Professor Tim Flannery in conversation with Professor Robert Manne (Politics, La Trobe University) and Vice-Chancellor Paul Johnson (La Trobe University) about the impact of the Copenhagen Climate Summit and what hope there is in its wake.

The 6th Ideas and Society lecture, held on 13 April 2010.

Part 2

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Transcript

Robert Manne

What we’re going to do is conduct a conversation.  It will be a conversation of a peculiar kind in that I’ll be mainly asking questions of someone who knows a lot more than I do about this topic.  But I’ll probably contribute as well to the conversation in a different way.  And then I would very much like you to join in and to ask questions and I hope on what I think all of us here think to be the pre-eminently important issue of the age for you to make contribution and to push anyone here as hard as you can on the questions that need to be asked.  Some of you will remember… I think it was a little bit less than a year ago when we talked here and the one thing that is uncontroversial is that a heck of a lot has happened over the past year and so the push of what I’ll be doing is asking for your reflections on this year and then we’ll be looking as much as we can to the future.  I’m actually intrigued with something and I’d like to begin with this, which is, I know you were a player at Copenhagen.  By the way, do we say Copenhagen, or Copenhargen, having been there? 

Tim Flannery

I think the Danes say Copenhaven or something like that, but I can’t do that, so I just say Copenhagen.

Robert Manne

OK.  We’ll call it Copenhagen.  You were there and I want to ask just a non-political, non-scientific question which I think a lot of people here would be interested in.  What was it like being there?  What was the atmosphere and what was the experience of what was once thought of as a crucial meeting in human development?  What was it like?

Tim Flannery

Well, it was held in a venue called the Bella Centre, which was the old, the Danish Showgrounds, you know, where they would have their agricultural shows and so forth.  It was a big venue that was then built on to become a major convention centre. And so the Bella Centre, you’ve got a imagine a place with soaring ceilings, a kind of pre-fab look about it really, big halls and so forth, enough to hold about fifteen thousand people, and rather rambling, and also, tacked on to the outside a number of pre-fab huts, shipping containers I think even in some places, just to hold a few excess people.  But that venue could take about fifteen thousand people comfortably.  The UNFCCC and organisers in their wisdom had enrolled forty five thousand participants.  You’ve got to imagine this venue also surrounded with very strict security because this was also the venue where President Obama and Premier Wen and others were going to appear.  So there was very long lines and it was a very cold winter as well.  So very long lines in the snow, progressively different entrances shut off to make the access even more difficult, but inside, for those who got in, this incredible circus, because not only were the negotiators there, every nation had their booth there, there was a whole hall devoted to activists, there was a hunger strike going on in the hall, yes, it was extraordinary, some young Australians on their 39th day without food.  I was quite concerned about them, about what they were doing.  There was the Fossil of the Day Award where a country is pilloried for doing something stupid, in the middle of this hall.

Robert Manne

Did Australia win this on any day?

Tim Flannery

Rarely.  I don’t think we won it at all.  Canada was up there, quite often, but no, Australia escaped, by and large.  So it was like a festival, a big, ramshackle festival.  And difficult to know where the centre is.

Robert Manne

Were you one of those who didn’t get access from time to time, or were you privileged to get in all the time.

Tim Flannery

I was fortunately one of the privileged.  The pass system changed over time – we found one pass was invalid so we had to get another, secondary pass.  But I was able, because  of our link with the Danish government and the role we played in this, to be able to get in right through the process.  And quickly as well.  So it was rather an iniquitous thing that some people might wait for nine or ten hours in the snow and others would be ushered through.  So it was just the way it was.

Robert Manne

An amazing experience.  Let’s now go through, as much we can, what happened there.  The way I thought I’d do it is to ask you about some of the key players and your assessment.  Probably the key player in a way was President Obama.  Just something about what the Americans did and what Obama’s role in the conference and the outcome.

Tim Flannery

Can I go back a bit and just perhaps suggest that I answer the question in a different order, because Obama came in towards the very end and what he did was critical.  But in the months leading up to the conference and then the conference organisation, a few really important things happened, that need to be touched on.  One of them was that following UN Climate Week and the Pittsburgh G20 Meeting where heads of nation said they would spare no effort to come to an agreement at Copenhagen, hopes were very high and expectations were extremely high.  Yvo de Boer who was heading the UNFCCC process, tried in September to hose that down by saying “There won’t be a treaty agreement, there’ll only be a political agreement” but nevertheless that was hardly heard in the anticipation that this was going to be a great event.

The Danish government was relatively poorly organised.  The person who had put all this in place, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, had gone off to chair NATO and he was replaced by a man called Lars Lokke Rasmussen, they have a lot of Rasmussens in Denmark.  They’ve had three Prime Minister Rasmussens in a row. Anyway, Lars Lokke is a much more domestic politician, rather inexperienced on the international stage, a man who, and I think I can say this fairly, takes things a bit personally.  And he was chairing the meeting and that is a critical role.  That was made doubly critical by a number of factors.  One was the G77 for developing nations, a hundred-odd developing nations.  That was headed by Sudan.  And the week before, President al-Bashir was expected to come to Denmark for this meeting; Amnesty International called for his arrest for crimes against humanity by the Danes.  So, needless to say, President al-Bashir didn’t turn up, but his deputy was out there to wreck this meeting from the beginning.  And was constantly making references to any agreement to deal with the climate issue was equivalent to the holocaust, and this sort of stuff.  And in a process that’s poorly chaired, that’s very democratic UN-type process, where everyone gets their say, it is easy to wreck things and to delay them.  So that was the situation we faced.

Robert Manne

Then there were plenary sessions all the time, is that right?

Tim Flannery

Yes, all of this is going on as well and announcements being made, and they do have an impact and one of the impacts that was particularly important was on the day Wen Jiabao arrived with 800 people, his retinue, he was like a Chinese emperor and these people rocked up with 800 assistants in tow.  On that very day, Todd Stern, the US negotiator, had one of these events, an event for the US where he said that the US was expecting transparency and accountability in all issues.  There’d been a lot of talk between the US and China on this but the last thing China expected was what they took as a public upbraiding.

Robert Manne

They knew, the Americans knew that they weren’t going to give it, so saying it was…

Tim Flannery

They would work something out but front is tremendously important in this. 

Robert Manne

When did this happen, roughly?

Tim Flannery

This was the Wednesday before the meetings finished, so towards the end.  It was the Wednesday.  So Wen Jiabao arrives, fully expecting to be treated like a hero; China has done incredible things internally, a fantastic amount of progress has been made.

Robert Manne

We’ll come to that in a minute.

Tim Flannery

Committed to this as well.  And hinted that they will do more.  Have privately agreed with the Americans that some sort of accountability will be… there’ll be some transparency, but they don’t want to be held publicly to anything at this point, on that.  So Wen comes in, Superman outfit, first hit on the head, Todd Stern, second hit on the head the G77.  China has a quarter of a million troops in Africa alone, trying to manage things, building airports, extracting resources, all this sort of stuff.  All of a sudden, the G77 members are at each other. Tuvalu is pillorying China for not agreeing to one and a half degrees.  So all of a sudden this is not just about climate change, this is about international politics from China’s perspective.  And the disarray that sowed in China’s ranks was extraordinary.  Wen just retreated back to his bunker basically, or back to his palace, and wouldn’t come out and kept on sending second or third tier emissaries out to everyone else.  So that was a catastrophe and I should just mention that the Chinese delegation when they went back, all of the leaders were forced to write confessions in the old Chinese style, about what went wrong.  That’s how seriously they took it.  They were very, utterly dismayed, that they had been… that what had looked like a great victory for them had turned into an absolute catastrophe.  And that’s the way they saw that.

Robert Manne

As the plenaries were going, and as the conference was proceeding, did you at any point think that something very concrete would emerge, or was it clearly unravelling, known to be unravelling, as the times proceeded?

Tim Flannery

Well, by the Wednesday evening the Danes as Chair of the conference were supposed to produce a draft negotiating text.  It failed to appear.  Thursday morning, it still wasn’t there.  Thursday lunchtime, it hadn’t appeared.  At that stage I was thinking this is going to be an absolute catastrophe.  And at the same time the Chinese thing was happening…

Robert Manne

Was this before the arrival of the American President?

Tim Flannery

That’s right.  Obama arrived I think on the Thursday.  I can’t recall – he flew out on the Friday before negotiations were completed.  So anyway, this is the environment that Obama came into, determined to make a difference.  And could I just say that Prime Minister Rudd through all this was doing an absolutely outstanding job, just trying to mediate and bring parties together.  But this was beyond anything that could…

Robert Manne

I read a bit about Rudd’s performance and I want to talk about that later, I read a lot about the Chinese, the questions you’ve been talking about.  I read when Obama arrived, I read a lot about that.  The one thing I haven’t read much about and I’d really be interested in are two other big players and what they did during this two weeks.  First the European Union and secondly the Japanese.  It seems to me that’s not been talked about sufficiently, because they certainly at Kyoto and after, were critical players in the whole game.

Tim Flannery

That’s right.  Had a draft negotiating text emerged I think that the Europeans would have been able to play a more constructive role.  What happened to them was they committed to a 20% decrease early on, so they put their cards on the table.  They said they might go to 30 if others joined them but they put their cards on the table.

Robert Manne

Even before the conference?

Tim Flannery

Yeah, but increasingly the meeting wasn’t about them, or that.  It was about how do we engage the developing countries, the weak countries, basically, in this.  So they were sidelined and because there was no formal process, they were just left out, so the meeting that Obama finally got into, was with the Chinese and the President of Brazil, South Africa and I think India.  That was just sort of  an accidental thing, in a way and there was no European representative so that the Copenhagen Accord came out at the end of the day came out without any input…

Robert Manne

It’s strange in a way, because they’ve been at the forefront of commitments to emissions reductions.

Tim Flannery

We’ve got 180 countries, trying to get them to agree on anything is frankly impossible.  And what happened was, both ends lost out.  The developing countries, the Tuvulus of the world had no voice in any of this and probably won’t into the future because the process is unmanageable at this level.  Maybe at some they’ll do some things, but not at the core, not the emissions reduction stuff.  And the Europeans were left out for the same reason.  The big deal was around George Bush’s idea – the major emitters forum as it used to be called or the major economic forum – that was the focus.  It was China, Brazil, South Africa, the US.

Robert Manne

And Japan, did it play any noticeable role?

Tim Flannery

No, I think they were sidelined by the same sort of things, despite their fantastic, again, domestic policy.  This is the extraordinary thing about the meetings.  We’d seen countries commit in advance to that meeting, really very significant steps forward and yet we were unable to broker the sort of agreement we would have all liked to see.

Now the Copenhagen Accord is not, I wouldn’t call it a failure, by any means.  I think it actually has quite a lot of very concrete steps.

Robert Manne

I want to go into that in some detail.  You made an important contribution in interpreting and in one way, during that time and after, and I want to go through that.  But first, perhaps, we get Obama’s, the Emperor’s entrance.

Tim Flannery

So Obama arrives.  Immediately dismayed to find that there’s no… the negotiating text is not likely to be there, that this is a chaotic process, where political leadership is going to be required, and yet, he’s locked out of the meetings.  And could I just say that the Chinese, by this stage, Wen’s in his cell, there’s a very low level person on the phone in these meetings…

Robert Manne

On the Chinese side?

Tim Flannery

Yes, yes, and Angela Merkel in one particular instance is trying to negotiate elements of the agreement, particularly the commitment by developed countries.  This is a bit before that meeting.  To a 2050 target.  So you know, 80% reduction by 2050 is part of the deal.  A Chinese bloke puts up his hand and says “Sorry, we don’t want that.”  And you’ve kind of got to say “What’s it got to do with you?”  This is nothing to do with China, this is about the developed countries and a medium term target but they were unwilling to wear it, things had broken down so badly.

Robert Manne

Can you explain why they…

Tim Flannery

Inexplicable.  I honestly can’t.  I think that at that stage the Chinese approach was in chaos.  We’re dealing with a very low level guy for who “No” was the safest answer in some ways.  Probably on the phone to others, but… certainly on the phone to others.

Robert Manne

Maybe they thought it would be read as “the developed world does its bit and China et al won’t do their’s” or something.

Tim Flannery

There was a number of interpretations made of these sort of things.  I’m not sure that any of them are convincing, really, in the longer term.  I think there had just been a breakdown of process and people were floating.

Robert Manne

So we’re now with President Obama there and clearly sensing the possibility of nothing.

Tim Flannery

That’s right and I wasn’t privy to any of this, but this was reported to me afterwards.  I should just say… all through this, the UNFCCC process is going on.  So poor old Lars Lokke Rasmussen is falling asleep in the seat at one o’clock in the morning, trying to keep things going, and we can see it lurching from one potential failure to another.  There was a number of moments where the process looked like it was going to break down any agreement at all and it was only the British, actually, and partly Rudd as well, by saing, “No,  don’t call for a vote.  Do it now.”  So anyway, this side process which was a meeting of, apparently, the Chinese Premier, the Indian Prime Minister, the Presidents of South Africa and Brazil, they were having a private meeting.  Obama, apparently, just introduced himself and walked into this meeting and it was at that meeting that the fundamental elements of this little two-page document, the Accord, were agreed.  And you can see it reflects that, very much.

Robert Manne

Without that, there would have been a sense that nothing had been achieved?

Tim Flannery

So in my view, Obama was the one who we owe what success that we got out of that meeting.  But without really the credit.  I don’t think he ever really got the credit he deserved for doing that.

Robert Manne

You were one of the major players in terms of writing and thinking.  You were one of the most important relative optimists in regard to the Accord.  Could we go through the bits of it?  I’ve read quite a few things since that are on your side so in some ways you’re a pioneer of the quasi-optimism.  I’m not sure what I think but if we can go through the elements, if you could talk about what you think their significance is.  The first is this very general commitment, without targets or anything else, to limiting temperature to 2⁰ Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  You do think that’s important I know. 

Tim Flannery

Yes.

Robert Manne

Can we talk about that a bit?

Tim Flannery

Of course I would have rather had a parts per million target but 2⁰ is what was agreed upon.  That is important because the science tells us that, well the best estimate we have on a probableistic basis is that 2⁰ is a threshold, going beyond that increases the risk very substantially of triggering an irreversible process. So that is an important outcome of any agreement.  And was agreed by and large before the Copenhagen meeting – it was at least there, enshrined in it.

Robert Manne

And do you think it has content even without targets? 

Tim Flannery

It now does have targets.  This is the thing about it.  It’s a little two-page document – five pages altogether if you include the title page and two empty appendices.  So three empty pages and two with writing on them.  But the appendices are now actually being filled out, and I think, I haven’t looked in recent days, but I think roughly a hundred countries have committed to their targets.  In those appendices.

Robert Manne

But mainly what they had previously agreed to, as I understand it.

Tim Flannery

Sure, that’s right.  But it’s still there.  We still actually now have a global deal with those targets formalised.  The temptation with this is always to say, it’s not good enough.  But the difficulty of achieving anything at the global level is such that I tend to applaud every little victory that you get.  It’s a bit like my view of cap and trade in Australia – you know, let’s take it for all of its faults, and build on it to go somewhere else.

Robert Manne

And you were also fairly optimistic or pleased about the agreement about forests I take it.  Perhaps you could explain because not everyone will be aware of the detail of that.

Tim Flannery

Sure.  We were hoping that the reduced or avoided deforestation in the tropics was going to be a key element in this agreement.  As it turned out a tremendous amount of work was done in the background but it didn’t really make it in any substantial way in the Copenhagen Accord.  I suspect that we’ll see an agreement on forests out of Mexico.  That’s much more central to their concerns.  But the work’s been done there.  The big issue is financing and if I could say the other big issue in the Accord is one hundred billion dollars worth of adaptation and mitigation funds for the developing world.  That hangs in the balance today.  I was in London two weeks ago with Bob McMullen who was meeting Gordon Brown to try to work out where this money is going to come from.

Robert Manne

That’s a pretty good question.

Tim Flannery

Well, it is.  And to be absolutely straight about it, that money was going to come from cap and trade.  That was where we were going to get a substantial portion of it from.  With cap and trade now stymied in the US and in Australia, in those two places at least, it is a very open question as to how we honour that commitment.  And to fail to honour that commitment will be a disaster because ever since Rio in 1992 we’ve been promising that kind of money and quite honestly those developing countries have run out of patience.

Robert Manne

I follow the American side of it reasonably closely or as much as I can, and I have to say even at the time I found it hard to believe that in its present atmosphere the US Congress would make large amounts of money available for that process.  What do you think about that?

Tim Flannery

The Congress isn’t really making the money available, it’s coming from the trade. 

Robert Manne

Well, they’ll take it in two stages.  I find it hard to believe that the US Congress would in the foreseeable future have a cap and trade system and therefore if that’s going to be the source of the revenue from the US side, it seemed to me hard to see how it could ever eventuate.

Tim Flannery

Well, looking at it from the point of view of the DOE and people like Steve Chu and others, there was a great deal of optimism last year that a cap and trade might get passed.  That may have been political naivety.  Certainly the whole health debate has slowed down and been put on the back burner and at the same time public sentiment has shifted.  People in the US are just sick of current circumstances, real unemployment at whatever it is, 18% and so forth, there’s a lot of hardship around and what we saw in the New England vote to replace Ted Kennedy – people are just sick of government and so they’re going to vote against them.  So it is a really hostile environment to try to bring cap and trade in.  There are a couple of new initiatives though, which are trying to do that and this is, what do they call it, cap and, oh God, it’s giving 70% of the money back to the taxpayers.  So it’s a very simple bill, only 34 pages.  That sort of thing.

Robert Manne

It seems to me with the US that Obama is only able to take on one big change at a time and all of the year was devoted to getting the health reform through. 

Tim Flannery

This one will be fiscal reform.

Robert Manne

And the next year seems to be fiscal reform and that’s going to be a hugely difficult task for him.  By then, you’re getting to the third or fourth year of the presidency.  I actually want this to be an optimistic session so I’m not going to push too hard, and also when I read stuff, climate change is remarkably low in American political consciousness.  When Americans are asked, where do you rate it? it comes as issue 10 or 15.  Particularly now with unemployment and so on.

Tim Flannery

Yes, well look, that is true.  There’s some hope however in the unique way Americans do things.  There are three court cases pending against major polluters, coal polluters, at the moment in the US, any one of which could turn this whole issue into a tobacco-like issue.

Robert Manne

And work through the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Tim Flannery

They’ve just pledged I understand not to use the EPA powers to do this.  I haven’t caught up with the details – just in the last couple of days I’ve heard that this has happened, that they’ve said they won’t.  But what will happen is if the courts go against the big polluters, they will come to government for help, for regulation.  At the moment Peabody Coal, I don’t know if you know, have got a court case against the EPA.  A very toxic environment over there.  Based on the East Anglia email dispute and the mistake in the IPCC report about the Himalayan glaciers.  That’s just arguing that the science is bogus so the EPA has no right to regulate.  So this is Peabody Coal who is going to be buying one of…

Robert Manne

So that’s going to be a very important test case.

Tim Flannery

I think their chances are Buckley’s and none as far as I can see but you never know.  We’ll just see what happens.  So it’s a very litigious environment at the moment, but that could drive change.

Robert Manne

Now, in order to drive optimism a bit, you said before that China was doing some remarkable things internally even though they haven’t committed to a target.  They’ve committed to energy intensity.  Reduction of a very significant kind.  Could you say a little bit about the things you think China is doing which are positive.

Tim Flannery

Well, what they’ve committed to is an energy intensity target, so they’re going to reduce their energy intensity quite significantly.

Robert Manne

Forty percent.

Tim Flannery

Yeah, and said they may go further.  This was before the ?? [29.37] but we haven’t heard much of it since.  But you know China is going through this incredible revolution at the moment.  They’re going to be housing in cities something like the population of North America over the next few decades, so there’s massive growth going on there.  They are struggling with how to do this in any way, shape or form sustainably, I think it’s very clear they can’t continue on the present trajectory and they really are diversifying in terms of energy generation – I think China is now the world’s biggest production of wind energy, or wind turbines and so forth.  They’re investing very heavily in electric cars.  They’re investing in solar obviously and other things.  So there’s a great diversification going on.  And just at the corporation groups like China Power International have spun out renewable energy companies that are responsible for the carriage of this.  So all of that is good stuff and the reason it’s not resulting in emissions reduction is that the growth in energy demand is so great.  China lives, it’s a bit like India, it lives with a perpetual energy drought, so that they’re always trying to catch up with demand.

Robert Manne

Well, one interpretation that I’d be interested to see if you agree with this is that this century is going to be China’s century, from their point of view and that in terms of the economic future, if they, because they’re a central economy still in many ways, if they invest huge amounts of money in renewable energy, they can lead the technology worldwide and thus economically they will have a huge kind of leap beyond the free market, capitalist countries.  Do you think that’s how they think?

Tim Flannery

Look, I suspect, to be honest with you, I think that what they think about internal stability, the life with the communist party of China is under threat at the moment by potential civil unrest.  Part of that is around the environment.  Part of it’s around the economy.  And just part of it’s about the process of democratisation.  And I think that they see that addressing this issue as just being fundamental to their own survival.  Quite honestly.  It’s as cynical and simple as that.  But it’s interesting to see Tony Abbott borrow policies from them, including this idea that you buy clean energy.  This is exactly what they do in China so you know, it works fabulously in the command economy.  I don’t know how it’s going to work in Australia.  We’ll find out.

Robert Manne

I want to talk about some of what I think of as the politics of climate change in a minute.  You sounded fairly optimistic that things could be better at Mexico at the end of the year.  I don’t want to put you on the spot but can you give a sort of prediction as to how things might not be as chaotic in the end and as difficult as they were at Copenhagen.

Tim Flannery

It’s going to be smaller, obviously.  President Calderon has been deeply involved with this stuff and is very competent with it all.  I think that it’s the perfect location to deal with the forest issue.  It’s near Central and South America.  There’ll be a big buy-in from those groups.  It’s a big thing that needs to be done.  I don’t know how much beyond that will get done, to be honest with you, but I think we’ll see another step.  One of the things we always assume and tend to hope from these meetings is that we’ll kind of complete it somehow, a bit like we hope that there’ll be that killer blow, the moment when it will be actually solved.  But the problem isn’t of that nature really.  It’s a much more holistic and difficult problem that’s going to take a series of small steps that will hopefully add up and one day we’ll wake up and think all of those steps have taken us a long way but no one of them seem like a major victory.

Robert Manne

I took it from something we were talking about, that Paul and you and I were talking about before, just a minute ago, that you think maybe there can be a change in global consciousness, if some major environmental catastrophe takes place, like a major part of one of the ice shelfs snapping away.  Is that how you think?

Tim Flannery

Not really.  That was a bit of a throw-away comment.  My yardstick… I think we’ll have a very successful and bigger step forward the day that we hold one of the cops (??) [33.54] in Beijing or Washington, because then there’s a lot of national pride involved. And things will get done.  Denmark’s a country of four million people, four and a half million, with a new Prime Minister – it wasn’t the ideal place to hold this meeting, in retrospect.  I think it would have been much better to hold it in Beijing or Washington.  But that’s not the way history played out.

Robert Manne

Now, if you don’t mind, let’s talk about what I think of as the cultural politics of climate change.  As I said earlier we talked a year or so ago, La Trobe.  Since that time it seems to me there has been a quite astonishing increase in what some people think of as climate change scepticism and what other people, including myself, think of as climate change denialism.  Firstly I want to ask you if that is the case, that your sense that that’s been an increasing movement, or whether that’s an optical illusion on my part.

Tim Flannery

I think it has been increasing.  I think it’s been a carefully orchestrated campaign.  I don’t know whether you’ve ever been defamed in the media but…

Robert Manne

I’m sure you don’t ask that seriously.

Tim Flannery

The way they do it though is they’ll often put out a bit of a teaser on a Friday, you know, with some serious allegations in it, on front page, page 1.  And then on Saturday, page 3, they’ll have a more extended story, documenting your supposed perfidy or whatever else, because people have got time to read then and digest it a bit.  And then on the Monday they’ll have a little stinger, just to remind everyone what a prick you are, you know.  And in some ways this whole climate scepticism campaign has followed the same sort of pattern, that just prior to the meeting, that terrible allegation of the East Anglia emails, which is all just insubstantial, and then the release of what people have known about for a long time as an error, during January when people have got a bit of time to think about it and absorb what it really means, and then the little sting about the Netherlands a bit later.  Very carefully orchestrated.  It’s all been put together in a brief by Peabody Coal to challenge the EPA – that’s their case.  I think this is… I’m quite cynical about it.  This has been a long and carefully considered attack on climate science.

Robert Manne

It seems to me that there are many… if it’s true, as I think it is that there has been an increase in this scepticism, denialism, I think there are two plausible, there are more than two, but the two most plausible theories as to why it’s happening, one that you’ve talked about which is a deliberate disinformation campaign coming from the industries who have the most to lose by the real pressure being placed on fossil fuels.  That’s the one that you think is true.  The other possibility, it seems to me, which is almost a psychological explanation, global psychological explanation, is that the change from a fossil fuel to a non-fossil fuel energy world is so huge that there is an incredible desire to believe that it doesn’t need to be done, a desire that is internalised both by governments and by businesses and even in a way by individuals, that is, this is almost using a quasi-Freudian explanation that the desire is to deep that we’re looking for a reason to think we don’t need to change.  I don’t know whether you think there’s anything there…

Tim Flannery

I don’t they’re mutually exclusive explanations.  Any good disinformation campaign has to fall on fertile ground, you know, it has to include an element of truth and I think that’s perhaps both things working together.  I think that’s probably right.  And the fact that we’ve had a cold winter in the northern hemisphere also sort of helped, you know.  So we have moved backwards in terms of public acceptance of the science.

Robert Manne

And I don’t think people have fully recorded how big a thing that is.  I would think really since the Enlightenment, and the only real exception I can find to this is the challenge to Charles Darwin by the church, because it so interfered with religious world view, or appeared to.  I think science in general has had a remarkable authority in our culture, particularly the western culture, but for there to be such a well-developed science as climate science and for there to be almost such a complete sensual conclusion not on detail, but on the general, that human activity has caused through fossil fuels, a change, a warming of the globe.  For that to be challenged so generally, particularly by the right of politics, seems to me an incredible cultural moment.

Tim Flannery

It is an incredible cultural moment.  I view it as being a bit more profound than what you perhaps have portrayed in those words, because ultimately the solution to these problems involves a fundamental shift in humanity and our relationship with the planet.  If you think back ten thousand years ago, we were all basically hunter gatherers, living in family sized groups, not knowing anything about the rest of the world and fighting between ourselves.  Somehow over the last ten thousand years we’ve built this super-organism, this integrated thing which first coalesced as tribes as so on, then into nations, empires and then into two global blocks, during the Cold War.  All of that is now giving way to a different sort of synthetic entity, which is being driven by increased globalisation around, you know, the economy, the internet and everything else.  And an emergent characteristic of that new entity has to be awareness of the planet, because in a sense we’re this intelligent entity that is inextricably bound with the planet and it becomes evident when you’re looking at it as a single entity.  That there are no more frontiers, there are no unexploited spaces, and so forth, we have to somehow live within that entity.  And that is enormously challenging to a whole lot of people.  People who just say, like my mate Richard Branson says, a lot of business people say, I look after my employees, I run a good business.  And Richard says, well, that describes a criminal syndicate very well, not a business in the modern world, and it’s true.  So you see, it’s very challenging, that view of what this new, emerging entity is, in terms of the way we operate and I think part of the push-back is almost a subliminal understanding of what a lot of this means.  That nations are going to become less important, that a lot of things that we hold dear are going to become less important and that all of that will force us to confront this fundamental issue, this disconnect between the way we live and the capacity of our planet.

Robert Manne

That we’re stumbling at the size of that shift, you’re saying.

Tim Flannery

We’re stumbling, but we’re being carried forward inexorably by a tide of change which won’t go away.

Robert Manne

Now you said, and I think one of the big questions I’d like to ask you is, how scientists, both climate scientists and scientists who understand what climate scientists are doing, whether they have responded with sufficient vigour and intelligence to the sceptical denial campaign, and whether they could do better.  What’s your judgment as to the scientific community and the nature of its response to the campaign you’ve described against their work?

Tim Flannery

They have done in my view, very little.  I think if you just go to individuals, and I don’t know any of those people at East Anglia, but I’ve seen interviews with them and so forth, the psychological stress they’re under is just enormous.  It really is, because there’s court cases, there’s all sorts of things happening around this now.  And there’s about, I don’t know how many commissions of enquiry.  There’s three or four.  The first one has come out, that important one I think by the British government …

Robert Manne

The House of Commons, I think…

Tim Flannery

Yes, which found they had no case to answer, effectively, which is wonderful, but there’s other ongoing investigations in this.  For those people, they’re fighting for their lives, really, their careers.

Robert Manne

Philip Jones sounds as if he’s almost at the point of collapse.  The main person involved…

Tim Flannery

That’s right.  Which is terrible.  So, expecting people like that to fight back is difficult.  And how would science fight back?  What would scientists do, really?  Restate the case.  And we can do it but you can see how easily it can be demolished by just misinformation.  I’ve taken a bit of a different view.  I’ve taken a bit of a step back and I’ve spent the last five years thinking about, and particularly the last twelve months writing another book about humanity in the context of the earth because I think the debate is going to move now on just from the climate science to a much broader perspective around sustainability and what it actually means, what it’s about.  Because I think once you understand that, the thing I was talking about earlier, what’s happening to us in the context of the planet, it becomes much more common sense.  Just to deal as a precautionary basis with this sort of thing.  And I think ultimately it is, it’s about ideas.  The difference between us and the ants, who also have their super-organisms, is that the ants’ super-organisms are all driven by genes.  Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene theory made manifest, basically.  Our super-organism is driven by ideas.  That’s all it is, it’s the idea of agriculture, it’s not agriculture itself that often spreads, or a technology that spreads, it’s the idea that spreads.  And so in this incredible sort of kingdom of ideas that we’ve built, ideas rule supreme.  So it’s ideas about what our relationship with the planet should be, what is acceptable, what the meaning of life is about and all the rest of it, that ultimately will drive these things.

Robert Manne

Well, you’ve stumbled on the… in the social sciences… the biggest perhaps debate of all, which is the relationship of ideas as against economic interests.  And I spend my whole life, as it were, wondering whether it’s ideas that drive things, or material interests.  The case that you’re going to be making is one that I’m going to be very sympathetic to, that ideas are the drivers of human affairs.

Tim Flannery

They’re the drivers of everything.  You can see it in the development of the human super-organism.  We borrow ideas all the time from each other.  When two civilisations meet they exchange ideas.  Sometimes they fight, but they absorb and exchange ideas.  Just going back to that question of whether it’s economics or ideas, if you think back to Darwin, there was a fertile ground there for a wilful misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas.  Not helped by the fact that the title of his book included the term “favoured races” which no-one read about as favoured races of ants or worms, but Englishmen.  And at the same time Darwin was publishing that work, Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder of the evolutionary theory, was also publishing, but from a totally different perspective.  From a holistic, Lovelockian sort of perspective of the planet.  And it’s no accident I think that in the 19th century that Darwin’s ideas triumphed.  Because there was a sort of tide in the affairs of people at that point that carried those ideas on.  I think there’s a tide now going in a very different direction.  It’s carrying the Wallacian view if you want, of a holistic view of people and planet that is moving forward.  So I don’t know if we can tease apart, if you want, economics and ideas as easily as we might.

Robert Manne

Except that with the Darwinian challenge, it was a challenge to another set of ideas which was the old religious view of the world.

Tim Flannery

It carried a secret weapon in itself, didn’t it?  This was survival of the fittest, but the secret weapon was the destruction of religion and of course religion was the only leash holding back that survival of the fittest stuff in the 19th century, beyond some humanism…

Robert Manne

But perhaps what I’m saying here, and this is the part of me that is slightly sympathetic to Marxism I suppose, that there were no economic interests as far as I could see, threatened by the Darwinian revolution in thought, whereas the thing we were saying earlier is that amongst the most powerful corporations in the world, the fossil fuel industries, they have, at least in the short term, a lot to lose by the challenge that science is laying before them. 

Tim Flannery

I don’t know Robert, to me the theory of revolution was published simultaneously by two people in two separate papers in 1858.  Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin.  Dramatically different views of what evolution actually meant.  Wallace took his revolutionary ideas and developed a holistic view of the planet and people and the context of it and became one of the great campaigners against pollution, against injustice, against all of this sort of stuff that has characterised our 20th century.  Darwin was a very much reductionist, scientific thinker, who followed the implications of the theory of evolution down to its impact on orchids and worms and crabs and all this sort of stuff.  But it was his view, that more mechanistic view that was taken up by industry.  So the two things were there from the very beginning.  It wasn’t as if we didn’t have a choice.  But the times were such that that more mechanistic view, I think, prevailed.

Robert Manne

The final thing I’d like to talk about before we invite the audience to join in, and it’s going a fair way down from these lofty heights, is Australia and Australian politics over the question of climate change.  The most important thing I think since we last spoke, is the change in leadership in the Coalition, or the Liberal Party.  And I know that you’re privately interested and have publicly said a lot about it as well, which is the move from the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull to the leadership of Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party.  And I wonder if you could say a little bit about what you think the significance of that is for Australia and climate change.

Tim Flannery

The first thing to say is that it was decided by a single vote, an absentee vote, and that if one of the members hadn’t been ill…

Robert Manne

Fran Bailey.

Tim Flannery

Fran Bailey, yes exactly, if she hadn’t been in hospital, if she’d been allowed in that absentee vote, Malcolm Turnbull would still be leader.  So it was a very, very close called thing.  What we’ve seen in the resurgence of the far right of the Liberal Party is very dismaying, from my perspective.  Their climate policy is so risible.  If a policy of similar quality was developed in the education sphere or the health sphere they’d be laughed out of court.  It’s just that people haven’t really taken the time to really try to tease out how ridiculous that policy is.  The government’s done a good job in saying it’s twelve times more expensive than their own.  But the other astonishing thing that the party of free enterprise moved away from the market as a solution.  So that I think just tells you the strength of feeling in the far right wing of the Liberal Party.  It’s more important to make money out of coal than it is to stand by your free market principles.  I think it’s as simple as that, I really do.  And that is a really tough one to beat.  It’s interesting that in Australia we’ve seen the right wing party do rather similar things to the public as in the US, which is develop a sort of content-free zone, just populism, political populism, which is very, very dangerous.  And I fear that decent people will now either leave the Liberal Party or decline to join or engage and it will end up a party devoid of talent.

Robert Manne

I don’t know whether it’s fair to ask you this, but I think you were both friendly with Malcolm Turnbull and very hopeful about where he would lead the Liberal Party on this question.  Is that right?

Tim Flannery

I was, absolutely.  Perhaps part of my dismay comes from that personal connection but I really do have the highest regard for Malcolm Turnbull and always have.  He’s a tough guy, but you need tough people in politics to do the tough things.  The one thing I can absolutely assure you about with him is that a coal company coming to him asking for a special deal, he’d just laugh in their face.  Because he knows about business.  People can be awed by the business case when they haven’t been in the business world.  If you’ve been in the business world, you take a much more sceptical view.  And I think he had the potential to be a great Prime Minister.  I really do.  But he obviously won’t have the chance now. 

Robert Manne

My view of him, for what it’s worth, is that he had many admirable qualities, but one that he doesn’t have is political savvy.

Tim Flannery

Yes.

Robert Manne

And I think, given the closeness of the vote after he had launched an attack on the right wing Minchinites, I think it was a mistake.  I think he could have played his cards with much greater savvy than he did, so that character in a way or his lack of political nous in the end proved decisive.

Tim Flannery

I think it’s a lack of patience as well.  He’s not the world’s most patient person.  He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and there was an abundance of those in his last days.  And you’re right.  Perhaps he’s not the right person to make the political climb but I think he’s the right sort of person in many ways to make the decisions, once he’s there.  And not everyone will agree with his politics, like every Prime Minister, if he was ever there.  He’d do things we’d all object to, but I just think that it was good for Australian politics that he entered the fray, he did the right thing by the climate issue because he understood and he believed that it was the right thing to do and he never backed away from that, which I think says a bit about his bravery in pretty tough circumstances.  I know it had a big personal impact on him.  He’s not someone who becomes discomforted easily.  He was suffering, I think, towards the end of that time, just from the backstabbing, being unable to trust people. 

Robert Manne

Are you still advising the Rudd government in this area?

Tim Flannery

I’m working with Penny Wong and that’s the thing about all of this, I’m apolitical but I’m happy to help good people on either side.  And I work with Penny Wong in the climate area and particularly I chair the Coastal Committee for the Federal Government now.  And I should say the Copenhagen Climate Council closed itself down in February this year which was a great thing to do because in our time we’d done what we wanted to do and moved on.  So I’m a little bit freer now.  I took up that role with Penny.

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