If you work in the sustainability field full time, you ride a roller coaster. There are incredible, interesting, hopeful things going on – many rife with opportunity for innovation and new business. At the same time, there?s the grinding reality: a serious challenge that collectively we are not doing nearly enough to fix.
Two recent visitors to Vancouver offered rides on the roller coaster. Included below are a few key points from their ideas – and links to watch their archived broadcasts online.
Gwynne Dyer: ?Hot, hungry and hostile?
Gwynne Dyer, who has spent much of his journalistic career studying geopolitics and war, plunges you straight down the steep slope of the coaster. But it?s a critical ride, largely because he skips over the information filters of international bureaucracy and political repackaging and presents what he has learned directly from climate scientists and folks who are preparing for fallout – namely the military.
The from-the-source information he offered recently at the BC Hydro Power Smart Forum included:
?climate change is happening fast. If we do not change our current behaviour, within 10 years we will have crossed the threshold beyond which the opportunity for human control of climate change will be lost;
?projections for warming based on our current behaviour puts us at 2 C warmer on average by 2030 – a planet ?with a fever?;
?two degrees is enough to cause widespread collapses in food production. Estimates are that 25% of India?s food production and 38% of China?s would fail; and
? military leaders are laying plans now for refugee flows, failed states and drought-induced war in areas where one country?s water supply is sourced from another country?s territory (think India and Pakistan, both nuclear states). Dyer?s Pentagon interviewees expect to be ordered to close the Mexican border in 10 years? time, causing ?the gravest social upheaval inside the U.S. since the Civil War.?
Said Dyer, ?This is really major stuff. If we don?t act quite differently quite rapidly and get the emissions down to zero at the end, we are facing a very grim future.?
So what needs to happen?
Dyer said the historic injustice of 200 years of fossil-fuel-based industrial development that favoured one-sixth of the world?s population must be righted, through a deal between ?old rich countries? and developing countries.
Developed countries must take deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions up front - 30% in 10 years and a continued press to get to zero. (Yes, it will be hard.) The developing countries must cap their emissions at present levels, or perhaps 10% above present levels. Then, all growth must come from non-fossil energy – wind, hydro, solar, nuclear.
?So who pays the difference in cost [in a developing country] between the coal-fired plant and that geothermal plant?,? asked Dyer. ?We do. That?s historical justice. We created the problem, we?ve got the money.?
He added, ?Right now, we live in a quite remarkable, peaceful, more co-operative planet than ever. We could now negotiate a deal that would stop the emissions in a reasonable amount of time. That world the military are seeing is not a world we want to get to, with shut-down borders and shooting people – because your possibilities, politically, for solving the problem shut down as you go.?
Watch Dyer?s Vancouver speech, ?Hot, Hungry and Hostile,? at wwe12.bchydro.com/businessevents/forum/live-webcasts/ or listen to his CBC Radio series ?Climate Wars? at gwynnedyer.com/radio/.
Chris Turner: The leap
Another recent speaker in Vancouver, thanks to Tides Canada, was author Chris Turner. Turner?s 2007 book, The Geography of Hope, was specifically aimed at driving us back up out of the depths of climate change concern.
His stories from all over the world show how people are shifting to clean technology, and to the next generation of political, economic and social institutions. His new book, The Leap, describes the lateral shift we must make to an economy based on renewable energy. He doesn?t suggest it?s entirely easy – like jumping from a moving train headed off the rails onto a sleeker, just-as-comfortable model heading to a bright future – but it is possible.
Turner?s book examines successes such as Germany?s support for renewable energy. The country now produces almost 20% of its electricity from renewables and is on track to produce 35% of its needs by 2020.
Along the way, it has created a $50 billion industry in Germany alone and created 250,000 jobs. All this despite being ?not particularly windy or sunny.?
Similarly, Turner looks at the economic impact of Spain?s AVE high-speed train system and urban design that allows people to massively reduce car usage, even in places where once enormous parking lot plateaus surrounded shopping malls.
Turner?s book is a great read - but you can also catch some of his key ideas in a 15-minute speech on YouTube. Go to www.youtube.com/user/TEDxTalks and enter ?Chris Turner? in the search engine.
And good luck with the roller coaster. ?
