Roadmaps and roadblocks to climate action

Volume 8 Number 11 November 12 - December 9 2012

Experts predict there are just 50 months left before we will be locked into runaway climate change, so researchers are examining the societal and political roadblocks to creating a world without carbon fuels. Nerissa Hannink reports.

University of Melbourne social scientists are asking some difficult questions about human nature and the political animal.

After analysing international strategies on how to achieve post-carbon economies – that is economies not based on carbon fuel – and finding that many of the plans are technologically achievable within realistic budgets, they are now trying to understand why we are not putting them into action.

The urgent need for a unified, global response to climate change has been consistently identified in academic and policy literature says Professor John Wiseman from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and Melbourne School of Population Health.

“The United Nations recommends we need to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, requiring emissions to peak by 2020 and then rapidly decline. Many climate scientists argue the target needs to be lower than two degrees to avoid potentially disastrous climate tipping points. 

“Yet we have an ‘emissions gap’ between cuts in greenhouse gas emissions proposed in most current government policies and what is scientifically recommended to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” Professor Wiseman says.

“Given this urgency, we are trying to understand the specific barriers in both politics and society to implementing these plans, and how they can be overcome.”

Professor Wiseman and Taegan Edwards from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute have combed through 18 post-carbon economy transition strategies, nine each from government and non-government sources.

Strategies were included in the review if they were publicly accessible, of national or regional scale, contained quantitative goals and costs, and addressed all greenhouse gas-emitting sectors.

The reports analysed include strategies developed by NGOs such as Australia’s Beyond Zero Emissions, Al Gore’s The Climate Project and the Earth Policy Institute; eminent university academics from Stanford, University of California, Davis and Germany’s Potsdam Institute; and government-led strategies from the UK, EU, China, India, Korea, Germany, Denmark, California and Australia.

The researchers developed concise summaries of each strategy and compared the key similarities, differences and overarching lessons.

Ms Edwards says it was encouraging to find that in many of the strategies, there were no major technological barriers to achieving power generation entirely from renewable sources.

“One of the non-government sources, Zero Carbon Australia, has a strategy to produce 100 per cent of stationary energy from wind- and solar-based renewables by 2020. They estimate this will cost AU$37 billion per year over 10 years, or approximately three per cent of Australian GDP.

“The most ambitious government strategy was from Denmark, which aims to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy in all Danish energy supply by 2050. Other governments are proposing a mixture of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions with or without carbon capture and storage, and nuclear energy.”

The review also looked at the financial implications of the strategies, concluding that they were significant but not insurmountable to achieve a post-carbon economy at the speed required. All strategies used a mix of market-based and regulatory policies to achieve their goals.

“The most robust estimates of the costs of actions required to rapidly decarbonise the global economy range from $US200 billion to US$1000 billion per annum to 2030. To give some sense of perspective, the 2008 bank bail out in the United States alone cost US$700 billion,” Ms Edwards says.

So when it came to identifying barriers to implementing a carbon-free economy, Professor Wiseman says the greatest obstacle is to secure broad and sustained social and political support for the transition.

“Among the highest priorities are strengthening public understanding of the urgency of action to reduce the risks of runaway climate change, and exposing and overcoming the vested interests, particularly in the fossil fuel, media and finance industries, working to block the opening up of pathways to a post-carbon economy.

“Theories on how to achieve transformational change commonly included visionary political leadership and broad community mobilisation. Many also highlight the potential for more dramatic ‘tipping points’ to trigger a swift change in political values and responses.”

“But all strategies had a lack of detail as to how to achieve these political changes and achieve social support for transition, so the next phase of our research is to understand how this could be done.”

“We are turning the scenario on its head, and asking some of the world’s best thinkers to imagine that the world of 2050 has prevented runaway climate change. We are asking-so how did we get here?”

That question is being posed to some of the transition strategy authors and leading post carbon thinkers as part of the next phase of the research.

www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/content/pages/post-carbon-pathways