Investments - like the purchase of a water pump for irrigation - can provide a sustainable farming income for farmers like Sanfo Karim in Burkina Faso. Ollivier Girard/CIFOR
Investing $1.8 trillion over the
next decade - in measures to adapt to climate change - could produce net
benefits worth more than $7 trillion.
This is according to a global cost-benefit analysis setting out five adaptation strategies.
The analysis was carried out by the Global Commission on Adaptation - a group of 34 leaders in politics, business and science.
They say the world urgently needs to be made more "climate change resilient".
The commission, led by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,
World Bank chief executive Kristalina Georgieva and Microsoft co-founder
Bill Gates, argues that it is an urgent moral obligation of richer
countries to invest in adaptation measures that will benefit the world.
Planting and restoring mangrove forests provides valuable natural protection for vulnerable coastlines. Jelajah Pangandaran
The report says those most affected by climate change "did least to cause the problem - making adaptation a human imperative".
Five things the world needs to invest in to be "climate change resilient"
Its primary aim is to put climate change adaptation on to the
political agenda around the world. And to do this, it sets out "concrete
solutions" and an economic plan.
There are, it says, five things the world should invest in over the next decade:
Warning systems: For the vulnerable island and coastal
communities in particular, early warnings about storms, very high tides
and other extreme weather can save lives. Better weather monitoring and a
simple app for fishing communities in the Cook Islands, for example,
allows them to plan according to the sea conditions
Infrastructure: Building better roads, buildings and
bridges to suit the changing climate. One project in New York City has
set out to paint rooftops white - a heat-reflecting strategy to cool
buildings and neighbourhoods
Improving dry-land agriculture: Something as simple as
helping farmers to switch to more drought-resistant varieties of coffee
crop could protect livelihoods and prevent hunger
Restoring and protecting mangroves: Underwater mangrove
forests protect about 18 million people from coastal flooding, but
they're being wiped out by development. Restoration projects could
protect vulnerable communities from storms and boost fisheries'
productivity
Water: Protecting water supplies - and making sure that water's not being wasted - will be vital in a changing climate
Each of these investments, the commission says, would contribute
to what they call a "triple dividend"- avoiding future losses,
generating positive economic gains through innovation, and delivering
social and environmental benefits. It is that dividend that the report
has valued at $7.1tn (£5.7tn).
Plant experts in Uganda are improving agricultural livelihoods in the country by introducing farmers to crop varieties with better drought and disease resistance. Georgina Smith / CIAT
Commenting on the report's findings, Mr Ban said climate change "doesn't respect borders".
"It's
an international problem that can only be solved with co-operation and
collaboration, across borders and worldwide. It is becoming increasingly
clear that in many parts of the world, our climate has already changed
and we need to adapt with it."
The report calls for "revolutions"
in understanding, planning and finance - to "ensure that climate
impacts, risks and solutions are factored into decision-making at all
levels". Turning its recommendations into action will be the next
endeavour; there will be a further announcement about adaptation plans
at the UN Climate Summit in September.
The
record drought has combined with a record warm winter to fuel this
year's grim fire outlook, according to climatologists and bushfire
experts.
"The forests are in a state where even a small ignition
source can cause major problems," warned Richard Thornton from the
Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.
"And that will only get worse as we move into summer and things dry out even further."
Andrew
Watkins from the Bureau of Meteorology says the southern half of
Australia has experienced the driest January to August on record.
"When
we take into account temperatures as well, which have been highest on
record for winter in some of those bushfire areas, we've had high
evaporation," he said.
"We have very dry soils and dry fuel as well."
According the BoM spring outlook,
the dry conditions have been driven by cooler than average waters in
the Indian ocean, which meteorologists refer to as a positive Indian
Ocean Dipole, or IOD.
Pacific ocean temperatures are not driving Australia's weather right now, with no El Nino or La Nina expected to develop in the coming months.
There is another, less well-known climate driver behind the strong westerly winds fanning the flames.
"We have a period of negative SAM (Southern Annular Mode) affecting us now, as it has on and off for a while," Dr Watkins said.
When the SAMis negative, strong westerly winds like the ones experienced at the weekend reach further north than normal.
What's driving the fire season ahead?
The warm, dry conditions that have led to the early fires are predicted to continue for the rest of the year.
"Unfortunately, the odds are high of having above normal daytime
temperatures right through at least until January," Dr Watkins said.
"And
likewise with rainfall, there are increased odds of drier than normal
conditions for much of eastern Australia right through until January as
well."
On top of this, the recent sudden stratospheric warming over Antarctica
is predicted to keep SAM negative for the rest of the year, reinforcing
the warm, dry conditions in New South Wales and southern Queensland.
Climate change trends
"Climate change is playing its role here, but it's not the cause of these fires," Dr Thornton said.
"We're seeing a degree on average higher temperatures than the long-term average."
Climate change expert Andrew King from Melbourne University agrees.
"It's
quite clear that the type of hot weather associated with bushfires is
becoming more frequent and more intense and it's also more likely to
occur earlier on in the warm season," he said.
But the climatologist said the story is more complicated when it comes to rainfall.
"There's not really a very clear trend," Dr King said.
"Overall, we don't really see a clear trend towards more dry conditions or more wet conditions [in southern Queensland].
"We
have really highly variable rainfall in eastern Australia, linked with
things like El Nino and La Nina, and also individual weather systems."
But he says further south, drought is linked to climate change trends.
"In the south west of Australia, and in parts of Victoria, there is a
decreasing trend in rainfall. Which obviously worsens bushfire
conditions, overall, on average."
And when it comes to increased
westerly winds like the ones that fanned this week's fires, he said
climate science predicts less strong winds.
"The general climate
trend is towards more positive SAM conditions, which means that we see
those weather systems moving further south away from Australia and
associated with that, we wouldn't see the same frequency of westerly
winds that we've seen recently in New South Wales and Queensland."
Fire danger on the rise
The Bureau of Meteorology's state of the climate report from last year showed the overall fire danger index had increased over the past 40 years over much of southern Australia.
Dr Thornton expects this trend to continue.
"What climate change will do is it will increase the frequency, or the return rate if you like, of really bad fire weather days," he said.
"So the days like where you had Ash Wednesday or black Saturday, the return period for those sorts of days, will come back and will become shorter.
"So we really need to start thinking about how do we prepare properties better for that?
"How do we make sure that communities stay safe?"
Extreme heat is a far greater threat for most Australians than
extreme cold weather, with the risks falling largely on the elderly.
Research published on Tuesday in the Climatic Change journal
examined the deaths of 1.717 million Australians between 2006-2017. It
found about 2 per cent were attributable to heat, while "close to zero"
were caused by cold days, said Thomas Longden, a senior researcher at
the University of Technology, Sydney, and author of the paper.
"We're going to get some very extreme events that really may start pushing people ... over a threshold": study author Thomas Longden, a senior researcher at UTS. Credit: Ryan Stuart
Dr Longden's research took aim at a 2015 study inThe Lancet
that examined 384 locations globally - including Brisbane, Melbourne
and Sydney - and found a warming world would generally be beneficial,
claiming mortality from cold was greater than hot weather.
That
study used data from 1988-2009 and was based on a so-called minimum
mortality temperature. In Melbourne's case, some 90 per cent of its days
were treated as cold, based on a 22.4 degree average daily temperature.
"It such a bizarre result to find more cold deaths to heat in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney," Dr Longden said.
His
study used median daily temperatures in six climate zones across the
country, and found 2 per cent of mortality in Sydney was associated with
heat and a near-zero linkage to cold weather. Melbourne showed similar
results.
Only
in the climate zone characterised by mild to warm summers and cold
winters - Tasmania and the alpine regions of NSW, Victoria and the ACT -
were more deaths associated with cold than heat, he said.
In
regions with hot, humid summers - such as Townsville, Cairns and Darwin -
as many as 9 per cent of deaths were related to heat.
Scientists
expect climate change will create longer, more intense and more frequent
heatwaves for much of Australia, a trend that would exacerbate the
risks of heat-related deaths.
"In the future we're going to get
some very extreme events that really may start pushing people, who have
not had an issue in the past, over a threshold," Dr Longden said.
"Hospitalisation, ambulance call outs and deaths can occur after that."
The elderly, in particular, will face more pressure on their health as temperatures rise, Dr Longden said.
Separately, the Australia Institute on Tuesday released its Climate Of The Nation report, which has tracked attitudes to climate change since 2007.
The
survey of 1960 Australians aged 18 years and older by YouGov Galaxy was
taken between July 25 and August 1. It found 77 per cent of respondents
agreed the climate was changing, matching the highest level recorded in
2016. Some 81 per cent said there were concerned the shift would result
in more droughts and floods, up from 78 per cent in 2018.
Other
findings included 78 per cent of respondents saying they were worried
climate change would lead to water shortages in Australian cities, up 11
percentage points in two years. More than two-thirds backed "an orderly
phase-out of coal" and a similar ratio supported Australia reaching
net-zero emissions by 2050.
“Australians
are rightly concerned about more extreme heat waves, droughts and
bushfires, and they want the Morrison government to show leadership on
climate change and do more to prepare for the impacts that are already
locked in," said Zali Steggall, the independent MP for Warringah, who
launched the report.
Climate of the Nation survey shows growing support for net zero emissions by 2050 and rapid phase-out of coal power
Drought-hit land 40km north-east of Coonabarabran in NSW. More than 80% of Australians are worried about drought and floods linked to climate change. Photograph: Brook Mitchell
Australians are increasingly concerned about droughts and floods,
extinctions and water shortages associated with climate change, and most
people think all levels of government aren’t doing enough to combat the
effects of global warming, according to new research.
The annual Climate of the Nation survey, which has been tracking Australian attitudes to climate change for more than a decade, finds concern about droughts and flooding has risen from 74% of the survey in 2017 to 81% in 2019.
Concern about climate-related extinctions – an issue highlighted dramatically in May when a major scientific report warned
that a million species across the world faced extinction – has risen
from 71% in 2017 to 78% in the 2019 survey, while concern about water
shortages, an issue front of mind as a consequence of Australia’s prolonged drought, has increased from 67% to 78%.
Public
sentiment about phasing out coal has also shifted in the past few
years. In 2017 65% of the survey thought coal power stations should be
phased out gradually to help manage the costs of the transition, but the
percentage has dropped to 52% in 2019. The percentage of people
believing the shift from coal to clean energy needs to be accelerated,
even if the transition costs more in the short term, has increased from
19% in 2017 to 26% in 2019.
There has also been an increase in the percentage of people in the
survey arguing that Australia should completely end coal-fired power
generation within the next 10 years. In 2017 30% of the survey agreed,
and in 2019 39% agreed.
In Queensland – where the future of coal was a significant issue in
the May federal election – 49% of the sample thought coal power stations
should be phased out gradually and 24% said as soon as possible.
Just
over half the national sample, 51%, said they would support a
moratorium on new coalmines (including 49% of Liberal voters and 53% of
Labor voters).
While parliamentary Nationals are the most vocal supporters of the coal industry,
the survey suggests their voting constituency is split, with 48%
supporting a moratorium, 40% opposing it and 12% undecided. It’s a
similar picture for One Nation, another vocal supporter of coal in
Canberra – 41% of One Nation supporters supported a moratorium, 36%
opposed one, and 22% undecided.
The annual survey, conducted by
YouGov/Galaxy, has assessed attitudes to climate change since 2007. The
now defunct Climate Institute began the series, and it is now managed by
the progressive thinktank the Australia Institute. The survey is
national and it has a margin of error of plus or minus 2%.
The research will be launched in Canberra on Tuesday by the independent who unseated Tony Abbott in the May election, Zali Steggall, in part on a platform of climate action.
“Australians are rightly concerned about more extreme heatwaves,
droughts and bushfires and they want the Morrison government to show
leadership on climate change and do more to prepare for the impacts that
are already locked in,” Steggall said.
“This latest report shows that Australians support far more ambitious
climate and energy policies than the federal government is currently
delivering.”
The 2019 survey found that 77% of respondents agreed that climate
change is happening (equal to the percentage in 2016), and 61% said
warming is caused by humans. For context, 64% of the sample agreed
climate change was happening in 2012, 19% weren’t sure and 17% said it
wasn’t happening. Now it is 77% agreement, 11% unsure and 12% said it
isn’t happening.
Just under half the sample, 48%, said climate
change is already causing more heatwaves and hot days – a nine-point
increase in a year – and just over half the sample (51%, up from 43% a
year ago) thought climate change is behind the melting of the polar ice caps.
More than half the sample, 64%, wanted Australia to adopt a target of
net zero emissions by 2050, and 56% of the sample wanted Australia to
limit global warming to 1.5C.
The survey indicates nuclear energy, which has been revived as a prospect by some Morrison government MPs,
remains divisive with voters. Only one in five put nuclear in their top
three preferred energy sources, and 59% of the survey put nuclear in
their bottom three.
Breaking down the responses by demographics, women were more worried
about climate change than men and, speaking generally, young people were
more worried than respondents aged over 55.
Looking at perceptions in the city versus perceptions in regional
Australia, people in metropolitan areas were more likely to agree that
coal plants should be closed and replaced with cleaner alternatives (64%
to 55%), and city dwellers were more likely to support a moratorium on
new mines than regional Australians (55% to 46%).
People in the regions were more aware than their city counterparts
that Australia is a signatory to the Paris agreement (62% to 57%) and
more likely to blame the energy companies for high power prices (64% to
53%).
The climate and energy director at the Australia Institute, Richie
Merzian, said of a looming UN climate summit in New York: “The public
want to see the Australian government take a leadership role when it
comes to global action on climate change.”
Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people –
revolutionaries, activists, politicians, and theorists – have been
unable to curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of
economic polarisation and ecological degradation. This is perhaps
because we are utterly trapped in flawed ways of thinking about
technology and economy – as the current discourse on climate change
shows.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions are not just generating climate change. They are giving more and more of us climate anxiety. Doomsday scenarios
are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate. Scientists from
all over the world tell us that emissions in ten years must be half of
what they were ten years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children
like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to avoid disaster?
Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their
hope in technological progress. Regardless of ideology, there is a
widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil fuels
by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust
that there will be technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for “geoengineering”
the Earth’s climate. The common denominator in these visions is the
faith that we can save modern civilisation if we shift to new
technologies. But “technology” is not a magic wand. It requires a lot of
money, which means claims on labour and resources from other areas. We
tend to forget this crucial fact. I would argue
that the way we take conventional “all-purpose” money for granted is
the main reason why we have not understood how advanced technologies are
dependent on the appropriation of labour and resources from elsewhere.
In making it possible to exchange almost anything – human time, gadgets,
ecosystems, whatever – for anything else on the market, people are
constantly looking for the best deals, which ultimately means promoting
the lowest wages and the cheapest resources in the global South.
It is the logic of money that has created the utterly unsustainable
and growth-hungry global society that exists today. To get our
globalised economy to respect natural limits,
we must set limits to what can be exchanged. Unfortunately, it seems
increasingly probable that we shall have to experience something closer
to disaster – such as a semi-global harvest failure – before we are
prepared to seriously question how money and markets are currently
designed.
Green growth?
Take the ultimate issue we are facing: whether our modern, global,
and growing economy can be powered by renewable energy. Among most
champions of sustainability, such as advocates of a Green New Deal, there is an unshakeable conviction that the problem of climate change can be solved by engineers.
What generally divides ideological positions is not the faith in
technology as such, but which technical solutions to choose, and whether
they will require major political change. Those who remain sceptical to
the promises of technology – such as advocates of radical downshifting
or degrowth – tend to be
marginalised from politics and the media. So far, any politician who
seriously advocates degrowth is not likely to have a future in politics.
Mainstream optimism about technology is often referred to as ecomodernism. The Ecomodernist Manifesto,
a concise statement of this approach published in 2015, asks us to
embrace technological progress, which will give us “a good, or even
great, Anthropocene”. It argues that the progress of technology has
“decoupled” us from the natural world and should be allowed to continue
to do so in order to allow the “rewilding”
of nature. The growth of cities, industrial agriculture, and nuclear
power, it claims, illustrate such decoupling. As if these phenomena did
not have ecological footprints beyond their own boundaries.
Meanwhile, calls for a Green New Deal have been voiced for more than a decade, but in February 2019 it took the form of a resolution
to the American House of Representatives. Central to its vision is a
large-scale shift to renewable energy sources and massive investments in
new infrastructure. This would enable further growth of the economy, it
is argued.
What will it take for us to seriously consider the roots of our problems? PicsEKa/Shutterstock
Rethinking technology
So the general consensus seems to be that the problem of climate
change is just a question of replacing one energy technology with
another. But a historical view reveals that the very idea of technology
is inextricably intertwined
with capital accumulation, unequal exchange and the idea of all-purpose
money. And as such, it is not as easy to redesign as we like to think.
Shifting the main energy technology is not just a matter of replacing
infrastructure – it means transforming the economic world order.
In the 19th century, the industrial revolution gave us the notion
that technological progress is simply human ingenuity applied to nature,
and that it has nothing to do with the structure of world society. This
is the mirror image of the economists’ illusion,
that growth has nothing to do with nature and so does not need to
reckon with natural limits. Rather than seeing that both technology and
economy span the nature-society divide, engineering is thought of as
dealing only with nature and economics as dealing only with society.
The steam engine, for instance, is simply considered an ingenious
invention for harnessing the chemical energy of coal. I am not denying
that this is the case, but steam technology in early industrial Britain
was also contingent on capital accumulated on global markets. The
steam-driven factories in Manchester would never have been built without
the triangular Atlantic trade
in slaves, raw cotton, and cotton textiles. Steam technology was not
just a matter of ingenious engineering applied to nature – like all
complex technology, it was also crucially dependent on global relations
of exchange.
Sketch showing a steam engine designed by Boulton & Watt, England, 1784. Wikimedia Commons
This dependence of technology on global social relations is not just a
matter of money. In quite a physical sense, the viability of the steam
engine relied on the flows of human labour energy and other resources
that had been invested in cotton fibre from South Carolina, in the US,
coal from Wales and iron from Sweden. Modern technology, then, is a
product of the metabolism of world society, not simply the result of
uncovering “facts” of nature.The illusion that we have suffered from since the industrial
revolution is that technological change is simply a matter of
engineering knowledge, regardless of the patterns of global material
flows. This is particularly problematic in that it makes us blind to how
such flows tend to be highly uneven.
This is not just true of the days of the British Empire. To this day, technologically advanced areas of the world are net importers
of the resources that have been used as inputs in producing their
technologies and other commodities, such as land, labour, materials, and
energy. Technological progress and capital accumulation are two sides
of the same coin. But the material asymmetries in world trade are
invisible to mainstream economists, who focus exclusively on flows of
money.
Ironically, this understanding of technology is not even recognised in Marxist theory,
although it claims to be both materialist and committed to social
justice. Marxist theory and politics tend toward what opponents refer to
as a Promethean faith in technological progress. Its concern with
justice focuses on the emancipation of the industrial worker, rather
than on the global flows of resources that are embodied in the
industrial machine.
This Marxist faith in the magic of technology occasionally takes
extreme forms, as in the case of the biologist David Schwartzman, who
does not hesitate to predict future human colonisation of the galaxy and Aaron Bastani, who anticipates mining asteroids. In his remarkable book Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto,
Bastani repeats a widespread claim about the cheapness of solar power
that shows how deluded most of us are by the idea of technology.
Nature, he writes, “provides us with virtually free, limitless
energy”. This was a frequently voiced conviction already in 1964, when
the chemist Farrington Daniels proclaimed that the “most plentiful and cheapest energy is ours for the taking”. More than 50 years later, the dream persists.
The realities
Electricity globally represents about 19% of total energy use – the other major energy drains being transports and industry. In 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9% from wind, while 85% relied on fossil fuels. As much as 90%
of world energy use derives from fossil sources, and this share is
actually increasing. So why is the long-anticipated transition to
renewable energy not materialising?
One highly contested issue is the land requirements for harnessing renewable energy. Energy experts like David MacKay and Vaclav Smil
have estimated that the “power density” – the watts of energy that can
be harnessed per unit of land area – of renewable energy sources is so
much lower than that of fossil fuels that to replace fossil with
renewable energy would require vastly greater land areas for capturing
energy.
In part because of this issue, visions of large-scale solar power
projects have long referred to the good use to which they could put
unproductive areas like the Sahara desert. But doubts about profitability have discouraged investments. A decade ago, for example, there was much talk about Desertec, a €400 billion project that crumbled as the major investors pulled out, one by one.
Today the world’s largest solar energy project is Ouarzazate Solar Power Station
in Morocco. It covers about 25 square kilometres and has cost around
US$9 billion to build. It is designed to provide around a million people
with electricity, which means that another 35 such projects – that is,
US$315 billion of investments – would be required merely to cater to the
population of Morocco. We tend not to see that the enormous investments
of capital needed for such massive infrastructural projects represent
claims on resources elsewhere – they have huge footprints beyond our
field of vision.
Ouarzazate Solar Power Station (OSPS), one of the largest solar plants in the world.EPA/STR
Also, we must consider whether solar is really carbon free. As Smil has shown for wind turbines and Storm van Leeuwen for nuclear power, the production, installation, and maintenance of any technological infrastructure remains critically dependent on fossil energy.
Of course, it is easy to retort that until the transition has been
made, solar panels are going to have to be produced by burning fossil
fuels. But even if 100% of our electricity were renewable, it would not
be able to propel global transports or cover the production of steel and
cement for urban-industrial infrastructure.
And given the fact that the cheapening of solar panels in recent years to a significant extent is the result of shifting manufacture to Asia,
we must ask ourselves whether European and American efforts to become
sustainable should really be based on the global exploitation of
low-wage labour, scarce resources and abused landscapes elsewhere.
Workers in a factory of a Chinese solar panel maker in Hangzhou.EPA/STR
Collecting carbon
Solar power is not displacing fossil energy, only adding to it. And the pace of expansion of renewable energy capacity has stalled – it was about the same in 2018 as in 2017. Meanwhile, our global combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise, as do our carbon emissions. Because this trend seems unstoppable, many hope to see extensive use of technologies for capturing and removing the carbon from the emissions of power plants and factories.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains an essential component
of the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. But to envisage such
technologies as economically accessible at a global scale is clearly unrealistic.
To collect the atoms of carbon dispersed by the global combustion of
fossil fuels would be as energy-demanding and economically unfeasible as
it would be to try to collect the molecules of rubber from car tires
that are continuously being dispersed in the atmosphere by road
friction.
The late economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used this example to
show that economic processes inevitably lead to entropy – that is, an
increase in physical disorder and loss of productive potential. In not
grasping the implications of this fact, we continue to imagine some
miraculous new technology that will reverse the Law of Entropy.
Economic “value” is a cultural idea. An implication of the Law of
Entropy is that productive potential in nature – the force of energy or
the quality of materials – is systematically lost
as value is being produced. This perspective turns our economic
worldview upside down. Value is measured in money, and money shapes the
way we think about value. Economists are right in that value should be
defined in terms of human preferences, rather than inputs of labour or
resources, but the result is that the more value we produce, the more
inexpensive labour, energy and other resources are required. To curb the
relentless growth of value – at the expense of the biosphere and the
global poor – we must create an economy that can restrain itself.
The evils of capitalism
Much of the discussion on climate change suggests that we are on a battlefield,
confronting evil people who want to obstruct our path to an ecological
civilisation. But the concept of capitalism tends to mystify how we are
all caught in a game defined by the logic of our own constructions – as
if there was an abstract “system” and its morally despicable proponents
to blame. Rather than see the very design of the money game as the real
antagonist, our call to arms tends to be directed at the players who
have had best luck with the dice.
I would instead argue that the ultimate obstruction is not a question
of human morality but of our common faith in what Marx called “money
fetishism”. We collectively delegate responsibility for our future to a
mindless human invention – what Karl Polanyi
called all-purpose money, the peculiar idea that anything can be
exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this relatively
recent idea is precisely what is usually called “capitalism”. It defines
the strategies of corporations, politicians, and citizens alike.
All want their money assets to grow. The logic of the global money
game obviously does not provide enough incentives to invest in
renewables. It generates greed, obscene and rising inequalities,
violence, and environmental degradation, including climate change. But
mainstream economics appears to have more faith in setting this logic
free than ever. Given the way the economy is now organised, it does not
see an alternative to obeying the logic of the globalised market.
The only way to change the game is to redesign its most basic rules.
To attribute climate change to an abstract system called capitalism –
but without challenging the idea of all-purpose money – is to deny our
own agency. The “system” is perpetuated every time we buy our groceries,
regardless of whether we are radical activists or climate change
deniers. It is difficult to identify culprits if we are all players in
the same game. In agreeing to the rules, we have limited our potential
collective agency. We have become the tools and servants of our own
creation – all-purpose money.
Despite good intentions, it is not clear what Thunberg, Extinction
Rebellion and the rest of the climate movement are demanding should be
done. Like most of us, they want to stop the emissions of greenhouse
gases, but seem to believe that such an energy transition is compatible
with money, globalised markets, and modern civilisation.
Is our goal to overthrow “the capitalist mode of production”? If so,
how do we go about doing that? Should we blame the politicians for not
confronting capitalism and the inertia of all-purpose money? Or – which
should follow automatically – should we blame the voters? Should we
blame ourselves for not electing politicians that are sincere enough to
advocate reducing our mobility and levels of consumption?
Many believe that with the right technologies we would not have to
reduce our mobility or energy consumption – and that the global economy
could still grow. But to me that is an illusion. It suggests that we
have not yet grasped what “technology” is. Electric cars and many other
“green” devices may seem reassuring but are often revealed to be
insidious strategies for displacing work and environmental loads beyond
our horizon – to unhealthy, low-wage labour in mines in Congo and Inner Mongolia.
They look sustainable and fair to their affluent users but perpetuate a
myopic worldview that goes back to the invention of the steam engine. I
have called this delusion machine fetishism.
Redesigning the global money game
So the first thing we should redesign are the economic ideas that
brought fossil-fueled technology into existence and continue to
perpetuate it. “Capitalism” ultimately refers to the artefact or idea of
all-purpose money, which most of us take for granted as being something
about which we do not have a choice. But we do, and this must be
recognised.
Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal
resource flows of colonialism by making them seem reciprocal: money has
served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by representing it as fair
exchange. Economists today reproduce this 19th-century mystification,
using a vocabulary that has proven useless in challenging global
problems of justice and sustainability. The policies designed to protect
the environment and promote global justice have not curbed the
insidious logic of all-purpose money – which is to increase
environmental degradation as well as economic inequalities.
In order to see that all-purpose money is indeed the fundamental problem, we need to see that there are alternative ways
of designing money and markets. Like the rules in a board game, they
are human constructions and can, in principle, be redesigned. In order
to accomplish economic “degrowth” and curb the treadmill of capital
accumulation, we must transform the systemic logic of money itself.
National authorities might establish a complementary currency,
alongside regular money, that is distributed as a universal basic
income but that can only be used to buy goods and services that are
produced within a given radius from the point of purchase. This is not
“local money” in the sense of LETS or the Bristol Pound
– which in effect do nothing to impede the expansion of the global
market – but a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalisation. With local
money you can buy goods produced on the other side of the planet, as
long as you buy it in a local store. What I am suggesting is special
money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally.
This would help decrease demand for global transports – a major
source of greenhouse gas emissions – while increasing local diversity
and resilience and encouraging community integration. It would no longer
make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages
in world trade, as is currently the case.
Immunising local communities and ecosystems from the logic of
globalised capital flows may be the only feasible way of creating a
truly “post-capitalist” society that respects planetary boundaries and
does not generate deepening global injustices.
Re-localising the bulk of the economy in this way does not mean that
communities won’t need electricity, for example, to run hospitals,
computers and households. But it would dismantle most of the global,
fossil-fuelled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries and
other commodities around the planet.
This means decoupling human subsistence from fossil energy and
re-embedding humans in their landscapes and communities. In completely
changing market structures of demand, such a shift would not require
anyone – corporations, politicians, or citizens – to choose between
fossil and solar energy, as two comparable options with different profit
margins.
To return to the example of Morocco, solar power will obviously have
an important role to play in generating indispensable electricity, but
to imagine that it will be able to provide anything near current levels
of per capita energy use in the global North is wholly unrealistic. A
transition to solar energy should not simply be about replacing fossil
fuels, but about reorganising the global economy.
Solar power will no doubt be a vital component of humanity’s future,
but not as long as we allow the logic of the world market to make it
profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the world. The
current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to
stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is
more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth: it is money
itself, and how money is related to technology.
Climate change and the other horrors of the Anthropocene don’t just
tell us to stop using fossil fuels – they tell us that globalisation
itself is unsustainable.
Fires that swept though subtropical rainforest around the historic Binna Burra lodge are unprecedented, experts say
Heritage listed Binna Burra lodge in the Gold Coast Hinterland rainforest, before and after it was destroyed by fire Composite: Supplied/Seven News
Queensland’s former fire commissioner
says an erratic bushfire front that climbed into the state’s subtropical
rainforest and razed the 86-year-old Binna Burra Lodge is “like nothing
we’ve ever seen before”.
“What we’re seeing, it’s just not within people’s imagination,” said
Lee Johnson, who spent 12 years in charge of Queensland’s fire service.
“They just didn’t believe it could ever get so bad.”
Queensland remains in the grip of one of the worst bushfire threats
in its history, fuelled by prolonged dry conditions and fierce gusting
winds; an “omen” of a potentially devastating fire season ahead. There are still 52 fires burning across the state. Schools are closed and about 20 structures have been destroyed.
Early on Sunday morning, a fire front climbed into the Lamington
national park and razed Binna Burra, a historic eco-tourism lodge built
in the 1930s and surrounded by subtropical Gondwana rainforest.
The heritage-listed main lodge was built in 1933. It has never before
been seriously threatened by bushfire, protected in part by lush and
damp surroundings that typically suppress the progress of dangerous
fires.
“There have certainly been fires in the area before,” said the lodge
chairman, Steve Noakes. “Back in the traditional owners’ time there’s
evidence of fires, but certainly in the period of European history in
this part of Australia, this is the most catastrophic.
“There’s nothing left to burn at Binna Burra, it’s all gone.”
Heritage listed Binna Burra Lodge in the Gold Coast Hinterland before it was destroyed by fire. Photograph: Supplied
Last year, Queensland experienced “unprecedented” fire conditions in November – a combination of hot, dry and windy days in tropical and subtropical parts of the state.
A year later, and again conditions are being described in
similar terms, the sort that can fuel catastrophic wildfires. Southeast
Queensland has been particularly dry; the fire-threatened town of Stanthorpe is almost out of drinking water.
In Lamington National Park, the rainforest has had very little recent rain.
Johnson, who is now a director of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards
Cooperative Research Centre, said in those sorts of extremely dry
conditions the forest terrain became a potential tinderbox.
“We’ve had a very long history of concern about that area, but we
definitely have not seen fire conditions like this,” Johnston said.
A koala rescued from the fires in the Gold Coast hinterland. Photograph: Jimboomba Police
“Their terrain is very similar to parts of southern New South Wales and Victoria where bushfires are the norm. In Queensland the potential is there. That country at Lamington National Park in particular, the topography is just cruel.
“The weather conditions they’re now facing are just unheard of. The
thing about fire, the bush in those conditions, is you can’t actually
fight it. The heat generated means you can’t put people or equipment in
front of this fires, you just can’t do it.”
Part of the attraction of a place like Binna Burra is the isolation.
There is one narrow access road. About 3am on Sunday morning, concern
about the welfare of firefighters forced a retreat. All anyone could do
was wait, while the fire front moved through.
“We
can’t access the site, it will be cut off for some days because of the
rock slides and the tree fall,” Noakes said. “A couple of the emergency
services workers hiked in yesterday, they were very brave, but it’s
basically a write-off.”
Noakes said the situation was “a signal to us that we need to take a more proactive approach to climate change.
“We need to know more about the impact of climate change on
subtropical rainforests of Australia and what that means in terms of
long term infrastructure. That’s why people come to Queensland, to
experience these places.”
He said Binna Burra would be rebuilt in a way that took into account the likely impacts of climate change.
“Binna Burra is 86 years old. When we position and design and build
and operate tourism infrastructure in these sorts of natural
environments, we have to think about 50 or 100 years ahead and what
changes climate impacts are going to have on the built infrastructure.
“Our responsibility now is to have a vision that is crafted of the
knowledge and the understanding of the climate as it will impact on the
tropical and subtropical rainforest.”
Bob Marra navigated his way to the back of a dusty barn in Hamden,
Connecticut, belonging to the state’s Agricultural Experiment Station.
There, past piles of empty beehives, on a wall of metal shelves, were
stacks of wooden disks — all that remains of 39 trees taken down in 2014
from Great Mountain Forest in the northwest corner of the state.
These cross-sections of tree trunks, known as stem disks — or more
informally as cookies — are telling a potentially worrisome tale about
the ability of forests to be critical hedges against accelerating
climate change.
As anyone following the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest
knows by now, trees play an important role in helping to offset global
warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide — a major
contributor to rising temperatures — in their wood, leaves, and roots.
The worldwide level of CO2 is currently averaging more than 400 parts per million — the highest amount by far in the last 800,000 years.
But
Marra, a forest pathologist at the Experiment Station with a PhD in
plant pathology from Cornell University, has documented from studying
his fallen trees that internal decay has the capacity to significantly
reduce the amount of carbon stored within.
His research, published in Environmental Research Letters late last year and funded by the National Science Foundation, focused
on a technique to see inside trees — a kind of scan known as tomography
(the “T” in CAT scan).
This particular tomography was developed for use
by arborists to detect decay in urban and suburban trees, mainly for
safety purposes. Marra, however, may be the first to deploy it for
measuring carbon content and loss associated with internal decay. Where
there is decay there is less carbon, he explains, and where there is a
cavity, there is no carbon at all.
“What we’re suggesting is that internal decay in trees has just not been properly accounted for,” says Marra.
This tree trunk section, or cookie, shows a large hollow in the center. Marra argues that traditional methods can miss such decay, and therefore overestimate how much forests will contribute to storing carbon.Jan Ellen Spiegel
While the first round of his research was a proof of concept that
necessitated the destruction of 39 trees to show that tomography is
accurate, his ultimate goal is a nondestructive technique to enable
better assessments of carbon sequestration than those done annually by
the U.S. Forest Service. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
ratified in 1994, governments are required to report annual estimates
of carbon holdings in all their managed lands. The most recent Forest
Service figures show that U.S. forests offset about 14 percent of the
nation’s carbon emissions each year.
The Forest Service estimates that carbon makes up 48 to 50 percent of
a tree’s biomass, so ones with decay will be less dense and therefore
hold less carbon. But Marra contends that the visual signs monitored by
the Forest Service, such as canopy and tree size, along with conspicuous
problems such as lesions or cankers, don’t accurately reflect internal
decay — a tree that looks healthy may have decay and one that appears
problematic may be fine inside.
In addition, he says, foresters typically use a mallet to hammer a
tree to register a sound that might indicate it’s hollow. “You know that
there may be a hollow, but you don’t know how big the hollow is,” Marra
says. As a result, he believes the government’s baseline data used to
estimate carbon storage are not accurate.
“There are a lot of ways to improve our estimates of carbon being
stored above ground in forests, and this decay component could certainly
prove to be important,” says Andrew Reinmann, an ecologist and
biogeochemist with the City University of New York’s Advanced Science
Research Center. But, he added,
“We haven’t really had the technology to
explore this before — it’s still a little bit of an unknown.”
Marra used a two-stage system for his research: sonic tomography,
which sends sound waves through the tree, followed by electrical
resistance tomography, which transmits an electric current. Both
processes are necessary to fine-tune each other’s readings.
The system, which costs about $25,000 and fits in a backpack, is
cheap and small by scientific equipment standards. Each reading takes no
more than a few minutes and computerized visual renderings of the
results appear instantly.
Marra uses a kind of scan known as tomography to measure carbon storage and decay in trees. Jan Ellen Spiegel
Marra experimented with three northern
hardwoods — sugar maple, yellow birch, and American beech — and included
more than two dozen of each, along with some control trees with no
decay.
The researchers analyzed the lower bole — the first two meters or
so — of each tree, which is the oldest part and closest to the soil,
where most decay-causing fungi would come from.
A dozen or so nails were tapped in a circle around the trunk and
connected by cables to the tomograph; a sonic hammer then activated the
system to get sound-wave measurements.
For the electric resistance tomography, a second set of nails was
hammered between the first, and electrodes — plus and minus — were
attached to each.
The various nail areas were painted in different colors to enable the
computer renderings to be aligned later with photographs of the cookies
after the trees were cut down.
The cookies, about 4 inches thick
and which Marra called “the truth,” were only taken from where the
measurements were made — the areas with the paint markings.
He analyzed 105 cookies from the 39 trees taken down. In the 11 cases
where tomography found no decay, the cookies revealed only one small
cavity. In the 32 cases where incipient, or early, decay was detected,
the cookies showed one additional cavity.
The cookies confirmed the
tomography results in 36 cases where active decay was found, though
eight small cavities were also detected. Tomography correctly identified
cavities in the remaining 26 cookies, meaning that it missed a total of
10 cavities among the 105 cookies.
“One thing to sort of mitigate against this failure, if you want to
call it that — these were very small cavities,” Marra says of the ones
the tomography missed. “So they would have very little impact on a
carbon budget.”
Marra readies a tree for scanning with electrodes and a tomograph.Jan Ellen Spiegel
Then came the time-consuming process of measuring the actual amount
of carbon in each tree. After air-drying the cookies for a year, the
wood from 500 drilled holes was sent to a gas chromatography lab at the
University of Massachusetts to determine the carbon levels.
The tomography and lab results were then combined to calculate how
much carbon was stored in the lower boles and to contrast that with the
levels if the trees had been solid wood. Those calculations took until
2017 to complete.
“You’re looking at anywhere from a 19 percent to a 34 percent carbon
loss for an actively decaying tree among those studied," Marra says.
“But any place there’s a cavity you’ve lost all of your carbon.”
The upshot of his five years of research, says Marra, is that
accurate tomographic readings are possible in just a few minutes. “And
what our tomography tells us is the carbon content,” he says.
At the same time, Marra is aware that tomography is not a practical
substitute for the Forest Service’s carbon estimate system — which
itself is a clunky and labor-intensive slog. But it could provide a
valuable way to augment those estimates.
“Those are very, very impressive results,’’ says Kevin Griffin, a
tree physiologist at Columbia University and its Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory. “They obviously have obtained a lot of precision in the
techniques.”
“The results are important,” he adds, “but whether internal tree
decay is the single most burning question? Probably not. There’s
probably bigger fish to fry before we get there.”
Among them, he says are forest growth rates and overall tree health
and age, as well as the impact of harvesting and other kinds of losses,
including disease.
A tree’s architecture and height could also play large roles in
carbon sequestration, says Reinmann of the City University of New York’s
Advanced Science Research Center, as could the makeup of the forest
landscape. His own research, for instance, found trees grow faster and
have more biomass at the edge of fragmented forest.
“I think they’re making a good point that we’re probably
over-estimating” carbon storage levels, says Aaron Weiskittel, director
of the University of Maine’s Center for Research on Sustainable Forests.
Even so, Weiskittel and others — including Marra — say the research
needs to be scaled up to many more tree types and full forests. For his
part, Marra would like to sample forests randomly with many more trees
and controlling for factors including species, age, and soil
characteristics.
The goal, he says, is to develop a methodology for generating data to
provide better carbon estimates for more than three tree types in one
small part of the country.
“We need to use tomography to refine models so we’re more accurately
assessing the role that forests are playing as sequesterers or climate
change mitigators,” Marra says. “We don’t want to be over-estimating the
roles that they play.”
