Category: Climate business

Gambling with nature’s tolerance

Al Morrison, the director general of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation — the government body that manages about one-third of the country’s land area, from World Heritage temperate rainforest in the south to kauri forests in the north (not to mention running world-class efforts to conserve endangered native species such as the kakapo and tuatara) — gave a remarkable speech to Lincoln University last week. It was brave, far-sighted and touched so many right notes that it brought a bright little melody to my weekend reading.

Morrison was giving the university’s 12th annual State of the Nation’s Environment Address, and took the opportunity to discuss the pursuit of economic growth above all else in a country where conservation is a major contributor to that economy. Here are some of the highlights, but the whole thing is well worth a read:

Morrison considers the message from the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment:

We are degrading ecosystems and destroying species to a point where the services that nature provides, that we rely on for our sustenance, and that determine our prosperity, are being run down and out.

If we are to save ourselves from ourselves, then appealing to the intrinsic value of nature is not enough. It is not a matter of giving up that sense of awesome wonder, but rather adding to that, an argument designed to compel the uncommitted.

He explores the case for business to play a role in conservation in its widest sense.

It may seem crass to say that climate change and it’s big cousin, biodiversity loss, create a potential competitive advantage for New Zealand. But connecting the ethics and the self-interest; intrinsic value and economic benefits, helps us better understand that sustainable management of natural resources is not just about nice things to do when time and discretionary resources are available.

It is a necessary investment in the natural capital that sits at the base of our economy. Water, soil, air, nutrient cycles, climate regulation, pollination…these and other services are the natural capital we need to survive and prosper. That reality turns on its head the received wisdom that only rich counties can afford clean environments.

The way we measure economic progress is broken:

When the current recession revealed a collapsing financial system, some 12 trillion dollars was found in quick time across the globe to prop it up. But when nations met at Copenhagen to try and restore a collapsing environmental system, the cupboard was apparently all but bare.

Therein lies the nub of the problem.

The way we conventionally describe and measure economic progress is an incentive to ignore the impacts of unsustainable natural resource use and management, and capture the benefits and subsidies from that with a clear conscience.

We need to move beyond GDP as the measure of the real economy, and beyond growth as the only goal:

If GDP is failing as a measure of environmental sustainability then surely that is a powerful incentive to find a new construct that measures true progress.

It is no easy task to build one. First base is to balance economic, social and environmental considerations and reach a pragmatic compromise. But that’s far from a home run. Living in harmony with nature’s systems; living sustainably, is not apart from the economy, it is a key component of it. Nature’s systems lie at the base of any economy. If they are not functioning efficiently, then the economy cannot function efficiently. If we destroy them, we destroy the economy.

So like or not, our future is inextricably linked to how we tread on our land and oceans, and manage the natural resources that are the key to our surviving and thriving.

And finally:

But there is a lot of work to do to make this a prosperous path for New Zealand. It will require radical change in public policy and management, economic thinking, and business practice. I see enough activity to make me optimistic, but no real sense of urgency. We are still gambling with nature’s tolerance.

It was a brave speech by a senior civil servant who reports to a government committed to growing New Zealand’s by all means possible — including more exploration for oil and mineral resources in the conservation estate. It shows an awareness of the real issues that confront New Zealand and the world, something that seems to be all too uncommon in government anywhere. If you read nothing else today, read Morrison’s speech.

Morrison quoted poet Brian Turner at the beginning of his address, but the Otago poet’s words also make a fitting conclusion.

Under Mt St Bathans

There is majesty in the mass

Light moves, tints the snow;

The wind shakes the sparse grasses;

Water runs, stones rattle unexpectedly

And the land speaks;

None of us are greatly different,

We’re ordinary more than extraordinary

Most of the time. And if there’s one word

For what the sun highlights on the hills,

One word that we should apprehend

And make our own, it is

Decency: and, what’s ever implacable,

And what stone has irreducibly,

Dignity

From: Into The Wider World by Brian Turner

For some reactions to Morrison’s speech, see this piece by David Williams in The Press.

Walking back to happiness

This is a guest post by Tom Bennion of stopflying.org, the first in a series in which he explores why he believes giving up flying is not only possible, but essential.

I am a 46 year old lawyer, running a small practice specialising in environment law. I also teach. I am married, with three small children. Eighteen months ago, I decided to give up flying. Here’s why.
I believe that the idea of voluntary drastic reductions in personal air travel is a fault line issue in the climate change debate. By this I mean that when I suggest to friends who are concerned about climate change that they limit their air travel to essential trips only, because that is easily the greatest source of personal carbon emissions, I am invariably met with arguments that would not look out of place on Anthony Watts’ blog or at www.lomborg.com. These include:
  • globally, flying accounts for only a few percent of emissions, so why bother
  • per kilometre, emissions are about the same as a family car
  • offsets are possible
  • biofuels are coming
  • I am taking other (invariably much less effective) measures such as changing lightbulbs
  • I am (now) very worried about the impact on tourism of x country if I do not fly
  • you are making me feel guilty – stop it
  • you want to take us back to the middle ages – stop it
  • China and coal are the big problems. What we do as individuals doesnt really count.
The arguments are all deeply flawed. I will provide my thoughts to those matters in a subsequent post. In this post I want to focus on what I think are the underlying reasons for these responses.
Flying is far and away the highest source of personal emissions. Yet they are some of the most easily reduced emissions. Flying to a holiday in Fiji or Europe, at 30,000 feet while sipping drinks, comes well down in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Consider the impact of the Icelandic volcano earlier this year. The closure of Europe’s airspace badly affected some businesses, but in the main it stranded a lot of holiday makers.
It stands to reason then, that this would be the first place concerned individuals would cut their emissions. Cutting out all non-essential flights is a no-brainer. But generally, they don’t. A number of commentators have pointed this out. George Marshall has written about climate scientists taking high carbon holidays.
To give a personal example. A colleague who does important work in the climate area and tells me “we are stuffed”, just returned from what he happily told me was a ‘high carbon’ holiday. Why this odd disjunction between thinking and action when to comes to flying?
I believe that the central problem is the fact that flying is bound up with our current identity – the feeling of freedom to go and be anywhere on the globe at short notice. That knowledge shapes how we view the world and our place in it. And it is tough changing your world view in such a dramatic way. In deciding to strictly limit flying, you have to radically alter your view of the future. There is some personal hardship. But the main impact is psychological. You have to change how you see yourself, and your future, and the future you might have imagined for your children.
That is why it is embarrassing to tell people you no longer fly because of concern about climate change. And that is also why the people you tell often get embarrassed. Some feel personally affronted, viewing it as a challenge to their world view (as compared to, for example, the mild response you get when you tell someone you are vegetarian). In the face of that sort of social pressure, science and logic don’t stand a chance.
My reasons for stopping flying have been two-fold:
  • finally appreciating at a gut level that the future will be quite difficult for my children;
  • finding out that CO2 emissions are persistent in the atmosphere and warm over an extraordinarily long time (around 1000 years) — so every emission saved today counts.
I also realised that there are worse things than social embarrassment. And that fear of embarrassment and upsetting others would be a silly reason for refraining from taking action for my children and seeing the planet warm by 4 degrees. I liken it to the reaction any parent would have if they saw an unsafe pedestrian crossing near their child’s school. You don’t wait for others to act, and you don’t keep quiet about the danger.
Making this change means you start to look at very practical schemes for reducing emissions. Top of my wish list is a revived overnight sleeper train service between Auckland and Wellington. Easily achieved, it would allow business trips to be made within workday timeframes not too different from flying (currently I use the overnight bus — but you have to be good at cat-napping).
There are unexpected benefits, dinner with my elderly parents in Hamilton while I wait for the 10pm bus, better quality meetings with clients – since there is no rush to catch that 3pm flight to Wellington.
Why couldn’t I have my brother, who lives in Dublin, sitting virtually on my sofa, enjoying a live test match?
Making this change also means that you ask for technologies that go beyond crude retrofitting of existing systems. It seems to me that we could do a lot more in the area of videoconferencing, perhaps with some holograms thrown in. Gaming technology is moving in this direction. Why couldn’t I have my brother, who lives in Dublin, sitting virtually on my sofa, enjoying a live test match? And if I really need to travel to Dublin, is the Chinese idea of a 2-3 days journey by fast train (powered by renewable energy) the way to go? When you start those discussions, transporting large numbers of people around the world at 30,000 feet in jet aircraft burning kerosene starts to look like old technology.
One argument often made to me is that this idea puts people offside. It scares them. It splits the climate change message. I reject that. People are canny. If climate scientists, politicians and the like don’t appear to be taking a relatively easy and fairly obvious measure to reduce emissions, people figure that there is no reason why they should act. People want to know, are those shouting loudest about climate change putting any real skin in the game?
George Marshall puts it well:
Imagine that we focus our efforts on generating a socially held belief. What would change in the way we present climate science?
Well, for one thing we would become far more concerned about the communicators and their perceived trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is an elusive and complex bundle of qualities: authority and expertise are among them. But so too are less tangible qualities: honesty, confidence, charm, humour, outspokenness. The tiny network of maverick self-promoting skeptics play this game well – which is one of the reasons why they exercise such disproportionate influence over public opinion.
I have been surprised how many of my peers and even strangers who have heard about my initiative want to know more. “You really think its that serious?”, is a common question. My intention is that people, on their next flight, at the back of their minds, will remember that some people they know aren’t flying anymore because of climate change. The seeds for change are planted.
My intuition is that, because this is a fault line issue, it really wouldn’t take more than a few high profile institutions (climate institutes at universities?) and individuals (academics, politicians, film/pop stars) to declare that their flying days are over, and we would have a whole new debate about urgency, and what the government needs to do about reducing emissions.
The last reason why I think it makes good sense to have a stop flying movement is because our government suspects that we all want to talk climate change, but will vote them out if they institute the CO2 reduction measures which are now urgently required. But people who have stopped flying are sending the message “we have the understanding, independence and resilience to deal with this. What shall we do next?”
Tom Bennion
www.stopflying.org

[Helen Shapiro]

Hide’s Aussie holiday: warming up for Carterist science’s new consensus

Rodney “The Hood“ Hide is taking an Aussie break during the current Parliamentary recess — popping over to Melbourne and Sydney to act as warm-up man for Bob Carter at the launch of Carter’s magnum opus, Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks. And it appears Hide is as happy to allow his hosts to misrepresent his qualifications as he is to mislead Parliament. The flier for the “Quadrant dinner” in Sydney says:

Rodney has a degree in environmental science, and is a powerful and well-informed public speaker.

He may be a powerful speaker, but Hide does not have a degree in environmental science, and he is woefully ill-informed on climate matters. Hide has Masters degrees in economics and resource management (Wikipedia, NZ Parliament bio), and as this comment at Hot Topic two years ago suggests, he could have completed the latter without encountering any science at all. But he’s good for a bit of rabble-rousing, and I expect his “ditch the ETS” rhetoric, liberally laced with attacks on NIWA’s stewardship of the NZ temperature record and chanted lines from the climate crank catechism will make the Quadrant dinner worth every cent of the A$74 being charged…

Meanwhile, Carterist science is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and the Heartland climate con is on its way to Sydney. Carter’s been appointed Chief Science Advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition.

 

Here’s Carter welcoming his appointment:

“Working with ICSC as Chief Science Advisor is a welcome opportunity to counter the widespread but erroneous belief that dangerous global warming is occurring, and that it has human causation”. Professor Carter continued:  “Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring.

So, do we have ambiguous evidence of problems caused by that unmeasurable warming, or is Carter just repeating standard climate crank nonsense? I think we know the answer to that one…

In one sense, however, Carter is breaking new ground in crank thinking. The title of his book (Climate: The Counter-consensus – a Scientist Speaks) suggest that a “counter-consensus” is assembling. For there to be a counter-consensus there first has to be a consensus in mainstream climate science to counter, but for years sceptics, deniers and cranks have been claiming loudly that there is “no consensus“. Indeed, point 5 of the “core principles” of the organisation that has just appointed Carter its chief science advisor says:

Claims that ‘consensus’ exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists.

But if there is no consensus, how can a counter-consensus assemble? Does Carter support the ICSC’s core principles? And what about that modest warming? According to Carter it’s not measurable, or not happening. At this point, dear reader, you will forgive me if I pour another glass of wine and ponder the many contradictory things you have to believe at the same time if you are to be a true climate septic…

Finally, the Heartland Institute is holding a one-day climate sceptic conference in Sydney next Friday, October 1st. Carter’s talking, of course, and Chris de Freitas is popping over to talk about Developments in Climate Science: Potential Drivers of Emissions Policy Beyond 2012 (at a guess, wishful thinking will be involved). Interestingly, the climate day follows on from two days of “workshops and brainstorming with free market advocates from the Pacific Rim” at the Pacific Rim Policy Exchange: chief sponsors Heartland, Americans for Tax Reform (a Koch & Scaife funded lobby group), the Property Rights Alliance (an ATR spin-off), and Australia’s free market Institute of Public Affairs. And NZ’s pulling its weight on the agenda, with the Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr on a panel considering free trade, and (somewhat more surprising, to me at least) Kiwiblogger and National party stalwart David Farrar taking part in a “working lunch” on “getting the message out”. Interesting to see he’s happy to take the Heartland shilling…

Wake the world

This is a guest post by Anthony Giddens and Martin Rees. Giddens is a former director of the London School of Economics, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the author of The Politics of Climate Change. Rees is president of the Royal Society.

This year has seen outbreaks of extreme weather in many regions of the world. No one can say with certainty that events such as the flooding in Pakistan, the unprecedented weather episodes in some parts of the US, the heatwave and drought in Russia, or the floods and landslides in northern China were influenced by climate change. Yet they constitute a stark warning. Extreme weather events will grow in frequency and intensity as the world warms.

No binding agreements were reached at the meetings in Copenhagen last December. Leaked emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia, claimed by critics to show manipulation of data, received a great deal of attention – as did errors found in the volumes produced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Many newspapers, especially on the political right, have carried headlines that global warming has either stopped or is no longer a problem.

Continue reading “Wake the world”

All around the world

The Arctic Ocean has been circumnavigated by sailing vessels in a single season for the first time. The Norwegian trimaran Northern Passage reports that it has passed 74ºN, traditionally regarded as the eastern end of the NW Passage, and is now sailing into Baffin Bay heading for Pond Inlet. The Russian boat Peter 1is reported to be about one hour’s sailing ahead of them. In their blog post marking the milestone, Thorleif Thorleifsson and Børge Ousland provide this telling comment:

It is, unfortunately, the dramatic changes in Arctic sea ice conditions in recent years that have made this trip possible. On the time of Roald Amundsen it took five to six years to complete the same distance, due to the extremely difficult and demanding ice conditions. Now we have proven that it is possible to make the voyage in a 31-foot fibreglass sailing boat, equipped with a 10 horsepower outboard motor for emergencies. This shows how dramatic and how fast these changes are happening. The changes that we are witnessing will influence climate on a global scale, in addition to the whole range of animal life in the Arctic – especially seals and polar bears, whose lives are dependent on the sea ice.

It is our hope that our voyage will be seen as a strong, visible symbol of the scale and the speed of these changes.

Congratulations to both teams for their remarkable achievement. Given that the first circumnavigation by a sailing vessel was made by the French yacht Vagabond over two seasons as recently as 2002-2003, it’s clear that the pace of change in the Arctic is not slackening. Reflecting that, the Arctic Forum — a meeting of countries with claims to Arctic territory — is currently underway in Moscow. The Independent reports that the mood of the meeting is “conciliatory”, but the pressure to establish territory is growing as the rush to exploit oil, gas and mineral resources intensifies (see BBC for more).

[Updated] And to remind us that what’s at stake in the Arctic is a great deal more than a few billion barrels of oil, Yahoo News carries an IPS story on Arctic warming and the methane problem. If the average global warming is held to 2ºC (which doesn’t seem likely under present policy settings), the Arctic will warm much faster. NSIDC director Mark Serreze is characteristically blunt:

“I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic,” Serreze said.

If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world’s permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost. […]

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree.

In other words, we have very good reasons to believe that settling for a 2ºC target would be to acquiesce in a global disaster. We can only hope for two things: that the climate commitment (the inevitable warming “in the pipeline”) does not push the Arctic into a huge release of methane, and that the world’s leaders wake up to the real scale and urgency of the problem. For all our sakes

[Oasis]