Climate change an ethical issue – Ross Garnaut

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 1  14 April - 12 May 2008 ]

By Katherine Smith

Uncertainties, competing interests and disparities in emissions between rich and poor countries beset the global policy debate.

The ‘wicked problem’ of climate change is at its heart an ethical issue, according to one of Australia’s leading economists and public figures, Chair of the federal government’s Climate Change Review, Professor Ross Garnaut.

He says the pressing ethical challenge for Australia is the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring the cost burdens of mitigation are distributed in a way that is just.

Professor Garnaut, who has been appointed a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne (see page 6), spoke recently to a conference on Climate Change and Social Justice convened by Dr Jeremy Moss, co-ordinator of the University’s Social Justice Initiative.

“One has to value the welfare of future generations to want to do anything about this problem,” he said, warning that unless policies to redress greenhouse gas emissions are seen to be fair, they will not be accepted by the Australian community.

A ‘wicked’ problem, he explained, is a term taken from the field of planning and design, describing a challenge that is hard to define, has interdependencies and multiple causes that interact, solutions that can sometimes lead to unintended side-effects, and in which new forms of the problem often emerge while solutions to the original problem are being developed. The opposite is a tame problem, which “stays still” while problem-solving is underway.

The wicked issues in the climate change debate, he said, were the uncertainties around the science involved, the fierce competition between competing interests and the disparity in emissions of poor and rich countries.

Professor Garnaut cited for instance the uncomfortable reality that there would be no slowing in the rate of climate change unless growth in emissions from India was brought under control, but that currently Australia is responsible for 13 times more emissions per head of population.

“It’s worthwhile our making an effort at mitigation only because it is essential in the international task of getting developing countries to mitigate their emissions, which, in turn, is essential for getting global climate change under control,” he said.

Professor Garnaut said that after considering many scenarios and proposals to address emission levels in Australia, putting a price on carbon (the most problematic and widespread of the greenhouse gases) through the form of a carbon trading scheme will be the central component of any policy developed.

And as a result, managing equity claims on carbon revenues from those disadvantaged by the strategy will be the core ethical challenge. He warned that the large energy generating companies that have invested billions of dollars in infrastructure may need to be considered as viable equity claimants, alongside the most poor and disadvantaged in our society.

He also said that climate change will have some “diabolical” direct effects on regional Australia, and that the science around the issue needed to be better defined.

“Research in the area is a pre-emptive mitigation strategy that will help communities before they come under extreme stress,” he said.

For instance the extent of the drying of southern Australia was still being estimated, but the negative impact on those living in the agricultural belt was certain.

It may be difficult to hear, but “economic life may not be able to just keep going on as it always has,” he said, and the government’s most important role may be to “help people to do something else”.

He named developing new drought-tolerant crops, or diversifying to non-methane emitting farmed animals, as well as re-skilling people to pursue other roles in society, as strategies to deal with changes in the way our land can be used.

Similarly, he said, the old ways of producing electricity will not be viable in the future and mitigation will not be possible without structural changes to the way we produce coal-based electricity in particular.

Closures of electricity-producing plants, resulting unemployment and flow-on effects on those local communities in certain areas were inevitable in any mitigation scheme.

Professor Garnaut said that if we are going to reach ambitious targets in mitigation, it was not an either-or situation, but that a “big contribution” will be needed from all possible sources, with public transport improvements and better fuel efficiencies in private motor cars essential.

He said the growth in Australian cities over the past 50 years had been built on the private ownership of cars, and that we have very inefficient systems of transport in a world that is carbon-constrained. The solutions to public transport are long term, decades in the planning and execution, requiring billions of dollars of investment, and therefore unlikely to make much difference to climate change mitigation schemes in the immediate future.

But he said we are “in a jam” on timing and the only viable solution was to put a price on carbon emissions, which will have the effect of raising the prices of many products on which society depends.

“The central question is to consider protection of low income households from carrying an excess of the burden,” he said.

For more about the University of Melbourne’s Social Justice Initiative see: www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/socialjustice/climate/