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I was recently in Bonn, Germany, for the UNFCCC talks, sitting on a panel of young people at a conference side event where we talked about ‘Re-defining Pragmatism’.  

During the questions, I was asked one of the toughest questions that I’ve had to publicly respond to in a long time… “What is your vision for the sustainable world you want by 2050?”

We spend a lot of time in the environment/climate/justice movement talking about how we need to “take urgent action now”. We’re very good at talking about the changes that we want to see - more renewable energy, an end to coal and fossil fuels. We want to decrease wasteful, unnecessary consumption and have ‘cyclical’ production systems, recycling, instead of linear extract-use-waste systems. We want an end to materialism. We want an end to deforestation. We want people in the least developed countries to have clean water to drink and access to healthcare. We want bicycles, buses and trains, not cars. And if cars, fully electric. We want polluting activities to cost more so that there is a financial incentive to be environmentally friendly. We want a fundamental shift in the way that our society, industry and economy operate. We want local food production and an acknowledgement that we’re currently overpopulated and need, somehow, to address this. We don’t want biofuels that destroy livelihoods or which compete with food production. But limited amounts of biofuel, from agricultural wastes, if they would otherwise be wasted are ok. We want you to eat less red meat.

We say that we - today’s youth - are the generation who are willing to make these changes reality over the next four decades, during our working lifetimes. On this topic, youth in Bonn ran a ridiculously-successful t-shirt campaign called ‘How old will you be in 2050?’ Personally, I’ll be 65, just retiring after dedicating my working life to the sustainability transition.

But when all of these changes are in place, in 2050, how will the world be different? What sort of society will we have? What is the key difference between now and then? We know that we need ‘a fundamental shift’, but what to?

This was the question that I was confronted with (and surprised by) at the side-event last week. While I know the answer in my heart, and have thought about it in countless ‘visioning sessions’, I have rarely had to articulate it.

I started to list the things that I outlined above… “We want a world where all the electricity comes from renewables, no more fossil fuels, a world where people ride their bike instead of driving cars.” It was about this moment that I realised that this was fairly predictable, and not what the Texan reporter was looking for.

“But all that is the obvious stuff. What we need between now and 2050 is a fundamental revolution in our social values. Where we understand and focus on what really makes us happy, instead of how much money we make.”

Without wanting to waffle for too long in responding to the question, I pointed to an end to wasteful materialism and the capitalist growth-at-all-costs economy, and referred to the study of happiness and the happiness economics that they do at Harvard, and other places. 

I also managed to briefly outline a few aspects of my vision - a world where we no longer ‘work jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need’, where we entertain ourselves with arts, music, sport, community, cooking and sharing meals with friends, instead of going to the shopping mall to ‘consume’.

There’s obviously a lot more work to be done here. Communicating a positive vision of the sustainable future - and not just the stuff/technology/practices that it has in it, but the values which underpin it - is crucial to our success. I’d like to start collecting these visions and over the next few months, synthsise them into something that is widely communicable. Then we can make this vision not just personal, but political too.

Two experiences that I’ve collected in the past five months of travelling give me some indication of the world that I want to head towards

1. It’s Easter Sunday in Amsterdam today, and everything is shut. People are staying in their houses and not out on the streets as they usually are in Amsterdam. So it’s been quiet all day. I’m standing on the balcony listening to some birds and sipping tea. Then, suddenly, emerging from around the corner, an eclectic four-piece band (Trumpet, Saxaphone, Tamborine and Accordion!) bursts into my quiet reality playing sweet Samba music. They’re colourfully dressed, appear totally impromptu, and are a mix of ages and races. There is no choreography. I watch for a few minutes as they make their way down my street - windows are opening, people stepping onto their balconies to see what is going on. Some are even dancing. The street is alive! When the song finishes and the band disappears around the next corner, a polite round of applause comes from the balconies, and people return to whatever they were doing before. Such random acts of beauty and kindness are something that I envisage being not just ‘random’ in 2050, but a focus of our existence.

2. In January I had the immense pleasure of living at London’s Temporary School of Thought. Just today I came across a notepad where I had recorded some reflections on the school, which I’ve never had the opportunity to share. I think that this goes some way towards the vision that I am trying to articulate.

“From day one in this society we are made to conform, to be less free, with less choice - through indoctrination by our school systems, through fear of authority, through rigid moral rules imposed on us by closed-minded religions, and through the false ideals that advertising causes us to pursue. In direct opposition to this conformity, the community here [at the Temporary School] is totally free - we educate ourselves how and when they want to, we explore the nuances of existence and life, and we are constantly discovering new ways of thinking.

An authority unto itself alone, with no recognition or even acknowledgement of systemic powers, the moral code of the School and it’s friends is based only on mutual respect, trust and community. The ideals shared here have nothing to do with what advertising has told us to aspire to.

In 2050, we will be a society that is:

Unplugged but switched on.

Truly alive. Safe, beautiful, fun, welcoming. Coommunity.

Independent. Free. Temporary.

Always expressing love as the joyful recognition of each other’s existence,

even on the quieter, harder days.

This is the joyfully cobbled together, temporary, school of thought.

We drink lots of tea.

A sustainable world is a creative world.

This was first posted on Climate Change Perspectives

Popularity: 98% [?]

I love how they have senate submissions and ask stakeholders to contribute. Arguably on every issue, but particularly on climate policy, every single global citizen is a stakeholder. But I’m not sure if they could handle 7 billion submissions. 

The Australian people are facing a catastrophe if we do not act to mitigate the threat of climate change. Human society has so far flourished during a period known as the Holocene, during which global mean surface temperatures have varied little, and the sea level has been almost constant. Climate change threatens to disturb this balance, drive up temperatures, raise sea levels, and endanger human civilisation as we know it.

The CPRS legislation indicates a fatal disregard for this scientifically-accepted conclusion. The 5%/15% target is woeful and scientifically inadequate. The compensation to polluters fails to create an incentive or serious price signal that will drive the change that is needed in our society – most worryingly is the compensation given to the coal industry. While the compensation given to EITE industries is expensive, I agree with it in principle. The compensation given to the coal industry is without rationale or justification – James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute, amongst many other scientists, justly calls for an end to all coal-burning as a necessary step to addressing global warming. Furthermore, the scheme allows for unlimited international ‘carbon credits’, that is, businesses can offset their domestic emissions by decreasing emissions in other countries. As I understand it, treasury modelling indicates that Australia’s emissions will actually rise, given this provision. While this may seem a technical point, the truth is that we need to not just reduce international emissions, but have a paradigm shift in Australian cities, and move towards a carbon-free future. International exports do not support this.

Also, as you hopefully are aware, Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute makes an irresistible case against the CPRS on the grounds that it ignores the efforts of individuals. In short, emissions reductions undertaken by concerned individuals – say, by installing insulation, or solar hot water - will simply free up permits to be used by others, most likely the big polluters. The 5% target thus represents not only a ceiling, but a floor, and emissions reductions cannot go beneath that in the current scheme.

Addressing climate change is the single most important issue facing the world today. Luckily, we need not address it at the expense of human well-being. Various modelling has shown that stabilising at a lower level of carbon dioxides has a net-cost near zero. Aside from protecting a livable climate, benefits would include: lower rates of the respiratory illness brought about by photochemical smog and airborne pollutants; lowering the strain that these illnesses put on our health system and those costs; reducing oil imports from middle-eastern countries with a history of supporting terrorism – imports that effectively subsidise terror; minimising the other environmental harms associated with fossil fuel mining and production, such as oil spills, coal ash slides, groundwater contamination and wilderness and habitat destruction.

Economic benefits would inevitable flow from this movement. International competitivity would be increased by greater environmental legislation – countries such as Germany are an example of this, having a high rate of patents of environmental technology. Green jobs would be created, jobs that couldn’t be outsourced, and many of these jobs would be in rural areas. Investments in efficiency would shortly pay for themselves, working out to be cost-negative, saving both businesses and individuals money. The extra disposable income for all people would act as a further stimulus to the economy. 

The case for climate action, properly understood, is, quite simply, without flaw. In this day and age, every parliamentarian – indeed, every holder of power in every nation – is morally indebted to those who their decisions affect, and this moral obligation demands decisive, inspirational, world-changing and life-saving action against climate change.

Popularity: 100% [?]