Organizations Fighting Climate Change: A quick guide

It took longer than expected, and arguably longer than what we wished for, but climate change is a growing concern that has been spreading to different sectors of society. The topic is reaching more people every day (let us not discuss at what speed rate), shining light on the growing risks of climate change. With information comes knowledge, which brings awareness and catalyzes action. “Climate Action” is what now the title that brands the work in climate change research, adaption, mitigation, etc.

A melting glacier.

Following the growing concern directed to climate change, different initiatives have been popping up during the last decades, especially after the Rio 92 conference, and more recently the Paris Agreement.

Many times articles and the media generalizes the work of climate change related organizations, and we (environmental concerned individuals) often hear about “the latest report”, “the new scientific data”, “growing green investments funds” etc., but sometimes the who’s behind such information is not clear. This article provides a quick overview of some of the organization related to climate change, focusing on a few big names in the areas of international governance, green investments, and civil society.

Read the story from Medium by Thales Dantas - “Organizations Fighting Climate Change: A quick guide."

Redefining The Role Of Business & Sport: How Can They Join Forces To Accelerate Low-Carbon Technologies Across Different Sectors.

Can you imagine a world where combating climate change is an exciting and inspiring opportunity, an opportunity to harness the power of the best, to raise the bar, to overcome hurdles and to redefine the role of business and sport in society?

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing our society, already affecting natural environments and people around the world. In 2017, global CO2 emissions have risen again, after being flat for 3 years. Hence, global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 are likely to be at the high end of the range projected by scientists under the 2°C and 1.5°C temperature scenarios, making it increasingly difficult to be on track to meet the global 2030 emission goals.

Learn more about the webinar and register here - “Redefining The Role Of Business & Sport: How Can They Join Forces To Accelerate Low-Carbon Technologies Across Different Sectors.” 

Ireland Demonstrates Climate Leadership with €22 billion Investment Plan

The Government of Ireland has announced it will invest €22 billion to transition the country to a low carbon and climate resilient society, aiming at almost zero emissions by middle of the century.

Ireland demonstrates leadership with regard climate change.

According to the country’s National Development Plan published this month, the funds are to be primarily deployed to reduce carbon emissions from transport, agriculture and the energy sector, along with flood defenses.

“While Ireland clearly faces a very significant task in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, the current profile of which reflects the particular structure of our economy, action can be taken now to position Ireland to harness significant benefits from realising a low-carbon economy,” the report says.

Read the United Nations Climate Change story - “Ireland Demonstrates Climate Leadership with €22 billion Investment Plan.”

Quitting coal: a health benefit equivalent to quitting tobacco, alcohol and fast-food

Imagine, for a moment, that climate change was not synonymous with doomsday scenarios, but rather presented an opportunity to radically transform society for the better. This is not an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the risks facing our climate. Rather, it is about reframing the choice we face, away from the prospect of bleak minimalism often associated with a low-carbon future.

 ‘Strategies focused on greenhouse gas mitigation could save
an estimated 1 to 4 million lives annually by mid-century from
 improved air quality.’

Consider the following realities: the World Health Organisation estimates 7 million deaths are attributed to air pollution every year; and rates of obesity and chronic diseases are rising in nearly all regions of the world. Burning fossil fuels, especially coal, accounted for 78% of the total increase in carbon dioxide between 1970 and 2010, with deforestation comprising the balance of emissions. Burning coal also releases pollutants such as fine particulates, eg PM2.5, which are deadly to human health.

Read Jonathan Patz’s story on The Guardian - “Quitting coal: a health benefit equivalent to quitting tobacco, alcohol and fast-food.”

Coastal Cities Are Increasingly Vulnerable, and So Is the Economy that Relies on Them.

There was a time a decade or two ago when society could have made a choice to write off our massive investment in a fossil fuel-based economy and begin a policy driven shift towards a cleaner renewable infrastructure that could have forestalled the worst effects of climate change. But the challenges of collective action, a lack of political courage, and the power of incumbent pecuniary interests to capture the levers of power meant we did not. The bill is now coming due.

That means that many of our great, low-lying coastal cities are what we call “stranded assets.” GreenBiz founder Joel Makower defines a stranded asset as “a financial term that describes something that has become obsolete or nonperforming well ahead of its useful life, and must be recorded on a company’s balance sheet as a loss of profit.” Makower was talking about Exxon and other companies that built their businesses on the combustion of climate changing fossil fuels, not cities. But the concept easily transfers from businesses built on carbon to cities threatened by carbon’s impact.

Consider Miami. An invaluable, irreplaceable cultural jewel that will be stranded, both figuratively and literally, by climate change.

Read the Harvard Business Review story by Gregory Unruh - “Coastal Cities Are Increasingly Vulnerable, and So Is the Economy that Relies on Them.”

Reading classic novels in an era of climate change.

Philip Steer.

There is a strange and troubled kind of intimacy between our own moment of climate change and 19th century Britain. It was there that a global, fossil fuel economy first took shape, through its coal-powered factories, railways, and steamships, which drove the emergence of modern consumer capitalism.

What might we now find if we look again at the literature of the 19th century? Although Victorian writers lacked our understanding of a warming planet, we can learn from their deep awareness of the rapid and far-reaching ways that their society was changing. In their hands, the novel became a powerful tool for thinking about the interconnections between individuals, society, economics, and the natural world.

Read the thoughts The Conversation of a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, Philip Steer - “Reading classic novels in an era of climate change.”

The sharp edge of climate will unmask human behaviour as it slices into society

T

he perverse realities of human behaviour will become clear for all to see as the sharp edge of climate change begins to slice into society.

The sharp edge of climate change will bring
its challenges and Lloyd Alter, writing on
Treehugger has suggested Hollywood
make more movies about the French
 Revolution illustrating to the privileged just
 how quickly the sharp edge of the
 guillotine can be deployed.

What is presently happening in California is something of a prelude, at least in the developed world, of what is ahead.

California is presently wrestling with it worst ever drought and people are becoming rather edgy and confrontational, just about their lawns.

Treehugger talks about this in its story headed, “Rich Californian with big lawn says ‘We’re not all equal when it comes to water’”.

At one point it writes: “Every once in a while, Hollywood should do a gritty drama about the French revolution just to remind the privileged what a guillotine is used for and how quickly it can be deployed.”

Such a comment suggests serious disquiet in the Californian community and illustrates the challenges we will all face as climate change worsens and uncovers inevitable personal challenges.

We know about climate change, but still we prevaricate

by Robert McLean

Only retrospective judgement allows for the pinpointing of a drought’s beginnings.

Climate change is a different beast – we already know pretty much when it began, or at least when the symptoms became clearly obvious, and yet the world still prevaricates.

Serious difficulties demand equally serious responses and while we have quibbled about the seriousness and reality of the unfolding catastrophe, opportunities for effective mitigation have slipped away and now the conversation has changed to adaptation.

Confusing the conversation is an array of morals, values, ethics, ideologies, religious beliefs, cultural attachments, economic dogmas, emotive drivers, a reality obscuring educative understanding of the science and even worse, a zero or near zero realization that the world is in serious trouble.

Intertwined with all that is our sweeping inability to see that humanity’s wellbeing is not inextricably linked to how the world fares economically, rather in a striking contradictory way our lives become richer, more complete and more rewarding as we connect with others, something that becomes obvious during times of stress, whether that be personal or a societal difficulty brought upon us either by nature or through the corruption of our behaviour toward each other.

Our response to climate change needs to be swift, decisive and in that take humanity in a different direction.

The question that if often asked, and most feared I suspect, is “What do I do now?”

Such questions are mostly greeted with a pall of silence or a retreat in a rhetorical answer in which the science of climate change is used to protect the answerer from the need to arrive at and provide a definitive answer, for to do so threatens everything upon which modern society depends.

Mitigation and adaptation ideas become increasingly byzantine as the circumstances disrupting earth’s atmosphere are more apparent and obvious, but in almost every instance it is about protecting and allowing for the continuation of the modern life that particularly the developed world presently enjoys.

The sheer numbers of humans who walk the earth is an obvious problem, but that is not insurmountable and if for a moment we could abandon the values, cultural morals and ethics, and ideologies to which we are wedded and put the boundless beauty of humanity ahead of the perverse need for personal possession and power, then it is possible we could meet the challenge spelt out so clearly by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest pre-Paris 2015 synthesis report.

Clearly we face dire times and so any response needs to be daring and demanding of courageous leadership hitherto unseen, certainly in Australia.

Having rattled in about that, I urge you to read this unrelated piece by Tristan Edis from the Climate Spectator headed: “Three heroes of climate change denial - a synthesis report”.

Progress depends upon de-legitimizing fossil fuel bodies

Little progress will be made on de-carbonizing society until the constituent parts of the fossil fuel industry are de-legitimized.

An example of our inability to see beyond the obvious is the giving of a “Climate Leadership Award” to the company behind the construction of pipeline integral to the worsening of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

The Huffington Post reports about this dilemma in a story headed: “Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Owner Wins Climate Leadership Award”.

It reports: “The company that wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline was recognized this week for leadership on climate change -– to the shock of environmental activists.”

A 'base-load believer' in just 13 minutes

by Robert McLean

Mark Diesendorf took about 13 minutes to convince me that renewable energy was the key to powering the world.

Much reading and listening had left me hugely suspicious that renewable energy would be unable to produce the base load power that modern society needed.



Dr Mark Diesendorf.

In just one 13 minute interview recently on Radio National, Dr Diesendorf illustrated beyond doubt that renewable energy had the necessary capabilities and capacity to answer the demands of our industrial society.

Dr Diesendorf, from the University of New South Wales’ Institute of Environmental Studies, only late last year published the book: “Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change”.

Beyond that, Professor Diesendorf will be the keynote speaker at an “Energy Forum” in Shepparton, Victoria, on Friday, September 26, this year staged by Slap Tomorrow.

Writing in his book, Dr Diesendorf said: “With smart design, a predominantly renewable electricity system can be just as reliable as one based on fossil fuels”.

Pointing to the complications associated with our use of fossil fuels, he wrote: “They are the major cause of global climate change; a major cause of air pollution with widespread severe impacts on human health; a significant cause of water pollution and land degradation; have very limited reserves (especially oil and good quality coal); are only relatively cheap because their environmental, health, social and some economic costs are excluded from their prices; are controlled by huge corporations and create relatively few jobs per unit of energy generated.

“Of the fossil fuels used on a large-scale, coal is the most damaging in terms of environmental and health impacts.

“Also, coal mining is one of the most dangerous occupations, even in industrialized countries,” he wrote.

Dr Diesendorf has encouraged people to think about the long-term, rather than falling into the trap of considering policies and ideas in a relation to the next electoral cycle.

“In practice,” he said, “scenarios may involve a mixture of forecasting and back-casting.”

“But without credible visions of a sustainable future and strategies to achieve them, it will be impossible to avoid devastating, irreversible changes to earth’s climate,” he wrote.

The efforts of Beneath the Wisteria and its sister organization, Slap Tomorrow, might sometimes seem nebulous and mostly a little like associating only with like-minded people, but Dr Diesendorf underlines the importance of their work.

He says: “Individual actions are necessary and valuable, but not sufficient to meet the challenge of climate change. To gain effective climate change policies from government, and business, pressure from a climate action movement is needed.”

“The first and key responsibility is, as citizens, to exercise our democratic rights collectively to demand that our governments take rapid and effective action by implementing appropriate laws, regulations and standards, pricing and funding policies, education and information, industry polices, institutional change and population polices,” he wrote.

Diesendorf has a message that all should listen and respond positively to, but they won’t.

Research clearly shows that unless a message rests comfortably with the recipient’s personal values, it simply becomes just another part of society’s “noise” that quickly leaks into the mental waste bin.

Sadly we can’t afford to let such critical messages as that told by Diesndorf in “Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change” to simply “leak” away and so it rests with those of us concerned about the less than encouraging impacts of climate change to keep the message alive and tell it, repeatedly, until the people and our government begin to respond positively.  

Avoiding the most difficult - we need to 'speak the words'

The obvious is being conveniently avoided by most in ongoing conversations about how we mitigate and address the damage we are doing to our climate.

The amazing and palatial
BMW Edge theatre.

Necessary changes are so extensive, dramatic, demanding, confronting and contrary to the contemporary understanding of the imagined good life that no one appears game to speak the words.

Many allude to what is needed in subtle ways, but fearing alienation from the mainstream or worse, a social shunning by most they avoid the direct spelling out of the urgent and needed action.

Let us be clear - everyone needs to stop doing anything that is the outcome of burning fossil fuels.

Melbourne’s February SustainableLiving Festival was wonderful and on show was a powerful exhibition of peoples’ innovative nature and skills, along with a fascinating array of speakers, films and demonstrations all aimed at helping us better understand how we could live in quieter and less energy intensive manner.

The festival, despite all the wonderment and energy it brought to the conversation about addressing climate change, would not have been possible, at least on that grand scale, with the input of fossil fuel powered energy.

Just on a personal sense, let’s consider my debt to fossil-fuels:

Journey to and from Melbourne by diesel powered train;

Travel within Melbourne on trams using electricity from fossil-fuel powered generators;

Food and drinks from establishments relying entirely on electricity;

Business cards, brochures and various handouts (some of which I brought home) were all available because of a finite resource;

The palatial beauty of the BMW Edge theatre (the venue of many presentations) was an exhibition of the power of fossil-fuels;

Many of those who spoke at the festival, or were exhibitors or worked on an exhibit, were able to participate because of energy derived from fossil-fuel;

In fact, most everything in sight, including the well-manicured plants and grass, existed because of fossil-fuel.

My trip, enjoyable and rewarding as it was, was made possible because of energy from fossil-fuels. That process, in itself, is not sustainable.

Clearly, if we are to slow the damage to our atmosphere and so slow climate change, we need to end our dependence today, not tomorrow, on fossil-fuels.

That, I know, is an unrealistic call, but the intent of the innovation on show at the Melbourne festival needs to be redirected from solving a particular problem, as important as that is, to rather helping the broader community understand how it can emotionally deal with a revolutionary change to their lifestyle.

Our way of living, even that of the Sustainable Living Festival, is predictably and scientifically impossible to sustain and so rather await the catastrophic collapse of society we should be devoting time, energy and effort to understanding an alternative.

The alternative is about close knit, resilient,  multi-use communities with a grasp on their governance, in which the basic method transport is walking or cycling, basic foods are available locally, and neigbourhoods, in which sharing is a way of life, are about people, rather than machines.

Arriving at that point will only happen with a significant “bottom-up” push accompanied by an equally courageous “top-down” leadership.