• Greg Gardiner

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25 February 2009The latest research shows that spending on economic recovery and climate change must be coordinated and complementary, writes GREG GARDINER

WHAT is the greatest threat to humankind: a sinking global economy, or a warming planet? We know the big and ongoing story has been the crisis in the global economy, a crisis addressed by governments worldwide, including Australia’s, with record spending packages. But this crisis has masked another: the crisis of accelerating climate change. New research has shown climate change is accelerating at a rate no one predicted or expected. The projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last reported in November 2007, may now be redundant.

Emissions The most significant single contributor to human induced climate change is the emission of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use. Research published in the aftermath of the IPCC report confirms that there has been a startling increase in the average rate of fossil fuel growth this decade. Far from reversing or containing emissions growth around the planet, fossil fuel and cement emissions in 2006 were 35 per cent higher than they were in 1990. According to the latest report from the Global Carbon Project, published in September 2008, fossil fuel and cement emissions growth is now running at 3.5 per cent per year. Global CO2 fossil-fuel emissions totalled over 8470 million metric tons in 2007, easily eclipsing 2005 as the highest release of CO2 into the atmosphere on record.

The present concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the highest in the last 650,000 years. The seven year increase in atmospheric CO2 from 2000 to 2006 is the most rapid increase since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The new research shows that actual emissions are currently tracking at the top end of, or beyond, the IPCC’s emissions scenarios and well beyond its stabilisation trajectories. No region of the planet is currently engaged in decarbonising its energy supply.

Global temperatures According to the UK Climate Research Unit, thirteen of the warmest years on record have all occurred in the last fouteen years (1995-2008). If this trend continues, then the first complete decade of the 21st century will easily supplant the last decade of the 20th century as the hottest decade on record. A recent study has concluded that global temperature today is probably at or near its highest level in the whole of the Holocene period, covering the last 10,000 years. The IPCC projected global warming of between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius, on 1990 values, by the end of the century.

Recent research shows that global temperature rise is near or at the upper limit of the IPCC projections. This new data is alarming scientists and lead agencies. In August 2008 Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific advisor to the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, declared that Britain needed to begin planning now for the effects of a 4 degree average global temperature rise on pre-industrial levels. In November 2008 Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, stated that on current trends the world was on track for a global temperature increase of up to 6 degrees Celsius.

Temperature rises of this magnitude would bring catastrophic results. According to the UK’s Meteorological Office a global warming of even 2-3 degrees by century’s end eould produce climate change unprecedented in the last 10,000 years, and with disastrous results for people and ecosystems. Rises of such magnitude would lead to widespread species extinctions, loss of ice sheets and massive sea level rises, with widespread disruptions and dislocations to human communities.

Sea-level rise The IPCC projected sea level rise of between 0.18 and 0.59 metres from 1990 to 2100. New research suggests that sea-level rise is accelerating. The rate of sea-level rise in the 20th century is probably the highest for the past 5000 years, and since 1993 that rate has doubled. Observers have concluded that sea levels are currently tracking at the upper limit of the IPCC projections, while some scientists are predicting rises of several metres this century. Many scientists are alarmed at the recent turn of events in the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets. The Danish Meteorological Institute reported in 2008 that the Greenland ice sheet shows rapid changes that had not been anticipated. Satellite measurements have revealed that from 2002 to 2006 Greenland lost between 150 and 250 cubic kilometres of ice per year, an unprecedented loss of ice due to melt.

Ross Garnaut has shown that even a one metre rise in sea-level would put at risk of inundation the homes of over 100 million people in our region. We are now thus travelling in two zones of uncertainty - in an economy the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression, and in a climate that is changing so rapidly that our best efforts to mitigate those changes may turn out to be useless.

That these two challenges are now running side by side presents all of us - governments and the governed - with an immense problem, so immense in fact that we may, as a species, simply lack the competence, intelligence and organisational ability to adequately address it. But let’s assume we do have the capacity to confront this multi-pronged challenge.

Choices have to be made about where our finite resources should go. How should any future fiscal packages be targeted? Some commentators have suggested that we should do nothing - that both systems, climactic and economic, will right themselves and should be left alone. This is equivalent to playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. Doing nothing is simply not an option. Others may believe that the economic downturn itself will mitigate climate change. This is, for a variety of reasons, completely false.

Two histories Let us look to history, both human and climatic, to find some answers. The economic history of the last 100 years shows that capitalism is partly defined by its cyclical character - markets boom, tread water, bust. The Great Depression of the 1930s represented an enormous challenge, and governments around the world (with the possible exception of New Zealand) dithered in their response, thus deepening and worsening an already horrible situation. Eventually, however, and with the immense stimulus of the war-effort, the global economy re-emerged, and growth took off again.

What is the lesson here? It is that, with the right policies, we know we can survive an economic depression. Now look at climate history over the last 10,000 years - the interglacial period known as the Holocene, within which nearly all human civilisation has developed. At the opening of the Holocene we numbered less than ten million people over the whole planet. But our numbers rapidly expanded, thanks, in part, to the stable climate of this period and the possibility it afforded for widespread agricultural systems. We’ve had the right conditions, climatically speaking, for human development and growth. We know that our civilisation can flourish under these conditions. We don’t know if our civilisation can survive in a climate that is dramatically different. We may survive as a species (we did so before, when it was freezing), but our civilisation could collapse.

Climate change test The greater threat then is climate change, but we obviously can’t afford to ignore our economic crisis. Both lead to human distress, so we need to address both. We could use the following principle. Every fiscal measure taken to ameliorate our economic crisis should, either directly or indirectly, contribute to the mitigation of climate change, regardless of whether it applies to consumption or production, to infrastructure or taxation. If the measure proposed doesn’t pass this test, it doesn’t get approval.

Every dollar spent must have a double return; one for the economy, one for the environment. For instance, create a broad climate change tax rebate that covers any legitimate activity that reduces emissions. Water, food, transport, education, health, energy - all of these have a climate change dimension - all of them can be funded to mitigate climate change. Spend to create sustainable employment in the new industries we need: in nanotechnologies, third generation biofuels, solar fuel cells. Use this as the template for determining the parameters of the next, inevitable, big government spend. Of course we need to do much more to stabilise, and then reverse, our emissions growth.

The changes needed are broad reaching and fundamental. But, after 200 glorious years, modernity, the era of the most extraordinary growth in the last 10,000 years of human history, has probably reached its nadir, brought on ironically by its own genius and devotion to coal and oil. Let’s not wait around for this old glory to slowly expire, arcing up global temperatures by four or six degrees, making any kind of civilised life unsustainable. Rather, we should use this economic crisis to help bring forward by a whole generation the project of building the non-fossil fuel economy and the new society that will go with it in the 21st century - the new era that won’t even have a name until we are all, to paraphrase Keynes, long dead.

Greg Gardiner is an honorary senior research fellow in Monash University’s School of Political and Social Inquiry and a parliamentary researcher. For further information on climate change see Accelerating Climate Change, by Greg Gardiner, Parliamentary Library Research Service, Parliament of Victoria.