Category Archives: Stephan Lewandowsky

Australian Climate Change Authority (CCA): Draft report released on targets

Climate Policy, Stephan Lewandowsky

On Wednesday, Australia’s independent Climate Change Authority (CCA) released the Targets and Progress Review Draft Report. The new Liberal government plans to abolish the CCA, and the legal requirement to set an emissions target, as part of legislation to repeal the former Labor government’s carbon price. Labor is now reportedly debating whether to negotiate on the bills, but at present Labor continues to defend the existence of the CCA and a cap on emissions. CCA is conducting the Review in accordance with existing law, but acknowledges the Government’s plans to replace the carbon price with an Emissions Reduction Fund, arguing that advice on selecting an emissions target remains relevant regardless of the chosen policy mechanism.

The Review was an opportunity for CCA to wipe the slate clean and challenge the beliefs of the major political parties about Australia’s role in climate action. Unfortunately, CCA has instead chosen to limit itself to recommending the incremental step of moving up the conditional target range at minimal cost. The Draft Report essentially adheres to the beliefs of the former government by operating within the flawed framework of the Garnaut Review commissioned by Labor, despite the Liberals having no affiliation with Garnaut.

The good

The report concludes all countries will need to do more to meet the globally agreed goal of limiting global warming to <2°C, and Australia’s present 5%-by-2020 emissions reduction target is “inadequate” and “not credible”. This is merely stating the obvious but nonetheless an advance on the position of the two major political parties. One of the reasons listed is that “it is inconsistent with action toward the 2 degree goal” because it implies “an implausibly rapid acceleration of effort” after 2020 (which seems to me important enough to make it unnecessary to mention other reasons).

CCA concludes the cost of emissions reductions is less than previously believed, because of the falling price of renewables and because emissions are tracking below 2012 business-as-usual projections (though something tells me that may have been because of the fixed carbon price). If Australia reduces its emissions by the same amount relative to business-as-usual as in the 2012 projections, we would reach 11% below 2000 in 2020. CCA also points out that more ambitious emissions targets would have a relatively small economic impact, and Australia risks becoming an economic “backwater” as the world moves away from fossil fuels.

Hopefully by declaring the 5% target “inadequate”, CCA will help shift the Australian climate debate toward more ambitious targets. However, from here on the report quickly goes off the rails.

The bad

The draft report buries the lead: at its current emissions rate Australia could exhaust its fair carbon budget in just 6 years. This conclusion is ignored in the Review’s recommendations.

CCA focuses on the <2°C target, ignoring the evidence that the present level of atmospheric CO2 and global temperature are already dangerous and there is very little time to avoid large feedbacks that could further accelerate climate change. This means we urgently need to phase out global greenhouse gas emissions, most importantly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, as quickly as possible. A pathway consistent with reducing atmospheric CO2 from 400 to 350 ppm would involve cutting global fossil fuel CO2 emissions by 6%/year beginning in 2013 (or even faster if the world delays).

CCA chooses a global budget of 1700 Gt CO2e for 2000-2050, which corresponds to a 67% chance of avoiding (or a 33% risk of exceeding) 2°C. Not only is the <2°C target unsafe, but 33% is an intolerably high risk of missing it. Also, CCA fails to spell out that a global carbon budget for any >50% probability of <2°C requires leaving most of the Earth’s fossil fuels in the ground.

In selecting its carbon budget, CCA has chosen to lump different greenhouse gases together using the flawed measure “CO2-equivalent” (CO2e). The report acknowledges that different gases behave differently in the atmosphere, but ignores this because: “Multi-gas approaches are consistent with Australia’s international commitments and with the approach adopted by other nations.” The report does not use the latest scientific information on global warming potentials in its CO2e calculations prior to FY2017-18. Similarly, the report does not acknowledge that fossil carbon and land carbon play different roles in the carbon cycle. Consequently CCA fails to recognize that it is most important and urgent to cut fossil fuel CO2 emissions.

CCA considers a number of options for Australia’s share of the 1700 Gt global carbon budget, the smallest being less than 4 Gt CO2e (based on a per-capita share of the global budget). This is the budget that would run out in a few years. But CCA dismisses this arguably fair approach because it implies an Australian emissions target of 70% below 2000 by 2020, claiming it is “probably infeasible” to make such reductions within Australia (but citing no evidence for this claim). Instead, CCA recommends Australia adopt a carbon budget of 10.1 Gt CO2e for 2013-2050, about a 1% share of the global budget. This choice is based on Garnaut’s “modified contraction and convergence” framework, which unfairly favors Australia by allowing Australia to maintain its high per-capita emissions for decades, rewarding Australia for its past failure to cut emissions, and rewarding Australia for policies promoting rapid population growth.

Unfortunately, however, CCA’s main argument for raising the emissions target is not the carbon budget but that “the Government’s conditions and the pace of international action justifies us going further”. CCA clearly sees Australia’s role in climate action as a mere follower, rather than the leader which our wealth and high emissions suggest we should be. Despite the fact that CCA’s mandate puts no limit on the ambition of the targets it can recommend, the report stubbornly stays within the Government’s present constrictive range of conditional targets (5%, 15%, or 25% below 2000). This is an implicit statement that Australia should sit around and wait for other countries to take adequate action before we strengthen our own target. Thus the argument becomes about whether the actions of other countries live up to Australia’s conditions to raise its own ambition, despite the report having earlier acknowledged the present targets of other countries are nowhere near what is required.

CCA argues the Government’s stated conditions for moving beyond 5% to 15% have been met. The report talks up the actions of other countries, for example describing the policies of the US as “ambitious”, when in reality their 2020 target is 17% below 2005, a mere 4% below 1990. And it uses various comparisons to show Australia is “at the lower end of effort compared with other developed countries”, whereas the 15% and 25% options are roughly in line with the actions of other countries. But all the Government has to say to counter CCA’s argument is that the conditions have not been met to the Government’s satisfaction.

Instead, CCA should admit it is unfair, undiplomatic, and counterproductive for Australia to make any of its actions conditional on the actions of other countries, particularly developing countries. The UNFCCC principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” obligates the world’s richest and highest per-capita emitters to show leadership, so poor countries are unlikely to ever be impressed by conditional emissions targets from Australia. If a given target is justified, then Australia should adopt that target regardless of international action. Unconditional unilateral ambition is required to break the international deadlock, and by “ambition” I mean zero emissions ASAP.

Some of the arguments CCA makes about low costs are problematic too. For example, the conclusion that a 25% target would cost little more than 15% relies partly on the assumption that international offsets will be allowed (see “The ugly”).

Another example is CCA’s recommendation that the Government use the 91 Mt CO2e of surplus credits from Australia’s Kyoto Protocol first commitment period target to grant itself a free three-percentage-point emissions “reduction” relative to 2000 by 2020. Not only would this displace future emissions cuts, it would unfairly reward Australia for having demanded an emissions increase target in Kyoto, and “achieved” that target with creative accounting in LULUCF (land use, land use change, and forestry) without meaningfully reducing its contribution to climate change. Instead, surplus permits should be voluntarily cancelled so they do not dilute future targets.

The report claims Australia’s emissions have been level since 1990. The reality is emissions excluding LULUCF rose 32% between 1990 and 2011. CCA also claims that “over the past two decades Australia has achieved solid economic growth while halving its emissions intensity (emissions per unit of GDP).” In reality, emissions intensity reduces automatically over time so this statistic is not very meaningful without further context.

CCA’s recommended targets are relative to a baseline of emissions levels in the year 2000 and include LULUCF. But it would be much fairer to make 1990 the base year and exclude LULUCF from the main target, because Australia should not be rewarded for the refusal of the Hawke, Keating, and Howard governments to cut emissions.

CCA’s final report will recommend an emissions target for 2020, a target range for 2030, and an emissions budget and trajectory out to 2050, with the post-2020 recommendations to be periodically reviewed. However, the draft report does not make a final recommendation on what the 2020 target should be, instead canvassing two alternate pathways:

  • 15% below 2000 by 2020 (using up 4.3 Gt CO2e of Australia’s budget during 2013-2020), and 35-50% by 2030.
  • 25% below 2000 by 2020 (using up 4 Gt CO2e of Australia’s budget during 2013-2020), and 40-50% by 2030.

As Tim Hollo notes, these scenarios link weak 2020 targets with weak 2030 targets, at odds with CCA’s conclusion that 15% would use up more of the budget than 25% and therefore require faster emissions cuts later. CCA rules out a 40%-by-2020 target based on an arbitrary principle that “anything more than a 35 percentage point jump between targets 10 years apart is too large”.

The focus on targets as far off as 2020, 2030, and 2050 ignores the urgency of rapid global emissions cuts and Australia’s responsibility to lead the world. Moreover, such distant targets are easily undermined. CCA should instead recommend an emissions trajectory that reduces rapidly toward zero, and requires large and systemic progress within a single electoral term in transitioning from the fossil fuel economy to a zero-carbon one.

The ugly

The report ignores Australia’s largest contribution to climate change, its fossil fuel exports. But in a world where national emissions targets do not add up to a safe global target, Australia shares ethical responsibility for its exports. Demand for Australia’s planned fossil fuel export growth depends on an emissions scenario leading to >4°C global warming with consequences that range from the severe to the unimaginable. Australia must stop expanding and start phasing out its fossil fuel exports.

CCA’s decision to recommend a single target for 2020 and a range for 2030 is supposedly intended to balance short-term certainty for investors with long-term flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. But investment certainty is unachievable because of the sabotaging influence of the fossil fuel lobby, and flexibility cannot wait until after 2020. The world’s governments are scheduled to agree on ambitious 2020 targets in 2014, and post-2020 targets in 2015. If Australia continues to insist on a weak target for itself, it will contribute to the global institutionalization of inadequate action until 2020 or beyond. Thus a bad decision may be difficult to correct for years even if CCA continues to exist. Therefore the CCA must get it right now.

The report endorses gas-fired electricity generation and says it is dependent on coal seam gas extraction (as well as climate policies), a conclusion which The Australian is already using to bash the Greens. In reality, investment in gas would lock in fossil fuel infrastructure for decades we don’t have.

Despite the fact that policies determine whether targets are met in a meaningful way, the Review refuses to comment on mechanisms, except for one issue on which its recommendation is to go in the wrong direction: it says international offsets should be allowed. One of the few things which the new Government has got right is that international offsets will cause Australia’s emissions to go up not down, and that this is unacceptable. CCA should reaffirm the Government’s decision to take a strong stand on this issue, instead of seeking to weaken it.

CCA claims there is “no special merit in confining emissions reductions to domestic actions, so long as the international emissions reductions purchased are credible”. In reality, even credible offsets would delay systemic economic decarbonization in Australia and unfairly shift the burden of Australia’s target onto other countries (making a mockery of dividing up a global carbon budget into fair shares). The report also claims emissions cuts will be more expensive without international offsets. In reality, the supposed cost reduction is actually a reduction in the effectiveness of the policy, while the “cost” is mainly paid by polluting companies and pales in comparison to the avoided long-term costs of climate change.

CCA recommends: “The Government should consider allowing the use of international emissions reductions”, albeit “paying careful attention to the environmental integrity of the emissions reductions allowed”. But does CCA really believe the Government, once the door to offsets is opened, will pay any attention to their environmental integrity? The historical record in Australia and around the world shows governments will do anything to get out of making meaningful emissions cuts, so independent bodies like CCA need to hold them to account.

CCA’s focus on minimizing costs represents a failure to understand that climate change is an urgent crisis, and policies that mitigate enormous costs from climate change are preferable to policies that are cheap and ineffective. Australia’s true national interest is not in low-cost climate policy, but in preventing dangerous climate change. Moreover, governments have a long history of overestimating the costs of climate action and underestimating the costs of climate change. Perhaps most fundamentally, the discount rates used in cost-benefit analysis of climate policy effectively devalue the lives of future generations.

Conclusion

CCA was supposed to take the politics out of emissions targets. Instead we are seeing the same evasion of action and rationalization of inaction that we saw from Garnaut, which might make CCA look good but won’t do much to address climate change. Now I find myself asking: is this it?

CCA must recommend a carbon budget, target, and trajectory that truly meets Australia’s obligations to help prevent dangerous global warming. The government may not listen, but they certainly won’t listen if CCA never makes the argument, and CCA’s report would at least help to reframe the climate debate. A WWF-commissioned poll shows CCA is lagging behind public opinion: 80% of Australians support a deeper target than 5% and 52% support a minimum target of 25% or more. CCA itself admits that a fair estimate of Australia’s carbon budget runs out in just a few years, so why don’t they heed their own advice? I recommend the 80% target be brought forward from 2050 to 2020.

CCA has called for public submissions on the Draft Report. The submission process closes on 29 November, and if CCA still exists it will release its final report on 28 February 2014. Let’s tell CCA to step up its game.

This is an updated version of a post that first appeared at Precarious Climate.

Association for Psychological Science on Inconvenient Truth Tellers

Stephan Lewandowsky

The monthly newsletter of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) contains two articles that examine the way in which “inconvenient” scientists are being attacked, both within the discipline of psychology and beyond.

 

The lead article, written by APS, can be found here. A companion article, authored by Stephan Lewandowsky, Michael E. Mann, Linda Bauld, Gerard Hastings, and Elizabeth F. Loftus is available here.

War or Peace? Psychology’s Contribution

Stephan Lewandowsky

Human beings have been fighting each other in organized warfare since time immemorial. The 20th Century has often been characterized as one of the bloodiest ever. Does this mean that war is inevitable? Will human beings continue to slaughter each other on a large scale?

Some scholars have offered an optimistic prospect for the future: For example, Steven Pinker has suggested that violence in the world has been on a gradual downward trend, major cataclysms such as World War I and II notwithstanding. Others have disagreed with Pinker and have argued that violence continues unabated.

Irrespective of the historical trends, many people might agree on the need for a better understanding of the societal and psychological processes that underlie warfare and violent intergroup conflict. The most recent issue of the American Psychologist is dedicated to exactly those issues. The issue, which commenced shipping in hardcopy on 16 October, with online postings of the articles to follow shortly, reports a broad range of contributions from experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists that address how a better understanding of human behavior might help us prevent or mitigate violent conflicts.

The special issue was organized by me and colleagues Klaus Oberauer, Alexandra Freund, Werner Stritzke and Joachim Krueger. All articles were subject to the regular editorial process of American Psychologist.

This first post on our initiative provides an overview of the articles and links to their online appearance and to the authors’ homepages. Future posts will focus on particular issues within the article(s) and provide a bit more background information that, for space reasons, could not make it into the printed article(s).

Lewandowsky, S., Stritzke, W. G. K., Freund, A. M., Oberauer, K., & Krueger, J. I. Misinformation, Disinformation, and Violent Conflict: From Iraq and the “War on Terror” to Future Threats to Peace.

In a world of unprecedented technology, information can spread across the globe in a matter of seconds. As both an instrument and an object of war, psychocultural influence increasingly defines modern warfare. The ways in which people respond to misinformation and disinformation are examined in a retrospective case study of the Iraq war of 2003 and in a prospective study of the destabilizing effects of climate change.

Christie, D. J., & Montiel, C. J. Contributions of psychology to war and peace.

American psychologists have contributed to war efforts in various ways over the past century. Breaking with this tradition, about 50 years ago some psychologists in the United States and around the world began focusing scholarship and activism on preventing war and promoting peace. Contemporary scholarship and practice in peace psychology focus on the prevention and mitigation of episodic and structural violence and the promotion of peace, human well-being, and social justice.

Leidner, B., Tropp, L. R., & Lickel, B. Bringing science to bear—On peace, not war: Elaborating on psychology’s potential to promote peace.

Only a fraction of human history has gone unmarked by violent conflict. Is war inevitable? While violence has its starting points in the human mind, an inherent human capacity for peaceful relations challenges the inevitability of war. Building on this capacity with approaches that foster empathy and understanding of outgroups and increase critical evaluation of ingroups, the authors emphasize the importance and use of psychology to reduce war.    

Al Ramiah, A., & Hewstone, M. Intergroup contact as a tool for reducing, resolving, and preventing intergroup conflict: Evidence, limitations, and potential.

History is rife with incidents of violent, long-term conflict, and postconflict societies often remain fragile and prone to civil wars. Among conflict resolution approaches, intergroup contact-based approaches, derived from Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis, can play a pivotal and complementary role in reducing, resolving, and preventing conflict. Highlighting some conflict zones around the world, this review explores how and when intergroup contact can most effectively aid lasting peace.

Jonas, E., & Fritsche, I. Destined to die but not to wage war: How existential threat can contribute to escalation or de-escalation of violent intergroup conflict.

Our higher cognitive capacities bring about unique awareness of our own mortality. Research emanating from terror management theory has shown that existential anxiety is heightened when people are presented with reminders of death. Defense of one’s cultural ingroup is a natural coping mechanism but can result in hostility when accompanied by derogation of outgroup members. The authors discuss possible approaches to overriding adverse consequences of existential threat.

Kruglanski, A. W., …. Sharvit, K. Terrorism—A (self) love story: Redirecting the significance quest can end violence.

The same motivation that when directed favorably may inspire people to their most constructive conciliations can, when misguided, drive them into mutual destruction. Rousseau’s diametric concepts of self-love, the quest for personal significance, and love of self, a focus on self-preservation, present a model for understanding terrorist motivations. Insight into the psychological processes involved in becoming a terrorist and leaving terrorism behind can yield nonviolent paths to personal significance.

Staub, E. Building a peaceful society: Origins, prevention, and reconciliation after genocide and other group violence.

Recent human history has been profoundly marked by genocide, mass killings, and civil war. Understanding the origins of intergroup violence—difficult life conditions, psychological factors, and social processes—can open possibilities for psychological intervention. Research suggests that early interventions, such as promoting positive regard for others, helping groups heal from past victimization, public education, and raising children to become inclusively caring and courageous people, might offer the best potential to avert violence.

Cohrs, J. C., Christie, D. J., White, M. P., & Das, C. Contributions of positive psychology to peace: Toward global well-being and resilience.

Peaceful societies are associated not only with the absence of violence but also with the presence of positive characteristics such as social justice and harmonious relationships. Positive psychology, with its focus on sanguine experiences such as happiness, hope, and fulfillment, appears to offer peace psychology useful concepts, while peaceful societal conditions may enhance well-being. The interrelationships between these fields, however, are found to be complex.

FAQs for PLoS1 paper by Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer

Stephan Lewandowsky

This post contains FAQs and answers to the paper by Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer that was published in PLOS ONE in 2013, entitled The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science.

The abstract of the paper is reproduced below, and because PLOS ONE is an open access journal the paper itself can be accessed here:

Abstract

Background: Among American Conservatives, but not Liberals, trust in science has been declining since the 1970’s. Climate science has become particularly polarized, with Conservatives being more likely than Liberals to reject the notion that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the globe. Conversely, opposition to genetically-modified (GM) foods and vaccinations is often ascribed to the political Left although reliable data are lacking. There are also growing indications that rejection of science is suffused by conspiracist ideation, that is the general tendency to endorse conspiracy theories including the specific beliefs that inconvenient scientific findings constitute a “hoax.”

Methodology/Principal findings: We conducted a propensity weighted internet-panel survey of the U.S. population and show that conservatism and free-market worldview strongly predict rejection of climate science, in contrast to their weaker and opposing effects on acceptance of vaccinations. The two worldview variables do not predict opposition to GM. Conspiracist ideation, by contrast, predicts rejection of all three scientific propositions, albeit to greatly varying extents. Greater endorsement of a diverse set of conspiracy theories predicts opposition to GM foods, vaccinations, and climate science.

Conclusions: Free-market worldviews are an important predictor of the rejection of scientific findings that have potential regulatory implications, such as climate science, but not necessarily of other scientific issues. Conspiracist ideation, by contrast, is associated with the rejection of all scientific propositions tested. We highlight the manifold cognitive reasons why conspiracist ideation would stand in opposition to the scientific method. The involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science has implications for science communicators.

FAQs

Q: What are the theoretical reasons for conducting this research?

A: There is a long-standing tradition of epistemological enquiry in philosophy that seeks to differentiate between justifiable (and potentially scientific) knowledge on the one hand, and conspiracy theorizing on the other—a problem that turns out to be quite nuanced and tricky. Those efforts have recently been augmented by empirical work in cognitive science, which seeks to analyze conspiratorial thinking into its constituents and seeks to identify associated psychological predictors. The present paper fits squarely within this theoretical tradition.

 

Q: What are the pragmatic implications of this research?

A: The public has a right to be informed about the risks societies are facing, from issues such as climate change or the introduction of GM foods to often-fatal diseases that are preventable by childhood vaccinations. Sadly, the public is currently prevented from exercising that right, especially as it relates to climate change, because the media coverage in many countries fails to reflect the overwhelming and strengthening scientific consensus. In addition to the widespread misleading representation of scientific issues in the media, there are cognitive and motivational factors that cause some people to deny well-established scientific facts, such as climate change or the benefits of vaccinations. Because such denial, when sufficiently vocal, can exacerbate the media misrepresentations, this alone renders the present research important. Moreover, its importance is enhanced by the well-known fact that people cannot readily dismiss misinformation unless they are provided with reasons for why false information was propagated in the first place. Thus, for the public to regain its right to accurate knowledge of the risks we are facing, it must also understand what motivates people to deny those risks.

 

Q: Are all skeptics “deniers”?

A: No. Scientists are skeptics and they use the peer-reviewed literature for vigorous debate. However, climate scientists no longer debate the fundamental fact that the globe is warming from greenhouse gas emissions, and in the medical community, doubts about the efficacy of vaccinations no longer have much intellectual respectability. Beyond such fundamentals, the submission portals of journals remain wide open for skeptical debate. Denial differs from skepticism because it usually side-steps the peer-reviewed literature and replaces skeptical analysis with the noise of talkfests or blogs.

 

Q: Is there no room for debate?

A: Of course there is. Science is debate, but that debate takes place in the scientific literature and at scientific conferences. In the history of science, we are not aware of a case in which a serious scientific issue was adjudicated by tabloid journalists or their modern-day equivalents such as blog commenters. Anyone truly interested in scientific debate can contribute to it by submitting papers to the relevant journals for peer review.

 

Q: Do the results imply that people who reject scientific findings should be silenced?

A: No. Far from it, everybody is most welcome to contribute opinions and potential data (in the form of blog comments and hypotheses) to the public sphere. However, the public has a right to be informed about why people voice such hypotheses and how they differ from sound scientific reasoning. Out latest paper places some emphasis on the difference between scientific reasoning and other modes of cognition in the Discussion.

 

Q: What is most surprising about our results?

A: The involvement of conspiratorial thinking in the rejection of science is not very surprising, given the existing body of literature that we review in the paper. Similarly, the important role of free-market worldviews in the rejection of climate science is also not surprising in light of previous results—including work by ourselves but even more so by Dan Kahan and Robert Gifford and others. What is surprising, and in our view quite remarkable, is the absence of any role of free-market worldview or conservatism in the rejection of GM foods, and their rather weak (and mutually opposing) role in the rejection of vaccinations. As we note in the paper, these results fly in the face of media speculation which—based on anecdotal evidence—ascribed opposition to vaccinations and GM foods to the political left. We find no evidence for this association concerning GM foods, and only weak evidence in the case of vaccinations. (Vaccinations are a nuanced beast and the article explores those nuances in greater depth.)

 

Q: Are all “deniers” conspiracy theorists?

A: No. There are many other variables that drive people to deny inconvenient scientific facts. The primary variable in many instances appears to be a perceived threat to people’s worldview: Mitigation of climate change threatens people who cherish unregulated free markets because it might entail corporate regulation or taxes on carbon; vaccinations threaten Libertarians’ conceptions of parental autonomy, and so on. However, even when those primary variables are controlled, there is a discernible conspiracist element to science denial. After all, if a U.S. Senator writes a book entitled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, then the public is entitled to know how widespread such beliefs are. In fact, our work shows that those beliefs are not exactly widespread: Not only is the number of climate “deniers” relatively small—and highly disproportionate to the public noise they generate—but conspiratorial thinking accounts for only a modest component of the variance in people’s opinions about climate change (although our paper shows that this component is greater and quite substantial for vaccinations).

 

Q: How might people who reject scientific findings deal with the now fairly well-established fact that denial involves a measure of conspiratorial thinking?

A: Some ideologically-motivated people who oppose the scientific consensus on climate change have recognized that their proximity to conspiratorial thinking is discomforting and have publically distanced themselves from that component of denial, in particular its anti-Semitic element. The present data may provide a further “Sister Souljah” moment.

 

Q: Where should skeptical members of the public who are confused by the denial campaign turn to obtain further information or to voice their concerns?

A: In addition to the peer-reviewed literature, there are several excellent websites that disseminate  evidence-based information about climate change. I list a few of them here:

There are many additional sources but this sample should suffice for starters. Readers who like their message presented as a video will enjoy this site.

 

Q: How does this paper mesh with other recent publications, such as the paper by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013; LOG from here on) that identified conspiratorial thinking among visitors to climate blogs?

A: There has been some recent concern about the replicability of scientific findings, particularly in the social sciences. This concern is valid and it is best met by showing that phenomena replicate, preferably under a variety of different circumstances. Thus, it is important that the famous “hockeystick” graph, which shows that current global temperatures are likely unprecedented in the last 1000 years or more, has been replicated many times. Equally, it is important to establish that the association between science denial and conspiratorial thinking is robust and holds under a variety of circumstances. In addition to the recent work by my colleagues and I, we now have a fairly robust body of research that establishes this association in a number of domains, from climate science to vaccinations to HIV/AIDS. Many of those sources are cited in the PLOS ONE paper. The paper also explains why those associations are not entirely surprising. 

 

Q: How does this study differ from the one reported by LOG?

A: There are several notable differences—the fact that those differences did not alter the basic pattern of results reveals how resilient the relationships between the various variables are to moderately substantial variations in methodology.

  • Unlike LOG, which relied on visitors to climate blogs, the present study used a representative sample of the American population, and the data were collected by a professional survey firm.
  • Unlike LOG, this study involved a number of additional scientific issues and psychological constructs: We included GM foods and vaccinations, and we separated conservatism and free-market worldviews into two separate constructs.
  • The response options for all items involved a “neutral” option. This differs from LOG, which omitted the neutral option. Both choices have ample precedent in the literature, and each has associated with it some distinct advantages and disadvantages.
  • We included an attention-filter question in the survey and we considered only those participants who passed that attention-filter.
  • We used a different (but related) analysis method in this paper owing to the large(r) number of manifest variables and the fact that the response scale had more categories.

Wanted: leader with a vision for a sustainable future

Stephan Lewandowsky

A sustainable future remains within our grasp but – thanks to the way human brains work – only governments can implement many of the necessary strategies. Our political leaders have a unique responsibility.

Consensus politics and compromise may well be the only way that we can deal with existential threats such as climate change, food and water scarcity, and the social disruption that would inevitably follow.  If the current election campaign is anything to go by, these concepts do not come easily to Australia’s political leaders. But perhaps that will change.

Humanity’s approach to these problems is limited by the way our brains have evolved. Climate change presents a challenge to our evolved altruism, which is circumscribed by expectations of benefit to kin or reciprocal reward and an obsession with fairness.

Similarly, our drives to seek status and consume goods are largely instinctive; our evolved intelligence has simply taken them to a higher level. Unfortunately contemplating the long-term future is not on our radar. That is why good government is so important.

So can our current political leaders guide us toward a safer world?

We need leaders who are prepared to put forward long-term plans for decades, even centuries, something which does not come naturally since we evolved to live in the present, and our instincts encourage us to discount the future and underestimate risk. They must resist the temptation to appeal only to immediate self-interest, a shortcoming of our current adversarial democracy and short election cycles where leaders appeal constantly to the hip-pocket nerve.

Consensus on intractable problems could be achieved by a commitment to multi-party committees. Bi-partisan think tanks that include Members of Parliament and independent experts can help circumvent parochial attitudes, and foster rational decision-making for the long-term future. Indeed, a party that commits to such a model for helping to formulate policy for intractable problems might well win support in the electorate.

Governments must extend the use of incentives and disincentives to satisfy our desire for fairness. Where policy to promote long-term sustainability conflicts with immediate self-interest, clever strategies can guide behaviour while still providing choice. In Australia, the carbon tax was coupled with compensation for most citizens and some industries, making the personal cost minimal.

Unfortunately, the Liberal Party’s Direct Action Plan fails to offer any incentive to individuals to decrease fossil fuel energy use. It would also fail to deliver the minimum 5% cut by 2020 without an injection of a further $4 billion. It would be necessary to either increase taxes or decrease services and, since paying for a secure future does not come naturally, there is a significant risk that Australia would abandon its pledge.

The Direct Action Plan also demonstrates our genetic predisposition to live in the present. There would be no mechanism for Australia to achieve the necessary further cuts beyond 2020. In contrast, Labor’s emissions trading scheme links our efforts to global action, and the introduction of a cap would ensure that we meet future obligations.

The government must also recognise our responsibility toward citizens of future generations, and those beyond our borders who will be affected by our actions. Such attitudes are not instinctive because of the origins of altruism, but they are morally equitable. The disadvantaged in developing nations have a right to move toward a reasonable standard of living. Sanitation, health care, and adequate food and water are basic human rights, and the simple comforts of life could all be provided by green electricity with support from the developed world.

Stewardship of Earth must be seen as a government responsibility. Currently both parties promote growth but continuing growth is impossible on a finite planet, a fact that is not intuitively apparent to many people. Might we able to able to move toward the goal of sustainability if the government incorporated gradual changes that move us in the right direction?

The developed world must ultimately move toward a steady state economy. Many countries already have a growth rate of per capita GDP that is close to zero (including France and the U.S.) – such a situation could be normalised and still provide a good quality of life. There are a number of strategies that would move us in this direction.

Gradually introduced cradle-to-grave pricing incorporating social and environmental costs would decrease consumption and moderate growth, and might be a more acceptable way to increase government revenue than an across-the-board increase in GST.

Reduced working hours as an optional alternative to increased salaries would also moderate consumption, ease unemployment, reduce inequity and increase leisure time, and would undoubtedly be popular with sections of the electorate. Research has shown that happiness does not increase above a modest income, but is a product of the quality of our relationships, our engagement with community, and time for pursuing our interests.

Runaway growth is also fed by the salary “arms race”. The instinctive drive to demonstrate status is then made visible by the purchase of inordinately expensive homes and prestige cars, driving conspicuous consumption. Instead status could be recognised by relative salaries maintained within limits by regulation or taxation, complemented by honours and significant privileges.

The rush to exploit our natural resources should also be slowed down to provide for the future, again something we instinctively tend to ignore. A significant tax on mining profits that creates a healthy future fund would leave more resources in the ground, provide income for new industries for the future, and decrease the extraordinary incomes and extravagant lifestyles that flow to the lucky few through happenstance.

We must frame this debate in the context of leaving a habitable world for future generations, and highlighting humanity’s common heritage. The world desperately needs countries that will lead: there’s no reason why ours shouldn’t be one of them.

This post is a slightly updated version on an earlier article on TheConversation.com

Ethics Lost in Translation

Stephan Lewandowsky

The tobacco-funded Heartland Institute already lost many of its sponsors—and millions in donations—a year ago when it suggested on a billboard that acceptance of the pervasive scientific consensus on climate change is somehow tantamount to being a serial killer or terrorist. The Institute is now again embroiled in a major scandal: This one does not involve billboards but a serious misrepresentation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

What happened is this.

On June 12th, the Heartland Institute crowed that

The Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious scientific academies in the world, has translated and published two massive volumes of peer-reviewed climate science first published by The Heartland Institute.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will present the two books at a June 15 event in Beijing, a landmark event that puts enormous scientific heft behind the questionable notion that man is responsible for catastrophically warming the planet.

‘This is a historic moment in the global debate about climate change,’ Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast said.

Actually, this was more of a historic moment in the revelation of climate denial for what it is: Denial of basic scientific facts for reasons that range from ideology to something else.

Because on 14 June, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement as follows:

However, the Heartland Institute published the news titled “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translators’ Note in the Chinese translation.

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. To clarify the fact, we formally issue the following statements:

(1) The translation and publication of the Chinese version of the NIPCC report, and the related workshop, are purely non-official academic activities the group of translators. They do not represent, nor they have ever claimed to represent, CAS or any of CAS institutes. They translated the report and organized the workshop just for the purpose of academic discussion of different views.

(2) The above fact was made very clear in the Translators’ Note in the book, and was known to the NIPCC report authors and the Heartland Institute before the translation started. The false claim by the Heartland Institute was made public without any knowledge of the translator group.

(3) Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.

(4) If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions to protect the rights of CAS and the translators group.

This response leaves little room for ambiguity, as amplified by a further CAS statement.

In the third instalment of this affair, Heartland issued an apology of sorts by noting that:

Some people interpreted our news release and a blog post describing this event as implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences endorses the views contained in the original books. This is not the case, and we apologize to those who may have been confused by these news reports.

Anyone familiar with the activities of deniers will recognize that this affair follows a fairly standard three-step template: First, a spectacular announcement is made that is at the very least misleading if not outright mendacious. Then, true skeptics (usually scientists) discover and correct the misrepresentation. Finally, the responsible party retreats into its shadowy lair of irresponsible ideology with an “apology” that blames a “confusion” on parties unknown.

There is no confusion here. There is organized denial on the one hand and real science on the other. The distinction is obvious to anyone who cares to analyze the pattern.

The scientific consensus on climate change: Still pivotal and more pervasive than ever

Stephan Lewandowsky

Science is debate. It’s a debate that takes place at conferences or in the peer-reviewed literature, and scientific debates contribute to the error-correction process that has served science and the public well for a century or more.

Scientific debates have somewhat different rules from other debates. Unlike the raucous shouting matches in political arenas and schoolyards, scientific debates rely on rules of evidence and reasoned judgments. (And for the most part, scientific debates remain civil indeed, at least when compared to schoolyards, beer gardens, and parliaments.)

But that doesn’t mean that anything in science is open for debate. There is no debate about whether or not the Sun is at the center of the solar system, or whether there is gravity on Mars. Scientists don’t waste their time discussing issues on which a consensus has been established. Thus, the fundamental fact that human greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet is no longer discussed at scientific meetings or in the peer-reviewed literature. Global warming is an accepted scientific fact.

There are two important aspects to this scientific consensus: The first one is psychological and relates to the impact of the consensus. The second relates to the way in which such a strong consensus emerges.

Turning to the psychology first, there is considerable evidence that the public is sensitive to the existence of a scientific consensus. If people perceive that scientists agree on an issue, then their own belief follows suit. This basic result has been replicated several times, including in my own research. It also explains why climate deniers expend considerable effort to negate the existence of that consensus, using the usual array of deceptive techniques such as pseudo-experts, or pointing to unreviewed blog-posts as “evidence” for their contrarian positions.

What is perhaps more notable is that the association between perceived consensus and the acceptance of scientific findings appears to be causal: in one of my studies, when members of the public were explicitly informed about the scientific consensus on climate change, they became significantly more likely to endorse the basic premise of global warming, and they attributed a larger share of the observed warming trend to human CO2 emissions, than people in a control condition who received no such information (and who underestimated the scientific consensus considerably.)

Underscoring the consensus in public communication of climate science is thus an important tool to counter the plethora of disinformation that is showered upon the public in some countries.

And that tool has become even more powerful today, with the publication of another peer-reviewed paper that examined the breadth of the scientific consensus on climate change. This new paper, by John Cook and colleagues, is particularly important because it underscores the source of the scientific consensus—namely its grounding in overwhelming evidence.

There has been evidence in the peer-reviewed literature already that more than 95 out of 100 climate scientists agree on the basic premise that human greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet. Those figures were derived from several surveys of scientists or analyses of their publication record.

But why do virtually all climate scientists hold the opinion that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions? Most members of the public have an intuition that scientists form their opinion on the basis of evidence. And so, if the evidence is only pointing in one direction, then the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world will come to the same conclusion. (The few individuals who think that the consensus is the result of a conspiracy to create the World Government can be safely ignored for present purposes.) But until now, tools for the visualization of that evidence have been limited.

This is where the new study by Cook et al. plays such a particularly important role: Going beyond previous surveys of climate scientists, Cook et al. performed a systematic review of the massive literature on climate change.

In a nutshell, they used a scientific search engine (ISI Web of Knowledge) to gather all papers published on ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’ between 1991 and 2011. This search returned a mind-boggling 12,000 papers (in round figures). Cook and colleagues then read all the abstracts of the papers and focused on those that expressed a position on the basic premise that humans are causing climate change. (The remainder addressed other issues such as new measurement techniques for polar ice and so on, and hence did not express a position in the abstract, although many endorsed the consensus position in the body of the paper.)

Of the roughly 4,000 papers that took a position, more than 97% endorsed the consensus.

To confirm their classification of the abstracts, Cook et al. additionally contacted the authors of the papers and asked the authors to classify their own article as to whether or not it endorsed the consensus. The result was the same: more than 98% of authors classified their articles as having endorsed the consensus.

Of all peer-reviewed papers expressing a position on human-caused global warming, 97-98% endorsed the facts that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.

This underscores what scientists had already known for at least a decade: That there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

The work by Cook et al. goes beyond related precedents in three important ways: First, the number of papers and scientists sampled was far greater than the number used in any previous study on this subject. Second, owing to the large sample size, it was possible to trace the extent of the scientific consensus over time. This temporal analysis revealed that the consensus has not only been stable for the last nearly 20 years, but if anything, it has been increasing ever so slightly. Finally, the work by Cook et al. was based on a content analysis of the scientific literature, and scientists were asked to rate their own articles only for confirmation of that analysis.

Thus, the results of Cook et al. tell us not just about the existence of the consensus, but it also identifies the underpinning of the consensus—namely, the overwhelming evidence in the literature that points to the very clear fact that the globe is warming due to levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that have been unprecedented for several million years.

The results of the paper by Cook et al. are explained in more detail on a new website, www.theconsensusproject.com that was also launched today.

Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations

Psychology, Stephan Lewandowsky

Our paper Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation has been published. The paper analyzed the public discourse in response to an earlier article by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (LOG12 for short from here on), which has led to some discussion on this blog earlier.

Refreshingly, the journal Frontiers makes all papers available for free with no paywall. Another unique feature of this journal is that readers can post comments directly beneath the abstract. Unfortunately this has led to the posting of a number of misrepresentations of the paper.

In this post, I’ll be addressing some of these misconceptions (but being careful to practise what I preach, will adopt the principles of the Debunking Handbook when I debunk the misconceptions). So here are some key facts about the Recursive Fury paper:

Conspiracy theorists are those who display the characteristics of conspiracy ideation

Yep, just stating the obvious, right? Recursive Fury establishes, from the peer-reviewed literature, the traits of conspiracist ideation, which is the technical term for a cognitive style commonly known as “conspiratorial thinking”. Our paper featured 6 criteria for conspiratorial thinking:

  1. Nefarious Intent: Assuming that the presumed conspirators have nefarious intentions. For example, if person X assumes that blogger Y colluded with the New York Times to publish a paper damaging to X, then X presumes nefarious intent on the part of Y.
  2. Persecuted Victim: Self-identifying as the victim of an organised persecution.
  3. Nihilistic Skepticism: Refusing to believe anything that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory. Note that “conspiracy theory” here is a fairly broad term and need not involve a global conspiracy (e.g., that NASA faked the moon landing) but can refer to small-scale events and hypotheses.
  4. Nothing occurs by Accident: Weaving any small random event into the conspiracy narrative.
  5. Something Must be Wrong: Switching liberally between different, even contradictory conspiracy theories that have in common only the presumption that there is something wrong in the official account by the alleged conspirators. Thus, people may simultaneously believe that Princess Diana faked her own death and that she was assassinated by MI5.
  6. Self-Sealing reasoning: Interpreting any evidence against the conspiracy as evidence for the conspiracy. For example, when climate scientists are exonerated of any wrong-doing 9 times over by different investigations, this is reinterpreted to imply that the climate-change conspiracy involves not just the world’s climate scientists but also the investigating bodies and associated governments.

Continue reading Recursive Fury: Facts and misrepresentations →

Don’t trust your Stone Age brain: it’s unsustainable

Stephan Lewandowsky

Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling we have when we know we should invest in solar panels but the 46″ wide screen TV wins out; we know we should catch the bus but we take the car anyway. It’s that sense of discord that arises when emotion and reason don’t get along. And unfortunately, it’s alive and well, sabotaging the climate change debate.

We’ve evolved to feel a single sense of self, but our minds consist of multiple voices. Our emotional brain has first go at making sense of our world, instantly telling us how to behave and what to believe, based on instincts reinforced by upbringing. Sometimes our rational brain is then called upon to endorse our intuitions, which then become beliefs. Problems that are unusually difficult or surprising will recruit our rational brain, but reasoning takes effort and we avoid it when we can.

Unfortunately our emotional brain is encouraging us to pursue perceived self-interest even if that means trashing the planet. This leaves our rational brain to try to justify our actions, even while the walls come tumbling down and the temperatures keep rising.

If we are to have any chance of a future we need to understand why our intuitions are so poor, and how we might temper them by engaging our ability to reason.

We haven’t evolved to be successful in the modern world. Civilisation arose only 12,000 years ago; in evolutionary terms that’s just the blink of an eye. Ninety-nine per cent of human evolution occurred during the Stone Age, so our evolved instincts, personality traits, and even some of our cognitive “short-cuts” are much better suited to this Pleistocene world.

Evolution didn’t care about the future; it was simply driven by those who survived and left the most descendants. So our ancestors were the ones who were best at competing for food and status, securing mates and having babies. They were materialistic, living very much in the present and rarely constrained by sustainability. They ate a broad range of foods, and if resources became depleted they could expand their territories or move on, behaviour that led to the extinction of many animals and to extensive migration.

A level of altruism did evolve, but it was circumscribed by benefits to kin, expectations of reciprocal reward, and an obsession with fairness. Altruism can often therefore be trumped by self-interest.

We might expect that intelligence and language would have been game-changers; they were, but not necessarily for the better. We learnt to tame nature and harvest its bounty, to build great cities, and to harness the laws of physics and chemistry. We may celebrate the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of modern civilisation, but it also ushered in burgeoning overpopulation, resource exploitation, pollution and climate change.

So if we evolved to exploit nature, and to be blind to the consequences, what now? Our only chance is to wrest control away from our emotional brain, and construct a new reality where our rational brain can take control.

We need to design a new kind of democracy where many government decisions are made cooperatively, with multi-party representation and the input of experts. Such think tanks must have strategies in place to promote critical self-analysis and to “frame” policy to reflect the long-term reality. The cost of climate change mitigation can then be shown to be minute compared to the cost of inaction.

If we value a sustainable world, the GDP must be replaced by a measure of a country’s wealth, including resources, social capital and the cost of pollution. Costs should reflect the inclusive cradle-to-grave value of products and services, so that choices reflect out true long-term interests. Conspicuous consumption might be curbed further by offering workers the choice of more leisure rather than a salary increase, and by rewarding excellence with honours and privileges, rather than fat pay packets and obscene bonuses.

Education must produce adults who can think critically and understand what’s at stake and why our judgement is flawed. To counter self-interest, the government should use incentives and disincentives to guide public behaviour. We need to encourage altruism by instituting reciprocal, incremental improvements, and by showing leadership.

We are at the crossroads. Unless we recognise the less-adaptive aspects of human nature and devise ways of keeping them in check, the world we bequeath to our children will be a diminished one. We have the means to do this, but do we have the will? Evolution may have made us the most intelligent animal on Earth, but it makes no promise that we will be survivors.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Caps Review Part 7: Complementary measures

Stephan Lewandowsky

This is the sixth part in a series about the Caps and Targets Review being conducted by the Australian Government’s independent Climate Change Authority (CCA) this year. Part 1 summarized the global climate crisis, Part 2 explained the importance of the review and how CCA should approach it, Part 3 outlined the role Australia should play in climate action, Part 4 debunked the economic justifications for inaction, Part 5 makes my central recommendations on emissions caps, and Part 6 makes recommendations on the design of the carbon price mechanism. This part argues for and suggests some complementary measures.

The carbon price should not be expected to do all the work. A single measure is highly vulnerable to repeal, failure, low ambition, or erosion over time, and there are many ways in which emissions trading schemes can go wrong. We need a range of climate policies operating alongside each other, so success in cutting emissions does not depend on the survival and effectiveness of any single policy.

Complementary policies are not redundant: they are a way of ensuring emissions cuts occur where it is most important instead of merely where it is cheapest (and ensuring they occur domestically, if international offsets continue to be allowed). Also, some of the required structural economic changes (eg. infrastructure) may not be driven by a price signal alone.

The carbon price should not be used as an excuse to scrap other existing climate policies or preclude new ones, and the Government should consider reinstating policies it has already scrapped. The COAG Taskforce on Regulatory and Competition Reform, due to conclude its work this month, must not cut any climate policies.

CCA should recommend the government continue to introduce new measures to assist in meeting emissions targets. Some complementary measures already exist (including the RET, CEFC, and ARENA), but they are far from sufficient in scale.

Currently annual carbon price revenue ($8 billion[i], which could fall dramatically after the shift to emissions trading[ii]) and annual renewable energy subsidies (approximately $300 million rising to $2 billion next year) are outweighed by the incentive-to-pollute provided by annual fossil fuel subsidies ($13 billion including $4 billion in free carbon permits[iii], the justifications for which are unconvincing). The net effect is to make polluting industries more profitable. These fossil fuel subsidies should be removed.

There is a risk[iv] (albeit diminishing due to the falling prices of renewables) that a too-low carbon price, instead of deploying renewables as is urgently needed, could drive investment in gas-fired electricity generation, locking in fossil fuel infrastructure with a lifetime of decades.[v] CCA should recommend the government ban new fossil-fuelled electricity generators to guard against this risk.

More government funding is needed to support deployment of existing zero-carbon technologies and zero-carbon infrastructure. Though R&D is also important, the emphasis should be on deployment as there is no time to wait for new technologies to be invented. The government should not prioritize funding for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which cannot be relied upon to save the fossil fuel industry because it is unlikely to be deployed on a global scale for decades.[vi] (Having said that, some form of CCS technology may be needed later to directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere.)

New wind power is now cheaper per megawatt-hour than new coal- or gas-fired electricity generation, but renewable energy still needs subsidies to compete with existing generators.[vii] Renewable energy subsidies are justified, especially considering the fossil fuel industry is profitable today thanks to enormous past and present subsidies and other supportive policies. New renewable energy subsidies could be funded by cutting fossil fuel subsidies, cutting carbon price compensation, and/or abandoning the unnecessary goal of a budget surplus. The biggest threat facing humanity is worth spending money on.

The RET should be increased to reach 100% as soon as possible. Funding for CEFC should be increased, and should be solely directed to zero-carbon technologies. A federal feed-in tariff should be introduced for each renewable energy technology. Most of the EU’s renewable energy has been delivered by feed-in tariffs.[viii]

The hole left by the failure of contracts-for-closure should be replaced with a new policy to close coal-fired power plants and replace them with renewable energy.

A greenhouse trigger should be added to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, and the federal government’s approval powers under the Act should not be delegated to the states.

Climate change mitigation should be one of the National Electricity Market objectives.

Mandatory energy efficiency and fuel efficiency standards should be introduced.

Most importantly, the Energy White Paper must be replaced with a new energy policy that will phase out fossil fuels, not one based on the delusion that we can afford to burn it all. Australia should declare a moratorium on new fossil fuel mining and export projects, and begin phasing out existing ones. Australia could then launch international negotiations on a global fossil fuel phaseout.

Conclusion

In this series, we’ve learned the climate crisis threatens human civilization; it is far more urgent than is widely appreciated; and solving it requires phasing out fossil fuels. We learned the Caps and Targets Review is pivotal, must consider matters beyond its scope, and must make ambitious recommendations to send a strong investment signal and counter the sabotaging influence of the fossil fuel industry. We learned unconditional unilateral ambition is required to break the international deadlock; Australia has greater responsibility for climate change than it acknowledges; and Australia should move beyond its inadequate existing targets and lead the world. We learned the economic justifications for inaction are greatly exaggerated, short-termist, and confuse fossil fuel interests with the public interest.

We learned Australia must set emissions caps that rapidly reduce toward zero to decarbonize the economy as fast as possible, enforced in a way that does not limit ambition. We learned Australia’s ETS needs fixing to ensure the emissions caps are effective; international offsets must be disallowed; and there is a case for greater restrictions on the domestic carbon market to ensure emissions cuts occur where they are most important instead of where they are cheapest. Finally, we learned Australia must support its carbon price with other new and existing policies to address domestic emissions, and start phasing out its fossil fuel exports.

Australian governments to date have acted as if our future depends on protecting the fossil fuel industry from climate policy. We must persuade the government of the reality: that our future depends on protecting our climate from the fossil fuel industry. Therefore I urge all Australians who are concerned about climate change to communicate these messages to the Caps and Targets Review.

This series was first posted on
Precarious Climate

[i] ‘Carbon price tug of war’, Australia Institute, viewed 21 February 2013, https://www.tai.org.au/node/586

[ii] G Winestock & M Priest, ‘EU carbon price a hard act to follow’, Australian Financial Review, 18 February 2013, viewed 21 February 2013, http://www.afr.com/p/national/eu_carbon_price_hard_act_to_follow_Lt5XbJv3iE9iyKRMit5tUI

[iii] ‘Carbon price tug of war’, Australia Institute, viewed 21 February 2013, https://www.tai.org.au/node/586

[iv] P Hearps, ‘A carbon price won’t bring zero emissions’, The Conversation, 30 March 2011, viewed 21 February 2013, http://theconversation.edu.au/a-carbon-price-wont-bring-zero-emissions-23

[v] J Romm, ‘International Energy Agency Finds “Safe” Gas Fracking Would Destroy A Livable Climate’, Climate Progress, weblog, 30 May 2012, viewed 14 September 2012, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/30/491970/international-energy-agency-finds-safe-gas-fracking-would-destroy-a-livable-climate/

[vi] M Atkin, ‘Clean coal “unviable for two decades”’, ABC News, 17 February 2012, viewed 21 February 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-15/clean-coal-unviable-advisor-says/3828946

[vii] G Parkinson, ‘Renewables now cheaper than coal and gas in Australia’, Renew Economy, 7 February 2013, viewed 21 February 2013, http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/renewables-now-cheaper-than-coal-and-gas-in-australia-62268

[viii] F Green & R Finighan, Laggard to Leader: How Australia can lead the world to zero carbon prosperity, Beyond Zero Emissions, 2012, viewed 9 September 2012, http://media.beyondzeroemissions.org/Laggard_Leaderv1.pdf, p. 60.