The Australian Rudd Government has realeased its White Paper on greenhouse gas reduction targets up to 2020. Lenore Taylor in The Australian describes it as a ’safe course’ in the context of present economic circumstances.
‘In a move that outraged conservationists and only partially appeased industry, Kevin Rudd made an unconditional promise to reduce Australian emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020.
But if other major emitters – including developing countries such as India and China – signed on to substantial emissions reductions in a UN agreement due to be finalised in Copenhagen late next year, Australia could cut its greenhouse pollution by up to 15per cent by 2020.’
As Greenpeace Australia Pacific states, a 5% cut would be meaningless. Is this a failure of Australian political leadership – or common sense in the context of an uncertain economic environment, with the major players as yet uncommitted to a global climate deal?
I think the Rudd government’s decision to start slow on cutting national emissions is a political and economic miscalculation. Rudd is securing the short term stability of the Australian economy at the cost of dangerously imperiling its future after 2020.
Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald points out that lack of resolve on the issue of emissions reduction targets means that the Australian government continues to send the wrong signals to green investors.
‘[A] soft start to emissions trading, together with the modest ambitions for carbon cuts, is unlikely to create a jobs boom’, Cubby writes. Quoting Matthew Warren, the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Cubby argues that ‘”[a] soft start [to emissions trading] only works if it is backed with aggressive investment signals in energy efficiency and clean technology. … These [signals would] deliver the biggest emissions cuts in the first years and prepare the Australian economy for the changes to follow”.’
Cubby is right. What Rudd’s modest target regime fails to account for is how Australia is to prepare itself for the major cuts it needs to make after 2020. Rudd seems to be proceeding on the expectation that the world will not be attempting to cut CO2 emissions by 80% or more after 2020.
What if this is a historical mistake?
Rudd is forgetting that the road to 2020 is just a run-up to a far greater leap. Top scientists claim that if society as we know it is to survive this century, we need a deep cut in global nett carbon emissions of 80% or more from 1990 levels. How is Australia to make this change smoothly and efficiently if it hasn’t trained and prepared itself for a massive infrastructural leap into a sustainable future? A slow start to emissions cuts means that industry and consumers do not get ready for the shift in gear. We need government policy that works to inspire and create the investment decision and business infrastructure that will shift Australia into a green economy post-2020.
Anatomy of desire
December 8, 2008
Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great asked him: ‘What can I do for you?’, he replied: ‘Please step out of my sun’.
Diogenes could have asked for anything — wealth, power, fame. But he chose to sit in the sun. What a fabulous example of philosophical asceticism!
Philosophers through the ages agree that to change ourselves for the better, we must get a grip on our desires. Does this mean limiting our desire, desiring less? Perhaps it simply means distinguishing good and bad desires — desiring those things that make us happy and healthy and rejecting the contrary.
Tectonic plates
November 28, 2008
Change can rock our world — and not always in a good way. Our lives are comprised of many parts, and the parts form systems. When part of the system shifts, seismic effects run through the whole. If the system lacks flexibility, the firmament of life can split and crack beneath our feet.
In preparation for change, we should ensure that the components of our life are like tectonic plates, sliding upon a bed of magma. When tectonic plates run up against one another, there is a sudden shock, but the fluid underpinnings mean that there is room for shifts, displacements, and the transference of force, until things settle down again.
Likewise, we must ensure that our everyday changes take place on a fluid underpinning. Successful change has a plastic substratum, a fluid cultural basis.
Big government is back
November 19, 2008
Robert L. Borosage writes in the Huffington Post (Nov 18, 2008): a ‘major recovery program — featuring substantial public investment — will be inevitably the first initiative of the Obama administration’. ‘The era of big government is over is over. …[W]e are … “all Keynesians now”‘.
Are we reentering an era of big government? It is hard to imagine neo-liberal ideology rolling over without a fight. At the same time, it’s hard to see how nations will haul themselves out of recession, or begin to fight climate change, in a laissez faire environment.
Perhaps we are inevitably Keynesians now?
More than an American dream
November 6, 2008
On November 4, 2008, Americans said ‘yes’ to life. They looked to the future and saw an America that was different to yesterday. And they affirmed the change. They affirmed the promise of an unknown future.
Pundits and strategists will analyze the success of the Obama campaign for years to come. But the reason that Obama triumphed is clear. He campaigned on a ticket of change in times that were crying for it. He ran a disciplined campaign, and built an unprecedented grassroots movement that raised record sums of money. Most importantly, he offered the American people the chance of believing in themselves again. He achieved this, not through jingoistic flag-waving and the rejection of things un-American, but by calling upon the heroic spirit that has seen America through its darkest days.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson weren’t born heroes but became heroic by the disposition they assumed in relation to their times. Obama reminds us that we too can be heroic, providing that we confront the need for change and see change for what it can be and is — a positive way ahead.
In times of change, this is more than just an American dream.
Creating futures
July 27, 2008
The future that we’ve been counting on for decades is unsustainable. Our task today, as individuals and societies, is to create a new vision of the future.
Bobby Kennedy said: ‘The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present’.
It is time we told a new story about ourselves. Are we the late-born children of the oil age, helpless and trembling on the brink of collapse? Or are we the early members of that heroic generation tasked with changing the world – the first generation of a new era of globalized co-operation and eco-consciousness?
Be warned: how you respond may change your life.
Affirmation and eternal return
June 6, 2008
Alexis was in love with life. Fresh out of art school in Fremantle, Australia, she’d picked up a scholarship to study photography under a famous Parisian photographer. Her mother had urged caution, but Alexis persisted – and thank goodness! The course – and Paris itself – was everything that she’d hoped. Her French sponsor found her an apartment in the Latin Quarter, just a stone’s throw from the Place Saint-Michel. Alexis would stroll along the Seine in the evening, up the Champs Elysées to take pictures of the Arc de Triomphe in the flurry of lights. After two months documenting daily life on the streets of Paris, she had enough material for an exhibition. Alexis felt like she was at the heart of life. Things could go anywhere from here.
One night Alexis was speaking to an old friend in Australia. They were reminiscing about their student days, which the friend dearly missed.
‘Do you remember Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return?’ the friend asked. ‘If I had to choose one time of my life to live out again and again, it would be art school days’.
Alexis, for her part, was ambivalent about the ‘good old days’. She realized then that if there were a time in her life that she would have again and again, it would be her time in Paris, not Fremantle. The more that she reflected on this, the more her life seemed to come into focus. Looking out her window at the bustling streets, she imagined Nietzsche’s demon coming into her room and making her the offer of Eternal Return. Alexis could hear herself reply:
‘Yes. You are a god and I have never heard anything more divine’.
Heraclitus on change
April 7, 2008
What does it mean to live in a world of change? Heraclitus’ answer is: to live in a world of constant change is to be constantly changing.
This vision of life is evident in Heraclitus’ epigram on the river of flux:
‘We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not’ (B49a).
The idea seems to be that no one can step into the same river twice. This is because the river is constantly changing. But surely, one might respond, a river only changes within its banks? If one accepts that a river is defined by its course, it remains the same river irrespective on how much changes goes on between its banks.
This may be right but it misses Heraclitus’ point. What Heraclitus is saying is that, along the banks, the material substance of the river is constantly changing. If you stand on the side of the Danube, the water that you see before you is not the same water from moment to moment. If the river is this water – the water that flows past the banks – then the Danube is not the same river from moment to moment. We step into Danube, we step out again. When we step into it again, we step into different water, and thus effectively, a different river.
Furthermore, we step into and out of the river as different beings.
Most interpretations of Heraclitus’s river fragment focus on the idea of the river in a state of flux. But Heraclitus says more than this in this fragment: ‘We are and are not’.
The river changes and so do you!
We are familiar with the principle of biological generation and corruption. Heraclitus puzzled over this principle two thousand years before the birth of the modern biological sciences and drew its ultimate lesson for the human condition. As material beings, we live in a world of flux. Moreover, we are flux. As physical bodies, we are growing and dying all the time, consuming light and resources to replicate our structure, while shedding matter continuously.
Change and death are omnipresent features of the natural world. Perhaps this is what Heraclitus means when he says we are living our death and dying our life.
Reflections on empowerment
February 19, 2008
Don’t underestimate the desire to think and learn. You know what Parmenides said — thinking and being are the same.
Don’t underestimate the wonder in discovering a new sentiment or passion. Do you remember the first time you fell in love?
Don’t underestimate the value of learning a new activity, or acquiring the ability to tackle a new task. These things can transform lives.
Don’t underestimate the human need to be and belong. To say ‘I am…’ and have that mean something… It gives meaning to life.
What do these things have in common? They are forms of empowerment.
No one knows what they are capable of thinking, feeling, doing, or being. The adventure of life is to find out.
