Is there hope after Copenhagen? - part 3

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 3

Transcript

Robert Manne

Therefore, I don’t know how much you can say about the Rudd government – this is going to be public, but many people here and many people that I know are disappointed that since Copenhagen and since the change in the Coalition and the failure of the bi-partisanship which would have led to an emissions trading scheme, many people have been rather disappointed by the apparent lack of resolve.  I don’t quite know what the Rudd government is meant to have done, but the apparent lack of resolve in the last few months… I suppose the fair question to ask you is, in your advice politically, if you are asked a political question, what should they now do, given that there is an Abbott-led Coalition, given that they don’t have the numbers in the Senate, even if they went with the Greens, they still wouldn’t have the numbers, what do you think the Rudd government should do to get an emissions trading scheme through the Australian parliament?

Tim Flannery

Can I first just say that I don’t think anyone was more disappointed at the Copenhagen outcome than Kevin Rudd.  I really think he had put a huge amount of effort into this.  He was a friend of the Chair which was quite an important position.  He worked tirelessly trying to get an agreement and I really think he was deeply personally disappointed.  Where we go from here it really is about domestic action.  I have a couple of things which I think should be done to regain public support.  One initiative I think needs to happen is that we need a local equivalent of the IPCC voice, we need some sort of body in Australia that represents Australian science at the university level, with CSIRO, whatever, that can give formal advice to government on matters of climate change, and he held accountable nationally.  I think that’s really important.  So all of the universities, all of the institutions, all of the academies, should be in that, doing that.  So in terms of gaining some credibility that’s an important thing to do.  I think we’ve got to get some of the programs right where wheels have fallen off.  At the moment Greg Combet and Penny Wong are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get the insulation scheme and the Green Loans scheme worked out, and they’re important.  They need to happen.  The other thing that really has to be sorted out in the near future is the RET scheme – at the moment it looks like we’re not going to make our mandated renewable energy target of 20% without some significant reform, and that significant reform has to centre around policies which will foster medium term… things which are energy alternatives which are not available today but which will be available a decade from now.  So concentrated PV and geothermal particularly need some support.  So all of that has to happen.

Robert Manne

Is there energy within the government along these lines, do you think?

Tim Flannery

Well, it depends who you ask.  If you ask Martin Ferguson, you get a very different answer I think to if you asked some other people.  But these are things that have to be done.  Now Martin’s view on this would be that coal is the future.  We’ve got a sunk cost of billions and billions and billions of dollars in coal therefore we’re going to have carbon capture and storage and we’re not going to spend money on other energy alternatives, because it’s not in the national interest.  I just profoundly disagree with that idea.  I think we actually need to have an energy policy which honours the mandated renewable energy target, develops indigenous expertise in some of the areas of real national advantage, and delivers on them, so that’s important.

Robert Manne

Almost everything I read from a non-scientist’s point of view, because I’m not a scientist, but everything I read suggests that carbon capture and storage is highly unlikely to succeed in making a large difference, even in the long term.

Tim Flannery

There is a real divergence of opinion on that and I’m one who argued for investment in this area and I continue to do, but what I think we need is a use-by date on that stuff.  We need to be in a position for investors to say, three to five years from this now this is going to work, or it isn’t, and investment has to be on a scale to allow us to see that.  Though, but at the same time we’re doing that, we should be investing in other energy alternatives as well.

Robert Manne

And geothermal is still your main card?

Tim Flannery

Geothermal and concentrated PV are the two that in the medium term, I think, could deliver real large-scale energy to Australia globally so I think that’s what we should be putting money into.  So that’s, for what it’s worth, there’s that, but then there is the issue of how we honour the commitment under the Copenhagen Accord for the hundred million dollars, or our part of that, for developing country adaptation.  How we actually honour this emissions target, the reduction in the cap, and we can’t do that, quite frankly, without a cap and trade ?? [58.37].  There are other ways of doing it but they’re all messy and difficult.  If I was… well, to be absolutely honest with you about the Fed Government, I’d be starting to desegregate the cap and trade into industrial sectors and I would be saying for transport and fuel we should just be doing a straight tax on fossil fuels and that encourages bio-fuels and we’ve seen in British Columbia where they’ve put a $5 a tonne carbon tax on, it’s almost all on transport fuels, because most of their electricity is hydro.  It actually is hastening the uptake of bio-fuel which is fantastic.  So that sort of thing we know works in that sector.  For stationary energy we have to have a cap and trade scheme because you and I when we pay a quarterly bill don’t get a clear message from that about renewable energy or not.  So I’d be trying to desegregate it a bit and do that.  And put a significant, a high enough price on it so that we force the closure of the least efficient coal fired plants over the next decade down.

Robert Manne

There is politically a very simple way in which the Rudd government could get their cap and trade and that is to hold a double dissolution from July onwards.

Tim Flannery

It’s a high risk strategy.

Robert Manne

Well, it’s an election but it really isn’t different from holding an ordinary election. 

Tim Flannery

We might end up with three Family First senators.  It’s a risk.  I can see what you’re saying but I think there could be some good arguments…

Robert Manne

If they go to that election they either win it or they lose it.  If they win it, then they can have their joint sitting and unless the numbers are really peculiar, they will have enough numbers to pass whatever they want on the triggers, and one of the triggers for the double dissolution will be the emission trading legislation.  I must say personally I will judge their sincerity a bit on whether they go that route.  I mean, if they had a double dissolution, they wouldn’t rely on either left or right, the Greens or Family First or anyone else – they would have the numbers to do what they want.

Tim Flannery

By themselves?

Robert Manne

Well, because there’s a joint sitting and if they have a majority in the House of Representatives the Senate really is irrelevant, for one joint sitting, and that’s the strangeness of the Australian constitution.  So if they go the double dissolution route, they then have the numbers I think.  They either lose, in which case it’s irrelevant, or they win and they have the numbers to do for that one moment what they want and that’s the Australian constitution.  So I will judge the sincerity… and I’m sure they’ve thought like this… I will judge their sincerity on whether, around the middle of the year, they won’t do it before the middle of the year because that would put the Senate and House of Representatives out of synch again, because of the technical question of the constitution – if they do it they can get through an emissions trading scheme.  So, we’ll see. 

I think another big question and I’ve got just one more after this, another big question and this comes particularly from the work of Guy Pearce, who I’m sure you’re aware of, the big question is whether Australia will ever, because of how much it gets advantage from coal, whether we’ll ever begin to break our coal addiction.  So much of our power is produced by coal, so much of our export income is produced by coal – I see no even debate about this, let alone desire to change away from coal towards renewable energy.  But I wonder what you think – whether there’s any realistic prospect.

Tim Flannery

I see debate about our domestic situation, whether we should be phasing our coal and moving to natural gas and renewable and so forth, and even the Howard government wanted to move to nuclear, which was presumably away from coal.  So I think there’s some debate around the domestic situation and really, you know, I think the last time I looked which was a few years ago, the total value of the generating of the coal fired capacity around the country was 40-odd million dollars, which is not a lot.  It’s a couple of years’ surplus a few years back.  So we’re not dealing with things that will break the bank, doing that.  It’s the export dollars that are the issue, and because the votes there are so regionally-based, that’s a problem.  But as an exporting country, I don’t think the onus is on us to actually deal with that.  Under the Kyoto Agreement the liability lies with the person that burns the coal, not with the one that exports it.  And in a way that makes sense, because in our situation in Australia, even if we decided to stop coal exports tomorrow, the slack would be taken up by South Africa, Indonesia and others, so there’s an argument that we wouldn’t achieve anything, so I think that realistically the best thing to do, which we have been doing, is arguing for an effective global treaty and our Prime Minister has been very active in that and that might seem to be acting against the national interest I suppose, but, really, the outcome is going to be a long term one and it’s going to be several decades.  We forget don’t we – you and I grew up in an Australia that rode on the sheep’s back.  Sheep farmers in the Mallee would have their prize ram in the back of the Rolls Royce, down the main street.  And then Australia’s gone.  And now we’re into this era of iron ore and coal.  And Australia will go too, and we need to think about that medium term future.  You know, thirty years from now the world will look different.

Robert Manne

One final question.  And it’s what I decided to call the session and I want you to answer briefly because you’ve said so much really, already, about this.  Do you think there is or is there not hope for the earth?  After Copenhagen?

Tim Flannery

I’m absolutely convinced there’s hope for the earth.  Look, we face enormous challenges but if we take the long view and look at the last ten thousand years, we’ve come a very long way.  We are now building this synchretic global civilisation – the first one that’s ever existed.  This capacity to deal with a whole series of problems.  There’s not just the climate problem – there’s a whole series of them we have to deal with.  But no, I think there is hope, but there’s no time to waste. 

Paul Johnson

Well, I think now we’ve got an opportunity to take some questions and have some interaction with others in the room.  We have a microphone at the front, so could I ask those who wish to ask questions to identify themselves and then please come to the microphone.

Ian Blair

My name is Ian Blair, I’m a sustainability consultant.  I’d like you to comment on linking the fact that we’ve got big debate on health, big debate on population, a large number of the community supports controlling population – if we link that to climate change, which health and population are going to have a major impact on climate change, is that a way forward?

Tim Flannery

It’s interesting you ask that question.  I just this morning came from the Healthy Parks and People Conference, down in Southbank, where people were debating just this issue of how do we link environmental health with human health, and the links are very clear, and they’re there.  Just as a relatively trivial example, but an important one on some levels, one of the presenters there was talking about the impacts on child health, of having parks available, of having natural areas where kids can just go and play.  It has a big effect on obesity apparently and on psychological problems, like Attention Deficit Disorder and so forth.  So it is all linked in my view and I think we somehow have to come to this holistic view.  You and I and everyone in this room, we’re just animated bits of the earth’s crust, you know, and there’s a carbon flux that runs through our body, back to the earth and into the atmosphere and everything else, it’s all linked up.

Paul Johnson

Tim, if I could just elaborate on that.  The latest set of UN population projections, global population projections, are for a 50% increase in the world’s… in the number of people living here, in an unprecendently short period of time, compared to that ten thousand year trajectory.  And that, it seems to me, poses another challenge to this, as it were, competition between ideas and self-interest, because when we’ve got 50% more people to feed, many of those people will be living in cities, because cities grow… mop up most of the population growth, cities are very expensive in terms of energy demands, doesn’t that population growth… we’ve got the issues currently the issues of climate change and the impact of the carbon footprint of human development, the exacerbation of that through population growth and the imperative to look after yourself and your children, you know, which in a sense drives the human species, seems to me to be another fundamental challenge.  And it’s in a sense in steady state.  You might say, yes, ideas will win out over self-interest, but clearly the global population isn’t in a steady state and isn’t that going to pose another major challenge and possibly trauma, with that population growth.

Tim Flannery

If you look carefully at the biennial UN population projections, which were released in March this year for 2009, they’re extremely interesting because what they are arguing is that by 2050 there will be about 9 billion people on the planet.  And among the assumptions they make in driving those projections is that we will win the war against AIDS, so the AIDS deaths in Africa which currently significantly impact on population growth will be obliterated. They also argue that developed countries will increase their population growth levels, so places like Australia and the US will increase their growth levels, so how is it we can have a global population which is topping out at 9 billion, given those projections.  And the other thing about those projections that is so important is that for the first time since figures have been kept and amassed, the population projection for 2050 is smaller than for the last projection period.  Right, so it’s always been going up.  It’s now going down for the first time, even with those bedded assumptions in it.  Now why is that?  The reason is that the projections also suggest that the demographic transition which most of the world is experiencing now, will be experienced in sub-Saharan Africa and a couple of other poor regions within the next forty years, that family size will be down to 2.5.  Now what that tells us is an incredible thing, that this demographic transition started in Europe a couple of generations back – my grandmother had more kids than a bloody rabbit, but anyway, that’s how it was.  That demographic transition, within the span of a century and a half or thereabouts, will have encompassed all of humanity.  Now it seems to me that those trends, and I don’t want to put too much of a gloss on it, are very optimistic.  The big question is – can the earth feed, clothe and house, nine billion human beings, for a limited period of time, because population will decline after that point.  Slowly, but it will decline.  And I think the answer to that is an emphatic Yes and the reason I say that is that one of the qualities of eco-systems that makes them so interesting, this is my own area of study, really, is that it’s not a zero sum gain, and, God, I want to take a second to think these… all the gum trees on this property here are actually a combination of several organisms – there’s the gum tree itself and then around the rootlets of the trees there is microrisal fungi that give access to minerals and nutrients to the tree.  And microrisal fungi by itself is hardly anything, the tree by itself would be a weedy and weak sapling, but put them together and you get a healthy organism. Eco-systems are built like that – you put two things together and you get more than the sum of the parts.  And agriculture is just a great example – a farmer putting cattle into a monoculture of grass will get less productivity than if there’s a dozen species of the grass in there because there’s more diversity, more resilience and everything else.  That’s the way eco-systems work and I’m convinced that as we learn about these eco-systems and apply the lessons of the new green revolution we will be able to feed and clothe nine billion people and I think with our energy systems, the potential is also there in the next forty years to fundamentally transform energy.  We’ll see it I think in the next half decade, with electric cars particularly.  The sort of era we’re moving into now, it’s going to come very quickly and it will be very surprising to people, the way electric cars start rolling out.  So you might call me an optimist, but I think if you look carefully at the trends and figures, that there is some room for optimism in that sort of stuff.  If we were still where we were in the 1990s with population going to grow for ever, it would be a different matter.  But I think we’ve seen in the last set of figures, the first glimmerings of some real hope.  Now of course tiny variations in birth rates can blow it out either way, you know, if the demographic transition in Africa is delayed a decade, we’ll end up on a trajectory to 10 or 12 billion.  If we get there a bit sooner we might stabilise at 8 billion.  So a lot still hangs in the balance, but for the first time we’re seeing the beginnings I think, of a very interesting shift.

Paul Johnson

More questions, or comments.

Graham Hedley

Hello, Graham Hedley from Up Electronics.  Tim, I was going to ask a different question but your last answer really got me thinking.  You were saying that we will be able to cope, the eco-systems will be able to cope with a population which peaks and then starts to drop away.  But one of the drivers, at least in western countries, is this growth in GDP which I don’t see any reason that we would expect that to drop away along with population.  How do you think that this growing wealth and the impact on the need for resources will… this is a question which is out fifty years so it’s damned hard, but what are your views?

Tim Flannery

See I reckon Robert’s discipline is what’s going to solve all of this.  Robert knows more than anyone else.  Social scientists and comparative social scientists know that, I guess, that what is not really important, the wealth is not really important, but it’s the social status that’s important, it’s the signalling to do with that.  And it’s only, well, we always have done to some degree, we’ve signalled with wealth, but we haven’t always signalled with conspicuous consumption and there have been periods in human history when people have signalled their status by building a monastery for example, or a school or whatever.  So I think the sort of answers to that question lie in our social systems. How do we… All right, I’ll tell it from another perspective.  When I was a young bloke at this university, if you had a car, you’d get a girl. It was as simple as that.  And you see it now with these guys with their four wheel drives, running around the place as status symbols.  What would happen actually if all of the girls decided, no, I like the guy with the bicycle.  He’s much fitter, he’s more committed, he’s just a better bloke, you know, the bicycle will do me fine.  If they wore t-shirts on them showing their lovely bodies with bicycles instead of, you know, I love the bloke with the four wheel drive, I think we’d have a social revolution.  Now I don’t want to put too much pressure on young women on the campus, but it’s the social aspects of these things that are important.  So that was a very frivolous kind of an example, but, so, I think we need to start driving social change.  For me, a four wheel drive vehicle, instead of being a status symbol, should be something that meets with mild derision, you know, and some irritation.  Because they’re these large and inefficient vehicles that block up our roads and cost us all in terms of, you know, time and pollution and so forth.  So, the way we view those things is important.  I don’t know whether that answers your question.

Graham Hedley

The answer you just gave is a very Darwinian one but our economy, the way that western governments drive our economy is based on…  I loved your answer, but it was essentially a Darwinian one, based on how we would behave as a society, but at least in western civilisations our economic situation is driven by growth, everything about welfare economics is growth-driven.

Tim Flannery

I guess so.  Look, I’m not an expert in this area, but I do know that GDP doesn’t measure overall wellbeing, it just measures growth, so maybe we do need a new set of factors.  And in fact one of the things that’s interesting I’ve found is very difficult with governments is the triple bottom line accounting that they tend to push down onto business, which is very good, I suggest business take up, they are very reluctant to do themselves.  So, part of that is, with the population issue is a great example, we now have a Population Minister, but will he apply triple bottom line accounting to his portfolio.  And so, OK, there’s an economic need here; there’s a social need which might be different, and there’s an environmental need.  And how do we mesh all that together into a coherent policy?  So, I can see what you’re saying, but maybe I’ll remain optimistic…

Robert Manne

Can I say, two very simple things about this very general area.  One is that there is through the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and others, a very serious attempt now to change from Gross Domestic Product, based on growth, to a growth wellbeing index, or whatever it’s called, in which environment, amongst other things, is taken into account.  And one of the great transformations would be if that measure in the end replaced GDP as the way in which we measure how things go, because with GDP, growth is the measure.  The other thing I’ve privately thought for a long time, this is in Australia and the English speaking world, I wish that we would put into our thinking the experience of Europe and wouldn't think that the world was constituted of the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Australia.  I think there’s a very interesting book called The Spirit Level which shows on so many human measures things in Europe, particularly north west Europe, are doing so much better in terms of equality and the delivery of wellbeing than they are in the English speaking world.  And I think that we are very much still transfixed by the idea that the successful parts of the world are the English speaking democracies, and I think the European experience would be… it would be wonderful if we factored it in much more in our discussion on these matters. 

Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson’s my name.  I just wondered what your views were on nuclear power stations.   And I’ll just sort of short comment about England, America and so forth.  Robin Boyd coined the name Austerica actually.  I think that’s what we should call Australia today.

Tim Flannery

What I’ve said now for some time about nuclear power is that it is inevitably going to be part of the global energy mix.  It’s already important overseas and there are a number of parts of the world where it is probably the most sensible solution, places like China where there’s huge population densities, very little in the way of renewable resources, or at least not enough for those population densities and where the choice effectively is between coal and nuclear.  So in those sort of places, we’re going to see a build up in increasing nuclear power plants.  In a place like Australia I don’t think we’ll ever need nuclear power.  We will have got 22 million people in a continent with the world’s third best wind reserves, the best sunlight you could ever want, the world’s single best geothermal energy reserve, abundant natural gas – I just can’t see that we’d ever need it.  And also we have a really ugly history of experience with the atom.  It’s one of the great tragedies of society that we decided that… once Einstein realised that matter and energy were the same thing, we decided to use that knowledge to build a bomb rather than a power plant.  And of course in Australia we’ve had horrendous things happen in the Centre as a result of that.  So we’re really allergic to that.  Politically very, very difficult.

Barry Jones

Yes, I was just going to say I’m inclined to agree with you on that – Australia’s got sunshine galore.  As a matter of fact I do spend most of the summer trying to keep away from the sunshine actually.  And I had to have a couple of growths on the side of my face removed – essentially excess exposure to sun.  But there’s been virtually no attempt to use solar concentrate actually, ?? [81.17] there was some talk of a solar concentrated power station up at Mildura but nothing happened.

Tim Flannery

That was a national tragedy.  The company that was doing that, Solar Systems, was based here in Victoria and had a factory at Dandenong, was all set to go, and due to the global financial crisis and what I would call inflexible bureaucratic response to their problem, they’ve vanished.

Barry Jones

I was listening to the BBC last year and there’s a guy called Day, actually, who spends all his time wandering around looking at factories and other things, and Frito Lay which is the snakefood arm of Pepsi Cola, I think they put in a solar concentrator in one of their factories, actually, two years ago.  Actually the person talking about said, well, the technology’s there – it’s just a question of using it.

Tim Flannery

And 240 watts per square metre is a lot of energy.

Paul Johnson

And I think too Tim that highlights the issue of the importance of public policy.  If you go to a number of European countries, obviously Germany, if you go to Spain for instance, and you see down in the southwest coast of Spain, row after row of wind turbines.  You Also have solar power there.  The same technology is available anywhere in the world.  The implementation is due to government policy that gives either tax or price advantages and that comes back to your issue about the renewable energy incentives here in Australia. Other questions?

Kristen Bartram

Hi.  My name is Kristen Bartram and I’m a student at La Trobe, and real men do sail boats and have electric cars as far as I’m concerned.  My partner and I plan to make one child.  When I’m sort of thinking about this question to you, I’m thinking about all the families out there that are making three to seven children, many of which don’t even finish high school.  And I’m wondering what you think the future is for intelligence in society.

Tim Flannery

Oh, God.

Kristen Bartram

Do we have to implement some sort of a breeding control program?  Maybe licensing?

Tim Flannery

Can I answer that uncontroversial question for you?  Can I answer it in a slightly different way?  I’m convinced that human intelligence has been declining since the pleistocene.  For agriculturalists.  And the reason is that we’re not as challenged as we might be by circumstances.  Can you imagine what it was like for the first person to have a domestic dog in the camp?  So the dog would bark to warn you about the leopard, rather than having to be awake half the night.  Our system since then has been about accumulating more and more species around us to make life easier.  There is some data suggesting that our brains have actually shrunk as a result of that.  And certainly all of the species we’ve brought into our mixed flock have experienced a decreasing brain size.  And the great challenge for us over the past ten thousand years hasn’t been necessarily been intelligence as a farmer, it’s been immunity because all of those animals brought poxes and things with them, so we’ve actually built up a very sophisticated immune system.  And all of that has had a huge impact on human health.  We’ve become short, stunted people.  If you look at ancient Rome or Elizabethan English, we’re all little, you know, and malnourished.  Compare that with hunter gatherers.  As healthy as buggery.  The aboriginal people around Melbourne here, the Jaga Jaga brothers who handed the place, who signed the paper over to Batman, were six foot two and six foot four, two of them six foot two, and one six four, big healthy people.  And incredibly capable too, because they’re their own lawmakers, they make their own house, they make their own tools, they educate their own children, they find their own food, do things that we would be utterly lost trying to do. So they live in a very complex world and a very challenging world and they were very, very intelligent people and very physically competent.  But what happens when we come in contact with them?  It’s the commonality of us puny, stunted, less intelligent individuals that are part of this super-organism that wins out.  And our germs are part of that but there’s a whole lot of other stuff that’s part of that as well. So individually, we’re not very competent compared with what we were ten thousand years ago.  But communally, as part of the group, we’re more powerful than ever before.  I don’t know whether that answers your question.  I think there’s a few factors acting on intelligence. 

Kristen Bartram

I think you’re right.  When I’m sort of thinking about the population of the planet and I understand what you’re talking about – you’ve got groups of people interacting together.  I’m sort of watching a lot of people, especially in my extended family, producing thousands of children and wondering how these kids are actually going to participate in society that can’t even get the amount of water per person quite right, going ten, twenty years into the future.  Or oil for that matter.

Jenny McMillan

Jenny McMillan from the Faculty of Health Sciences here.  I was actually interested in your problem solving that led to the t-shirts, but I’m wondering beyond women wearing t-shirts with various slogans on them.  If you actually were in government, what would be the big ticket items that… what would be the decisions that you would make within the Australian context, to address climate change or at least the energy issues?

Paul Johnson

Prime Minister Flannery, over to you.

Tim Flannery

Well if you were unconstrained, just say you did have the power to do whatever you wanted to do, I’d certainly introduce a cap and trade bill, to be sure.  But one with less giveaways and more aggressive target.  I’d be certainly putting a lot more money into the medium term renewable options, so concentrate on the PV and geothermal energy and seeing those as part of national projects effectively, to build an economic base that’s going to be very valuable into the future.  I’d probably still be investing in carbon capture and storage technology.  And I would certainly be investing in a whole lot of efficiency gains – the sort of stuff the government’s been doing with insulation and so forth, but also into the broadacre management of agriculture and eco-systems because it’s in those systems, that’s where the interface of the carbon cycle really occurs.  And there’s a whole lot that can be done in that area as well to allow us to live more sustainably.  So all of those sort of things.  Increasing money for education.  Taking some subsidies off other businesses, the fossil fuel businesses and so forth, the less productive ones.  And making a much more transparent government.  I think that what Anna Bligh said about the need to reduce business contributions to the Liberal Party and so forth is centrally important.  Because at the moment, I won’t mince with words, they are a potentially corrupting influence.  You know.  And we need to work on our democracy, to make sure that our democracy represents our desire, and in a system that still has those loopholes in it, that’s not quite as possible.  So, all of that.

Paul Johnson

Time for one last question, if anyone wishes…

Lester Jones

First of all, thanks Tim for your advocacy for what I consider my children’s lifestyles and future.  It’s been much appreciated.  I’m Lester Jones from the Faculty of Health Sciences.  This is probably a question to all three of you, including Paul.  The university community, what could they do to promote I suppose the ideas that we’ve been talking about, particularly because I think students coming into the university are ripe for getting new information, developing new ideas about the world and where their futures are going to take them and where they can take us.

Tim Flannery

Do you want me to be heretical first?  Breakdown of departments.  Get a bit more cross disciplinary stuff happening would be one of my things I think I would be very keen on.  It’s too easy for kids to go through an education these days without being exposed to that broad liberal arts as they call it in the US, education for life.  It’s been probably shockingly controversial but anyway…

Robert Manne

About that, I do think also that cross disciplinary work begins when you have command of a discipline, or maybe one or two disciplines.  I think too early you don’t have the structure to interact with other disciplines.  I think that the stuff we’ve been talking about plays a role in many of the disciplines and should be part of that, but not too big a part either.  I think you have to retain the idea that there are certain demands that each discipline has that the urgency of the situation will come to people who are well educated, rather than that the whole kind of curriculum of the university is dominated by pressing issues, even ones as significant as this.  So, that’s my penny’s worth.  But I’m most interested to hear the Vice Chancellor.

Paul Johnson

Well I would say, for a university, it’s important that we have targets, just as it’s important for governments and intergovernmental agencies to have targets.  We need to be clear that as an organisation, as an institution, we need to live sustainably.   I think that’s particularly important in universities. Universities are curious institutions.  They are close to being perpetual institutions.  A bit like governments.  So they’re not like companies.  They’re not like most institutions in our civil society.  And it’s important that each university as an institution, has a commitment to a sustainable mode of operation.  It’s my responsibility and the responsibility of everyone in the university to make sure that in our stewardship of the university, we make sure that we improve it so that we hand on to our successors a better organisation which will be even more effective in creating educational opportunities for students and doing more good research.  So we need to be sustainable in our operations.  We need to be sustainable in our interactions with the broader society in terms of our operations.  But I think the biggest thing we have to do is to have a commitment to values and I fundamentally believe that universities should not be value-free organisations, we have to commit to values and I think they should be values that are… we have to have a set of values about ethical behaviour, about decent treatment of our fellow humans, whether they are alive today or whether they are yet to be born and therefore implicitly we have to have a commitment to, for instance, the United Nations definition of sustainability.  Ensuring that whatever we do today, we do not damage the world in which we live so that we bequeath to our successors a better world, which has more opportunities than we’ve had for ourselves.  And that seems to me to be absolutely core and fundamental to what we do at a university.  We have to have that as a high level goal, just as governments have to have these as high level goals I think, in terms of sustainability.  And then a lot of the work of those of us in universities, whatever position we have, is to think well, how do we translate that into real action?  And if you’re working in the, I don’t know, the facilities maintenance bit of the university that may be something to do with how we run our co-generation plant even more efficiently so we reduce our carbon footprint.  If you’re working in one of the faculties it may be, how can I develop my teaching programs, even if they’re maybe in an area of health sciences, not obviously connected with issues of climate change and sustainability, but on the other hand the health impacts of climate change are going to be significant.  How can we introduce some of this into our teaching programs?  How came we commit the huge research potential we have right across the university to focus on issues of climate change and sustainability, which as Tim has pointed out through this wonderful conversation that you’ve both been having, these are multi-faceted issues, that you cannot resolve, you cannot find simple solutions – there are no simple solutions.  You cannot find easy ways forward from a narrow perspective.  And it seems to me that in some ways because universities are rich intellectual institutions, we have an obligation to look at the world in all its complexity and thereby counter some of the challenges that are coming out of, for instance, the fossil fuel industry, which is a very narrow view of the future.  We should challenge… we should always be good scientists in the broad sense of science, in using… retreating from rhetoric and advancing towards evidence, but we should always be taking up that challenge and not let people, whether they be in the world of industry, or politics, or pressure groups, we should not allow them to get away with shoddy arguments and shallow thinking.  So I would say that’s a challenge for a university.  Easier said than done but it’s a challenge I think we all share in the university.

This has been a fascinating discussion.  For me it’s been a real privilege to listen, because we’ve in a sense had intriguing insights into the international world of politics and diplomacy through the lens of the Copenhagen summit.  We’ve moved between different levels of analysis, from in a sense, high levels of philosophy down to the specific issues of practical policy.  And we’ve also had discursions into the current state of Australian electoral politics, party politics and the electoral politics and the constitutional issues.  It’s been… that in itself I think reveals how fundamental, how important climate change is. It pervades everything we do and everything we think about. Tim, Robert, it's been fantastic, thank you very much.

Contact:

Phone: