Opportunities Beyond Carbon

Looking Forward to a Sustainable World

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• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780522856897
• eBook ISBN: 9780522859959
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Opportunities Beyond Carbon presents climate change as potentially the 'best crisis we ever had'. It maps the many opportunities for communities large and small, local and international, making the transition to a low carbon economy. John O'Brien has compiled essays by key politicians, investors, business people, activists and academics on how to make the most of the current predicament. This fresh, lucid and practical optimism for the future offers a foundation for an entirely new and proactive attitude to climate change.

Part 1

Setting the Scene

Climate change is the problem of the twenty-first century. This book details the many opportunities that are emerging as we solve this problem. The scale of the opportunity is, however, far greater than the scale of the problem—and the scale of the problem is huge.

Writing in Time magazine in April 2008, Bryan Walsh discussed the ability of the United States to win wars or rise to challenges when it set its mind to the task at hand. However, he pointed out that the ‘war on carbon’ had the potential to be far harder than previous challenges:

Forget precedents like the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, or the Apollo program that put men on the moon—single-focus programs both, however hard they were to pull off. Think instead of the overnight conversion of the World War II—era industrial sector into a vast machine capable of churning out 60 000 tanks and 300 000 planes, an effort that not only did not bankrupt the U.S. but instead made it rich and powerful beyond its imagining and—oh, yes—won the war in the process.¹

Halting climate change will be far harder than even that.

This section provides the context for the problem, the solutions and the opportunities. The science of climate change is complex and this book does not attempt to repeat detailed narratives on this aspect. The precise nature of the problem is often difficult to grasp in its entirety and is often oversimplified to make it tangible. Sea-ice areas, average temperature increases and Pacific island land loss are all measures of the consequences. One commonly used and simple measure that describes where we might be on the scale of change is that of parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide—equivalent (CO₂e) gases in the atmosphere. Science has general agreement on both the pre-industrial levels and current levels of CO₂e. There is more conjecture over what might happen at various levels of further increases and hence what is a desirable target for the world. This section provides a case that the current targets present unacceptable levels of risk and that, like an errant schoolboy, we ‘must try harder’.

To drive a solution however is not an easy task. First, and most important, it is essential to recalibrate our view of the world. With the massive changes that are required, the community in which we all live has the opportunity to create a different world that works better, creates more sustainable societies and more fulfilled residents. To do this we must challenge all the assumptions behind the way the industrial world has been constructed and envision the future we want.

It is also essential to understand the range of technological solutions that can be applied to the problem. By combining this knowledge with an understanding of the targets we want and the world we want to build, work can commence in delivering solutions.

The last part of the puzzle to enable opportunities to be seized is communication. It is only by effectively communicating all of the above that widespread support and achievement will be secured. To date this has maybe been the greatest weakness in the armoury of those wanting to facilitate change.

By gaining a feeling of these four aspects: targets, visions, technologies and communications, the reader can then frame the specific opportunities identified throughout this book.

Notes

1 Bryan Walsh, ‘Why Green is the New Red, White and Blue’, Time, 28 April 2008, pp. 33–44.

1

When Words Fail

Climate Change Activists Have Chosen a Magic Number

Bill McKibben

I almost never write about writing—in my aesthetic the writing should disappear, the thought linger. But the longer I’ve spent working on global warming—the greatest challenge humans have ever faced—the more I’ve come to see it as essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing. How do you say: the world you know today, the world you were born into, the world that has remained essentially the same for all of human civilisation, that has birthed every play and poem and novel and essay, every painting and photograph, every invention and economy, every spiritual system (and every turn of phrase) is about to be something so different? Somehow ‘global warming’ barely hints at it. The same goes for any of the other locutions. And if we do come up with adequate words in one culture, they won’t necessarily translate into all the other languages whose speakers must collaborate to somehow solve this problem.

I’ve done my best, and probably better than some. My first book, The End of Nature, has been published in twenty-four languages, and the essential idea embodied in the title probably comes through in most of them. It wasn’t enough, though, nor were any of the other such phrases (like ‘boiling point’ or ‘climate chaos’) that more skilful authors have used since. So in recent years I’ve found myself grasping, trying to strip the language down further, make it communicate more. This year I find myself playing with numbers.

When the Northwest Passage opened amid the great Arctic melt in the northern summer of 2007, many scientists were stunned. James Hansen, our greatest climatologist, was already at work on a paper that would try, for the first time, to assign a real number to global warming, a target that the world could aim at. No more vague plans to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or keep it from doubling, or slow the rate of growth—he understood that there was already enough evidence from the planet’s feedback systems, and from the quickly accumulating data about the paleoclimate, to draw a bright line.

In a PowerPoint presentation he gave at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December 2007, he named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety—above it and the planet would be unravelling. It is unravelling, because we’re already at 385 parts per million. And so it’s a daring number, a politically unwelcome one. It means, in shorthand, that this generation of people—politicians especially—can’t pass the problem down to their successors. We’re like patients who’ve been to the doctor and found out that our cholesterol is too high. We’re in the danger zone. Time to cut back now, and hope that we do it fast enough so we don’t have a stroke in the meantime. So that Greenland doesn’t melt in the meantime and raise the ocean by seven metres.

For me, the number was a revelation. With a few friends I’d been trying to figure out how to launch a global grassroots climate campaign—a follow-up to the successful Step It Up effort that organised 1400 demonstrations across the United States one day and put the demand for an eighty per cent cut in America’s carbon emissions at the centre of the political debate. We need to apply even more pressure, and to do it on a global scale—it is, after all, global warming. But my friends and I were having a terrible time seeing how to frame this next effort. For one thing, the 180 or so countries that will negotiate a new international treaty during 2009 are pretty much beyond the reach of effective lobbying—we did maybe influence the American election, but the one in Kenya? In Guatemala? In China? And for another, everyone insists on speaking those different languages. A Babel, this world.

But a number works. And this is a good one. Arcane, yes—parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere. But at least it means the same thing in every tongue, and it even bridges the gap between English and metric. And so we secured the all-important URL: http://350.org. (Easier said than done.) And we settled on our mission: To tattoo that number into every human brain. To make every person on Planet Earth aware of it, in the same way that most of them know the length of a soccer field (even though they call it a football pitch or a voetbal gebied). If we are able to make that happen, then the negotiations now under way, and due to conclude in Copenhagen in December of 2009, will be pulled as if by a kind of rough and opaque magic towards that goal. It will become the definition of success or of failure. It will set the climate for talking about climate.

So the literary challenge—and the challenge for artists and musicians and everyone else—is how to take a mere number and invest it with meaning. How to make people understand that it means some kind of stability. Not immunity—we’re well past that juncture, and even Hansen says the number is at best the upper bound of safety, but still. Some kind of future. Some kind of hope. That it means kids able to eat enough food, that it means snow caps on mountains, that it means coral reefs, that it means, you know, penguins. For now 350 is absolutely inert. It means nothing, comes with no associations. But our goal is to fill it up with overtones and shades and flavours. The weekend before we officially launched the campaign, for instance, 350 people on bicycles rode around the centre of Salt Lake City. That earned a story in the paper and educated some people about carbon dioxide—but it also started to tint 350 with images of bicycles and the outdoors and good health and pleasure. We need 350 churches ringing their bells 350 times; we need 350 spray-painted across the face of shrinking glaciers (in organic paint!); we need a stack of 350 watermelons on opening day at your farmers’ market; we need songs and videos; we need temporary tattoos for foreheads. We may need 350 people lining up to get arrested in front of a coal train.

It makes sense that we need a number, not a word. All our words come from the old world. They descend from the time before. Their associations have congealed. But the need to communicate has never been greater. We need to draw a line in the sand. Say it out loud: 350. Do everything you can.

Originally published in the July/August 2008 issue of Orion magazine.

2

What Holds Us Back from the Big Shift?

Time to Stop the Hand-Wringing and Start Envisioning What We Really Want

Dr Sam Wells

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

Henry David Thoreau

Wherever we look today we are confronted by challenges to global sustainability, and they seem almost overwhelming. Climate change; poverty; community fragmentation; water scarcity; deforestation; desertification; threats to food quality and distribution; urban pollution; soil depletion; decreasing biodiversity; accelerating species extinction … the list goes on and on. To make matters worse, while there is a great deal of discussion about potential harm and a growing sense of urgency to do something, it’s difficult to cite instances where our response as a community, as a species, has been equal to the challenge. We are, in fact, doing lots of things, but all our doing does not yet seem to be making the necessary impact, or seem likely to do so.

Management of water and South Australia’s Murray-Darling river system is a good example. We know that, over and above any use we choose to make of the river water, the ecological health of that entire river system requires 1500 to 2000 gigalitres per year, the so-called ‘environmental flows’. We’re working hard as a community to preserve this magnificent and precious waterway, and yet, at the time of writing, the environmental flow is effectively zero litres, and the Coorong continues to die. The Murray is still a beautiful, inspiring body of water, but we seem as far away as ever from being able to secure its long-term health.

And so it is, also, with climate change. There is no shortage of discussion, no shortage of debate, and a good deal of alarm—there is even a growing consensus on the need for urgent and far-reaching action. There is a flurry of activity—in the media, in government—a great deal of busy-ness at the margins of change. But we seem to be always at least one order of magnitude off the pace, and the absence of change, or even proposed change, on the scale and within the time frame required by the crisis, drives us to wonder in our bleaker moments whether we collectively have what it takes to meet the challenge.

Why is it, then, that in relation to water management, land use, climate change and a whole range of threats to global sustainability we see evidence of small changes at the margins of the established approach, but very little evidence of the fundamental shift in thinking and action—the transformational change—that is demanded ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• Part 2: Community Opportunities
• Part 3: Business Opportunities
• Part 4: Investor Opportunities
• Part 5: National Opportunities
• Part 6: Global Opportunities
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright