The present is past ... the future has arrived
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 5, No. 3
8 June - 12 July 2009 ] By Shane Cahill
Do we have the ideas to meet the unprecedented challenge of climate change? Laureate Professor Peter Doherty believes humanity is being forced to face its very future for the first time.
It’s the new reality writ large. And there is no avoiding it. Towering above Swanston St, the University of Melbourne billboard articulates bluntly what the population at large has come to know intuitively over the past year.
the present is past
the future has arrived
The advent and impact of climate change on our daily lives and wellbeing is forging cultural as well as physical changes as we seek to adapt to a new landscape that is as much in our minds as it is in our backyards, cities, rivers, farms and forests.
Add to this the mix of a financial and economic crisis of a magnitude not seen since the 1930s; the seemingly inexorable rise of China to world leadership and a parallel crisis of confidence in the United States.
The inaugural Festival of Ideas at the University of Melbourne will examine the challenges and opportunities of this unique configuration.
Was it really only a couple of years ago when you still could water your garden, the job market was booming and superannuation delivered double figure returns?
For Vice-Chancellor Professor Glyn Davis, the Festival recognises that the University of Melbourne occupies a public space, with community expectations of a broader contribution to intellectual, social and economic life.
“The Festival of Ideas reflects the role academics play in stimulating and informing public debate in many forums, bringing scholarly expertise to complex public problems that the wider society faces, extending education to a broader canvas, offering and testing the wisdom of research in the public domain,” Professor Davis says.
“We may not find all the answers but hopefully we will identify many of the issues to be faced in coming years.”
Laureate Professor Peter Doherty, who will deliver the keynote address to open the Festival on the evening of 15 June, argues humanity has to face reality as never before or face a future of mass conflict and deprivation.
“We need to face up to reality and until we do that we won’t get anywhere and won’t find the wisdom to meet the challenges at hand,” Professor Doherty says.
“These are really acute crises humanity is facing and they require transitions of the likes never seen before. Humanity never before has been forced to face its long-term future. This is not factored into how humans think. And it is not immediately clear to me that humanity is as yet up to the challenge.”
Professor Doherty believes the establishment of new universal values is the starting point of adaptation.
“No ethical framework exists that says we can’t use all the planet’s resources now and leave none for the future.
“What right do we have to take everything if that means nothing is left for the future? We’ve never had to think like this before. It just wasn’t a problem.”
In his address, Professor Doherty will consider how an outsider explores the complexity, scepticism and denial in climate science.
“It’s a very complex issue and there are various forces at work, with some forces trying to clarify what’s happening and others to obscure it,” Professor Doherty says.
Australians’ natural scepticism has assisted them in testing the complex range of sciences involved and allowed them to come to a position of informed acceptance of climate change.
He is adamant that the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents rigorous science that demands acceptance.
“It’s the best we’ve got – and it’s unique, we’ve never really done anything on a scale like that before to try to look at a global scientific problem, pulling together all these various pieces of expertise to try to get an overview and synthesis out of it for general audiences and policy-makers.”
Professor David Karoly, a lead author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, has upped the ante with a letter addressed to the owners of all coal-fired power stations in Australia.
The letter – co-signed by six other climate scientists – calls for no new coal-fired power stations to be commissioned except ones that produce zero emissions. Existing coal plants need urgently to be replaced with zero-carbon energy sources and energy efficiency programs as soon as possible.
“The growing understanding of climate change science, of the increasing changes in a number of aspects of the climate system at the upper end of previous projections, and the major impacts of climate change in many different areas all demonstrate the clear urgency for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” Professor Karoly says.
Professor Doherty is scathing in his dismissal of climate change deniers whom he regards as being from another era and totally out of touch with the interdisciplinary approach required to tackle the complexities of climate change.
“The leading scientific figures in denial are mostly well over sixty – essentially retired from active science with their noses out of joint. For retired scientists to say the active scientific community is a group of fools and knaves is pretty extraordinary.”
Professor Doherty pulls no punches in his assessment of the gravity of the crisis nor the magnitude of individual and societal effort required to meet it.
“It is not all that clear to me that renewable energy in its current form can adequately substitute fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
“And it is not immediately clear that humanity is up to meeting the challenge. Nothing in our history has been as complex as this.”
Professor Doherty points to the current issue of Nature magazine which examines the environmental and social consequences of a four degree temperature rise over the next century and The Lancet which warns that the “effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at risk.”
For Doherty the solution will derive from individual courage and hard work, a strengthening of our most successful institutions, and a committed citizenry.
“The past doesn’t offer us a ready made store of wisdom. We need to make our own wisdom. We have to look beyond dogma and think on the scale of seeing the world differently, perhaps as the makers of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution did.”
At the forefront of identifying critical issues and developing applications is Professor Ruth Fincher, who heads the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) – the first of a number of recently formed institutes developed at the University to harness interdisciplinary research and applications in critical areas.
Building on the University’s own advances at the Parkville campus towards higher levels of sustainability, MSSI is looking to take this experience of resilience to a broader reach.
“The main way MSSI is considering questions of resilience is through trying to set up a framework within which University research around a number of principal specialties we have here already can be consolidated, allowing new and bigger multidisciplinary projects in sustainability to be advanced,” Professor Fincher says.
Central to Professor Fincher’s vision of this harnessing of existing knowledge and its transformation into new fields across a range of disciplines is inclusion of social as well as technical aspects.
“It is now recognised of course, that in areas like water use and adaptation to climate change – the big environmental questions of our day – that these are not just technological issues – these are also social issues. These are issues to do with the way we live, the way we behave, the way we consume, the way that business counts things.
“The question of bringing the social, the technological and scientific together in framing environmental problems that we see and working out ways to respond to them, has really been the motivating force here.
“If you are going to have resilience in some environmental situations that are becoming quite extreme, then there need to be ways of looking at that socially and scientifically, and at the same time.
“We need also to be aware of the social justice outcomes of any given strategies we might adopt to save water or save electricity or whatever it might be.
“There will be groups in society that suffer more than others from those sorts of policy changes, so the socio-environmental mixes of problems that we identified are what this institute will look at.”
The complexity of the politics of climate change is brought into the sharpest of relief in Australia’s relationship with China.
China is the world’s largest user of coal and accordingly the largest contributor to global warming through carbon emissions. Australia of course is a major supplier of that coal and other raw materials used by coal-fired power.
Australia’s prosperity and solutions to climate change are inextricably linked to China, which is already leading the world in switching to building cost-effective “clean coal” power stations.
At the same time China remains a product of its history.
“Demographic growth in the eighteenth century – roughly doubling the population – resulted in environmental degradation through deforestation and the constriction of drainage basins,” says Professor Antonia Finnane.
“Contemporary China is heir both to these problems and to problems created by industrialisation and capitalism. Like other governments, the Chinese government would like to have no pollution and has developed appropriate policies, but again like others, it gives priority to sustaining economic growth. It has laudable policies in place, but local compliance is difficult to ensure. Corruption is endemic, not least in the coal industry. A viable governance model would seem to be a prerequisite for a viable growth model.”
Irrespective of how the two countries resolve their dispute over the timing and extent of emission targets, China will continue to be a primary driver of the Australian economy.
“Some people are not used to the re-integration process of China into the world economy because it is relatively recent and despite the Global Financial Crisis that re-integration is still occurring,” says Melbourne Business School Associate Professor Mark Crosby.
“And in Australia we’re at the centre of it as China has been the driver of our economy since 2001.
“The Global Financial Crisis is a hiccup along this road rather than throwing us fundamentally off course.”
However, one issue that has already begun to emerge – ownership of Australian mines by state-owned Chinese enterprises – should not be blown out of proportion according to Crosby.
“China is now our biggest trading partner and our second biggest export destination after Japan but as far as financial and investment flows go China is still very small.
”China has very regulated investment flows and until quite recently they haven’t allowed funds to go out of China at all to buy assets, so that is a much more recent change than the changes on the trade front.
“This process is very new and to Australian customers and corporates it is just getting their minds around the fact that not only do Chinese companies have goods that they might want as far as imports go, but they’ve also got cash.
“For a country like Australia that imports $20, $30, $40 billion of foreign money every year it’s a bit silly of us to say no to a good source of this funding. We need to get that level of funding into Australia because of the size of our current account deficit.”
Associate Professor Crosby believes it is vital Australia quickly adopts a more balanced attitude towards Chinese investment.
“We have been sending mixed messages but we need to get our messages clear with them. Just turning our back on that level of funding that is available from China is going to be to our detriment in the medium to long term.”
“But I think the Government’s got the changes somewhat right in the sense that we need to think strategically about ownership of assets and be a little bit careful with most countries, but as far as smaller companies and acquisitions go Australia is pretty slow and lacks transparency relative to other countries in allowing foreign investments to take place quickly and under completely transparent rules.”
So the present has been consigned to the past and the future has arrived, larger than life.
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