Michael Green

Writer and producer

Interview with Kevin Anderson

In Environment on

LAST weekend, the G20 leaders agreed to increase economic growth by an extra 2 per cent or more. It’s a strange promise – if it was in their power to increase growth by that much, I’m sure they would have been doing it anyway.

It’s also strange because of the troubling relationship between economic growth, as we know it, and carbon dioxide emissions.

So with those conundrums in mind, here’s an edited version of an interview I did early this year with climate scientist Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. I interviewed him for a newspaper article that was scrapped before I’d even finished my research, so I never got to write it up.

Anderson wrote a blog late last year stating that if we’re to keep a good chance of staying within 2 degrees warming, rich countries need to cut emissions by up to 10 per cent per year. Reductions of that magnitude are likely to require economic contraction, or degrowth – at least temporarily.

I asked him about that blog:

KA: It caused quite a stir. Almost everyday I get someone responding. I think it’s opened a dialogue which I think was being held back before. It came out of the climate change data and the maths are so blatantly obvious that people cannot argue against the simple numbers: the industrialised countries require degrowth strategies for 2 degrees C. There’s no way out of that.

“We have an inevitably radical future”

My own judgement now is that a lot of people don’t like the conclusions, but don’t necessarily disagree with the analysis. That is not a good enough reason not to have it as part of the debate.

This ties into an already existing language and literature, whether it’s from ecological economics or Herman Daly with his steady state economics and so forth, there have been a lot of people talking about these things for decades. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get ripped to shreds by people for even discussing it. That still happens, but nevertheless, I think there is now sufficient momentum to allow it to actually become part of the discussion – although very much a minority part of it.

MG: Your carve up of the carbon budget requires rich countries to cut emissions deeply – by 8 to 10 per cent per year.

KA: The important thing about those reduction rates is that they work if we start doing it immediately. Ideally we should have started some little time ago. It’s a few years out of date, but we know that we’re always further along the line than we were when the data ended. Every year we fail, that percentage rate goes up.

MG: And of the rich countries, Australia would be at the upper end of that scale, given its high per capita emissions?

KA: I think you can make quite a good set of reasoned arguments as to why some of the high emitting countries on aggregate – the US, Qatar, Australia – would have to do more than the others. Australia would be at that end, at least.

MG: One reason the rich countries need to cut emissions so fast is that you assume China will peak later – in 2025 – than most of the other modelling does, including that by the Climate Change Authority here in Australia. Is that unrealistic? Do we need China to do more to cut emissions than you’re suggesting?

KA: Realistic is a word we use that applies to the thinking of the last century. We hear that all the time: ‘This is clearly impossible.’ Well, oh fine, we’re in an impossible world now. Can we deal with 3, 4 or 5 degrees C? Well almost certainly not in any reasonable fashion. Can we mitigate for 2 degrees C? Well if we have the same mindset, then certainly not, either. In that sense, I would argue the future is impossible. It’s unrealistic.

We should have done something about that earlier. But we are where we are now and we have to think differently. The argument I often make is that we have an inevitably radical future. Now, whether it’s radical because we’re doing radical mitigation and we have some control over the levels of climate change we are going to see, or whether it’s radical because we just carry on doing what we do now and we have to reap the repercussions of rapidly changing climate, both of them are radical futures. Both are unrealistic with the current mindset.

On China – I think it’s more realistic to say the wealthy parts of the world should be looking to radically reduce their emissions rather than to expect China to peak before 2025. You have to bear in mind that a lot of the emissions attributed to China and others of the industrialising countries are actually the responsibility of the west, from a consumption perspective – and I’m sure this goes for Australia, because it also imports a lot of manufactured goods.

Really, China should be permitted even longer to peak, but we cannot apply a fair and equitable system because we’ve got to the point where it is inevitably unfair and inequitable.

The historical legacy is such that Australia, the EU, the US, we still owe a huge amount because of what we’ve done. Although China’s emissions are heading in our direction now, if you look at the cumulative emissions per capita they’re much, much lower than the west, and that feeds into development and so forth. So it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to just look at instantaneous per capita emissions and then say China should be peaking earlier. They are clearly still a poor country in terms of development. Their GDP per capita is still much lower and their purchasing power parity is much lower than Australia or the EU.

MG: The world’s governments have agreed to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees. In Australia, we continue to claim that’s our aim, but we also promise very limited emissions reductions. How do we make sense of that contradiction?

KA: That same gap is occurring everywhere. The EU here has just agreed a 40 per cent reduction target by 2030. It then claims that is consistent with a 2-degree trending for the EU, which it isn’t at all. What’s required is nearer 80 per cent. We probably have more appropriate rhetoric here than you have. But the action isn’t any better.

MG: Do we have an idea of what would be necessary to reduce emissions so rapidly? What’s life like for a human in that society?

KA: It’s inevitably a woolly discussion about what that sort of future would look like. But I think you can start to hone it down a little bit in terms of the internal equity within countries. One of the arguments I’ve made repeatedly is that even within nations, the differential in our emissions is absolutely enormous.

So we are not necessarily saying everyone in the UK or Australia has to reduce at that rate. Those people who are the major emitters, they are the ones that need to make the lion’s share of the change. It may well even be, even within a country that is having rapid reductions in emissions, that some of the poorest people may still see no change or even perhaps a rise in their emissions.

The scare tactic is to say that this will apply to everyone, so even if they’re in fuel poverty, they’re going to have to cut back or see dramatic increase in the price of their fuel. As academics in the UK, we’re getting paid three or four times the low salary. It is people like us who have to make the radical changes, not the poorest 20 per cent of our societies.

MG: What kind of policy measures might be necessary to reduce emissions by up to 10 per cent a year?

KA: I think it’s unlikely you can deliver these rates of change with a price mechanism. I would go so far as to say there is no evidence to suggest it’s in any way possible with price, because the price would have to be so high. For those of us who are the main emitters, we are effectively inelastic to the price of energy. The poorer people in our own communities and the poor people globally are highly elastic to it and if the price of energy goes up significantly because of a carbon price, they will be in even more dire positions than they are today. In countries like the UK won’t be able to heat their houses or drive at all.

“We can do things that are seen to be radically different”

I think the price route is going to be re-thought. The argument we’re making is that we need a regulatory framework, maybe complemented with prices as well. From a UK perspective, that sounds like a throwback, but we have to think about regulations differently. They’re about standards, not about picking winners. It isn’t the role of policymakers to say which technology; they usually get that wrong anyway. They set the standards and say you can use whatever technology you want as long as it meets these standards.

The work we’ve done at the Tyndal Centre here with some of my colleagues has been very much at a sectoral level, without looking necessarily at the whole economy. But it does suggest there is huge potential for emissions reductions.

In the UK, 80 to 90 per cent of all kilometres are travelled by cars that are 8 years or under old. So within 8 years you can change virtually the whole fleet. That’s a very quick turnaround time. So what can you change it to? Using existing cars, in the UK there are now around 300 models available with emissions below 100 grams of CO2 per kilometre. The average car in the UK is something like 168. If you had a standard that said no car beyond 2015 that was more than 100, then you would have about a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in car emissions within about ten years. With no new technologies, no new infrastructure and no additional price in the system.

You’d get a much bigger saving in places like the US and Australia because you start with cars that are much more inefficient. That’s an example where we could carry on doing exactly what we’re doing, with existing technologies, existing skill sets, and see radical reductions in emissions. You can do it with refrigerators too. Within 8 years you could change out most of the fridges in UK homes and radically reduce our emissions from refrigeration. There are no price premiums on these things.

There are lots of reasons we’re not doing it. In the UK, it’s this old concept of choice: we cannot interfere with the market. As long as we put a label on it, people can choose what they want. And that mindset means that we cannot set standards, we cannot use a regulatory framework to drive down emissions even using existing technologies.

MG: But is efficiency enough to get the kinds of emissions reductions we need?

KA: No, nothing like it. But the demand side is really important and generally gets missed because people talk about wind turbines or tidal schemes or solar or nuclear power. They always talk about these big schemes, but they will take a long time – decadal penetration rates really.

All I’m saying here is the demand technologies penetrate the systems much, much quicker and can deliver huge savings, but only if we can overcome the rebound effect. What policies we can put in place to ensure any savings we make are not just squandered by us then using the money for more consumption? That’s really important. I think those policies will vary depending on the cultural framing of each country.

It wasn’t that long ago that we bathed once a week in the UK. We then started to shower two or three times every week. We now have power showers and people use power showers often twice a day now. We moved towards showers partly for energy reasons many years ago and actually our showers now use far more energy than our baths ever used. We’ve normalised the idea we have to shower once or twice a day, which means we have to buy more clothes, we have to wash our clothes more often, so you get a whole suite of things that build up. These practices are things that are normalised and we say we can’t change them. We need to actively think about the practice we’re embedding in our societies, particularly for poorer parts of the world who can avoid locking themselves into some of the more stupid things we’ve got ourselves locked into.

MG: We don’t seem to be anywhere near having that kind of public conversation. There are all sorts of issues with degrowth we aren’t delving into, right? Like what would happen to our debt-based financial system?

KA: I wonder if we use those things as an excuse for not having bigger discussions. We’re looking at climate change now against the backdrop in which many industrialised countries are having to do things quite differently anyway, because of the economic situation we find ourselves in.

Unfortunately, we tried to resolve what were the biggest banking issues since the 1930s with the same sets of tools that brought about the problem in the first place. We could have retrofitted every single property and to a very high level for the money we gave back to the banks. That would have helped with employment; it would have helped with reinvesting the money back into the economy; it would have helped with resilience to the changing climate; it would have helped fuel poverty. There’s virtually nothing that doesn’t get a tick on that. And yet what we did is we gave the money to the banks.

We are having to think differently in the environment we’re in today, even about our established organisations, so why not think a bit more differently about how we actually deal with these issues? When people say these things are impossible, it at least gives us a chance to turn around and say, ‘Well they weren’t impossible when we had to deal with it from a banking point of view’.

We can do things that are seen to be radically different. I think the agenda is moving. It is moving on to allow us to think about things that were previously just dismissed out of hand. Where people would once say this isn’t possible, I think now the analysis is being undertaken to say: ‘Well, what could be achieved?’

You can find more of Anderson’s work on his website. Or, see the recordings from the Tyndall Centre’s Radical Emission Reduction Conference last December.

Bread and roses

In Blog on

THIS past couple of weeks I’ve been meeting with striking cleaners in the CBD. My attention was piqued a month or so ago by a news snippet saying cleaners were refusing to change toilet paper. They were advising office workers to bring in their own.

So I went to their noisy protests. All this year, their union, United Voice, has been coordinating protests four days a week. They do it like this: one or two dozen workers materialise in front of a building, armed with wailing megaphones and 20L steel buckets and drumsticks. They make the worst racket they can for 45 minutes, hand out flyers to office workers, and leave.

They’re targeting the biggest cleaning contractor, Consolidated Property Services, which so far has refused to renew the Clean Start agreement, first negotiated with the union in 2009. About half of the cleaners in Melbourne are international students, and almost all were born overseas. But more about all that another time.

For now, follow me through a few leads: last week I met with a Nepalese student and cleaner named Koustup. He is tall and handsome, and endearingly friendly (in our correspondence, he told me to say hi to my girlfriend for him). He’s only been in Australia and working as a cleaner since the start of the year, but he has decided to help front the campaign because many of his co-workers are too scared. It was a bright afternoon and we sat outside a café on Swanston Street. “Have you seen the movie ‘Bread and Roses’?” he asked me. “It’s just the same as ‘Bread and Roses’. Exactly the same.”

So I watched ‘Bread and Roses’. It’s a Ken Loach film, made in 2000, starring Adrien Brody and Pilar Padilla, about cleaners at one building in Los Angeles trying to organise for better pay and for health care. The story is based on the Justice for Janitors campaign by the Service Employees International Union. At one point, Brody, the union organiser, escapes the caretaker by hiding in Padilla’s trolley. Another time, he confronts the building owner at a fancy restaurant, sips his wine, and eats a lamb chop from his plate. Later, Brody and Padilla kiss in a cleaning cupboard. The movie also unflinchingly portrays the dilemmas for the janitors, who are nervous about making trouble, and must decide whether to risk their precarious livelihoods.

Striking millworkers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912

Afterwards, I wanted to know about the title. It comes from a speech by unionist, socialist and feminist Rose Schneiderman, said to have been given at the famous 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Half the employees of the major mill company were women between the ages of 14 and 18, and they’d come from dozens of different countries.

Camella Teoli, a 14-year-old millworker, testified before a U.S. Congressional hearing on the strike in March 1912. She started working when she was 13, she said, and after only two weeks she was in an accident in which the machine pulled her scalp off. She spent seven months in hospital.

Mr. HARDWICK. Why did you [join the strike]?

Miss TEOLI. Because I didn’t get enough to eat at home.

Mr. HARDWICK. You did not get enough to eat at home?

Miss TEOLI. No.

She was among more than 25,000 workers who joined the strike. It was led by the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and, chiefly, by the 22-year-old unionist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. At the time in Lawrence, the infant mortality rate was among the worst in the country, and over a third of millworkers died before they were 25.

But in her speech at the strike, Schneiderman argued for more than starvation wages. “What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art,” she said. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

After eight weeks, through the bitterly cold winter, the owners gave in. In 2012, a centennial committee commemorating the strike stated that it led to pay rises for 150,000 textile workers. Within a few years, however, the textile companies had undermined those gains.

Schneiderman, who was a Polish Jewish immigrant, died in 1972, at the age of 90, after a lifetime of campaigning for workers’ and women’s rights. She had red hair; her critics dubbed her the “Red Rose of Anarchy”. In the 1930s and 40s she helped European Jews flee to the USA and Palestine.

At the café, Koustup told me that at his building, it’s standard practice for cleaners to begin work up to 45 minutes early, unpaid, to get through the chores required of them. They haven’t had a pay rise for two years, and reports of bullying and intimidation are common.

Nevertheless, he says, the cleaners’ hourly rate – over $24 per hour, for four-hour evening shifts – is “good money” compared to earnings in many of the workers’ home countries, so many of them just accept the difficult conditions. Why don’t you just accept it? I asked.

“I can’t,” he said, abruptly.

Why not?

“Because I know it’s wrong.”

Renewable energy: power to the people

In Community development, Environment, The Age on

Locally-owned renewables are shaking up the energy market. Will government and industry join the party or try to shut it down?

CHEWTON Primary School – student population 40 – perches on a hill above the houses of the small Central Victorian town, which borders on Castlemaine.

Before the year is out, its red tin roof will be home to solar panels facing east and west, positioned to best offset its demand. The school is crowdfunding for a renewable energy system, by way of a new scheme called The People’s Solar.

“Our savings won’t go back into the big bucket,” says principal Julie Holden. “They won’t be used for staffing and books.” She’s promising to fund environmental initiatives by students around the town instead, as well as more energy efficiency improvements for the buildings.

Modest though its goal sounds, Chewton Primary is one front in a revolution.

In a speech in mid-October, Michelle Groves, CEO of the Australian Energy Regulator, described the coming change in the electricity industry that way: “a revolution”.

“Revolutions can seem threatening at first, but they also present opportunities,” she said.

In her speech, delivered to the Energy Users Association of Australia conference, she was discussing the rise of “prosumers” – consumers of electricity who are now also producers. Over a million households have installed solar panels in the last few years, she said, and that’s a good thing: along with smart appliances and batteries, this wave of solar generation is increasing both customer choice and the resilience of the electricity network.

But she warned that if existing networks resist these new, competing technologies, “there is a risk that a significant number of consumers will ‘walk away’ from the network”.

That is, they’ll leave the grid altogether, in favour of their own generation and storage, leaving its fixed costs to be defrayed among fewer users. “This would have major consequences for many consumers and for the efficient operation of energy markets,” Groves said.

Solar photovoltaic panels are booming for good reason. They’re a consumer item of malleable meaning, alluring for stubborn individualists and climate change activists alike.

But for a growing number of people, renewable energy promises something even more: an opportunity to rejuvenate communities and create local jobs. All around the country, volunteers are planning energy systems that will be owned by their community, covering a scale from single rooftops to entire towns.

“The buzz phrase is that solar power is democratising the energy market,” says Tosh Szatow, the founder of the People’s Solar, as well as a consultancy called Energy for the People. “But the democracy we’ve got isn’t serving our interests. This is something more – it’s energy owned by people, serving interests defined by those communities themselves.”

Around Castlemaine and districts, in particular, the solar citizens are rallying.

It’s a cloudless Sunday morning at Chewton Primary. Szatow explains the People’s Solar to his audience: “If the community gives the solar panels once, those panels will give back to the community for 25 years. So we turn $8000 of donations into $25,000, or more, of reinvestment in the town.”

Szatow is wearing a blue t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Stick it where the sun shines”. The event is called “Going off the grid” and it’s doubling as a fundraiser for the primary school’s panels. The People’s Solar has already overseen the installation of community-funded panels at Taradale Primary and Castlemaine Childcare Co-operative.

The region is becoming a hotspot for grid-connected solar households. In August, over 300 residents signed up for new rooftop systems by way of a not-for-profit, bulk-buying scheme called Mount Alexander Solar Homes.

Beforehand, Castlemaine already boasted nearly double the statewide proportion of solar houses, says the scheme’s coordinator, Neil Barrett. Because the new systems are much larger than most pre-existing ones, in total they’ll lift the shire’s solar generation capacity by up to a quarter. “It’s been a ripper,” he says. “It’s employed a lot of people for four or five months. We’re taking expressions of interest for a possible second stage.”

Volunteers with another organisation, the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, are investigating renewable generation on an even larger scale. They’re scoping a range of options, including a solar farm, small-scale hydro and biofuels generation, which would account for a quarter of the shire’s total electricity consumption. They are planning to establish their project as a co-operative, majority-owned by locals.

The group has adopted the same model used by Hepburn Wind, a community wind farm that has been generating power since 2011. Its two turbines feed enough electricity into the grid to more than match the needs of nearby towns Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane is the community officer for Hepburn Wind. She also works for its spinoff, Embark, which was founded to help similar projects start up. Right now, she says, the best option for community groups is solar, because there are several viable models, from bulk buys and donations, to investing in powering the local pub. There are at least ten community groups across the state working on it, from the Surf Coast to East Gippsland, and fifty around the country.

The outlook for wind, however, is grim. The federal government’s decisions to scrap the carbon tax, and review and reduce the Renewable Energy Target have slashed the co-operative’s earnings.

The Victorian government hasn’t helped. Its sudden blanket ban on wind power in the Macedon Ranges (among other locations), imposed in 2011, scuppered locals’ plans for three turbines in a nearby pine plantation. Previously, the community group had received a government grant for a wind monitoring mast.

“It’s a bit of a mess isn’t it?” says Lane. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

She argues that the state government should exempt community-owned projects from the wind “no-go zones”. It should also introduce a state-based renewable energy target and establish a feed-in-tariff for community-owned solar – policy measures that have already been adopted in South Australia and the ACT.

But as the state election approaches, there’s no sign of change. In mid-October, the Napthine government released its energy policy. Renewable energy wasn’t listed among its seven priorities. The state Labor party has promised to review the wind no-go zones and other planning restrictions, and also, to expand renewable energy, but hasn’t announced how it’ll do so.

North of the Murray, the signs are more encouraging. The New South Wales government, also Liberal, has emerged as an unlikely champion of community-owned energy.

Last Thursday, Rob Stokes, the NSW environment minister, will launch the “Repower One” project, a 99 kW solar array on the roof of the Shoalhaven Bowling and Recreation Club.

He also announced a new round of grants worth $700,000 for community energy projects. Last year, the NSW government awarded $411,000 to nine different community-owned wind and solar farms.

The solar panels on the bowls club are an initiative of volunteer group Repower Shoalhaven. On the strength of countless volunteer hours, they managed to locate a profitable oasis in the regulatory morass, explains Chris Cooper, the group’s founder.

They raised $120,000 in ten days. More than half the investors are locals and Cooper says it’ll deliver them a good commercial return. The bowls club, too, stands to come out several hundred thousand dollars ahead over the life of the system.

Repower Shoalhaven is planning on doing it again and again – cuts to the RET notwithstanding. Already, they’re in discussions about rooftops on local universities, high schools, ambulance buildings and water authorities. “We hope to get another one up by Christmas,” Cooper says. “Every three months we aim to get another project out to our members and investors.”

Elsewhere in NSW, the government is sponsoring a project to establish Australia’s first “Zero Net Energy Town”. The winning town, somewhere in the northern inland region, will be announced in mid-November. It’ll be funded to develop a blueprint and business case to switch to 100 per cent, locally generated renewable energy.

The scheme’s coordinator, Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, a charity that works on regional sustainability, says the public shouldn’t underestimate the scale of projects, and the ambitions of those involved.

“Most people think community and they think cute and little,” he says. “People haven’t yet understood that this is about serious projects with serious engineering, money, law, governance and marketing. And it’s got to be one of the most professionally overqualified sectors I’ve ever worked in – it’s a long way from the lamington drive part of the community sector.”

All that knowhow goes only so far, however, because the challenge isn’t only technical; it’s also regulatory. Now, over half our electricity bills are consumed by distribution, he says, and the regulated charges are the same no matter how far the electricity travels. Local energy systems, especially in the regions, have the potential to cut those costs – if they’re allowed to.

“Until now, regulation has been about ensuring the generators and network operators don’t go bankrupt and we always have electricity,” Blakester says. “When you want to fiddle with it, you find out it’s very complex – and you bump into some of the most powerful vested interests in the world.”

Earlier this year, Blakester helped found a peak body, the Coalition for Community Energy, to help lobby for regulatory change. In June, it held a conference in Canberra. One of the speakers was Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildspoldsried. Last year, the village produced more than four-and-a-half times the electricity it consumed.

“In Germany there are more than 300 towns that have achieved zero net energy status,” Blakester says. “It’s like another planet compared to the centralised energy oligarchy we live in.

“Can we do it in Australia? It’s too soon to be confident the answer is yes. Technically it’s doable, but whether it’s culturally and systemically possible, well, that’s up to us.”

*

THE chasm in thinking about our energy future can be traversed in just 12 kilometres in Central Victoria, between the towns of Maldon and Newstead.

Late last month, the state government announced that Maldon, a village of 1500 residents only a short drive from Castlemaine, is going to get gas – by the end of 2017, approximately.

It’s part of the “Energy for the Regions” program, first announced in 2011. The state government’s latest tender, worth $85 million, will fund gas connection for 11 towns across Victoria by way of “virtual pipelines”. Compressed gas will be trucked to a station on the outskirts of each town. From there it’ll be distributed throughout the streets via a brand new pipe network.

The successful contractor, TasGas, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Group, says the rollout will cover 12,500 homes and businesses.

In the middle of next year, the company will go on a “roadshow” of the towns, says CEO Roger Ingram, to explain its offer and pitch residents to connect. TasGas is still finalising its numbers, but Ingram estimates that the virtual pipeline will deliver gas 40 per cent cheaper than LPG.

Tony Wood, the energy program director at the Grattan Institute, thinks it will be a hard sell. The institute’s latest report, Gas at the crossroads, speculates that households will, if anything, begin switching away from gas. In the last 5 years, retail gas prices have risen by more than one-third, and they’re expected to rise significantly more. The wholesale price is tipped to double in the next two years.

“If gas prices go up as much as they might, a lot of customers aren’t going to connect after all. Or if they do connect, they’re going to be really pissed off. How would you feel if you connected and gas prices went up by 50 or 100 per cent in a very short space of time?” Wood says.

He describes the government’s spending on Energy for the Regions as “mindboggling”.

The $85 million amounts to a subsidy of $6800 for each house and business that could connect. But in reality, it’s much more. At the take-up rate estimated by TasGas – between 15 and 30 percent over the next decade – the government is shelling out somewhere between $22,667 and $45,333 a pop.

“I’m sure governments must have made worse investments, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head,” Wood says.

The residents of Newstead, 12 kilometres south of Maldon, want something different. For four years, the volunteers comprising “Renewable Newstead” have been working on a plan to become completely powered by renewable energy.

The group began by offering energy audits, which were taken up by 8 out of every ten residents. Then they began looking into creating a local micro-grid, fed by banks of solar panels.

“Our main interest is community building,” explains Geoff Park, from Renewable Newstead. “We’ve got the complete spectrum of views about climate change and sustainability. The number one priority for us is that whatever we do needs to add to the social capital of our community.”

Park anticipates that the scheme would offer electricity to locals at a slight discount from current prices, while also generating cash for to spend elsewhere in the community. And unlike gas, they don’t need the government to pay. A small grant would help scope a plan, but otherwise, it would be a commercial proposition.

Two years ago, when Park contacted the Liberal state government about the idea, he didn’t even get a reply. The group has had similar trouble dealing with the network distributor, Powercor.

Tosh Stzatow is advising Renewable Newstead on its plan to go 100 per cent renewable. He notes that if the money being poured into “Energy for the Regions” – $6800 per house – was spent on solar instead, it would cut an average household’s electricity bills close to zero for over 20 years.

“We really are at a crossroads,” Szatow says. “Every dollar we spend in centralised gas and electricity infrastructure takes us down a road to rising energy prices, non-renewable fuels and extractive business models.

“The other road is locally-owned and managed renewables, with stable or declining energy prices. That’s the one we want to walk down.”

Read this article at The Age online

Left to pick up the pieces

In Environment, The Age on

Plastic pollution in our waterways is getting worse fast. More and more citizens are cleaning beaches, but can we stop litter at the source?

NICKO Lunardi, from Newport, is wearing a black t-shirt with two skulls on it. He is 27 years old, an electrician, and a drummer in two punk bands. He’s also the leader of a small group of volunteer beach cleaners in Melbourne’s west.

It’s Sunday morning and a dozen people have slipped through a gap in the fence to the Jawbone Reserve in Williamstown, the closest marine sanctuary to the CBD. Parks Victoria’s website describes it as an “unspoilt place” and a “haven for coastal and marine life”. 

It is full of trash. Lunardi picks up a fistful of sandy debris, shot through with countless plastic chunks, lumps and specks. “What can we do with that?” he asks.

In the next hour, the group fills 16 large bags with plastic waste: wrappers, bottles, straws, lighters, labels, lollipop sticks, thongs. Plus rope, parking meter tickets, innumerable unknowable broken bits, half a dozen syringes and a tyre.

Lunardi had been in the habit of cleaning up litter by himself. “I felt weird telling people I picked up rubbish,” he says. “But then I realised: ‘No, I think they’re weird not picking up rubbish’.”

Laura, Nicko and Luke (foreground) from Scab Duty, cleaning the Jawbone Reserve, Williamstown 

So in June he started Scab Duty. The name comes from the slang for “yard duty” from his school days in Werribee. Now, every Sunday morning, a small group of volunteers spends one hour collecting refuse. And they like it – sort of.

It is Luke Fraser’s second week on Scab Duty. He’s sporting skinny black jeans and gumboots. “It makes me feel better afterwards,” he explains. “I didn’t realise how bad it is – I thought there were programs in place. I miss ignorance.”

Ignorance has just become much harder, for citizens, industry and policymakers alike: CSIRO has released the damning results of a three-year study of marine debris around Australia’s coastline and seas. Three-quarters of all the refuse is plastic, and almost all of that comes in small pieces. In Australian waters, it found up to 40,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.

The report states that “plastic production rates are intensifying” and “the volume of refuse humans release into marine systems is growing at an exponential rate”. Dr Denise Hardesty, the study’s lead author, says plastic has devastating effects on wildlife. She estimates that in the last few years, between 5,000 and 15,000 turtles have been ensnared in abandoned fishing nets in the Gulf of Carpentaria alone.

Nearly half of all seabirds have plastic in their guts; by mid-century it will be 95 per cent.

But some species fare worse already. For a decade, Dr Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist from University of Tasmania, has been studying the Flesh-footed Shearwater population on Lord Howe Island. They are deep-diving, large brown birds with a broad wingspan – and plummeting numbers.

Every Flesh-footed Shearwater in the Lord Howe Island population has ingested plastic, Lavers says.

“Plastic is absolutely and utterly everywhere. There is no even miniscule corner of the ocean that is not impacted by marine pollution right now. It’s been found from the Arctic to the Antarctic,” she says.

Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the floating refuse soup in the North Pacific Ocean. But there are actually five oceanic gyres – rotating ocean currents – which have come to trap our debris. One reaches close to the coast of Perth. In any case, oceans don’t need gyres to have a plastic problem. During their breeding season, Flesh-footed Shearwaters feed only in the Tasman Sea. “It is not unusual for a three-month old chick to contain more than 200 pieces of plastic,” Lavers says.

For the CSIRO research, which was funded by Shell, students and “citizen scientists” surveyed the beaches at Port Melbourne, St Kilda and Williamstown. As in other urban areas, they found more rubbish than where the coastline is clear. Above all, they found “cigarette butts, lots of cigarette butts”, Hardesty says.

EPA Victoria has modelled the way plastic circulates once it washes into the bay. From the rivermouth, it blows east and strikes the shore, often in the shelter of headlands. What doesn’t get beached will end up in Bass Strait within a year.

The consequences of all this plastic are two-fold. It can clog up some animals’ digestive systems, causing starvation or dehydration. But scientists have also discovered that plastic acts like a magnet for toxins in seawater. Contaminants concentrate on the plastic’s surface and are absorbed into the animals’ bloodstreams.

“It’s not just a problem of bottles on our beaches or plastic in our seabirds’ guts,” says Dr Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist from University of Tasmania. “Microplastics are infiltrating zooplankton and filter feeders like clams, mussels and sea cucumbers. These are creatures at the absolute base of the food chain. That has repercussions for every other level.”

Stony Creek Backwash, beneath the Westgate Bridge

After the clean up at Jawbone Reserve, Lunardi drives to Stony Creek Backwash, a small park beneath the Westgate Bridge. Parks Victoria describes it as a “Wetland Wonder” containing a rare stand of White Mangroves. It could add that the mangroves are surrounded by a wide and deep crust of extraordinary filth, in which grimy soft drink bottles and rusty spray cans comingle with a stained rainbow of degraded plastic scraps.

Most of this refuse has flowed from citizens’ hands onto the streets, into stormwater drains and then, the waterways. But some is industrial. Among the bottle tops and polystyrene, Lunardi draws my attention to thousands of “nurdles”. They are tiny plastic pebbles, 3 to 5 millimeters wide, the raw material for plastic manufacturing. In the Stony Creek Backwash, they seem to comprise a significant portion of the soil.

They’re a problem all around the world – and elsewhere in Melbourne too. At the same time, directly across the river, Neil Blake and volunteers from a group called ‘Port Melbourne Beach Patrol’ are conducting their own a “nurdle survey”.

Blake has been the Port Phillip “Baykeeper”, a volunteer position with the international Waterkeeper Alliance for the last six years. Each waterkeeper is a local advocate against the pollution their watershed, all in the name of swimmable, drinkable and fishable water worldwide. Blake has the long, snowy white beard of a storybook seaman. “Apparently the early waterkeepers were known as the greybeards, so I was in the running immediately,” he jokes.

He’s also the director of the Port Phillip Eco Centre, and the subject of ‘Baykeepers’, a recent documentary made by Michael J Lutman about plastic waste our waters. “The plastic age has really snuck up on us,” he says. “We haven’t been conscious of its proliferation and because it’s so cheap, we haven’t worried too much about where it goes.”

Since August 2013, he has been surveying the numbers of nurdles each week at various beaches – the most collected was over 5000 in an hour at St Kilda West, but he’s observed that numbers always spike at the high-tide line after heavy rain. Blake has also conducted several trawls of the Yarra and Maribyrnong rivers. “There’s an ongoing influx of them from industrial sites,” he says. “Once they get out into the waterways, it’s economically impossible to remove them.”

He points at the foreshore, where a few volunteers are picking up nurdles up one-by-one. “We can collect a few thousand in an hour, but if we get that many, how many million must there be along this rock wall?”

Dr Randall Lee, senior marine scientist at EPA Victoria, says the nurdles are spilled in transit and onsite by manufacturers. “They’re so small that people tend to think they’re too hard to clean up,” he says. “It’s fairly well understood that the solution, particularly for nurdles, is not at the end point. It’s at the source.”

However, despite requests, the EPA could not provide any examples of investigations or penalties enforced for nurdle spills, or any work to improve industry practices. 

The EPA says Port Phillip Bay is “generally healthier and cleaner than comparable bays near large cities”. It monitors levels of chemicals, nutrients and sediment, but hasn’t conduced litter surveys since 2007. Until then, its results showed that rubbish on bay beaches had decreased slightly overall, but gotten worse at St Kilda and Port Melbourne.

While the possible sources of nurdle spills number in the hundreds, they’re few in comparison with the sources of discarded packaging – that is, everyone, everywhere.

Packaging itself is tied up with our economic system. Food manufacturers, for example, face a challenge: humans can only eat so much. To profit, companies must constantly market new processed products and whet appetites with their wrappings.

Last week, the Packaging Industry Council revealed the finalists in its 2014 packaging design awards. Among those shortlisted for the “sustainability” category is Barista Bros, an iced coffee produced by Coca-Cola Amatil. It has a shrink-sealed label that comes off easily, leaving a fully recyclable, clear PET bottle.

But is this kind of incremental change help or hindrance? The council’s CEO, Gavin Williams, says that over decades, packaging has diminished in one sense – it’s much more streamlined. To save money, businesses try to limit its cost and weight.

This innovation doesn’t always boost recycling rates, however. Lightweight plastic containers – soft films, pouches and shrink labels – are increasingly replacing glass, aluminium and steel. The latter group is more readily recyclable.

Williams contends that packaging trends are a symptom of demographic and social change. In the food industry, single-serve packs are on the rise. Smaller households want “ready-to-eat quantities that suit their purposes”, he says. Working parents want quick, microwavable meals. “Yes, there is more packaging,” Williams says, “but that’s not because the industry is inflicting it. The industry didn’t create those trends; it is responding to them.”

While the plastic in our waterways accumulates, however, our leaders dither. State and federal governments have completed a three-year consultation process to devise a national anti-litter policy. Ten models were considered, including a government-funded campaign, a voluntary industry scheme, a flat fee on all packaging manufacturers and a container deposit scheme (such as the popular 10 cent system in South Australia). 

In April, all state and federal environment ministers met to consider the options, but they deferred a decision. Five months later, there has been no progress. The final policy recommendations have not yet been made public.

The Victorian environment minister Ryan Smith says his government has funded a dozen new litter traps, more recycling bins and litter prevention officers at the EPA. It supports a national container deposit scheme, as does the state Labor party.

But a national scheme won’t happen, because the Queensland government opposes it.

Jeff Angel is the convenor of the Boomerang Alliance, a collection of environment groups campaigning for strong government regulations. “The vast majority of the community want this plastic pollution problem solved,” he says. “Consequently, they’re willing to support things like container deposits, banning lightweight plastic bags and the removal of plastic micro beads from soaps and shampoos.”

The industry favours a voluntary scheme administered through the Australian Packaging Covenant, which is signed by over 900 businesses. It has consistently campaigned against container deposit schemes. In early 2013, legal action by Coca-Cola Amatil put a temporary halt to the Northern Territory’s cash for containers program.

Several policy reviews have found that deposit schemes are among the most expensive anti-littering measures. Even so, the recent CSIRO research found strong evidence that South Australia’s scheme is effective. There, drink containers are three times less common in litter surveys than in other states.

The Victorian government spends about $80 million each year cleaning up rubbish. A large number of submissions to the federal policy process stated that industry should bear more of the burden for litter.

By that view, public money spent on packaging waste can be understood as a subsidy: companies profit from selling a convenient, single-use product, while taxpayers and marine life pick up the costs – if they’re picked up at all.

The Packaging Council argues that’s a mistaken view of the problem: while companies must do what they can, the balance of responsibility lies with individuals.

“What do you do about the person who goes out drinking beer on a Friday night and drops their bottle in the street?” Williams says. “I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the company is responsible.

“Litter is a behavioural issue. In the long run, the only way you can change it is by consistent educational campaigns – not just for one or two years, but for a decade.”

Luke, from Scab Duty, cleaning up rubbish at Jawbone Reserve, Williamstown

On that Sunday morning, before they began the “nurdle survey”, the volunteers from Port Melbourne Beach Patrol cleaned up a 70-metre stretch of sandy riverfront on the Yarra. In an hour, they collected enough rubbish to fill twenty green shopping bags (polystyrene was particularly prominent).

Like Scab Duty, Beach Patrol is powered by concerned citizens. And much like the plastic problem, it has been growing exponentially. In 2009, the first group was founded in Middle Park. At the beginning of this year, there were five patrols at different bay beaches. By the years’ end there will be 14, stretching as far south as Chelsea. 

Terry Lobert, an IT project manager and the president of Beach Patrol, says volunteers come from all ages and backgrounds. Mostly they aren’t stereotypical greenies. “Plastic debris seems to worry everyone, which is good,” he says. Lobert co-founded the St Kilda chapter, where about three-dozen volunteers show up on the second Saturday of every month.

Beach Patrol is tallying its results for the year so far, in volunteer hours (over 1200) shopping bags of rubbish (over 900) and kilograms collected (nearly 3500).

“We’re collecting all this data to drive for change,” Lobert says. “Governments at all three levels could do lots of things that would solve the problem quite dramatically.”

He plumps for several policies: cash for containers, direct bans on plastic bags, straws and other single-use items, and more litter traps on stormwater drains, as well as public education campaigns. There’s no time to waste.

“In my ideal world there are no Beach Patrols because they’re not needed,” he says. “I don’t want to be doing this forever.”

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Mining morality or vilifying coal?

In Environment, Social justice, The Age on

Churches, universities, superannuation funds – they’re beginning to divest from fossil fuels. And the mining industry doesn’t like it.

IN mid-July, the peak body of the Uniting Church in Australia voted to sell its investments in fossil fuels. The decision was available online for anyone who cared to peruse its minutes, but the church didn’t get around to issuing a media release until a month and a half later, on the last Friday afternoon in August.

“We didn’t think it was the most earth-shattering news, because it’s a pretty mainstream issue in the Uniting Church now,” explains the church’s president, Reverend Professor Andrew Dutney. Yet its resolution included a moral claim that may be confronting for most Australians, who, by way of their superannuation funds – at the very least – own a stake in coal, oil or gas projects.

“Further investment in the extraction of fossil fuels contributes to, and makes it more difficult to address climate change,” the church states. Given the harm climate change will cause, “further investment and extraction is unethical”. “A number of people have found that to be a strong statement,” Dutney says. “But it’s very hard to argue against.”

Australians have two key facts to consider, he says: we’re among the world’s highest emitters of carbon dioxide, per person; and on top of that, we have enormous reserves of coal set to be exported for electricity generation.

“If we were to extract and burn all those reserves, then global warming will be much more disastrous for the poorer nations who are our neighbours.”

Since its belated media release, the church has been overwhelmed by the public response. News of its decision had “all but gone viral” on social media, Dutney says. “The reaction has been remarkable – I can’t remember a statement of ours having this kind of impact. It has made us realise that there are a lot of people who think this really is a big deal.”

The church’s decision is the latest move in the dizzying campaign for divestment from fossil fuels, which began in United States in late 2012, spurred by the writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben and his activist group 350.org.

McKibben toured Australia in mid-2013 and since then, advocates for divestment have emerged wherever institutions and individuals are investing their money. There are dozens of campaigns targeting universities, churches, councils, superannuation funds and banks.

In Australia, there are divestment campaigns at 19 universities, including the University of Melbourne, Monash, Latrobe and RMIT, calling for the institutions to sell whatever investments they have in fossil fuel companies.

Off campus, nearly 1000 residents in Melbourne’s inner north have petitioned Moreland City Council to go fossil free. And following a campaign headed by 350.org, UniSuper has just launched its revamped “sustainable investment” fund. It now screens out all fossil fuel companies, including the utilities Origin and AGL. On Friday, HESTA, the health industry superannuation fund, announced that it would restrict its investments in coal for electricity across its entire portfolio. It is the first Australian super fund to do so.

Thea Omerod, chair of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, says “a whole swag” of church organisations have pledged to divest, or are considering it: “They’ll be coming thick and fast.”

In July, the World Council of Churches, an umbrella group representing over half a billion Christians, announced its plans to fully divest from fossil fuels. The same month, the Anglican Church of Australia passed a motion encouraging its diocese to divest. A global campaign for the Vatican to divest has just been launched.

Father Brian Lucas, general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, says divestment is “actively being researched and considered” by the Catholic Church, but it will be hard to reach a clear resolution. “It’s too simplistic to say you can’t invest in coal mining companies – there are other factors to do with how emissions are mitigated,” he says.

The proliferating calls for divestment have also prompted an increasingly vocal counter-campaign – extolling the virtues of coal in particular – led by the mining industry and championed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

At a mining industry dinner at Parliament House in May, the Prime Minister said his job in government “is to keep mining strong” and that it is “particularly important that we do not demonise the coal industry”. He said the fundamental problem with the carbon tax was that it promoted the idea that coal should be left in the ground. “Well really and truly, I can think of few things more damaging to our future,” he said. The Prime Minister did not mention climate change.

Charlotte Wood, the campaigns director for 350.org in Australia, says the divestment movement is growing precisely because of that kind of attitude.

“We’ve tried for many years to get ambitious political action on climate change, but until we address the influence of the fossil fuel industry on our political decision makers we’re not going to see the change we need in the time we’ve got left,” she says.

“Divestment is about trying to unlock the deadlock that shackles our leaders to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s about speaking to the industry in the only language they understand, which is money. It really does have the power to erode the industry’s social license to profit from wrecking the planet.”

Researchers from Oxford University released an analysis of the campaign last October. They concluded that divestment would have little direct effect on companies and their share prices, although some coal businesses were vulnerable.

The report, funded by World Wildlife Fund UK, said the movement’s real power lies in its ability to stigmatise the industry. “In almost every divestment campaign we reviewed, from Darfur to adult services, from tobacco to South Africa, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation affecting stigmatised firms.”

It identified three stages of divestment, beginning with churches or bodies such as public health associations – who are motivated by ethical priorities – then moving to universities and councils or cities, and finally, investors such as banks and pension funds. The fossil fuels divestment campaign had moved rapidly to the second stage, the report said.

Nearly 30 cities have now pledged to divest, including San Francisco and Portland in the United States and Dunedin in New Zealand, as well as 13 universities and colleges in the United States. In May, Stanford University, in California, committed to divest from companies that mine coal for energy generation. Its endowment fund is worth about US$19 billion (AUD$21 billion).

A fortnight ago, the University of Sydney announced it would suspend further investment in coal companies while it reviews its ethical investment policy. It is also assessing what to do with its existing $900,000 holding in Whitehaven Coal Limited, owner of the controversial Maules Creek mine in NSW. The decision followed a brief, intense email campaign orchestrated by Greenpeace, adding to a longer-standing push by students.

The same week, students at the Australian National University held their annual elections. This year they voted on an extra question, about divestment. Over 80 per cent said the university should stop investing in fossil fuels. The university has refused to comment.

Students at University of Melbourne and University of Sydney are holding similar votes this week.

The campaigns for the third wave of divestment – superannuation funds and banks – are also thriving.

One of the key advocates is Market Forces, which is affiliated with Friends of the Earth. The group has been digging into the finance behind fossil fuel projects for the last 18 months. Its founder, Julien Vincent, argues that as well as the environmental imperative not to invest, there’s also a financial case, especially for long-term investors such as banks and superannuation funds.

That argument is based on the idea of the “carbon budget”: there are already far more proven reserves of fossil fuels than can be burnt if we’re to avoid runaway climate change. As the world moves to limit carbon emissions, some of those reserves will become “stranded assets” and lose their value.

Market Forces has just launched a website called Super Switch, which helps people compare various funds’ investments in fossil fuels, based on publicly available information.

It is also one of more than a dozen groups pushing Australian banks to rule out funding the recently approved Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin and the expansion of the Abbot Point port on the Great Barrier Reef. The project is owned by the Indian multinational, Adani Group.

The activists are encouraging people to “put their banks on notice” before a public “divestment day” in mid-October.

“The big four banks play a critical role in financing fossil fuel projects,” Vincent says. “If you want to get a major new coal mine, coal port, or gas export plant up, you need money from the big four.

“But this movement is going to keep getting bigger and bigger until the banks do what we want.”

Unsurprisingly, the banks have gone to ground – all four major banks declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Adani Australia.

Meanwhile, the environmental groups have celebrated the commitments of several international banks – including Deutsche Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC – not to invest in the expansion of the port at Abbot Point.

But the reality is less clear-cut. Deutsche Bank, for example, hasn’t ruled it out. It has only said it won’t invest while there’s disagreement between UNESCO and the federal government about the risks to the reef. That situation may change.

Likewise, Bendigo Bank has been praised for stating it won’t invest in coal and gas projects, but its position is more coincidence than commitment: it is a small bank and those are very large projects. Neither Deutsche Bank nor Bendigo Bank was willing to be interviewed either. Fossil fuels remain a touchy subject.

Perhaps that’s because the mining industry is biting back. Soon after the University of Sydney announced its pause on coal investments, Whitehaven Coal boss Paul Flynn accused campaigners of “green imperialism”. He said the industry needed to spend more time and money countering the divestment movement.

Asked what he thinks of divestment, Brendan Pearson, CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia, says coal must not be stigmatised. “We want to make sure that an environmental campaign doesn’t get dressed up as investment advice. We can’t let claims about ‘the end of coal’ go unanswered,” he says.

He argues not only that the coal industry is good for the Australian economy, but also contests the notion of the carbon budget, maintaining there’s no limit to fossil fuel extraction. Pearson says more efficient coal power plants, as well as “carbon capture and storage” technology will change the equation.

The industry has also begun to press an ethical claim of its own: new coal projects and exports are necessary to reduce world poverty. “The cheapest electricity is coal,” Pearson says. “If people are in energy poverty, they are absolutely likely to be in poverty, because the correlation between energy access and economic growth is incontrovertible.

“To me it is not just condescending, it is morally bankrupt to say: ‘We have it, but you can’t’.”

Debi Goenka, from the Mumbai-based Conservation Action Trust, lodged a submission with the Queensland environment department opposing Adani’s Carmichael coalmine and rail project. His organisation works with rural communities near several of the company’s coal-fired power plants in India.

Goenka is critical of the industry’s claims about reducing energy poverty. “Even assuming they had physical access to an electricity connection, people living below the poverty line would not be able to pay for the electricity,” he says. About 400 million people in India have no access to the grid.

It’s not an argument that convinces big investors either. Nathan Fabian, from the Investor Group on Climate Change, says the industry’s claims about energy poverty appear “disingenuous”.

“If the industry was serious about eradicating poverty it would understand that runaway climate change will wipe out the development achievements of the last three decades,” he says.

Fabian’s organisation represents over 50 superannuation funds and major investors, which together manage approximately $1 trillion. It helps members understand the impact of climate change on their investments and how best to deal with the risks. He’s got feedback for both the campaigners and the coal barons.

Divestment is a “campaigning concept”, he says, which doesn’t match the complicated reality for investors. “It takes time to identify which energy investments may underperform, which fossil fuel exposures to reduce, and how fast. It’s not as simple as saying ‘Just sell all those stocks today’.”

But he also says that some NGOs are providing more credible information and analysis about the implications of a carbon budget than the miners, who often use “the most ambitious assumptions”.

Earlier this year, the Investor Group videoed a mock board meeting for the fictitious “Perfect Storm Pension Fund”. In it, the trustees debate resolutions for considering climate risks in their investment decisions.

“It simply isn’t the case that campaigners are forcing investors to do things they don’t think are right,” Fabian says. “Investors have been tracking this climate risk issue for years, they know it’s a problem, and they’re working on it.

“But it is moving quickly, so if the NGOs want to continue to be relevant, they will need to improve their sophistication on the issues.”

While some investors are looking hard at the business case, the Uniting Church is hell bent on the ethical dimensions. Its NSW/ACT Synod resists publicising how much money is at stake, insisting that there is “no cost to ethical decision making”.

Reverend Professor Dutney says the Uniting Church’s decision was strongly influenced by the worries of its sister churches in the Pacific. “We’re already seeing the results of climate change across the globe and it affects the poorest people disproportionately badly,” he says.

“For us, the idea was simply to do the right thing, regardless of what anybody thought about it. The idea is to accept our responsibility for future generations.”

Read this article at The Age online

Read this related article about the carbon bubble