Phillip Sutton talks about meeting the climate challenge

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uthor and climate strategist, Phillip Sutton, recently shared his ideas on how societies could rise to the climate challenge as it confronts us in 2015. 

The “Striking Targets” author and “Climate Code Red” co-author’s strategy aims to address the scale and speed of change needed, at the 11th hour, to provide the maximum possible protection for the world's people, species and ecosystems.

Phillip talked about his concept at a September Breakthrough Forum presented in partnership with the Australian-German Climate and Energy College, University of Melbourne.

Watch Phillip had to say – “Post Paris: sketching a new approach”.

Phillip Sutton matches climate goals with climate reality

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Phillip Sutton.

n this latest paper, Philip Sutton highlights what he sees as an impending shift in the purpose of climate campaigning and calls for the most effective action in the new ‘post-Paris’ era.

In the foreword to “Matching climate goals with climate reality”, sustainability advisor and author of the 2011 book “The Great Disruption”  and co-author of “The One Degree War Plan”, Paul Gilding said, ”Amidst the noise of the day-to-day debates, we have lost sight of the simple logic of the advice coming from the world’s top climate scientists.

“Despite the uncertainties in the details, the science carries one underlying message, from which we can draw only one rational conclusion. It is time to declare a global emergency and mobilise all our available resources, political will and human ingenuity towards one task – reducing the risk of catastrophic climate change to a safe level.”

Phillip paints word pictures to explain the complexities of climate change

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Phillip Sutton.

ictures painted with words helped listeners understand some of the complexities of climate change and why it is what it is.

Co-author of Climate Code Red, Phillip Sutton, “painted” that picture when he spoke at “Post-Paris: Sketching a new approach” at The Carlton Connect Initiative on Wednesday, September 23.

Phillip, standing before a table of books, all of which he had obviously read, went back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to begin his illustrative story.

Phillip is an active member of the Victorian Climate Action Network and recently circulated fellow members of VCAN alerting them to a new book.

He said: “Tim Snyder, an historian, has written what I think is a very important book:  "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning".  In the concluding chapter, where he focuses on the future, Tim explores stress dynamics that could lead to new genocides.  He draws a conclusion that might surprise some of his readers - that climate change might be one of the most serious.

“Tim makes a very powerful argument, developed in the second half of his book, that the ability to rescue threatened people when genocides are underway is terrifyingly limited - so effective prevention is crucial,” he wrote.

A “long read” on the Guardian says, in commenting on the book and discussing the order both those on the left and right fear it says: “In an era of climate change, the rightwing version of anarchy, economic libertarianism, may pose the more pertinent danger.”

Read the Guardian’s long-read story - “Hitler’s world may not be so far away.”