Climate Code Red: The case for a sustainability emergency

[robertpaulsen]

Climate Code Red: The case for a sustainability emergency
by David Spratt and Philip Sutton

Phil Hart of The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand writes:

David Spratt from CarbonEquity and Philip Sutton from Greenleap Strategic Insitute have published a pivotal report in Australia titled "Climate 'code red': The case for a sustainability emergency". This post reproduces the report's discussion of why peak oil and climate change must be treated together.

The full report is available from the Carbon Equity website. The dominant theme of their report, and indeed their purpose behind it, is to:

Recognise a climate and sustainability emergency, because we need to move at a pace far beyond business and politics as usual.

The usual approach to an emergency is to direct all available resources to resolving the immediate crisis, and to put non-essential concerns on the back burner for the duration. Many people argue that in today’s world we should focus our attention exclusively on climate because a “single issue” approach is a good way to concentrate people’s minds on action, and cut through the competing, lower-priority issues.

While this is a powerful practical argument, is it the right strategy? To test the approach, we need to ask whether there are issues that:

* will be seen, in retrospect, to have caused major problems if ignored;
* are of great moral significance from a caring/compassionate point of view and therefore should not be ignored;
* should be taken into account in the framing of solutions to issues that are tackled during the period of the emergency, because otherwise serious new problems will be created or existing crises will be worsened; or
* are so compelling (for any reason) in the short term that they threaten to take attention away from climate if a one-issue-at-a-time approach is applied?

When these questions are asked, it is clear there are several issues that simply must be resolved together with the climate crisis. There are those that cannot be ignored because their impacts on all people, including the rich and powerful, are so great: for example peak oil, severe economic recession, warfare and pandemics. And there are ethical issues that we should not ignore such as poverty — including adequacy of food supply at an affordable price — and biodiversity protection.

Some examples might be useful to see how this multiple issues approach might work.

It is increasingly recognised that the discovery of geological reserves of cheap conventional oil cannot keep pace with growing world demand. This problem is often referred to as “peak oil”. Its emergence is reflected, in part, in rising oil prices and the expectation they will go higher as the gap between supply and demand increases in coming years. A recent Queensland Government task force (2007) found “overwhelming evidence” that world oil production would reach an absolute peak in the next 10 years.

So should we postpone dealing with peak oil until we have solved the climate crisis? Given the enormity of the climate problem, we cannot resolve it before peak oil demands our attention in a very practical way. Or should we put off the resolution of the climate issue until we have sorted out the peak oil issue? It will take at least 10 to 20 years to carry out the economic structuring required to solve the peak oil crisis (Hirsch, Bezdek et al., 2005), yet the economic structural changes that need to be made to solve the climate crisis must be completed in the same time period. Clearly the two issues need to be dealt with together and the solutions integrated.

http://www.energybulletin.net/40081.html

I haven't read the full report, but this synopsis seems to reflect my own belief that Climate Change and Peak Oil are flip sides of the same coin: both concern the crisis we have created through our overconsumption of fossil fuels; one addresses the crisis environmentally, the other economically. But they are THE SAME GLOBAL CRISIS!

[ixion]

1. yeah, but our congress is too busy building a police state

to worry about the environment.

[HeraldSquare212]

2. They'd love a 'sustainability emergency' -

they'd use it to put us all in camps to cut down our emissions.

[kestrel91316]

3. It's the Bush administration that's building the police state.

Congress is just too busy pretending they are doing something to actually bother fighting him.

[ixion]

4. don't kid yourself

congress is pitching in every chance they get.

[rosesaylavee]

5. This is why I was hoping for a Gore candidacy in 2008.

Whoever wins this year needs to steer a course towards addressing this immediately. None of the candidates we have had this past year have addressed it as a crisis... as in we need to start working on this yesterday.