ANGFA Queensland

Original story by Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg, University of Nottingham at The Conversation

Research shows the environment usually comes off second best when companies are forced to compromise between sustainability and profit. Photo: Mohammad Rhaman/Flickr

A commitment to sustainability has become a typical component of any modern-day corporation’s public face. Visit the homepages of major organisations in any sector, from coal-mining to cola-making, and you’ll find “green” credentials front and centre.

This might be viewed as a predictable and well-intentioned response to mounting concerns over climate change, deforestation, declining biodiversity and other environmental issues. Yet a distinctive component of that response has been to try to incorporate the environment within market capitalism.

For example, last year the UK government’s Environment department initiated an Ecosystems Market Task Force to review opportunities to “value and protect nature’s services”. This is typical of the fast-emerging trend for the environment to be accorded a market worth and for corporations to be seen as the central institutions through which that worth can be maintained.

Consequently, we seem to have reached a stage where both the environment and the market are treated as social goods. It follows then that the two will occasionally have competing interests. So which tends to benefit and which tends to suffer when compromise is inevitably sought? In a recent article in the British Journal of Sociology, we argue it is the market that is almost invariably and overwhelmingly favoured.

The study, focused on the sustainability approaches of a number of Australian and global companies and involved lengthy interviews with their sustainability managers and consultants. They were chosen because their work encompasses precisely the sort of compromises that have come to characterise the relationship between the environment and the market. Many saw their roles as involving not only an allegiance to their employers and shareholders, but also a concern for the environment and society. Some had even changed careers and reconsidered their personal values because of their dedication to environmental issues.

We also analysed a range of relevant material, including corporate sustainability reports, policy documents and statements relating to carbon emissions. As has become de rigueur, many of these were festooned with evocative images of forests, oceans and landscapes, as well as employees' testimonials about the environment’s significance in their personal and professional lives.

Yet beneath the warm glow of corporate social responsibility lurked the cold reality of economic exigency.

In the cold light of day…

Staff members expressed a keen and genuine interest in the environment, but at the same time were well aware of the constraints of challenging successful business practices likely to exacerbate ecological degradation. As the director of one sustainability consultancy remarked: “It always comes down to the optimum point. You want them to be as sustainable as can be, but you don’t want them to shut down their operation. There’s no simple path through this.”

Moreover, compromise was shown to be at best a temporary resolution – one subject to continued criticism, adaptation and refinement. The next step frequently led only to a new and ‘better’ compromise or an outright shifting of the goalposts.

Take, for instance, environmentalists' much-publicised claim that bio-fuels cause deforestation and food shortages: the result was the promotion of “second-generation”, more environmentally friendly bio-fuels. Or the company whose initial confidence in its “ambitious” carbon emissions reduction target of 40 per cent was followed by the observation that this would prove “difficult to deliver” because of an increase in business – despite investment in energy-saving equipment and “sustainable” retail outlets.

There are “win-win” situations – say, when new “green” products or initiatives cut costs or enhance revenues – but it is generally acknowledged that these are pursued only when the benefits to the market, not the benefits to the environment, can be guaranteed. In such instances compromise serves to deny the inequality of competing goods. There is no space for a reduction of profit or a decline in growth. Boosting the bottom line remains the primary objective. Ultimately, it is the market that records another lopsided victory.

Ironically, within any organisation it is the individuals who are most environmentally attuned who are also most often engaged in compromising the environment. They accept – albeit sometimes grudgingly – the impossibility of governing innocently. As the environment is reconstructed into a commodity and a tool for profit, they have to get their hands dirty.

One key question is whether the continued expansion of the market might be met with a counter-movement of protection and conservation through legislation. In short, can nature have a legal standing? There may be some hope in this regard.

In New Zealand a river was recently recognised as a legal entity with the same rights and interests enjoyed by a company. Constitutional amendments in Bolivia and Ecuador have embraced specific rights for the environment.

Irrespective of whether they eventually prove of limited practical impact, these fledgling efforts at least illustrate a social awareness of the need for some control over market capitalism’s excesses. They also underline – as if further evidence were needed – that the conflict between the environment and the market is likely to prove a source of even greater friction, criticism and compromise as the physical realities of the natural world’s decline become ever more profound.

Christopher Wright receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Grant examining business responses to climate change..

Daniel Nyberg receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Grant examining business responses to climate change.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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Original story from Sky News

Tony Abbott's insistence that bushfires aren't linked to climate change is like the tobacco industry claiming smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, Nobel laureate Al Gore says.

In light of the NSW bushfire disaster, the former US vice president says the prime minister's comment that bushfires are a function of life in Australia and nothing to do with climate change reminds him of politicians in the US who received support from tobacco companies, and who then publicly argued the companies' cause.

'For 40 years the tobacco companies were able to persuade pliant politicians within their grip to tell the public what they wanted them to tell them, and for 40 years the tragedy continued,' Mr Gore told ABC TV's 7.30 program from Los Angeles on Wednesday night.

'And bushfires can occur naturally and do, but the science shows clearly that when the temperature goes up and when the vegetation and soils dry out, then wild fires become more pervasive and more dangerous.

'That's not me saying it, that's what the scientific community says.'

Mr Gore says it's a political fact of life that politicians and commercial enterprise collude to achieve goals after he was asked if there was a conspiracy between polluters and politicians.

'I don't think it's a commercial conspiracy. I think it's a political fact of life,' he said.

'It certainly is in my country. In the United States, our democracy has been hacked.

'Special interests control decisions too frequently. You saw it in our recent fiscal and debt crisis.

'The energy companies, coal companies and oil companies particularly, have prevented the Congress of the United States from doing anything meaningful so far, to stop the climate crisis.'

The Nobel laureate says Australia's new direct action strategy was not workable.

'The meaningful way to resolve this crisis is to put a price on carbon and in Australia's case, to keep a price on carbon,' he said.

He argues the price needs to be at an effective level with the market sending accurate signals so that renewable systems of energy are encouraged.

Original story by David Hodgkinson, University of Western Australia at The Conversation

This is the last part of a series following on from the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report and looking at emerging alternatives to the UN climate agreement process.

Optimism is lovely, but individual action won’t solve climate change. Photo: !/_PeacePlusOne/Flickr

State based action and sectoral agreements show some promise in dealing with aspects of climate change. But from humanity’s climate change experience to date and its failure to address the climate change problem through a global agreement, it’s safe to suggest we are headed for trouble.

Given our current path on generating and dealing with emissions, here are my predictions for the future of climate change and climate change action.

Individual action doesn’t and won’t matter

Much has been made of individual action as a means of dealing with the climate change problem, but what one does personally doesn’t on its own make the least bit of difference.

Put another way, the things individuals do in their daily lives, taken by themselves, have no effect. The planet doesn’t notice. It is collective action that matters, or what several billion people do.

Environmental economis Gernot Wagner argues that “[t]he changes necessary are so large and so profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action”.

Instead, what is required is policy that motivates individuals and major industrial sectors to reduce emissions and use resources more efficiently.

In any event, there is nothing to indicate that our behaviour is changing; if anything, it’s “business as usual”.

Policy focus will eventually be on adaptation

Climate change mitigation involves reducing emissions through, for example, price-based mechanisms like emissions trading. Climate change adaptation means coping with or adjusting to climate change.

With mitigation, adaptation becomes easier (and they are not alternatives). Together with mitigation, policies focused on adaptation are required, to make adjustments to the unavoidable changes that we now face.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and others have suggested that achieving a limit of 2C global warming above pre-industrial levels may be impossible. This raises the possibility of global temperature rises of 4C this century. This could result, as the Royal Society says, in the “collapse of systems or require transformational adaptation out of systems, as we understand them today”.

The world’s failure to mitigate, the potential severity of impacts, and the challenges (behavioural, societal, economic) in dealing with such failure and such impacts, all argue for renewed efforts on adaptation.

There will be ‘ever more people’

David Attenborough asks us to make a list of all of the environmental problems which afflict the planet – climate change, desertification, famine, loss of rainforest, collapse of fish stocks, shortage of arable land, and so on. He argues that these problems share one underlying cause: all of these problems become “more difficult – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people”.

The UN estimates (with qualification) that the world’s population will reach 10 billion and climbing by 2100. If families, on average, have half a child more than the UN projects, population will reach 16 billion by 2100.

In Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals, statistician Paul Murtagh and others argue that a person’s reproductive choices must be considered together with his or her everyday activities to work out that person’s impact on the global environment. And it’s difficult to take issue with the view that the decision to have a child is an ethical decision.

Ethics also underpin any market-based approach to population control – how about “tradeable procreation credits”, for example, for buying and selling the right to have children? Market-based mechanisms – emissions trading schemes – are in vogue as a means to address the climate change problem. Why not use such mechanisms to address the population problem?

Perhaps, though, if having children is, as philosopher Michael Sandel says, “a central aspect of human flourishing, then it’s unfair to condition access to this good on the ability to pay”.

Growing global population amplifies a range of other threats, and they are all related to climate change: resource scarcity, for example, and the energy crisis. And energy of course goes to the heart of the climate change problem.

There will never be ‘enough stuff’

UCLA’s Laurence Smith poses this question:

What if you could play God and do the ethically fair thing by converting the entire developing world’s level of material consumption to that now carried out by North Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese, and Australians today?

Would you?

The world Smith depicts would be frightening. Consumption globally would rise elevenfold. Where would all that meat, fish, water, energy, plastic, metal, and wood come from in a carbon/climate-constrained world?

Suppose, though, that such conversion takes place gradually over the next 40 years. If demographers’ estimate that world population might stabilise at about 9.2 billion by 2050, and if the ultimate objective is for everyone on Earth to live like the developed world, we will need enough stuff to support the equivalent of 105 billion people.

Such a world is completely unsustainable – yet it is, as Smith points out, the “end goal implicit in nearly all prevailing policy”.

This is the ‘age of the Anthropocene’ and will be the end of the wild

Fully 80% of the world’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) is directly influenced by human activities. More than a decade ago, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen suggested we were living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch inadvertently brought on by the influence of human activity and behaviour on the Earth’s atmosphere.

Further, studies suggest that Earth’s creatures are on the brink of a sixth mass extinction. Perhaps three-quarters of animal species will vanish within 300 years.

This leads MIT’s Stephen Meyer to refer to the “end of the wild” and to conclude that “the extinction crisis … is over, and we have lost”.

Two alternative conclusions

The optimist is comforted by humanity’s ability to come up with solutions. As Brian Schmidt, the Australian winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, said (though not in the context of climate change), “Humanity is remarkably clever at figuring out how to do things that are not obviously possible”.

But Stephen Emmott, Head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, may be more accurate when he says in his book 10 Billion, “I think we’re fucked”.

Part one of this series is here and part two is here.

David Hodgkinson does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

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