In conversation with Tim Flannery

The 1st Ideas and Society Lecture, held on 4th June 2009.

Professor Tim Flannery and Professor Robert Manne (Politics, La Trobe University) discuss climate change, sustainability, the environment, and politics.

Transcript

Paul Johnson:

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a large and successful series of lunchtime events that we’re going to be putting on in the university to address a whole series of issues of significance to Australian and international society. We have tremendous expertise within the university, within our alumni groups as well and I believe that within the university we need to give opportunities for people to have voice on issues of concern at the moment. There is no issue I think, of greater concern just at present in the world than the issue of climate change and sustainability. Every time the intergovernmental panel on climate change produces an undated report, they say “Well, really, we were far, far too optimistic last time. The climate is changing” without saying why it’s changing, or who is responsible, it is changing, that is something that is a fact and all our societies are going to have to respond to that and change.

Today I’m delighted to welcome someone who I think does need no introduction, Professor Tim Flannery to come here and talk here with Professor Robert Manne about sustainability, climate change, politics, the world, a whole range of issues. Tim, Robert, over to you.

Robert Manne:

Thanks very much Paul. I’d like to say a couple of things before we begin our conversation. This is, for me at least, the first of what will be a number of events that have already been mentioned. The beginning of what we’re going to call Ideas and Society Program at La Trobe University and the aim is to have a vibrant life in which students and staff come together to discuss the issues of the day as Paul has mentioned. I’d like to say a thanks to the Vice Chancellor and to the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Belinda Probert, for the support they’ve given the beginning of this initiative. I think it’s going to be very important for the university. I’d also very much like to welcome Tim back to his university. Not everyone will know that Tim was a student here in the 1970s, at Chisholm College I’ve discovered, he studied the humanities before moving into the sciences. In my view, I mean I haven’t done research on this question, Tim’s the most distinguished alumnist of the university and for me at least it’s extremely fitting that he should be the first of the people we are going to have and we’ll move towards the end of the conversation towards the very important work he’s doing in the international arena in regard to climate change.

So that said, welcome very much Tim. It’s really great to have you here. What I’m going to concentrate on in the questions, and there’ll be time for you to ask questions later, is obviously the issue of climate change and I’ll just say a couple of things and then get Tim to respond.

It seems to me anyhow that climate change is the most significant problem that human beings have ever faced and it’s one that – and I’m thinking spanning the centuries – and it seems to me for two reasons that it’s the most important and using Ross Garnaut’s words, diabolical problem we face. One is that it seems to me if the scientists are right, the whole question of the habitability of the earth for us, but also for many, many species, is in question in a way I don’t think it’s ever been. But also I’m involved in politics, political science, it seems to me to pose a challenge to global human cooperation of a kind that I don’t think has ever occurred. So can I ask you to just talk to those themes, the size of the problem and what you think about the response to that kind of analysis.

Tim Flannery:

Sure, well, look maybe the best place to begin with that Robert is with the science itself and just to say that there is really no serious doubt about the science of climate change at its most fundamental level today. The basic science behind global warming and how CO2 affects the atmosphere is as old as Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, John Tingle did the basic work in the 1850s on that, and by 1903 we had perfectly good models explaining how different the increases in the levels of CO2 would affect the climate. They weren’t computer-based models obviously, and weren’t anything like as sophisticated as today, but looking back, were amazingly prescient and accurate.

So this is an old science. It hasn’t been something everyone’s known about, but it’s been there for a long time. At the beginning of the 1970s we developed more sophisticated computer modelling that allowed us to identify more accurately the various impacts of climate change and that has now built to where we have a very, very sophisticated science in place.

The climate sceptics I could say really have… there is really no place in the body of science for people who question that CO2 warms the earth. That is absolutely clear. The fact that the earth is warming is absolutely clear. Some of the impacts now are becoming evident. So those basic building blocks are there. What they tell us is that we already face a serious problem but that if we let this issue continue to grow and the science is informing us correctly about what is to come in future, we face a great problem in a very few short years. The best evidence we have of how grave that problem is and how quickly we need to act is really expressed in the sort of what we see now in the global negotiations on what is going on. And there is a widespread view in the new US administration for example, and in Australia and in other parts of the developed world, that emissions of CO2 have to peak within the next decade in order for us to be able to overcome this problem. In the US the Waxman Markey Bill is aiming to see emissions peak in 2015, so just five years from now. After two centuries of unbridled growth. In Australia we should see the same sort of thing, with our CPRS. And that’s a historic moment, when you think about that. So that’s the scale of the problem, how difficult it is.

When we come to the diabolical nature of the problem, I think the best way that I can sum that up is to say that the cause of the problem, CO2, is the result of the expenditure of energy. That’s where it comes from. You and I, as we expend energy, exhale CO2, and we know industrial processes do the same thing. So in a sense it’s a measure of the metabolism of, particularly, human activity. So the diabolical nature comes about how you make a shift from that particular model of growth, into something different. And it’s not just about industrial processes. If it was just about industrial processes, it would be easier to deal with, because everything’s within our control. But the earth has its own metabolism and its own expenditure of energy and we see in that the carbon cycle is a biological phenomenon which affects oceans, terrestrial environments and everything else as well as our human enterprises. So it’s a very, very large and complex problem, even before you start looking at global politics.

Robert Manne:

You called your most recent book, which I read yesterday for the second or third time and I think I’ve finally got what you’re really saying properly, Now or Never, and I’m thinking about perhaps not the “never” but if we take twenty or thirty years – and I’ll start by saying this – as far as I can see, after the signature of the Kyoto Protocol, treaty, which at least developed countries tried to agree to reduce their emissions, the earth doesn’t care about who was doing it, but there has been a vast increase in emissions since ’97 so that it’s now almost, it’s getting close to twelve years away or whatever. Now, if one is pessimistic, one might think that whatever happens later this year, still the trajectory won’t change. What happens, and if you could give a general view, in say, twenty or thirty years, to the earth, if the trajectory of emissions growth continues? What are the kinds of worst things that can happen?

Tim Flannery:

One of the things that scientists – it’s awful to ask a scientist to predict the future. I’ve got to say we can’t do that. But what we can do is project out with some certain fundamental areas. And the computer projections that really inform this work, we know they’re flawed, we know they’re not going to tell us the truth, but they help inform our thinking about the way the future is going to evolve and develop. So the first thing I’d say is that twenty or thirty years from now, if we do nothing, our capacity to deal with the problem will be gone. And the reason for that is the biological feedback systems then take over so no matter what humanity does, at that early stage it’s finished. It’s a bit like the process of… imagine rolling a sort of a big stone off the top of a flat hill. You know, you’ve got to put some effort in at the start, and you’re in control of that, but once the slope gets beyond a certain steepness, it’s a runaway process and you can’t do anything about it. So that’s going to happen in the next twenty years, thirty years. This decade is absolutely critical.
Now what will it actually mean? What will the runaway process mean? In my work in this area, I’ve constantly been surprised by what the most proximate threats are, so five years ago when I was researching this I thought one of the most proximate threats would be sea level lines. And that’s because the oceans are really a thermometer for the earth, as the earth warms up, the water expands in the oceans and ice melts and adds to that, so sea level rise is a really good indicator of how much the earth is warming. But we haven’t seen dramatic rises of sea levels despite the collapse of ice shelves off the Antarctic. What we’ve instead seen, I think, is the true significance of extreme weather events. So as the earth warms up and the metabolism of the earth warms up, the atmosphere becomes more energetic and we see more energy being pushed into extreme weather events. One of the most surprising to me was the bushfires in Victoria this year, which were… climate change played a factor in. To have a really big bushfire like that, a whole lot of things have to come together. But the climate signature of that was twelve years of below average rainfall, which we now know I think is the new climate for this part of the world, very low levels of soil moisture as a result, very low moisture in tissues of plants, as a result, and the heat wave, which is again part of these extreme weather events, where you’ve got a week of above 40⁰ temperature spiking at nearly 47⁰ which is unheard of in this part of the world. So those sort of surprises I think are going to be a more important element in our future. So if we take just this part of the world, it’s probably easier to talk about Victoria, yeah? Extreme weather events with bushfires being important, increasingly chronic water deficits. What we see in Adelaide now where the National Water Commission had told us just a matter of a month or two ago, that we cannot guarantee the supply of critical water use to the city of Adelaide, with a million people in it. For next year, we will eventually see here in Melbourne. Because this is just part of a collapsing system, that we see. So the deserts are pushing south as the planet warms up.
So those two phenomena are worrisome. If we also see sea level rise starting to be a significant factor some of the low lying coastal areas around here will have serious problems and with that sea level rise will come greater activity from low pressure systems and so forth that we see already having an impact. So the rise in those low pressure storms that have hit Melbourne recently – they’ve really only been there since the ‘70s, since the planet’s warmed, so we’ll see more of that sort of stuff.
So it will be probably be something like a death by a thousand cuts for us, and we’ll be rushing to plug one hole when another problem will arise and eventually the stress becomes too great for a society that’s facing that sort of view, and then you either cut bits off the body corporate, or I don’t know what else happens – you just have an internal collapse.

Robert Manne:

Can I ask… I want to ask two different kinds of question about this. One is a couple of things I’ve read about but I don’t pretend event to understand the likelihood, but they sound alarming to me and I’d like you to just give a view. But then I want to ask a conceptual question, in a minute. A couple of the things I’ve read about recently is the permafrost up in the north in the Arctic region and the possibilities of that… could you say something about that?

Tim Flannery:

Sure. What we’ve seen at the northern part of our planet has been probably the most alarming rate of climate change anywhere. So the rate of change over the Arctic is about four times greater than the rest of the planet, on average. The ice cap which has been over the Arctic Sea for at least three million years and likely longer than that, has started to melt away. We thought up to 2005 we’d have about a century before they would melt away entirely. It now looks as if it will melt away entirely before about 2030, although there’s obviously variability year to year, but the general trajectory is downwards. So once that happens, once you melt away the ice, that ten million square kilometres ice cap previously would reflect sunlight into space so at midday over the Arctic in the northern summer, 90% of the energy that hits the ice reflects back into space and doesn’t heat the planet. Once that’s melted away, and you get a dark ocean revealed, 90% of that energy is turned into heat energy and then it starts to melt. Now under that ocean, particularly on the continental margins, you have land that was flooded at the last rise of sea level at the end of the ice age. So, sea level rose 120 metres and under the ocean is a permafrost layer which was originally on land and includes a lot of decomposing plant matter that has methane in it. Now as the ocean warms, that permafrost layer starts to get holes melted into it and methane comes to the surface. The first real indication we saw of this was in September last year in the last week of the Arctic melt season, when a joint Russian-Norwegian group of scientists who had been monitoring methane at the ocean surface for twenty years, reported the first large scale eruptions of methane. In that last week. And then it started to freeze over and disappeared. We don’t know what this means. We don’t know whether there was an undersea landslide which triggered this large release of methane, or whether this was holes in the permafrost which were being punctured, but if it was the latter, the worry is that next year, or the year after or the year after, we’ll see an increase in these holes and more methane will be released. Methane is twenty times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and the amount of it in the submerged permafrost is large enough to significantly alter the heat balance of the planet. So that is a serious risk, a liability that we’ve somehow got to deal with and how we deal with that is in the lap of the gods. It’s one area of science we just don’t know enough about.

Robert Manne:

And just one more of these sort of concrete matters I’ve been reading about is the likelihood of the melting of the glacier system in the Himalayas, which seems from some of the stuff I’ve been reading, would have enormous implications in the middle term, let’s say, for just the water supply for a billion people or so.

Tim Flannery:

That’s right. Again harking back to work done in 2005, you’d say that by the middle of the century there’d be a major problem, but things are moving faster than that now and we don’t know when the major problem will arise. But you can think of those glaciers really as being dams that store water until they’re required by agriculturalists downstream. So the water stored through the winter and then in the summer growing season, the water’s released as the glaciers melt and the Mekong River and the Ganges and all of those rivers which have a billion people or more depending upon them for food, get their water when it’s needed. Now, if the glaciers melt away the water will still be there but it will be coming down in winter when it’s not so valuable and there will be no means of storing it. You might say, well, why don’t people just build dams and store the water? Well, theoretically you could, but the trillion dollar cost is just beyond anything anyone could do in the timescale that’s required to deal with that problem. So that does represent a major threat to food security globally, and one that people are aware of but as yet have no solution to.

Robert Manne:

And now the conceptual thing. I said earlier that I think I got your book – yesterday’s reading of it – and it seems to me your thought is very strongly connected with James Lovelock’s idea of Gaia. I wondered first for the audience if you could give a reasonable succinct view of what his conception of Gaia is and then I want to talk about your book a bit in regard to that.

Tim Flannery:

Well James Lovelock is a genius, who’s 90 years old, who was a kind of a, well, a medical person for a while. He came up with the view that the earth functions as a single organism basically, and it’s not a new view. If you read Plato he tells you that the world is one perfect entire creature. So they had a view of earth being a living organism like your body or my body. Now, Lovelock’s Gaia theory doesn’t go that far but it says that the earth at least works together as a whole to create conditions that are favourable for life, but that there are certain thresholds which, once they’re exceeded, earth lacks the capacity to regulate. And he sees one of those thresholds being this warming that occurring now. I must say, having thought about this quite a lot, this is where I’m really very focussed at the moment. I think that Lovelock is absolutely right but fails to see a very important point, which is that in any… can I go back, because this will take a moment, I’m sorry. I’m an evolutionary biologist. I was taught that competition is the source of, really the driver of evolution. But when I look around the world that I’m living in, I don’t see competition everywhere. What I see is incredible cooperation. I see my body and your body made up of billions and billions of individual cells and even each of those individual cells is made up of separate organisms, so the mitochondria in our cells started life as a bacteria that had nothing to do with us, it just came to live in our cells and cooperate with our cells, and build us. So we’ve got us as just – we’re here because of cooperation. And I look around at this university – it’s here because of cooperation.

Robert Manne:

Generally…

Tim Flannery:

Cooperation is the great legacy of evolution. It is, and it’s cooperation perhaps driven by competition but the great legacy of evolution is cooperation. It occurs at every level from the tiniest bacteria in this world to the planet as a whole. And the thing that evolution continues to do is refine that cooperation because the greater the level of cooperation, the better the outcome for the system. And in our bodies, what that’s resulted in is this brain that is the commanding control system of exquisite precision, to run our bodies. It’s doing a million jobs every moment that we’re unaware of, just to keep this incredibly complex thing going. And what’s happened now is that Gaia for four billion years had mediated itself through the atmosphere, that’s been the organ that’s allowed the interconnectedness and the cooperation of the parts. Just over the last decade Gaia is on the threshold of acquiring a brain and that’s happened because the internet and changes in human society have for the first time ever, allowed us theoretically to deliver a single, strong message to Gaia, what we want from Gaia. And also, after four billion years, we have got now the intelligence to see Gaia from space and to actually enhance its working parts and it won’t be by virtue of the organism itself, this enhancement won’t come about by some heavy handed approach, it will be more like a conductor in front of an orchestra, giving a light touch here and there to the carbon cycle as a whole. And so that, when you get down to it, the Kyoto Protocol was a first failed attempt by Gaia to regulate its conditions in a finer way than had been done for four billion years. We hope Copenhagen will be more important than that.

Robert Manne:

Is what you’re saying then, that human beings have to somehow become the regulator?  Of processes that once we were not able to control or didn’t feel the need to control or whatever?

Tim Flannery:

By virtue of the process of evolution humans are destined to become the regulator.

Robert Manne :

And you think, and this is where I thought I’d got your argument properly, Lovelock is now in his ninetieth year or whatever, incredibly pessimistic is he not, about the future of the earth?

Tim Flannery :

He is.

Robert Manne:

And on balance, I think, you’re an optimist?

Tim Flannery:

Yes.

Robert Manne:

And it connects, doesn’t it, to this idea of yours which is the capacity of human beings now to see what has to be done and to do it. Is that it?

Tim Flannery:

That’s right and it’s already happening. It’s not like this is theoretic. We actually have built a system now that allows us to send a single strong message to the part of the carbon cycle we want to deal with. A unified message. And that’s something that’s happened only over the last decade. We couldn’t have done it without this interconnectedness which we’ve developed and the control we’ve developed. We now understand enough about the system that there will a meeting in Copenhagen where the heads of state of the world will get together to discuss this very issue. And work out how it’s done. So it’s not like this is theoretical. This is actually happening.

Robert Manne:

And in your most recent book there are lots of ideas and I’d just like to get you to talk about a couple of them, in which you see human beings as having the potential to take charge and to do things that might reduce the emissions, which is the central issue. One is, again I’m not sure that everyone has followed this, but I know some people in Australia including Malcolm Turnbull are interested this, is the idea of charcoal, or biomass.

Tim Flannery:

Could I first say I don’t like the idea of taking charge because in a sense the brain doesn’t take charge of the body, it is a co-evolved part of the body that has its own energy budget and so forth and so helps coordinate the whole system, so I don’t think we’re in charge. We simply are fulfilling a function in the…

Robert Manne:

But you use the word “intelligence”. It’s conscious.

Tim Flannery:

It is, whereas it’s always been unconscious until now. This is… Gaia now has a consciousness. Just as we have a consciousness, but I defy you to say your big toe has a consciousness. We still say we are conscious. It’s the same way as Gaia is conscious now. But going back to the more specific issue of charcoal. I just want to say, how would be regulate this system? Given what we’ve said about carbon dioxide being as a result of the expenditure of energy. There is another system on earth which is regulating the CO2 in the atmosphere which is photosynthesis, by green plants, and one of the things that people generally fail to understand, I think, is that plants draw down 8% of all atmospheric carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every single year. That is an incredibly powerful carbon capture mechanism and it really has dictated the nature of our atmosphere. So what happens is the plants take in CO2, they strip out the oxygen, keep the carbon to build their tissues and the oxygen goes into the atmosphere which now forms 20% of our… But 8% -- huge capture. In order to solve this problem, we not only need to focus on the industrial processes but on the power of plants to help us. If we can store a little bit of that captured carbon, we will have gone a long way towards winning the battle. One way of doing that is protecting our forests. Another way is better management of our agricultural lands and our range lands. And a third way is the generation of charcoal and this is in some ways the most exciting potential because if you take plant matter which is just captured carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, heat it in what’s called a pyrolysis machine to make charcoal, you generate three products. About a third of the plant matter turns into a synthetic gas you can burn to generate electricity, a third of it into a crude oil substitute you can use to make fertilisers or whatever, and a third into charcoal. Most of the carbon in that plant is turned into charcoal and the chemical bonds within the carbon are altered so that it’s mineralised and that mineralised carbon won’t rot. So you’re effectively recreating a fossil fuel, doing that. You’ve then captured that carbon permanently. And if you put it into an agricultural field, it has fantastic benefits for agriculture, for plant growth and so forth. In fact, crop trials just completed last year in Western Australia, showed an enhancement of yield in wheat by about 30%. Just with a dressing of charcoal.

Robert Manne:

Is this a serious project? At a global level?

Tim Flannery:

It is a serious project on a global level but strangely enough Australia is in the absolute lead in this area. I’ve just been in Washington talking to people about that and the very best work, and the most innovate work, is done in Australia. As was true with photable tags twenty years ago until our units were closed down by our august Prime Minister at the time. So who knows whether we will retain the lead in charcoal production? But we have it at the moment.

Robert Manne:

And just a little bit about one more very practical thing which is geothermal which I know is associated with your ideas.

Tim Flannery:

That’s right. Geothermal energy is potentially hugely important for Australia because we require large volumes of energy for minerals processing and minerals extraction. And given the costs at the moment of renewal energy it’s hard to see the sort of volumes required, coming from that. But these geothermal reserves are enormous and potentially able to provide that base load that’s required. So the hot rocks in northern South Australia that are currently being exploited, there’s enough potential energy embedded in them to run the entire Australian economy for a century so it’s a great alternative to conventional coal burning and one that needs to be supported and developed.

Robert Manne:

 Talking about coal, I want to get to some more political questions and I’ll start with coal. You’ve written that one of the greatest climate scientists is James Hansen, NASA, and he’s become a real activist, in a way almost as much as Al Gore, I don’t know how much science he does any longer but he goes around the world and his major campaign as I understand it, is to stop people using coal. For some reason I don’t understand he says that oil will be used, gas will be used, but unless human beings cease burning coal, we’re stuffed. And for an Australian audience this matters a great deal, partly because we’re so reliant on coal and partly because we export a great deal of coal, it’s said that we’re the greatest exporter of coal. And it seems to me that my tendency is to cut through everything and to say that as you have to take on the tobacco industries, so must you, in the end, take on the coal industry. But you think that’s unrealistic and that you’re interested in, and think it’s vital, that sequestration is pushed on. Can I ask you to discuss all of that?

Tim Flannery:

Sure. Well, look, could I just say that Hansen’s reasoning is as follows: that oil and natural gas are hydro carbons so they are less carbon dense as a fuel source than coal, so if you burn natural gas for example for electricity, you generate about half of the emissions you would from burning the same amount of coal. Coal is almost pure carbon. And the volumes of oil and natural gas in the world are such that you could conceivably burn all of the oil and natural gas without triggering danger of climate change. You could not burn all of the coal without doing that. So he sees coal as the problem, as I do. It is the fundamental problem at the moment. There are other problems but that’s the big one for us at the moment. The thing about the coal industry is that it’s not just Australian, we’re not the only people dependent on coal. The Chinese, for example, have a heavy dependency on coal. They’ve just over the last decade built about half a million megawatts of pretty new coal-fired capacity and one of the big stumbling blocks I see to reducing emissions is what to do with those power plants. You cannot argue that China should close them down when they’re only a fifth of the way through their life and the financial penalty is just huge. We have to find a way to retro-fit those plants with carbon capture and storage and there are some promising technologies that may do that. And some of them being developed here in Australia in fact. They’re still at the very early stage, and need to be developed. My argument is that we’re not putting anything like enough money into those technologies. And we shouldn’t be putting more government money in. The industry itself has to come to its own rescue. Coal export is a 55 billion dollar per year industry. If the government can’t put a 5% tariff on that and just say you’re going to be paying 5% more guys, we’re going to give it back to you to put into carbon capture storage, we’re not going to be able to solve the problem. We need a multi-billion dollar budget to start solving that problem and the industry itself has to foot the bill for that.
I’m optimistic about the technology because I’ve seen some great advances made over the last two or three years and I think it’s conceivable. Whether it’s economically viable or not’s another question. But in addition to placing a tariff on the coal industry, the other thing that I would strongly recommend the Australian Prime Minister needs to do to solve his problem is to put a sunset clause into conventional coal burning. To say, come hell or high water, by 2030 there will be no more conventional coal burning in Australia. That gives the generators twenty years and most of the generation is going to be retired by that time anyway, to either figure out that carbon capture is going to work or to go into something else like geothermal or whatever. But that would send a very strong message, particularly to the investment sector. That investment in new conventional coal is not going to happen. We’ve already seen in the US that that sort of approach is working. About eighty coal fired power plants that are on the board, plans have now been scrapped for them in the US. Last year for the first time, 47% of the new energy generation capacity in the US was renewable energy which is a fantastic step forward. There are a few new projects going ahead in conventional coal as a result of the deals being done in committee, you know, to get this bill passed, but my view is that they’re going to have trouble raising funds for them and that’s a good thing, and that’s where we need to start applying the pressure. And could I say to the student body here, that I’m sick of people bloody protesting about the killing of whales, which you know, you might agree with or not, but where are the people chaining themselves to the coal export facilities? Saying no more of this stuff. Because by doing that, you actually do put more pressure on the industry by putting a question mark over security of supply. And anyway this is my radical…

Robert Manne:

The thing that I wonder about is the likelihood or the possibility of China retro-fitting this vast economy based very largely as you say, on coal burning. Putting up, depending on which book you read, one or two power plants, one or two weeks for a new power plant, it would be vastly expensive would it not, and vastly difficult to retro-fit even existing, let alone new coal plants in China. What the hell are we going to do? Given the size of that economy and its growth.

Tim Flannery:

Well, this is I think at the heart of a global treaty, this issue. And the first thing we’ve got to recognise is that China cannot do this on its own and neither should it be expected to. The Australian coal industry has been very busy in China encouraging them to build more coal fired capacity rather than other things, and so some of the liability lies with us and with the industry in terms of dealing with this. And part of the global treaty has to be tech transfer and all the other issues that will help the Chinese solve this problem. The situation in China however has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. There has been a real renewed focus on renewable energy. I was in Copenhagen for the World Business Summit last week and we had the Premier of the NRDC, the Chinese Department who deals with all of this stuff. And he was saying quite a few very illuminating things. They’ve got very aggressive mandated renewable energy targets in China. They’re about five years ahead now in their retirement of old and inefficient coal fired plants, because they’ve got a scheme to do that. And it really seems to me as if China is really ready to engage on this, but this key issue remains of a legacy, these coal fired power plants. It has to be dealt with.

Robert Manne:

We had a conversation a year ago and I think you were more pessimistic then about prospects than you are now, and I take it that two big things have happened in the last year which offer some grounds for guarded optimism. One is what you’ve been saying about China, the other is the change in the United States from Bush to Obama. I would say to the audience that Tim more than anyone I know anyhow, is in touch with international events, he’s not just reading about them or looking at a screen about them but is talking to people over the world and we’ll talk about your work in a minute. But could you say something about what you think is happening in the States and what the effect of the Obama election has been on this issue?

Tim Flannery:

Yeah, sure. Well I suppose my insights on this come from Steve Chu who’s now the US Energy Secretary who was a member of our council, this council I chair. He took the job as Energy Secretary. So in December last year in our meeting in London we had some quite in depth candid discussions with him – he hadn’t yet taken up the role and he had a dinner discussion which I mediated and we just had questions and so forth. And he’s a Nobel laureate. He was running the Lawrence Livermore labs where a lot of the one on green tech’s being done in the US. He has a very clear vision for what has to happen. He’s turned out to be a surprisingly able operator in the Washington environment I think and he’s tireless. He’s a really hard worker. He’s managed to secure the funding now for this smart grid – I forget the figures but I think it’s ten billion dollars, I can’t remember how much they’re spending but it’s a large amount anyway, which is going to transform American electricity generation. He’s made the concession that a few coal fired plants will be grandfathered but I think there is now the widespread recognition now that there’s no future in building more coal fired power plants, and he takes a very big picture view of the illusion for example of transport and stationary energy, an important part of his thinking, which is going to change things quite significantly. One of the problems he faces in the Department of Energy is four out of five, quite literally four out of five staff members work on the disposal of nuclear waste. You can imagine the sort of mindset that comes with that job. Very precautionary, very legalistic – not the sort of people you need to start implementing smart grid decisions. So he’s got a job ahead of him. But I’m confident that he’ll do it. And the Waxman Markey Bill which was obviously so much of his work is really central.

Robert Manne:

And how important is Obama, do you think? As a leader in this area.

Tim Flannery:

He’s absolutely critical. His very first act on becoming President was the signing over of those energy bills which was about climate change and energy. So central to his way of thinking. His appointments have been fabulous – John Holdren as the Science Secretary who’s had this long-lived dialogue with China, you know, he’s been going back and forth for years and we now understand is at the point of having a Memorandum of Understanding, some sort of memorandum ready for signature between the US and China on climate change, which is great. Steve Chu, and various others. You can’t ask for more than that.

Robert Manne:

What do you think will get China to be a real player in Copenhagen and the whole climate change area?

Tim Flannery:

Well, it’s interesting. The Premier of NRDC laid it on the line last week at the meeting in Copenhagen and said what will get us over the line to engage is emissions reduction by the developed countries on a band width of between 25 and 40% by 2020. Now that represents a problem and the language isn’t very precise on who has to commit to this. But what we see is the US with Waxman Markey will be on track to achieve a 17% reduction in emissions by 2005 levels by 2020, so we’ve got the peak there at 2015, fantastic. Australia at the stretch target could commit to 25%, we shall see. Below 2000 levels. Europe is on track to achieve 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and possibly 30% if others join it. So depending on who the Chinese think the developed world is, and how you bring all those figures together, I guess will depend upon their response. But they’ve thrown down the gauntlet very clearly. And that is such a relief because up until a few weeks ago, no, really earlier in the year, they were saying “We’re not going to do anything.”

Robert Manne:

That means that the change would have to come from the developed world and I take it from the United States, whereas the Bush administration and as usual Howard following along, saying “until China acts, we don’t”. The whole centre of gravity has to be the other way round doesn’t it? Because we act, China will.

Tim Flannery:

That’s right. That’s what China’s laid on the line now and very interestingly.

Robert Manne:

Do you think in the States that’s understood?

Tim Flannery:

It’s understood. There are political problems in the States at the Senate level, you know, to pass a global treaty they need 67 Senate votes and there’s a rump of Republicans left who are very unpredictable to say the least…

Robert Manne:

I thought they were predictable.

Tim Flannery:

I don’t know. They’re very angry and hurt and all over the place. But the success of the Waxman Markey Bill going through committee was really surprising and went through very, very quickly and I think…

Robert Manne:

And you think he’s a great politician, don’t you? Henry Waxman.

Tim Flannery:

Oh, he is. He is one of the most accomplished and one of the most determined politicians I think in the US and that Bill is testimony to his work. So there’s hope. And that’s not the only bit of legislation that will come into play. There may be other things as well. We shall just have to see how that transpires.

Robert Manne:

Can I raise a melancholy topic before I get on to the more optimistic one about your own role in all this. Australia. I have views about the Rudd government’s response and I’ve been very disappointed in that one area of Rudd government over climate change for all sorts of reasons but I’m more interested obviously in what you think about how the government’s behaved in the area.

Tim Flannery:

Well, it’s been, I think it’s been spectacularly inept politics. In many ways. We’ve seen people come into power with the right aspirations, so they want to reduce emissions, they want to have our own CPRS scheme and all the rest of it, but from the very start what Rudd has said is that this will be a middle of the road scheme, so we’re going to alienate the polluters and we’re going to alienate the greens but we’ll be in the middle of the road, and I can’t believe that he thought there was anyone in the middle of the road. There’s no one there, we’re either on one side or the other, so what’s this politics on the middle of the road on this issue. It doesn’t exist. And of course that reflects most strongly in the Senate, where you either play with the Liberals or you play with the Greens and the minor parties. So you’ve either got to green up the scheme, the middle of the road scheme or you’ve got to let it die. You know. And that is the reality. So it was just a fundamental political blunder. And there was another error made I think, when Ross Garnaut produced his report. The really… the first and most important point he made was “Don’t give away any concessions”. Everyone will be in for their chop. And so what does the Rudd government do? First thing is give away 3.9 billion dollars to the States and the old coal fired power generators in New South Wales and so forth. Just because they’re in the same political party, does that really mean you’ve got to do that? I don’t know, but as soon as that happened, of course, then trade exposed industries said “Oh we’ve got to have our chop”. And then Woodside, god bless their cotton socks, gas generators who you never thought would be in this, “Oh, we’ve got to have our bit too” and now coal, believe it or not is a trade exposed industry. Can you believe that? So they want twenty billion. It just goes on and on and on. And you could see it with the very first concession being given. So there’ll be no money now, at least in that scheme, to compensate people who were hard hit, pensioners and so forth, by these rises in electricity I suspect. And the scheme has lost a lot of its integrity and the difference between that and the Waxman Markey approach has been really salutary.  Because, sure, there was a lot of horse trading with Waxman Markey, but none of it was around the core objectives of the bill. The trade offs were elsewhere, which is American politics. In Australia, we’ve traded away the very centre of the efficiency. Having said all that, Robert, I’ve got to say I’m still a supporter of the CRPS and I think we have to pass it through the Senate because it’s just… we’ve got to take a first step, as flawed as it may be, we have to take that first step. Because if this bill dies, who knows how long it will be before another bill can be resurrected or another approach happen? And our emissions peaking by 2015, we have to.

Robert Manne:

I’m very interested in the difficulties the Rudd government has had. And one thing, you know more about this than anyone I know, that is the different atmosphere in Australian corporate world to the atmosphere in the corporate world outside Australia. Can you say something about that? I mean, one of the things that seems to be a problem is that the corporate sector in Australia has not been coming to the party in a way that I think from your experience it has elsewhere.

Tim Flannery:

I chair a thing called the Copenhagen Climate Council and made a decision two years that we’re going to do a lot of stuff overseas because here it was looking so dismal. But we just held, as far as I know, the world’s biggest summit, business summit, on climate change in Copenhagen. We had 500 CEOs from companies like BP and Intel and so forth, there. So that was a fantastic event. And those people signed on to a very aggressive call, the Copenhagen call, for emissions reductions and a proper framework for this new treaty that’d going to be brokered. And we did it in the very same venue as the Con 15 was going to be held in. That Copenhagen call that we put out has had accolades from green groups around the world now, which is fantastic. We’ve had a few complaints too but by and large people thinking it’s a job well done. And yet when you come back here to Australia, who is the voice on business on climate change, I ask you? Mitch Hooke. Who in their right mind would let Mitch Hooke be the voice on climate change, for BHP? My godfather. I mean, really, the Australian Mining Industry Council is way out there on a twig, and it’s just… it’s so pathetic to see that happen. And I can’t understand why businesses here who have a stake in a better future for the country and in the scheme aren’t raising their voice in a similar way that we saw in Copenhagen. And the brutality of the industry lobbying is ridiculous. I mean, the energy people coming up and saying “the lights will go out mate, if you don’t give us some more money”. That’s blackmail. That’s not negotiation. It’s just disgusting.

Robert Manne:

Just one more point – this is a culture war point which I have to make. Is there any other country in the Western world at least where you would have so much media coverage of denialism or scepticism.

Tim Flannery:

No. The Australian is unique, as far as I’ve seen. There may be some papers in the Midwest of the US that are as bad, the Couch Grass Chronicle for example in Nevada, I don’t know. I made that up. But they win the medal for that.

Robert Manne:

I think we should open for questions. I would like to ask perhaps just one or two last questions and open it up. And I think, perhaps the most important thing for an audience like this, is for you to say something about what students can do. I mean, everyone comes away from meetings like this I think, in my experience, almost everyone really feeling there’s matters and wondering what is it that I or we can do. Do you have any sense, among the student body, the kinds of things that can be done?

Tim Flannery:

Well, I do. I think that, what would I say, action campaigns that remain within the law but still are hard hitting towards the offending industries is important. It’s one thing students can do that we can’t do. I’m engaged with business and others and I can’t do that. And young people have got time. And I remember… I used to have time, yeah. But you see it today with forestry. There are a lot of people who commit their lives to protecting forests, which is a very noble and wonderful thing to be done. But they don’t realise that those forests are imperilled not just by the axe man and the logging companies but by climate change as well. And so I think there is a role for that determined voice to be heard. From young people. After all, it’s your future. The younger you are, the bigger stake you have in the issue. You and I will probably have a miserable old age but you’ll have a miserable middle age if we don’t get the problem solved.

Robert Manne:

And I do think… I’ve been around for longer than I like to admit, and I think this is the issue, since the Vietnam War, that in a quite different way, is general among the student body. It’s the first really big issue I think which, since the ‘60s or ‘70s we’ve seen. It is a much harder issue to know what is to be done and so, the more thought that goes into that… I’m going to mention later a student initiative here, I’ll mention it in the end, which is happening in September. There must be many things. The final question and then I’ll shut up and let other people ask questions of you. Do you think Copenhagen will be successful, in general, or, how optimistic in general are you about what happens in December? Some people are saying it’s the most important human conference we’ve ever had.

Tim Flannery:

I think there’s no doubt about that. It is the most important conference that humanity has ever brokered. But, I’m increasingly confident that we’ll get a deal. I’m also increasingly certain that that deal will be shallow at one level because there might be commitments made but then there won’t be much detail behind what that actually means and there’ll probably be a couple of years of really intensive negotiations behind the scenes and of course, the whole process of ratification of the treaty by different countries. So it will mark a moment in time but it won’t be the defining moment if you know what I mean. All the work will have to be done afterwards.

Robert Manne:

So we won’t expect to know everything at the end of the conference.

Tim Flannery:

No, that’s right. And the details won’t be there. They’ll have to be worked out afterwards. But we hope for an ambitious treaty, one that will be ambitious enough to allow for the whole carbon cycle to be taken into account, not just the industrial end of it, the forest protection and all the rest.

Robert Manne:

And the involvement in the non-developed world?

Tim Flannery:

That’s right. Really, we’ve talked about the developing world being China and India but there is a whole lot of the rest of the world where the poorest people live who need to be involved in this too. And the only meaningful way that that can occur is through forest protection and making funds available for that, for the biological sequestration of carbon in the poorest countries. And our record there has been pathetic. From the Rio Earth Summit to the Kyoto negotiations, the developed world’s promised this flow of cash and it’s never materialised. So there’s a very high degree of disillusionment among those countries upon that. And that will have to be overcome as well. There’ll have to actually be real cash on the table this time.

Robert Manne:

And it’s my real pleasure to thank Tim so much for such an extraordinarily interesting hour and a bit and I hope you’re back soon as I know you wish to be.

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