyer wrote his book Climate Wars partly because he discovered that climate-change scenarios were playing a large and increasing role in military planning processes.  Chatham House associate fellow Cleo Paskal discussed the need for forward planning for the geopolitical impacts of climate change in her recent book Global Warring. Now the International Institute for Strategic Studies has produced a book by research fellow Jeffrey Mazo, Climate Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it. I notice incidentally that in his acknowledgements he thanks Cleo Paskal for discussions on climate and security.

He also thanks climatologist Michael Mann for comments on his first chapter. It included an up-to-date summary of the science, depending on the IPCC AR4 reports but also acknowledging that, if anything, their projections underestimated the amount, rate and impact of anthropogenic climate change. Although the book is largely directed to the likely impacts of climate change in the medium term, Mazo has no doubt that, without early and severe reductions in emissions, climate change will be disastrous for the global community in the second half of this century. Such a recognition strikes me as a necessary basis for serious engagement with policy questions.

However, although he hopes effective mitigation policies will be undertaken quickly, it is on the unavoidable effects in the next two to four decades that Mazo’s discussion centres.  In particular he focuses on state failure and internal conflict.

A brief historical survey looks at how climate has been implicated in the collapse of many previous cultures. It’s a complex matter isolating the relative effects of climate change from other stresses undergone by societies in danger of collapse, but he detects it as a common contributing factor in many cases. He includes interesting reflections on the way in which adaptation can be part of the cultural toolkit of societies which value mobility and flexibility. On the other hand some cultural values can work to make societies reluctant to abandon unsustainable lifestyles and prevail against rationality. He also notes that increased complexity in societies means increased fragility when systems finally fail, as in Easter Island and the Mayans, among others. In our own time the wealthier industrial nations are much more resilient to climate shocks than less developed countries, but he posits that if they do reach the breaking point the collapse will be further and faster.

Darfur provides the first modern climate-change conflict. Mazo examines this proposition carefully, paying attention to the variety of analyses that have been offered. He does not think it can be said that the conflict was caused by climate change, if ‘cause’ is meant as both a necessary and sufficient condition. His approach is rather to ask whether climate change has acted as an exacerbating factor or threat multiplier. Following through the various threads contributing to the conflict, many of them environmental, but also economic and governmental, he concludes that if one doesn’t take  a simplistic, reductionist view of causality it becomes apparent that anthropogenic climate change is a critical factor underlying the violence in Darfur.

From the Darfur model the book moves to a wider range of countries where climate change has the potential to affect stability and contribute to state failure. Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Sahel region in particular, is where the greatest number of already fragile states are also among the most vulnerable to climate change. Many other less fragile African countries are highly vulnerable but better placed for adaptation measures. The prospect is for increased volatility as a result of climate change for the most fragile states, and increased risk for more stable ones. Mazo also nominates and discusses some countries outside Africa which are particularly vulnerable to climate change and the deleterious effects it might have on the stability of the state, among them North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He notes the efforts Bangladesh has already made to reduce its vulnerability through a policy of deliberate protection of coastal mangrove forests, bucking the global trend of deforestation. Selected for closer attention are two less fragile states which have emerged from instability in recent years but are likely to be challenged again by climate change effects.  Colombia faces a high probability of the disappearance of its glaciers by 2035. Projected temperature increases and changes in precipitation could disrupt water and power supplies to large segments of the population, reversing the country’s progress and making a return to violence more likely. Indonesia’s food security is at risk, with agricultural production under threat from likely increased flooding and drought. If the country remains relatively stable it should, with support, be able to adapt to climate change over the medium term. But other stresses within the nation may be heightened by the effects of climate change and lead to a reversal of Indonesia’s progress.

Climate change presents policymakers in the developed world with two different questions. One is how to respond  to acute crises with new or increased military or humanitarian interventions. The other is how to prevent chronic problems caused or exacerbated by climate change through adaptation funds and other forms of aid or support.

The strategic implications are difficult to assess. Climate change is a threat multiplier, but not necessarily more so than the other causes or contributors to instability. However Mazo is clear that it is a new variable which must be taken into account in strategic assessments. And it is a very significant variable – strongly directional, accelerating and  irreversible on the time scales that current planning deals with. Among the points he discusses is the likely part to be played by militaries, not in fighting but in responding to humanitarian crises. He observes that militaries are often the only institutions with the capacity to deploy rapidly in such responses and sees them facing increased demands as such crises intensify and multiply with the increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events, aggravated by sea level rise. He warns that cutbacks in this role will not only increase humanitarian problems but also result in a loss of prestige and soft power and even a negative reaction to a perceived uncaring West.

The book issues no clarion calls. But there’s no mistaking the underlying message of its careful and seemingly rather abstract low-key discussion. In effect it says to policymakers “You must take climate change seriously and integrate it fully into your understanding of what is happening in the world and into your planning to address global problems.”  About time too, one might add.

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Climate change science is clear and undeniable in its general thrust.  Climate change politics by contrast are murky and uncertain.  Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson have spent nearly two decades researching and writing about the politics, and their new book Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy reflects all the uncertainties and ambiguities.

They well understand the suspicions and anxieties felt in relation to the capitalist economy by many who take seriously the threat of climate change. The economy’s growth has been fed by increasing CO₂ emissions and many of its actors seem heedless of the need to change that dependence. The early business response to climate change was automatic denial. More than that, positive attempts were made to discredit the scientific base on which the case for action was made and to give the impression of widespread public opposition to action. Some companies are still stuck in those responses and in some sectors of the economy they seem likely to remain vociferously opposed to the economic transformation required.

However the authors see no likelihood of the abandonment of capitalism or its dependence on growth. For them the question has to be how capitalism can be configured to grow while gradually replacing coal, gas and oil. It’s a very difficult task but not a hopeless one. They point to those within the world of business and finance who have come to realise that the science will not be gainsaid and that the costs of action would not be disastrous.  In a variety of ways those firms have begun to discern economic opportunities in a low-carbon economy. For sunrise industries, the nuclear industry and biotechnology companies the advantages are clear. For others reputation management and corporate social responsibility are to be considered. Overall there is a tendency to see failure to anticipate likely possibilities as a business risk — risk to reputation, risks of legal liabilities, risks of losing out on new market opportunities. It remains a mixed picture, but there is a policy momentum likely to keep the issue relatively high on the executive agenda.

Whether we like it or not, neoliberal capitalism has already shaped the character of our response to climate change. That is why emissions trading has become the preferred policy approach, ahead of environmental taxation measures. The authors comment that emissions trading became almost unstoppable once the dominant financial actors realised its potential as a new market, with its derivatives, options, swaps, insurance, and so on, and thus as a profitable enterprise.

The power of investors is to some extent being felt in driving an orientation to face climate change issues.  One example is the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), effectively a consortium of investors who write annually to corporations listed on stock exchanges asking them to report on matters relating to CO₂ emissions and their perception of risks from climate change. The uptake has been impressive and by 2008 the CDP was backed by $57 trillion worth of assets from over 3000 financial institutions. Investment growth in renewable energy has been considerable in recent years. The book recognises that, given the neoliberal context we live in, mobilising the money of large institutional investors like insurance companies and investment funds will be crucial to the transformation to a low-carbon economy.

The authors lead the reader patiently through the apparently bewildering variety of mechanisms by which the demands for a flexible carbon market are addressed. Of particular interest is their examination of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism and its emission credits whereby purchasers in the North can enable projects in the South. It has proved far more popular than expected, though in practice the book acknowledges that it has not yet delivered the benefits that many hoped for and expected, and critics continue to see it as a fraudulent mechanism that lets rich countries off the hook.

As the explanations proceed it becomes very clear that market governance is the key to whether a market-based approach to climate change will succeed in reducing emissions. The book tackles this squarely. A market requires more than a minimum of creating property rights and enforcing contracts. It needs rules by which trading can occur, elaborate accounting systems to measure emissions and make companies report on them, and complex methodologies to estimate whether a project has reduced emissions. The authors distinguish three basic sorts of governance. First, by quantity. Here rules are set which establish overall limits for carbon emissions, allocate them among different players, and enforce those limits. Second, by price. In emissions trading schemes so long as the targets produce scarcity a price is created for carbon emissions permits which exerts a governing effect on behaviour. Price can also be affected directly, through carbon taxes. Some governments have instituted such taxes and the authors consider they should remain a possibility if necessary. The third type of governance is by disclosure, where business and other actors are required to report on their emissions profile.

How good is all this governance at present?  Not very, is the impression given. Targets set are often too weak. The flexibility allowed in meeting commitments means that carbon offsets are not sufficiently rigorous. The voluntary market is particularly prone to such problems. Can we learn and improve?  The authors think the EU has made considerable improvements to its emissions trading scheme as time has progressed, tightening its allocations and data collection methods. The voluntary carbon market has also considerably strengthened its certification schemes.

In the very uncertain future for climate capitalism the authors have a preference for what they call climate Keynesianism, where strong governance directs the markets more closely towards the goal of decarbonisation and integrates them globally, including a green Marshall Plan-type global scheme. Their filling out of this vision is central to the positive view they have tried to achieve of the potential of a capitalist economy to successfully meet the climate challenge.

The book is sympathetic to those whose interest in climate change is driven not by the potential to make money but by the gravity the issue poses.  But, say the authors, we have to understand how capitalism works if we’re going to have any chance of success in dealing with the threat in a humane way. It’s not easy, and it’s urgent. However there have been significant transformations of capitalist economies in the past. They instance the Bretton Woods system after the second world war which in a short space of time created a new global deal that produced an unprecedented period of smooth, rapid economic growth. On the technology side their analogy is the development of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, a messy affair involving a number of entrepreneurial engineers acting competitively, and one which had far-reaching effects on daily life.  They urge novel and probably uneasy alliances – environmentalists and venture capitalists for example – as we assemble the necessary coalitions to rewrite the rules of the global economy.

In the course of developing its major themes the book is valuably informative on many of the details of carbon markets and trading. The reader who wants a better picture of complicated systems within reasonably brief compass will be rewarded.

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François Houtart, born in 1925, is a Belgian sociologist. He’s also been a catholic priest for sixty years. His orientation can be seen in the NGO he founded in 1976, CETRI, which aims to promote dialogue with third world social movements and to encourage resistance and action. He’s one of the most active members of the World Social Forum. The concerns these organisations represent are reflected in his book first published in French last year, now translated into English: Agrofuels: Big Profits, Ruined Lives and Ecological Destruction.

Houtart is far from unaware of the climate crisis, which he describes in fully adequate terms. He is also aware that the question of energy is not only central to the climate crisis but also faces the exhaustion of its nonrenewable sources within the century. But he argues clearly and strongly that agrofuels (biofuels) as at present produced are no solution to either the climate crisis or the energy crisis and are taking a terrible toll on the lives of those dispossessed by their advance in countries of the South.

Before examining the realities of rapid agrofuel development Houtart places it in the context of the neoliberal discourse on climate change.  Neoliberals began by denying or playing down climate change. Scepticism and political manoeuvring marked this stage, with attempts to delegitimize the scientific approach. However a second phase began to develop as the extent of the climate crisis became evident. Market-oriented solutions can be found. Optimism pervades this approach. The appropriate technological solutions can be employed and capital accumulation can continue. But in relation to agrofuels Houtart says hold on: new externalities have emerged and not been accounted for in the reckoning of profit from agrofuels.

His attention is largely on the so-called first generation agrofuels — ethanol from alcohol-producing plants and bio-diesel from plants yielding oil. He acknowledges the potential advantages of second generation agrofuels in that they don’t use food crops, require fewer fossil inputs, and aim at using the whole plant.

His survey of Brazil’s production of ethanol from sugar cane considers the ecological and social effects of its production and the type of economic model by which it is developed. Although sugar cane does not directly encroach on forest land, which doesn’t suit its growth, it displaces pastureland and soya cultivation, pushing them towards forested regions. Another displacement, that of population, is a consequence of the massive monoculture which requires land concentration. Big companies and foreign investment are required for the scale of the operation, which is clearly orientated towards exportation. The social consequences include a considerable elimination of labour, particularly that of peasants. For those who take employment in the sugar cane plantations the work is so hard and the pay so low as to be akin to a new form of slavery.

Palm oil plantations in Asia, mainly Malaysia and Indonesia, displace vast forests of trees containing carbon.  The driest areas are used first, but when plantations move to the marshy land of forests growing on peat bog the soil must be dried after the forests are cut, in the process releasing more carbon than that contained in the trees. Local populations suffer illegal misappropriations, unjustified debt, and harsh employment conditions.  In Latin America Colombia has a massive lead in the palm oil sector. The author includes at this point in his book a wrenching personal narrative of his own visit to Colombia, recounting brutal displacements of local peasants and massacres by the paramilitary. “It is difficult not to feel rage when you see such things.” He briefly participates in a protest operation to destroy palm trees, “the work of death” as one of the peasants describes them.

The author has kinder words for jatropha, though not when farmed as a large-scale monoculture. In many of its present forms of production it is aimed at satisfying local needs and has the merit of respecting biodiversity.

Ecological and social externalities are being ignored in the development of agrofuel monocultures. The model under which large-scale agrofuel production is presently pursued focuses on economic efficiency which means concentration of land ownership, heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides, exploitation of cheap labour, large companies capable of transcending national frontiers, and quick return of profit. The results include forced peasant migration (with 60 million estimated to be at risk of expulsion from their land to make way for agrofuel crops), the destruction of biodiversity and carbon sinks, water pollution, soil contamination, and other disastrous consequences which arise because the productive operations have excluded them as costs. “But one day, we are all going to suffer from the effects, including financiers.”

It’s not as if agrofuels produced in this way are a solution to the climate problem.  Nor can they be more than a marginal alleviation of the need for new forms of energy. They use a development model which owes its legitimacy to its own success.  Houtart sees this as the logic of capitalism which continues to consider as externalities everything that does not enter directly into the calculation of exchange value.

He proposes five conditions for accepting the production of agrofuels: respecting biodiversity; avoiding encroachment on forests, especially primary forests; respecting soils and underground water; promoting peasant agriculture; combating the monopoly of the multinationals. If these conditions were met, he considers the production of agrofuels would be automatically towards the needs of the local populations, which is a rejection of the capital logic of exchange value in favour of use value.

His final chapter takes a brief look at the various alternative ways of solving the climate and energy crises and proposes four principles for an alternative development model to that offered by the engagement of big business in agrofuel production: sustainable use of natural resources; priority given to use value rather than exchange value; a generalized democracy; multiculturalism and interculturalism. A society which respects those principles can readily engage with energy economy and new sources of energy that respect nature and social relations.

Houtart is obviously no friend to global capitalism in at least some of its modes.  But his case against the agrofuel developments, laid out with painstaking detail, is hardly ideological. The ecological consequences in the various locations are carefully described.  The human consequences in the places where the crops are grown are for the most part dispassionately explained, save for the one brief first-hand Colombian account he allows himself. One doesn’t need to have a particular view of neoliberal capitalism to see that these consequences are bad. The extensive agrofuel industry Houtart focuses on looks like a blind alley so far as climate change mitigation is concerned, looks positively inhumane in the exploitation of labour and the dispossession of peasants, and fails badly in its ecological effects.  Capital may be an important ingredient in the fight against climate change, but not along this path.

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“I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to face unpleasant facts.” So writes Joseph Romm of blogging, in his new book Straight Up, a themed selection from the thousands of posts on his widely respected blog ClimateProgress.org. It’s as direct, lively and unequivocal as its title suggests. Romm, an admirer of George Orwell, knows how to express himself with admirable clarity and to satisfy what he describes as “a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk”.

The “status quo media” receive a drubbing. Romm is critical of their giving the same credence to a handful of US scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, as they give to hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists. Senior political reporters are writing more and more pieces as the issue becomes political; most know little about global warming and haven’t bothered to educate themselves. They stick with the “horse-race perspective”, measuring only who is up and who is down. In one post he criticises even Andy Revkin of the New York Times for suggesting that catastrophe is a marginal possibility and that campaigners for carbon dioxide curbs are suppressing the uncertainty in their picture. Revkin, says Romm, should know that catastrophe is not at the edge of the debate. The Washington Post he accuses of publishing unmitigated tabloid nonsense on climate change.

On the science Romm considers that the IPCC 2007 summary report underestimated likely climate impacts by not giving sufficient weight to positive feedbacks that accelerate warming and by assuming there would be aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The book includes a stunning post written in March 2009, where he reports on more recent scientific literature. Under five headings he relentlessly lists the evidence that points to catastrophic impacts this century under business-as-usual conditions — temperature rise of 5-7 degrees, sea level rise of 5 feet or more, dust-bowlification in the Southwest US, high loss of species on land and sea, and likely further unexpected impacts difficult to foresee. So we must stabilise at 450 ppm or below, or risk humanity’s self-destruction. The cost of action is maybe 0.12 percent of GDP per year or a little higher if we aim for 350 ppm. This is the reality that the scientific community and environmentalists and progressives need to start articulating cogently.

The solution is clean energy, a strong focus of Romm’s blogging. For a number of years in the mid-1990s he worked in the Department of Energy on energy efficiency and renewable energy. He considers that the US has all the clean energy technology it needs to start reducing emissions aggressively and cost effectively now. Deployment is the key. Electricity efficiency is high on his list. He points to McKinsey’s estimate that one third of the US greenhouse gas reductions by 2030 could come from electricity efficiency and be achieved at negative marginal costs. California is a model: if all America adopted their energy efficiency policies the country would never have to build another polluting power plant. Concentrated solar power is the technology on which Romm places most hope, because it generates primary energy in the form of heat which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity –and with far greater efficiency. If all the renewable technologies that are commercial or nearly commercial today are deployed they will be enough to see the US through to 2050. He emphasises the steadily declining cost curve, due to economies of scale and the manufacturing learning curve.

As peak oil approaches it’s crucial that we avoid the strategy preferred by most in the oil industry of ramping up unconventional oil. Oil from tar sands and shale will make global warming worse. Coal to diesel will be catastrophic. The way forward for vehicle transport is better fuel economy standards and a move to plug-in hybrids which he discusses in some detail.

Romm has two key questions for the US. Will they voluntarily give up fossil fuels before they are forced to do so after it is too late to stop the catastrophe? When they do give them up will they be a global leader in the new technologies, or will they have been overtaken by other countries, especially China?

Romm was an advocate of the “flawed” Waxman-Markey climate bill which finally made it through the House of Representatives in June 2009. How can his climate politics realism be reconciled with his climate science realism? He replies that the bill was the only game in town and its passing a staggering achievement. It didn’t do enough, but it began a process and established a framework that can be strengthened over time as the science warrants. His political realism is also on view in his optimistic take on the result of Copenhagen. High level negotiations by the senior leaders of the big emitters seems to him a more likely way forward than the consensus process of the UN.

In right-wing US circles politics and climate disinformation have become entangled. Romm sees the conservative think tanks, media pundits and politicians as driving the disinformation campaign. He observes that while they can stop the country from taking the necessary action to avert catastrophe, they can’t actually stop the climate from changing. And some of the congressional conservatives are pushing policies that will lead to unimaginable planetary horror. Why? A post on a Krauthammer article in the Washington Post finds the heart of US conservatives’ hatred of climate science in the fact that it requires action by government, which is the same as socialism (except when it comes to government action on behalf of the nuclear and fossil fuel industries).

Misinformation has had a field day in the US. In part this is due to the organised campaign and the repeated broadcast of its messages by conservative pundits and politicians like George Will and Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe. The “balanced” presentation favoured by the media hasn’t helped. But there are messaging failures from progressives in general and scientists in particular. Romm strongly opposes the notion that the impacts of global warming should be downplayed in communication to the public. Doing that would amount to unilateral disarmament in the battle to have the public understand what will happen if we continue on the path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. People need to know the truth.  However he considers that some of the simple rules of rhetoric need to be better used in getting the message across. He identifies three of them as simple language, frequent repetition, and skilful use of figures of speech, especially metaphor and irony. The posts discussing better techniques of communicating the science are well worth attention and clearly underly his own practice.

Romm’s industry as a blogger is phenomenal, as anyone who follows Climate Progress will know. The selection of posts that he has chosen for this book testify that quantity doesn’t rule out quality. They have translated well to the printed page. Many of them repay close reader attention and together they serve to highlight the major themes which guide his work. The urgency displayed in his 2007 book Hell and High Water is undiminished.

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The climate change rhetoric when Obama came to power was exciting. It sounded as if he would lead from the front and the US would soon have a federal cap-and-trade system. “Delay is not longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”  Certainly we have seen an end to denial from the White House. But we are still waiting for an end to delay, and increasingly it looks as if we’ll be waiting for a long time. Why?

Eric Pooley’s book The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth sheds a good deal of light on why it is that America, in spite of all the scientific evidence that demonstrates the threatening reality of climate change, is still unable, and often unwilling, to mobilise itself to address the danger.

The author is an accomplished journalist who has spent hundreds of hours over the past three years interviewing some of the players in America’s painfully slow progress towards climate change legislation.  The result is an illuminating story of battles in an ongoing war which is far from conclusion. It’s told painstakingly but with a narrative verve that carries the reader along irresistibly through its mass of detailed accounts. It’s compelling reading, from which I’ll mention just a few examples.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is the climate change group to which Pooley devotes most of his attention. A large organisation which has been at work for over 40 years, the EDF has long argued for a cap and trade system to tackle CO₂ emissions. Its president, Fred Krupp, is focused on partnership with business to bring about political action on climate change and was influential in the formation of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) in 2007, initially a group of ten companies and four environmental groups. Among them was Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy. In typically detailed fashion Pooley recreates the drama of meetings at which were hammered out the conditions on which Rogers felt he could join the Call for Action USCAP planned to issue. It hinged on whether allowance was made for initial free distribution of allowances to utilities like Duke, a sticking point for Rogers.

USCAP may have been looked at askance by many Green groups, but Roger’s involvement didn’t go down well with his colleagues at the Edison Electric Institute either. He was chairman at the time and several CEOs called for him to step down. At the Heartland Institute denier’s convention in 2008 Steven Milloy bitterly expressed his dismay that CEOs would endorse a mandatory cap. “What do you do when the people who represent business and free enterprise have switched sides on you?”

As the Waxman-Hartley bill was developing, the question of emission allowances being free or auctioned remained vexed. Krupp was willing to give way to the companies, maintaining that it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how many allowances were distributed in a given year and how quickly the number was ratcheted down. The declining cap would see to it that coal use declined.

After his close coverage of the tortuous development of the bill, Pooley concludes:

“Of course Waxman-Markey was full of flaws, compromises, and reluctant nods to political reality.  But the bill got right a lot more than it got wrong.  By giving carbon allowances to electric distribution companies and requiring them to pass the value on to customers, it used the cap and trade mechanism to address to genuine cost imbalances between regions of the US – making the system fairer and helping the very heartland people who most wanted to see the whole thing wither and die.”

Pooley recognises that the intransigence of the Republicans meant that the bill reflected negotiations only between the left and right wings of the Democratic party, not between the left and right wings of America. “Like a wounded animal, the GOP’s only reflex was to lash out. Anything Obama was for, they would be against.”  It’s a sad commentary on a party which has too often allowed itself to be informed on global warming by the organised denial movement which Pooley also takes into his purview.

Al Gore features frequently in the book. His Alliance for Climate Protection organization aimed to spend $100 million a year for three years on advertising campaigns. In July 2008 his Repower America speech challenged the nation to commit to clean energy within ten years. After the elections he sought to orchestrate a large, loud chorus of voices calling on the president-elect and the new Congress to go big and go quickly on the energy front. Some wanted an energy bill first and to leave cap-and-trade for later. Gore disagreed. “If we’re going to have a fight on climate, let’s have a big fight.”

James Hansen enters the picture from time to time.  He met with Rogers over a meal. Pooley records each man’s feeling as they left the restaurant. Rogers felt positive: I’m not a confrontational guy, and neither is he. Hansen felt disappointed: This man has a reputation for being green, but he doesn’t really know what it means. His priority is making money.

Pooley records at best mixed messages from the White House. On a good day Larry Summers told USCAP leaders that the stimulus bill needed to be complemented with a cap-and-trade mechanism. “It’s like two blades of a scissors…We need both of them.”  But when it came to the Waxman-Markey bill, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod wanted to stick to the clean energy message and leave climate policy to Waxman. Pooley tells of the committed greens in the White House being defeated time and again by those in the political and economic teams who consider voters don’t care about climate action enough for the president to fight for it. The president who we expected to lead on the issue remains strangely constrained.

Obama went to Copenhagen having failed to move a climate bill. Pooley credits him with an honest, even heroic, attempt there to break the deadlock by bringing the major developing nations to the climate table. His speech offered welcome straight talk on the science, though little on the necessary action to address it. But the possibility of a triumph at Copenhagen had already been ruled out by his decision at home not to mount an education campaign on climate science and clean energy jobs to counter the sceptics, and the failure to put a top-level aide in charge of the international climate issue.

Pooley ends with questions:

“Alexis de Tocqueville long ago said that in the US, events ‘can move from the impossible to the inevitable without ever stopping at the probable.’  Was that still true?  How bad did things need to get before the moment came?  Would the prospect of a clean energy economy, and the jobs it would bring, mobilize enough people to make a difference?  Or would some sort of monstrous, galvanic weather event – epic heat and drought, Katrina on steroids – be needed to shake America fully awake?”

They seem to me open questions.  After following through the labyrinthine processes the author describes by which anything happens, if it happens, in the American political system and recognising the blinkered self-interest and sometimes sheer malevolence that seems to motivate many of the players, I found it hard to credit that America is on the verge of significant progress.  But I took what comfort I could from Pooley’s final brief paragraph where he imagines that the campaigners refused to be paralysed by the questions posed, “splashed some cold water on their faces, ran their fingers through their hair, threw back their shoulders and marched toward the sound of the guns”.

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Eleven French journalists – writers and photographers of Collectif Argos – visited some of the people who live on the front line of climate change. Their report was first published in France in 2007, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has now published an English version: Climate Refugees. It invites reading. The written narratives are engaging and immediately informative. The related photographic sections are strikingly alive and stir the imagination. But it’s not lightly done -– the journalists spent time staying with the people whose lives they describe and there’s satisfying depth to the stories and the pictures.

Nine places were visited: Alaska and New Orleans in the US, the low-lying halligen on the North Sea coast of Germany, Lake Chad in Africa, the village of Longbaoshan near Beijing in China, Himalayan Nepal, the small town of Mushiganj in the south west corner of Bangladesh, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific.

Shishmaref is a village of 600 people on the small island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean. As their village slowly crumbles into the sea and the whole island moves towards becoming inhabitable by 2050 the issue is not whether they will have to relocate. It’s where they will go. On offer is a move to towns 200 miles away to take advantage of the urban infrastructure. But the Shishmaref Inupiaq are convinced that relocating to a city would be tantamount to “burying their culture, soul, uniqueness and future”. What many would prefer is to recreate the village on a mainland site only 12 miles away. But it would be double the cost – $200 million as against $100 million – and the fear is that the state will not pay the extra.

The village of Longbaoshan, just 38 kilometres north-west of the Beijing suburbs, is not falling into the sea but being slowly buried by advancing sand. Only 700 people now remain. In recent years 200 have already left for the capital.

“My fields are nothing but stones and sand, sand and stones. Where’s the soil? Where’s the rain? The sky is my only hope, the only way we are able to eat. After the big storm in the spring of 2000, my son had to leave. He became a cook at a restaurant in a Beijing suburb. We don’t see him any more.”

The journalists went to the city to track down a couple who made the move, leaving their young son with his grandfather. They found them working very long hours and living in a nine-square-metre single room.

Around the town of Mushiganj in Bangladesh it’s too much water which is driving people away from their homes. Bangladeshis are accustomed to flooding and have learned to use it to their benefit. But global warming has added a scope and duration to floods which are destroying that balance. In the area the journalists visited the salinity of the soil has increased and crops have been replaced by shrimp farms, which bring far fewer jobs than rice paddies. Drinking water has to be fetched in exhausting trips. The nearby mangrove forests of the Sundarbans offer some fishing and other resources but are infested with pirates and are the refuge of the dangerous Bengal tiger. So for many it’s Dhaka for employment and income, albeit in demanding and exhausting work such as rickshaw driving.

The climate change pressures on Bangladesh will only increase and Dhaka will simply be unable to absorb the large-scale rural exodus anticipated. Where will people go? The journalists spoke with a geography professor who rules out neighbouring India and Myanmar as destinations for political and climate change reasons. He looks for cooperation outside southern Asia in preparing for the massive migrations anticipated.

“I think that countries with larger land areas will have to change their immigration policies. If we believe climate change is a global problem. then we must look for global solutions. Trying to solve it at national level is a mistake.”

Another researcher put it this way:

“For a long time now, I’ve been proposing the following solution. Each country must take responsibility for – in other words transport and accommodate – a quota of climate refugees proportional to its past and present greenhouse gas emissions.”

The water problem in Lake Chad is quite a different one. The lake is disappearing and taking life with it. Over the past 40 years it has lost 90% of its area, shrinking from 25,000 to 2500 square kilometres. A UNESCO statement describes the gradual drying up of the lake as the most spectacular example of the effects of climate change in tropical Africa, attributing it to low amounts of rainfall, evapotranspiration from high temperatures and a series of severe droughts. The effects on the surrounding populations are harsh. “God needs to send us a miracle because there’s too much suffering involved in living on the lake.”

When the journalists began their stay in Tuvalu they record that they couldn’t help feeling some irritation at what they saw as the carefree attitude and love of the easy life of the Tuvaluans. However further acquaintance revealed a pragmatic people fully aware of their inevitable fate and wanting to do everything in their power to stay on their land as long as possible, though involved in a global struggle to negotiate their relocation under optimal conditions. The Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

“We asked the governments of Australia and New Zealand to acknowledge the concept of climate refugees.  They refused, saying that, according to international law, refugees can only be people subject to persecution or political, ideological, ethnic or religious pressure – a narrow definition that suits them just fine.”

The journalists, however, wonder whether, based on current scientific knowledge, the existence of climate refugees may give rise to the concept of ‘environmental persecution’ of the most vulnerable populations by the major greenhouse-gas emitters. This could be, they suggest, the beginning of climate justice in which the biggest polluters per inhabitant would not be able to turn away Tuvaluans forced to flee their land.

The Maldives face a similar prospect to the Tuvaluans. The valley residents of Nepal are seriously threatened by growing number of glacial lakes high above them that are becoming engorged with water from receding glaciers and may explode in outburst floods. Many former residents of New Orleans have been relocated in Houston and elsewhere in the US. The sparse population of the halligen in the meantime have a great deal of government money spent on keeping them in their threatened enironment because protecting the halligen means helping protect the mainland.

What is the rest of the world going to do if under the pressures of climate change it becomes apparent that large numbers of people must move from where they now live and work?  The book puts that question squarely in front of us. Some of the migration will be within national borders. That will be demanding enough. But some will have to be beyond those borders. Will the rich nations face up to the responsibility they have incurred?  Will ethical imperatives survive the crunch times ahead?  It would be a hard heart which looked at the photographs in this book and didn’t hope so.

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Why should four distinguished American physicists ally themselves in their later years with movements to fight the scientific evidence and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time?  That’s a question Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway address in their admirable new book Merchants of Doubt. Three of the physicists were Fred Seitz, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. The fourth, Fred Singer, is still living.

The issues in which the men, jointly or severally, played a part cover a wide range.  A surprising range at first sight.  What have tobacco smoking, the strategic defence initiative, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoking and climate change got in common? They were not areas of professional expertise for the four scientists. Oreskes and Conway point to the fact that they all involved the possibility of government regulation of market activities in the interests of the environment. Regulation was the road to socialism. All four men were stout defenders of free market capitalism and strident anti-communists. Nierenberg and Seitz hated environmentalists, viewing them as Luddites.

As eminent scientists who had played important roles on a national level they were men of influence and did not hesitate to use it when opportunity offered. The book traces in considerable detail the way they added their weight to the battle against regulation in the fields they engaged with. Seitz, on retirement, was employed by R J Reynolds Tobacco Company to oversee the distribution of a very large grant to biomedical research. To some degree this worked to create friendly witnesses for the tobacco industry.  Seitz agreed with the industry’s position that there was “no proof” that tobacco caused harm.  When in later years the battle moved to secondhand smoke, the Environmental Protection Agency called the epidemiological evidence conclusive. Seitz and Singer leapt in to create confusion. Singer claimed that the EPA was taking “extreme positions not supported by the science.” He and Seitz became advisers to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition which attacked the science and campaigned against it. Singer argued that the EPA assumed the risk from second-hand smoking was directly proportional to the exposure, whereas it should have assumed a “threshold effect” – that doses below a certain level would have no effect.

Ozone depletion is a serious matter on which to oppose the science, and fortunately the science won out in the Montreal protocol of 1987 and its subsequent revision in 1990.  But Singer, at the time chief scientist at the US Department of Transportation wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal dismissing ozone depletion as localised and temporary and insisting that there was no proof that CFCs were responsible. The ozone hole he accounted for as part of Earth’s natural climate variability. There was therefore no need to regulate CFCs. His writing on this issue had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. It reads like a striking prefiguring of the attacks on climate science that persist today.

The four men were closely involved in the attack on climate science in the early days. In 1980 Nierenberg chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee report in which economists Nordhaus and Schelling argued, contrary to the natural scientists’ contributions, that because there were enormous uncertainties about climate change and its potential costs, policymakers should do nothing but fund more research. The report synthesis followed the economists’ line.  It was heavily criticised, but not by the White House which used it to refute two EPA reports advising immediate action to reduce coal use. Then in 1989 the Marshall Institute produced a report written by Jastrow, Seitz and Nierenberg which rejected Hansen’s 1988 claim that warming as a result of CO₂ emissions was detectable and instead blamed rising temperature on the sun. It went down well at the White House. “They are eminent scientists. I was impressed,” said one member of the cabinet affairs office. Singer joined in during the 90s with a litany of complaints at the findings of the 1996 IPCC and a vicious attack on climatologist Ben Santer for alleged unauthorised changes to the chapter of which he was a lead author.

The book tracks the ways in which these four men lent their considerable scientific prestige to a series of issues in which vested interests tried to deter government action to regulate business activities. They did so not by engaging with the science but by downplaying it or attacking it. The motive was ideological. It’s a sad story.

Part of the interest of the book is its reflections on the nature of science. Science doesn’t provide certainty or proof. What it does provide is the consensus of experts, based on the organised accumulation and scrutiny of evidence. Thus the geological theory of plate tectonics, for example, has emerged as accepted scientific knowledge. Modern science is a collective enterprise. What counts as knowledge are the ideas that come to be accepted by the fellowship of experts, the jury of one’s scientific peers.  If a claim is rejected the honest scientist moves on to other things. When Robert Jastrow and his colleagues first took their claims to the halls of public opinion rather than to the halls of science, they were stepping outside the institutional protocols that for four hundred years have tested the veracity of scientific claims. Many of the claims of the climate science contrarians had already been vetted in the halls of science and had failed to pass the test of peer review. Many were never even submitted for vetting.

Modern journalism often misunderstands the process. It’s considered only fair to give due consideration to another viewpoint. Journalists don’t always understand that the contrarian has already received due consideration by peers. And contrarians are often very insistent that they should be given a hearing. In the case of the four men who are the subject of this book journalists were also fooled by their stature as scientists. But the authors point out that they were never really experts on the diverse issues in which they engaged “in their golden years”. They couldn’t be. Modern science is far too specialised for that. Physicists can’t also be epidemiologists, ecologists, atmospheric chemists or climate modelers.

The sensible conclusion of the book is that we  must trust scientific experts who work in and through the scientific community of which they are part. The credentials of the experts matter, of course, but they are scrutinised by scientific bodies. We should take seriously the judgments of such groups as the National Academy of Sciences or the IPCC when they report on their searches of the science. It doesn’t make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts because someone dissents, especially if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of an interest group.

I took some comfort from the fact that this book is incidentally a record of the ultimate defeat of  those who attacked the science in the issues the authors cover. But in every case the attackers succeeded in delaying appropriate action. When one considers the magnitude of some of the dangers they denied, their confidence seems irresponsible in the extreme. There is little doubt that the science of climate change will also ultimately prevail. But delay is costly and dangerous. It is to be hoped that many journalists and policy makers read this book and learn from it to ignore the specious attacks climate science still suffers from deniers who play little or no part in its patient work.

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Adapting to climate change is a complex matter for human communities, as Mark Carey makes abundantly clear in his newly published book In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. Carey is a historian and explores nearly sixty years of disaster response in Peru since the beginning of his story in 1941 when an outburst flood from a glacier lake in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range sent a massive wave of destruction on the city of Huarez, obliterating a third of the city and killing an estimated 5000 people.

There have been further disasters since that one.  Peruvians have, Carey points out, suffered the wrath of melting glaciers like no other society on earth.  Further outburst floods followed in 1945 and 1950, and glacier avalanches in 1962 and 1970 (the latter following an earthquake) killed many thousands.

The Huarez disaster prompted three national government strategies to protect the population from the hazards that the outburst flood had revealed: drain glacial lakes, prohibit urban reconstruction in the flood plain, and build retaining walls in Huarez to contain the glacier-fed Quilcay River. It all sounds quite rational. But only the first was able to proceed. Class and race issues, as Carey sees it, prevailed to counter the plans for hazard zoning and retaining walls. Huarez’s upper and middle classes wished to reconstruct the city in order to re-create the physical characteristics that helped symbolize urban authority and social standing in relation to the rural indigenous population. The socioeconomic order disrupted by the flood was to be restored.  Resistance to hazard zoning and relocation was not confined to Huarez but also occurred in other communities subsequently affected by disastrous outburst floods or glacier avalanches. One local writer reflecting on the triumph of “human will” which led to rebuilding in the same places of destruction concluded: “…[T]hey will be there forever, suffering. stoic, crying through their destiny. And that is the beauty of it, the poetry, the immortality of a people.” Defiant stuff, and part of the complexity Carey’s book explores.

But though people may have been unwilling to move from where they lived, they certainly supported the draining of glacial lakes and other measures to protect them from further disasters. Not that such measures are simple. Peru struggled to get a picture of the extent of the threat from glacial lakes in the Cordillera Blanca.  Indeed it was not until 1953 that an inventory of how many such lakes there were was finally achieved. There were 223. Today there are more than 400. It’s a growing problem. Once identified, lakes need to be assessed for the danger they pose. This is no easy matter. Accessibility is difficult.  The moraines behind which the lakes build vary greatly in their capacity to retain increasing volumes of meltwater. The incline of the glacier and the likelihood of large falls of ice causing large waves has to be taken into account. When drainage is undertaken the logistics of the operation can be daunting for both machinery and manpower.  Carey describes some of the on-site work as well as the difficulties at the national level of offices trying to carry out the task with limited resources and varying levels of support from successive governments.

Hydroelectricity is a complicating factor in the situation. The Santa River flows north through the valley parallel to the Cordillera Blanca. When it turns west and descends steeply to the coastal plain it feeds the large Cañón del Pato hydro-electric facility. The power station was itself the victim of the 1950 outburst flood, which destroyed it when it was nearing completion. It was the flood’s devastation of this facility and of the Chimbote-Huallanca railway line which transformed the piecemeal disaster prevention measures of the 1940s into the more effective and far-reaching response of a new government agency, the Lakes Commission. Carey notes that it was the setback to national industrialisation plans in 1950 rather than the deaths of thousands in the 1940s which led to this much better resourced body. The hydro-electric power station was rebuilt and, following privatisation in 1996 under Fujimori’s neoliberal progammes, is now owned by Duke Energy. Its generating capacity has increased considerably with successive upgrading.

Glaciers are not only hazards but also resources and Carey records a shift in emphasis after the 1980s from the hazard focus to the measurement and management of glaciers as hydrological resources, particularly for electricity generation and for irrigation. He notes that the information gathered has been of benefit to Duke Energy, a private company based in the US and responsible to shareholders rather than the Peruvian public. Duke Energy has been involved in attempts to retain glacial lake waters as reservoirs for regulating the flow of the Santa River and has encountered considerable local resistance. While glacier retreat has enabled expansion of water use in the region, this is a trend which is likely to change if the glaciers continue to diminish.

Hazards haven’t gone away because of the focus on resource, but the neoliberal agenda of the 1990s brought a severe reduction in the public funding of disaster prevention programmes. Neoliberalism exacerbated vulnerability to natural hazards, and although the state disaster prevention agency reopened in 2001 it never regained the status, budget and support it had in previous periods. Carey is even-handed in his treatment of neoliberalism, but sees it as a theory which collided with historical reality. Some of that reality is manifest in the local resistance which has prevented Duke Energy from managing the waterscape uncontested.

Throughout the book Carey devotes much attention to the ways in which various groups in Peruvian society and the relationships between them have played a part in forming the country’s response to melting glaciers. Many interests have had to be — sometimes have insisted on being — consulted and taken into account. Socio-economic divisions have played a part. Increasing international interest has become part of the interaction. Carey the historian has brought a valuable insight into the way a society functions or malfunctions in facing up to the impacts of climate change. He emphasises the need for understanding social relations and power dynamics at the same time as deciphering how much water will flow from a glacier in fifteen years’ time.

As Carey recognises, the acceleration of glacier melt is an issue not just for Peru but worldwide. Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Nepal, India, Russia, Switzerland, the US and scores of other countries have populations which live near or depend on water from melting mountain glaciers. If there is a message to others from the Peruvian experience it is that disaster mitigation is a political and social process as much as it is a matter of science and engineering. Social conflicts, for example, may be more urgent to people than the potential floods or even water-shortage issues that experts see as the most pressing. It’s not only technical and scientific skills that will be needed but also a sense of social relations and of the perceptions of the populations affected.

As history Casey’s book is an engrossing read. What he recounts hardly leaves one sanguine about the ability of societies to navigate the adaptation requirements ahead as climate change begins to bite, but it offers some useful signposts.

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The problem with cutting greenhouse gas emissions is that it will harm economic growth. Right? No, quite the opposite, says Ben McNeil in his book The Clean Industrial Revolution. It’s an age-old myth that doing good for the environment is bad for the economy. He’s addressing Australians, but what he has to say will arrest readers from many countries. It has certainly grabbed the attention of some prominent New Zealand businessmen who have presented every MP with a copy of the book and used it to back a call to the Prime Minister for a joint business/government task-force to focus attention on emerging clean technologies.

McNeil is a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Besides a PhD in climate science he also holds a Master of Economics degree.  The two worlds are bridged in this energetic book.  Australia is very vulnerable to climate change through sea-level rise, rainfall changes, storms, and a decrease in food production. It is also highly carbon-intensive in its economy and its export industries will suffer as a consequence when the world starts to move heavily to reduce carbon emissions and impose carbon tariffs.

Such consequences can be pre-empted by a clean-energy revolution, one for which Australia is well-endowed. That hot arid interior is the potential source of vast quantities of high capacity solar power. The use of mirrors to concentrate sunlight so perfectly that the ultra-high temperatures convert water to steam is one way. Another, already under construction in north-west Victoria, uses mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on to high-performance photovoltaic panels. Solar power could replace the need for coal-fired power stations. A massive underground “hot rock” heat source can be tapped to create steam for power generation, a technique already being worked on by a number of companies at several sites throughout Australia. Wind power in the south could supply 20 percent of the country’s needs. Advanced biofuels that do not impact on food can be produced.  Biomass-fuelled electricity is already generated in some parts of rural Australia. Carbon capture and storage may hold some hope for the continuing use of coal, though not while coal companies put a miserly 0.3 percent of their production value into research, apparently believing that governments will do the work for them.

McNeil argues that Australia must take up a forefront position in the low-carbon economic future if it wants to remain prosperous. At the time of writing in 2009 he expected the emissions trading scheme to kick in, putting a price on carbon and pointing the economy towards investment in clean energy. This has been delayed, but even without it there is ample reason for the change of focus away from the carbon-intensive economy (carbon obesity he calls it).  The world will soon be crying out for clean energy technology.  Australia will continue to prosper in the future if it has used research and development to drive down the cost of renewable energy technologies, and investment to commercialise them and prepare them for export.

McNeil illustrates this with a striking imaginary scenario. A series of climate catastrophes hit the world in the 2020s. Global greenhouse gas sanctions quickly followed. Those nations with expanses of desert which had been working on the development of solar power became the energy superpowers of the 21st century. Australia led in the building of the Asia Pacific Electricity Grid following a breakthrough in transport efficiency for transmission cables discovered by Australian researchers. The grid connected Australian energy supply to its Asian neighbours.  The scenario is much more elaborated than this, but it all certainly sounded feasible.

Back to present reality. McNeil is adamant that there are solid employment opportunities in an economy focused on clean energy. More than offered by the present carbon intensive economy, and jobs which can’t be outsourced. Creating energy-efficient homes and buildings, for example, is a proven source of increased jobs. The European Commission suggests that energy efficiency creates three to four times the level of employment as an equivalent investment in a new coal-fired power station. Renewable energy requires two or three times more people for operation than an equivalent coal-based energy project. A comparison between Denmark’s wind industry and New South Wales coal industry clinches that. A renewables manufacturing industry is feasible kept based in Australia by a strong domestic market.

McNeil provides a wealth of illustrative material from many countries and forward-looking firms. He instances General Electric’s ‘Ecoimagination’ programme launched in 2005, aimed at developing low-carbon solutions. The company reports that it has never had an initiative that generated better financial returns so quickly. Cloudy Germany is the world’s largest market for solar energy and German solar manufacturing companies produce over half the world’s solar panels. German companies are positioning themselves for the burgeoning global clean-tech market. Tiny Denmark manufactures over half the world’s wind turbines, obtains 20 percent of its electricity from wind and plans to increase that to 40 percent. McNeil notes dryly that contrary to some prophesies Danes are far richer than Australians by GDP per capita, while cutting their carbon intensity by over one-third in less than ten years.

Innovation needs science, and McNeil titles one of his chapters “How Science Must Save Us”. If Finland can produce Nokia, Australia also can help shape the world, not by raw military or economic might but by “the seeding of ideas in an interconnected world.” Education and research funding are crucial for the development of science and he discusses how they can be expanded. Scientists and engineers will not only develop new generation clean energy but also seek to understand and monitor the effects of climate change on the natural ecosystems of Australia with its immense variety of specially evolved plants and animals. They will also continue to seek the development of techniques for reducing methane emissions from livestock, which produce 10 percent of Australian greenhouse emissions.

McNeil knows first hand how serious the implications of climate change are.  The disease has been diagnosed but his attention in this book is on the cure. He matches the environmental imperative of emissions reduction with the economic benefit of entering wholeheartedly into a new, clean, low-carbon industrial revolution. Climate change poses a great risk to the Australian economy, and so does their over-reliance on fossil fuels. They need to embrace the change to clean energy. The costs of not doing so will far outweigh the cost of making the change.

One doesn’t need to be an Australian to be cheered by much that the book has to say and the detail with which it is illustrated.  But the final sentence has to be conditional:

“If Australia sets strong greenhouse gas emission targets and invests in unleashing clean-technology innovation,…”

Unfortunately it’s still a big if, not only for Australia.  But here’s the rest of the sentence:

“…not only will Australia help the world as it makes the transition towards a low-carbon development pathway to solve climate change, it will bring new prosperity and employment growth to a country desperately needing economic reform in its energy policy.”

Note: There’s a short relevant interview with Ben McNeil here on YouTube.

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