Confronting climate change deniers 4: CCS is the sole answer

Fallacy 4: We can solve everything using carbon capture and sequestration

Continuing my review of fallacies offered by climate change deniers discussed by Mark Diesondorf in his latest book, I now turn to a shorty but a goody! The fallacy is simply this: coal power with CO2 (carbon) capture and sequestration (or CCS) is the principle greenhouse solution.

Response: Big Mark D begins by note that a while a few components of this solution exist, it remains largely an unproven technology.

The federal government is pouring $2 billion into this technology in an effort to save the coal industry (yes kids, Mark does say $2 billion). Despite this, pilot plants will only be built in about 10 years with no commercial production possible until long after that.

In contrast to the Australian position, the US Government terminated funding to a power station with CCS technology because of the out of control costs. In addition, there are substantial risks that the carbon captured will escape – which adds to the cost and liability!

Despite this, Mark D does not dismiss the technology, but quotes the Future of Coal study that indicates it is possible that CCS can make a contribution but not before 2025. So rather than dismissing, Mark argues we should not put all our eggs into this unreliable and unproven basket. Rather, we should also be investing in renewable technologies that are ready to go (wind, solar and so on) as well as the ones that are close to fruition (such as rock geothermal)

Hard to argue against that one!

Cheers, james

Socio-logic with James - FBi Radio (28 Oct 2009): population and religion

Hi everyone

This week on socio-logic with the amazing Alex Pye on FBI radio, we looked at some controversial issues… would love your thoughts…

Population growth: what should Australia’s population level be?
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/challenges-of-our-growth-spurt-20091025-hely.html

The Prime Minister recently got excited about the idea of having 35 million people in Australia. Ken Henry, Treasury secretary responded by raising concerns about Australia’s ability to handle this – fair point.

I have historically avoided talking about population growth and environmental issues because it makes me feel that we are adopting a ‘life boat mentality’ and we can use it as an excuse to exclude people (here I am thinking refugees). This has been described as the ‘greening of hate’ by the very cool Betsy Hartmann.

I think we cannot shield ourselves from what is happening around the world including population growth and herein lays the issue: the problem is not with the poor countries with big populations, but with us. That is, we use way more resources than they do.

In fact, if everyone used the same resources as an Australian, we would need four earths to support us! (Check out this website on eco-resources.)

There are two ways around this that would also act to deal with the excess resource use that is threatening our planet:

a) The first is to build smarter cities: mass investments in public transport and green medium density urban environments; and
b) We should get used to using fewer resources!

We are better off doing this now in a negotiated way and having a response to the issue of population growth – not have it forced upon us at some future point.


Religion v. ethics in schools
http://newmatilda.com/2009/10/06/dumbest-education-policy-australia

The issue of religion or scripture in public schools has always perplexed me. I only realised recently that it is done as a compromise between the State government and the Church in a deal struck in 1880 (see article above).

When I was at school, many of us avoided religious studies because we could not relate to the teachings – so we just kicked the ball around instead.

The Parents and Citizens Association has recently proposed that ‘ethics’ could be taught in parallel with religion as a way of giving non-religious children and families an alternative.

I think this is a great idea and it could act as a way of discussing the many ethical dilemmas to modern life: how can anyone be against this. Further, any teaching of ethics must include religious ethics because the frameworks are related.

In seems that sections of the Church are against it however – it seems more because it sets a precedent than because they do not like the idea. What a crock I say!

Teaching on ethics are important – both religious and secular – and are part of a well-rounded education. In fact, I have had a long association with a number of religious groups who are strong advocates for human and environmental rights: and there is no reason why these things should be in conflict. For the State government to squander this opportunity is to let us all down: well those of us who believe in a well rounded society anyway.

For some information on ethics teaching, check out the St James Ethics Centre who designed the proposed program.

Speak soon

james

Socio-logic with James - FBi Radio (21 Oct 2009)

Hey everyone

This week on FBi Radio (94.5 FM) we got into some serious stuff. It was a week when Parliament has been sitting and throwing mud at each other in debates that my first year students at University of Western Sydney undertake with much better dignity!

This week’s stories…

1. Refugees and Australia:

We started by looking at the Australia's attitudes to refugees: it felt like we were going to return to the Howard Government era of fear and hate towards some of the world's most vulnerable people. A brief look at the lives of those who risk their lives shows that we need a more humanitarian approach: click here for a discussion by Australia's Human Rights Commission!

There is no doubt that race plays an issue here, but as I have written for the Centre for Policy Development, I do not think we should take a simple approach by saying Australia is a racist country.

What is needed is leadership - and while the Prime Minister did not show a great deal, a number in the ALP stood up to be counted (as did the Greens Senator Bob Brown). The truth is that refugees flee countries because they have little or no choice - it has nothing to do with Australia's policies. These are human beings like us and we need to show humanitarianism rather than use it for political advantage - as the Liberal Party seem bent on doing: see a great piece by Crikey here.

2. Political Donations

The issue of political donations was the second story discussed. The question is: do political donations corrupt democracy? I have discussed this previously in a paper looking at the need to reform the system and make it more transparent (read it here).

There is no doubt that when someone makes a political donations there are, at least some, strings attached. The questions is how many strings?

I think that we need to demand more from our politicians and ask them to reform the system. All donations over $1000 should be made public and no longer should there be such cozy relationships between big business and government. Even if there is nothing to worry about, the truth is that the perception that such a relationship means 'favours' are being done, we are seeing the undermining of our democracy.

Ok, that is it for now... join me next week on FBi!

Cheers, james

Socio-Logic with James (on FBi Radio)

Hey everyone

As some of you may know, I have a regular gig on FBi Radio (94.5 FM). It is a trial for 6 weeks so let’s hope that they like me and keep me! (You can email them and tell them I rock or even better subscribe to keep independent radio alive and well in Sydney).

I am on Up For It with the cool and funky Alex Pye every Wednesday morning at about 8.15 am, so please tune in!

This week’s stories…

1. Pay to use the internet:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/10/2710367.htm

This week at a conference in Beijing, the News Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch, criticised online companies like Google – saying they were ‘content kleptomaniacs’. His argument is that Google makes money by directing people to content loaded by organisations such as Fox News and Sydney Morning Herald, and they should pay (and by extension, we should pay).

The internet has always been a battleground since its development as corporations have always tried to commodify it and make us pay, while the open source software movement has always believed that this is something that we all own as it was built by our tax dollars and should remain free. An amazing guy here is Lawrence Lessig – you should check out his work!

I am all for free content – and think Rupert’s move is a negative one. He never establishes why we should pay to visit his site: is it better than everybody else’s? I do not think so: it is just a way to enclose more area for profit.

Watch this one – I think it will heat up – and get ready to get active to protect what is owned by all of us already (a true commons) – in which corporations are already making money off!

2. Climate camp

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/11/2710652.htm?section=justin

The second story was a discussion about Climate Camp – which is a community of volunteer’s environmental group – that has emerged because they believe that the government is not doing enough to combat climate change: and I think they are spot on the money!

The Climate Camp ran for three days at Helensburgh near Wollongong. This was symbolic because it is the site of one of Australia’s oldest coal mines and the NSW government, despite everything we know about carbon emissions, coal and climate change, has decided to expand it! (Note that residents are also concerned – not just about the emissions, but the risk to the local environment and water quality).

The meeting culminated with about 500 protesters blocking and closing down the mine on the Sunday afternoon. It was a peaceful protest though 13 people were arrested.

I am all for non-violent civil disobedience – it may be the only way to make people list and confront power.

Again, watch this space – I think we are going to see a whole lot more of these leading up to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year. (Click here to be linked to Oxfam Australia's discussion and background information and Copenhagen).

Join me next week on FBi!

Cheers, james

Confronting Climate Change Deniers Fallacy 3: Climate change is unstoppable

Continuing my review of Mark Diesendorf’s new book, Climate Action, I know move to look at the next fallacy…


Fallacy 3: Climate change is unstoppable

This is a simple one - climate change is happening and is unstoppable, so why waste money on mitigation and spend it on adaptation.

Response: Big Mark D (or MD) begins by explaining the difference between mitigation (which means reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (which is reducing the impacts of climate change while doing nothing about reducing emissions).

The underlying assumptions for this position include that Australia is too small to have any impact on emissions (something that he repudiates in fallacy 2).

The second assumption is that expenditure on mitigation is expensive and ineffective and will not reduce the cost of adaptation. Big MD responds as follows: if the global mitigation effort is sufficient enough to avoid catastrophic tipping points, some mitigation is much better than no mitigation. That is, a 2 degrees rise in temperature will have a significantly smaller impact on the earth than a 3 degrees rise - so why just go with the worst possible outcome?

The third assumption is that the cost of adaptation will be below that of mitigation. For Big MD this is a ridiculous argument - and I have to say, I agree with him. He uses the following example to make the point:

One strategy of adaptation is building more dams in areas where droughts happen; as MD points out, however, what good is a dam if there is not rain brought on by climate change?

MD also quotes the Stern Review: where it notes that the cost of adaptation if climate change continues unabated, the cost of adaptation will be much more expensive.

The solution is quite simple: for some countries to take the lead and make changes. For them, they will be in a better position to take advantage of new clean industries that are going to emerge. In other words, time to show some leadership!

New article: Surviving Neo-Liberalism: NGOs Under the Howard Years

I have just had this new article published titled "Surviving Neo-Liberalism: NGOs Under the Howard Years” with NEBULA - an academic journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship.

In the article I look at the issue of social rights - and int he process provide a historiography of a government that went out of its way to silence dissent...

For those interested in understanding the complex nature of the nation state, check out my previous blog here...

Cheers, james

Promises and Perils of Modernity

Introduction

This blog is based on a guest lecture I did at UNSW on the same topic. What I was attempting to do here was to look at the issue of how, based on the dominant cultural view that has emerged in the west, we attempt to control the environment. That is, since the Enlightenment, the dominant cultural view of our relationship between society and the environment is one of ‘control’: that scientific and rational decision-making can harness the power of the environment and overcome any challenges we face.

The truth is, that in the western world modernity has, until know, met many of these promises. We have used the resources of the world to a great deal of success: we have powered the industrial and post-industrial revolutions, and now have a consumerist lifestyle that even 30 years ago seemed unimaginable. We have relied on science to overcome the limitations we have faced: an exploding world population was met with a green revolution that increased food output; pollutants that have been harmful to the environment such as CFCs have been replaced; and we are finding more efficient ways to use energy. We are living longer and wealthier than we have ever been.

The problem is, I am going to argue, is that the very reasons for our success and wealth are also leading to the potential of humanities downfall. The very consumerist lifestyles that have driven our wealth are leading to potential devastation. It is for this reason that we have called this lecture the ‘promises and perils’: and I want to focus on the perils.

I will be looking at three authors: Jared Diamond, Ronald Wright and Ulrich Beck


Jared Diamond’s Collapse

Jared Diamond’s most famous work is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The focus of the book:

How societal collapses may not only involve an environmental component, but also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbours, and trade partners, and societal responses.

In writing the book Diamond intended that its readers should learn from history. Diamond's approach differs from traditional historians by focusing on environmental issues rather than cultural questions.

I do not have time to cover Diamond’s thesis in this lecture and we will return to it later in the semester. What is key here is that Diamond lists some key factors that have led to various societies collapsing. These are lists eight factors that have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies.

Importantly, he notes that key here is environmental abuse (including habitat destruction; soil problems; water; effects of introduced species on native species; and overpopulation). However, he also states that: "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is an ancient one. It's obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice" (p. 15).

Diamond says Easter Island provides the best historical example of a societal collapse in isolation.

Let’s imagine what the last Easter Islander was thinking when he was cutting down the last tree:

• A scientist will come along to find a substitute;
• I am sure that the problem has been over-exaggerated;
• I am sure that there will be more trees over there somewhere; or
• It is this that made us wealthy, so why should we stop now!

It is this final point that I want to turn to: what are people thinking, and what are they willing to do. Diamond finds that societies most able to avoid collapse are the ones that are most agile; they are able to adopt practices favourable to their own survival and avoid unfavourable ones.

It is this point that ends Diamond’s thesis: the real problem is that the modern world remains in the sway of a dangerously illusory cultural myth – that most governments and international agencies seem to believe that the human enterprise is somehow 'decoupling' from the environment, and so is poised for unlimited expansion.

To emphasise the point, Diamond draws a distinction between social and biological survival (because too often we blur the two). The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal.

In the end, Diamond raises some cultural issues dealing directly with our promises of modernity and science:

• So we should take problems seriously – as well as the difficulty in finding solutions;
• Societies may reach a cognitive impasse having mental fixations that prevent their later problems from being recognized;
• Societies make choices: both good and bad ones – which ones are we making
• Role of the elite… they did not insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Is our contemporary society different? Just look at the gated community – which you can get away with it for only short time. It is not viable to have a two tier society
• Importance to reappraise our core values – often painful. Blueprint for trouble is when we cannot do this – especially when these core values are the source of our strength. For example, consumerism (resource consumption) and isolationism


The problem is progress – Ronald Wright

Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization itself: a 10,000 year-old experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled.

Wright examines the meaning of progress and its implications for civilizations past and present: The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology that placed an unsustainable burden on all natural systems. History has shown us that each of the societies coming before us fail – and the 20th century represents our last opportunity to succeed where our forefathers almost without exception have not.

Wright's concerns reflect that of Diamond’s:

“Our civilization, which subsumes most of its predecessors, is a great ship steaming at speed into the future. It travels faster, further, and more laden than any before. We may not be able to foresee every reef and hazard, but by reading her compass bearing and headway, by understanding her design, her safety record, and the abilities of her crew, we can, I think, plot a wise course between the narrows and the bergs looming ahead… (we must act)...without delay, because there are too many shipwrecks behind us. The vessel we are now aboard is not merely the biggest of all time; it is also the only one left. The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years. Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world so far by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes.”

He sees societies self-destruct from a combination of lack of foresight and poor choices that lead to overpopulation and irreparable environmental damage.

So returning to the guy from Easter Island – according to Ronald Wright, he was not even thinking!

He asks: "Why, if civilizations so often destroy themselves, has the overall experiment of civilization done so well?" For the answer, he says, we must look to natural regeneration and human migration.

Again, covering everything that Wright argues is not possible, but key for us are "progress traps" throughout the book — including even the invention of agriculture itself. Wright labels such cultural beliefs and interests that act against sustainability — and hence civilizational survivability as a whole — the very worst kind of "ideological pathology":

We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet’s natural capital. We’re logging everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. The twentyfold growth in world trade since the 1970s has meant that hardly anywhere is self-sufficient. Every Eldorado has been looted, every Shangri-La equipped with a Holiday Inn. Joseph Tainter notes this interdependence, warning that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. ... World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. P.124–5

Ecological markers now indicate that human civilization has surpassed (since the 1980s) nature's capacity for regeneration. Humans in 2006 used more than 125% of nature's yearly output annually: "If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital of nature" (p. 129).

Wright concludes that "our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance" (p. 129). "It is a suicide machine" and "Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now". We must therefore "transition from short-term to long-term thinking", "from recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle" (p. 131).

The problem is, however, that we our culture is simply focused on progress and expansion, and changing this around seems impossible.


Risk society – Ulrich Beck

The third perspective is Ulrich Beck’s "risk society": a term that highlights how our very practices create risks and increasingly becomes organized in response to these risk. The thinking is that this is a consequence of its links to trends in thinking about wider modernity, and also to its links to popular discourse, in particular the growing environmental concerns during the period.

In contrast, to the positions above, society is increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk, Society must organise in a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself.

So the guys on Easter Island are still chopping down the trees, but thinking about how they can make money from it and who will wear the consequences.

The risk society is a phenomenon firmly from the perspective of modernity: which is seen as a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization – it is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society... which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past.

Beck argues that it is possible for societies to assess the level of risk that is being produced, or that is about to be produced. The problem is that disasters such as Chernobyl means that public faith in the modern project has declined leaving public distrust in industry, government and experts.

Beck contends that widespread risks contain a 'boomerang effect', in that individuals producing risks will also be exposed to them. This argument suggests that wealthy individuals whose capital is largely responsible for creating pollution will also have to suffer when, for example, the contaminants seep into the water supply.

So, modernity creates risks that are worn, initially unevenly, and the boomerang to everyone. While this is happening, many are making money from it, and hence this is unlikely to change quickly.


Conclusion


Modernity has made many promises – and has fulfilled these. The problem is, now that it is failing us, how do we walk away from its processes.