The Canberra Times: Challenge for our generation

There are practical and effective ways for Australia to tackle the cause of climate change and its effects.

Many native-born Australians, and those born overseas who migrated to Australia in search of a better life, did not anticipate that our expectations might be prematurely curtailed by population growth, peak oil or climate change. A decade ago, when we celebrated the new millennium, such ideas were hardly on the radar.

Not on our radar, perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. A little thought would have told us that exponential growth in our use of natural resources is bound to end when those resources run out, or if damaging by-products compromise our environment.

In 1972 the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth, warned of just such a scenario, and from 1990 onwards the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change drew attention to the risks of climate change.

Governments and corporations were well aware of these assessments. Some, including the Europeans, took notice. But successive Australian governments, under Hawke, Keating and Howard, took no heed: ''She'll be right''.

In the middle ages, natural catastrophes, plagues and pestilence were acts of God. Now we turn to science to explain the natural world. Scientists continue to unravel the complexities of climate change, and have revealed grave risks. There's no time to lose in responding to what we already know.

Many countries, corporations, communities and individuals are taking steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The main task now is to encourage others to do likewise. But climate change is not the only issue.

Johan Rockstrom and 25 other scientists from around the world have begun to define what they call planetary boundaries, or limits within which humanity can operate safely. Transgressing, or going beyond, one or more of these limits may be damaging or even catastrophic due to the risk of triggering worldwide, abrupt environmental change.

These limits for human activity relate not only to the climate, but also to the acidification of the world's oceans, levels of ozone in the upper atmosphere, the biogeochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, the use of global freshwater, change of land use, loss of biological diversity, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosols.

The increasing scale of human activity, which makes it necessary to identify limits beyond which it would be unsafe to go, results from the burgeoning human population (up from three to seven billion since 1960), and the increasing per capita use of natural resources.

Kevin Rudd was spot on when he called climate change ''the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation''. And Peter Singer gave an excellent account of the ethical dimensions of globalisation in his book One World. Each one of us should do our fair share. Deciding what a fair share is can be a tough, but necessary part of achieving a solution. A plan to harmonise global greenhouse gas emissions to a safe and sustainable level per person was conceived in the mid-1990s by the London-based Global Commons Institute.

In seeking to advance a common framework to address climate change, the UN Copenhagen conference in December 2009 fell short of expectations. But since then, there have been promising developments.

China and the US are the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, but China's new Five Year Plan (2011-15) makes ''low carbon development'' a national priority for the first time. China will reduce the carbon intensity of its economy (emissions per unit of output) by 16per cent by 2015.

This will be achieved by huge investment in low-carbon technologies. As one European analyst put it, China has now taken ''an expensive bet on a low-carbon future''. Michael Jacobs (special advisor to the British prime minister, 2004-10) writes that China's plan could be a ''turning point for global climate policy.'' Brazil, India and Mexico are all ranked, together with seven European countries, in the top ten on the Climate Change Performance Index. To our shame, Australia has slipped to 55 out of the 57 countries included in the Index, in front of only Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.

Among OECD countries, Australia, Canada and the United States stand out with the largest per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. By contrast, the European Union and Japan emit at only half their rate. The EU and Japan reacted quickly to the early IPPC reports, and now operate much more efficient economies in terms of emissions per unit of output. What of Australia? Since ratifying the Kyoto protocol in 2007 and commissioning the Garnaut Report, the Commonwealth Government has achieved little to mitigate climate change.

Measures to promote solar energy and improve energy efficiency in homes were as much to boost employment during the Global Financial Crisis as to reduce emissions. Already these measures have been curtailed or are being phased out on the pretext that they will be replaced by a carbon tax, though no carbon tax has yet been agreed by Parliament.

Last year the research and advocacy network Beyond Zero Emissions published, with the University of Melbourne, a fully-costed plan to shift Australia to 100per cent renewable energy by 2020. Essential elements include commercially-available solar-thermal and wind technologies; long-distance direct-current powerlines augmenting the national grid, and measures to make more efficient and widespread end-use of electrical power.

Greenhouse gases have the same effect on the atmosphere wherever they are emitted or absorbed. Emissions by Indonesia and Malaysia exceed those by Australia, and forest clearance makes up a large part. A co-operative, regional initiative to conserve native forests threatened by land use changes could significantly reduce global emissions.

By pulling our weight to save forests in our region, we might also save the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef for future generations.

Many federal parliamentarians seriously underestimate the importance and urgency of climate change, and both Labor and Coalition parties are engulfed by vested interests.

The steps taken and proposed by the Commonwealth Government to mitigate climate change are lamentably inadequate. They bear no relation either to Australia's responsibility for contributing to the problem, or to our capacity to help solve it. We have the scientific, technological, financial and logistical capacity to do far more.

Nevertheless, other levels of government, some businesses, some local communities, and many individuals are taking action to reduce emissions and tread more lightly on the planet. Through GreenPower, over 800,000 electricity users already source their electricity from renewables.

If all households sign up for 100per cent GreenPower, the funds raised would be sufficient to build all the new infrastructure required in the Beyond Zero Emissions plan. The reduction in Australia's emissions would be massive and could be accomplished within one decade.

Faced with a problem that appears to be serious but insurmountable, a natural human reaction is to put it to the back of the mind. Many Australians react to climate change like this.

There are practical and effective ways for Australia to tackle the cause of climate change and its deleterious effects. The same is true for other risks to our natural environment.

We need to make it very clear to our parliamentarians that we are willing to play our part, and will accept nothing less from them. No spin. No excuses.