TALK GIVEN TO CLIMATE CHANGE BALMAIN-ROZELLE

31 March 2007

Dexter Dunphy
Distinguished Professor
University of Technology, Sydney


Introduction:

First, congratulations on forming and sustaining this organization – Climate Change Balmain-Rozelle. This is a great initiative and it confronts the nub of the environmental problem we face – climate change. I’m honoured to be here because of what you are doing and also because two of my grandchildren, Indigo and Aidan, attend school in Balmain. I appreciate what you are doing to help create a better world for them and their generation.

Most of you here tonight are aware of the risks global warming poses to our way of life –I guess, your awareness of the crisis will have brought you here. I suspect however that the degree of your awareness will vary – some of you will have been ferreting out information for years; others of you may be just becoming aware and here to find out more.

I have an advantage in this area – I come from an unusual family. My father was Myles Dunphy. He started the first bush walking clubs in Australia and grew to be passionate about our natural environment in Australia. Most of the national parks in this State were his vision and he worked actively to bring them into being. The World Heritage Blue Mountains National Park and the Snowy Mountains National Park are part of the heritage he left us all. Today he is known as the Father of Australian Wilderness. My older brother Milo was, along with Bob Brown, one of Australia’s early political ecological activists. He founded the Total Environment Centre and had a major impact on two state premiers, Neville Wran and Bob Carr. Unfortunately he died in 1996. However largely as a result of his work, backed up by many others, the area of national parks in this state was doubled. Milo built on the heritage our father left for him and for all of us – extending the great chain of national parks around this state. It is possible to make a difference.

So I had the advantage of growing up in a family where we spent a lot of time out in the bush, walking and camping, where nature was seen as a priceless possession to be nurtured because it nurtured us, and where there was acceptance that if you believed in something, you acted on your beliefs.

I took a different path from my brother – I became a social scientist and a professor of management - and ended up working actively with private and public organizations, researching and consulting. And that’s still how I spend most of my time, crossing the gap between the world of academia and the world of business. I advise companies, some of them Australia’s largest corporations, on how to change to meet the demands of modern life. An increasing part of what I write about, research and consult on is how organizations can change from despoiling the earth, producing emissions, pollution and waste, and begin to renew the earth so that it continues to support us and future generations. Senior executives in many of our leading organizations are undergoing a profound shift in awareness – many of them are thoughtful and responsible citizens as well as parents and grandparents. And they see that we cannot continue to conduct business as usual; they too are asking: how must business and government change to meet this crisis in which we find ourselves? And what can we do to change the way our organizations operate?

We too must ask ourselves much the same kind of question – how can we change to meet this crisis? We can’t continue to live as we have, squandering our children’s future. So what can we do? All of us have to change the way we live, work and consume and that’s what I want to talk about tonight.

But first, let’s look at climate change and just what it means for us –it’s hard to keep up to date with new scientific knowledge being published daily.

Growing awareness:

In the last 12 months, there has been a remarkable transformation of public awareness of the global crisis. How has this happened? There are too many things to itemize but I’ll just touch on some critical events:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is a collaboration of 2,500 of the world’s leading scientists with expertise in climate change. Their last report documents that global warming is occurring, that it threatens our future on this planet and that there is a 90% probability that human beings – that’s us – are responsible for what is occurring. The biggest culprit is the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal. Not only do we Australians burn more coal per head than any other nation, we are exporting it in huge quantities to China and India, fuelling their economic expansion, helping them pollute the atmosphere – an atmosphere we share and which is the unique feature of this planet.

For all people in developing and developed economies around the world, our way of life has become a health hazard. Believe me, we Australians are hitting well above our size. We are wasteful polluters of the planet ourselves but we are enabling millions of others to follow our example. We are opening more coal mines, expanding our rail links and ports to export more coal – and are we making a motza in the process?! That’s great for our salaries and mortgages – but it will have unintended consequences for the lives of our children.

Another factor influencing awareness of global warming is the media. The much criticized media have actually done a pretty good job in this area over the last year – not long ago articles dealing with climate change and related issues were small and tucked away in the back pages. Last year they became big informative articles with headlines that punch you in the face: Things like: Race against the Clock! We’ve wrecked the Weather! Cold Comfort in Climate Change!

Last year was also the year that big business weighed into the debate on the side of taking action to limit global warming. Up until then we had Hugh Morgan and the Australian mining companies on the one hand and the Bush administration on the other influencing John Howard to deny the reality of global warming and keeping us out of the Kyoto agreement. But concerned Australian business leaders on the other side launched a counter attack. The Business Roundtable on Climate Change was formed by a number of leading companies including Westpac, BP, Origin and IAG. They sponsored research on the costs of mounting an effective climate change policy and recommended action by governments and companies to address the crisis. They argued that we can still have strong economic growth while reducing emissions by 60% (from the levels of 2000), and do it by 2050.

And then there was the Stern Report – commissioned by the British government, written by Nicholas Stern, a respected economist with World Bank credentials. The Report said clearly that the situation is serious, we need to take action, and that it will cost us more not to act than to act. Stern even paid us a visit last week to emphasise that we are particularly vulnerable and to say that the world needs a revolution in the way we live and work. Now when the economists start advocating a revolution, we must REALLY be in big trouble.

And then there was a survey that showed that over 90% of Australians thought the government was not doing enough to address climate change and that 84% want stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution levels. John Howard and other formerly skeptical political leaders were suddenly scrambling to demonstrate their green credentials.
“I am their leader – I must follow them!”

Action is now forthcoming from governments in other countries: About two weeks ago the UK established a target of reaching a 60% reduction of emissions by 2050 and is also setting mandatory five year targets for industry - to be reviewed annually. This followed on the heels of the leaders of the European Community agreeing to make mandatory cuts of 20% by 2020. In the USA, the Democrats have prepared a bill to go to Congress to cut US carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. Nancy Pelosi, the new House Speaker, has said; “The science of global warming and its impact is overwhelming and unequivocal. Now is the time to act.”

So overseas at least business and government are at last demonstrating leadership and taking important initiatives. Here governments of both political persuasions are lagging; we need to give them a nudge.

The Scope of the Crisis:

So how will global warming affect us?

I was in London in 2004 when the temperature there hit 40 degrees every day for a week. Never before in the history of London had there been a day where the temperature reached 40 degrees. London’s infrastructure collapsed. In Europe 2,500 people died that summer from the effects of heat. Global warming is a life and death issue.

What about property loss? I work with insurance companies and they are at the forefront of business action on global warming. Companies like IAG, Swiss Reinsurance and Zurich have been charting the growing incidence of serious environmental catastrophes. As a result of more storms and more serious storms, annual claims attributed to natural causes skyrocketed from less than US$3 billion in 2005 to more than $US25 billion last year. 37 of the 40 largest insurance losses since 1970 have been caused by the more turbulent weather.

Or take drought, this year the value of agricultural production in Australia is down 50%. In 2004 it was a drop of 60-70%. And we have had only an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius warming – can you imagine what even another degree will mean? It will mean a devastated continent – Australia is particularly vulnerable to global warming. And what will happen to Australia and the planet if we have 6 or 8 degrees of global warming as some scientists are predicting if we continue to pour increasing quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere? What areas of Australia and the world will remain habitable? What will happen to the Balmain peninsula as the sea levels rise?

We are already exceeding the earth’s capacity to supply us with resources and are consuming our children’s futures. If we continue with business as usual we will need 2 planets by 2050 and four by 2100. Unfortunately we haven’t found any other habitable planets – this is all we have. We had better start living within our means. It is time to realise that we are not the indestructible masters of the planet –like all other species, we depend on the thin precious layer of atmosphere surrounding the planet and we are stuffing that up for all species including our own.

All that’s pretty depressing; it’s easy to just react by saying: “It’s all too big a problem. What could I do anyway?” and lapse into cynicism and depression. I must say that I have days when I feel like that.

So what’s the good news that can energise us to do something positive?

The good news is that awareness is starting to flow into action and that awareness is initiating a torrent of change. The revolution that Stern advocated in his report is already happening. There are three spheres of revolutionary action:

1. the workplace: What we can do as members of organizations and as stakeholders of those organizations
2. the community: What we can do as citizens and parents
3. the marketplace: What we can do as consumers.

The workplace: Let me report first on the revolution occurring in the workplace which is the area in which I’m putting a lot of my personal energy.

Well the revolution is underway. Yes, we still have organizations that are actively opposing or ignoring the crisis. Those who oppose I refer to as the stealthy saboteurs and freeloaders. The executives in these organizations actively oppose attempts to inform the public of the global crisis and try to sabotage attempts to change existing business practice.

The classic organization is Exxon-Mobil. For years it has run an expensive campaign of disinformation and threats against responsible media outlets that have tried to tell the truth about climate change. Exxon Mobil has been caught out recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists for funding a $16 million campaign to discredit the case for global warming – they are using many of the same PR groups and phony scientists who ran the cigarette companies campaigns to deny that cigarettes cause lung cancer. Exxon Mobil want to keep us hooked on oil as the cigarette companies wanted to keep us hooked on tobacco. And it can be profitable. Last year Exxon Mobil posted the biggest profit in US corporate history: $US 39.5 billion. This is partly because of the enormous favours that the Bush administration has given Exxon and the other oil companies. The Democrats are preparing to change that.

The public is becoming increasingly aware of the game some businesses are playing in seeking indemnity against environmental costs, passing them on to the public purse and claiming special exemptions from taxes before they will play ball. The economist even have a word for it: “externalities” – that means we, the public, pay. The companies that often talk most loudly about ‘free enterprise’ are often using subsidies and tariffs to tilt the playing field in their favour. Increasingly the public are calling the shots on that game - the Internet and Corporate Responsibility legislation is making it harder to get away with this.

In Australia Gunn’s has attempted to discredit and break the Greens financially by keeping them tied up in court. Gunns want to keep stripping our unique forests in Tasmania and keep the Japanese hooked on woodchips.

The motto of the Stealthy Saboteurs and Free Loaders is: Let’s keep traveling first class on the Titanic. Iceberg? I don’t see any iceberg. Pass another glass of champagne will you?

My advice to you is to boycott their products and shut off their champagne.

Then there are the bunker wombats – they haven’t even got heir heads out of their burrows to notice the world is changing. They’re just ignoring the crisis. There are bunker wombats all around us – but they’re going to find it increasingly difficult to survive if they don’t start changing. Recently the CEO of the UK retailing firm Tesco set out Tesco’s ambitious commitment to tackle climate change. He promised major cuts in CO2 from Tesco’s operations, support for the development of low carbon technologies, carbon labeling on all products and a thrust to make green choices available to customers in an affordable way. His announcement was hot on the heels of another by the prestigious UK firm Marks and Spencer earlier in the same week that announced a 200 million pound eco-plan to cut waste, sell fair trade products and make the company carbon neutral. When firms like these start competing to prove their green credentials, would you want to be a retailer in that market without any? Anyone from Woolworth’s or Coles listening here tonight?

Well, of course, firms don’t have to compete – survival isn’t compulsory. The bunker wombats will just quietly slide into oblivion, whispering their motto: “Ignorance is bliss.”

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that there’s a bit of bunker wombat in all of us – we just wish all this climate stuff would go away so we don’t have the wrench of changing. Sorry, it’s not going to go away. Come on out of your burrows – it’s “coming, ready or not.”

Other organizations are starting to reap the benefits of taking more proactive initiatives. They are doing things that benefit the environment and deliver higher productivity and make them more profitable. Let me give you two examples;

For some years my colleagues and I have been studying the Fuji Xerox Eco Manufacturing Plant near Redfern. It is one of the leading examples in the world of how manufacturing can be transformed to eliminate waste and pollution. Fuji Xerox decided to take cradle-to-grave responsibility worldwide for all its office equipment products – to lease, not sell them. So they set up eight remanufacturing plants around the world and the Sydney plant is the most innovative one. Fuji Xerox leases its equipment to its customers and, when parts break down, it takes back the defective equipment, analyses what went wrong and remanufactures the part to a higher standard. Think second hand is higher quality.

In this plant there are no emissions to the air or to ground water; no waste to landfill. Even the carbon black in used printers is sucked out into sealed containers and sold to BHP for steelmaking. What did all this cost? Building a new plant, inventing a whole new approach - remanufacturing? It has been a highly profitable operation, returning 20% on the investment year on year. The operation saves $25 million dollars per year and earns revenue of 5 million dollars. The Australian company has dramatically reduced its import of new machines and has created new export markets in seven Asian countries which is good for our balance of trade. Since the plant was established in 1993, the remanufacture of office equipment has diverted an estimated 1.5 million major part assemblies from landfill.

Fuji Xerox is only one of many such examples I could give of how companies that thought they were efficient have found that they were wasting energy, water, metals and so on. Really they were throwing away valuable assets. Think about your workplace – could that be true there? Think about your household economy – could it be true there?

Other companies are taking this further – seeing that commitment to sustainability offers strategic advantages and is also an important part of being a good corporate citizen. One such company is Westpac which has been given the international accolade of being the world’s most sustainable bank. I am a member of Westpac’s Community Advisory Council which consists of 20 community leaders, mainly heads of not-for-profit organizations like the Salvation Army, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the St James Ethics Centre. The Advisory Council is chaired by CEO David Morgan who typically asks us to talk about what’s on our minds when we think of the next five to ten years. We each have an opportunity to speak and David listens for 2.5 hours. Now that’s pretty unusual behaviour in a CEO!

Our ideas are fed back into their strategic plan and become business initiatives. It’s a smart way of doing business and it is helping make the world more sustainable too. Westpac has been a leader in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions – it has reduced them by 45% and is moving to become carbon neutral. But that’s only one of a multitude of environmental initiatives Westpac has taken. Westpac has not suffered financially from its commitment to the environment – to the contrary it is one of Australia’s most profitable banks. It too made a record profit last year – responsibly.

So that’s a brief report on what some businesses are doing – there are many other examples I could give and the number of organizations taking effective action on climate change is growing daily. Many of you are members of organizations and spend a large part of your life in these settings. You have the opportunity to initiate action where you are – to ask what your organization is contributing; for example, to make suggestions about actions that can be taken to create energy efficiencies where you work.

A young woman phoned me and said that I didn’t know her – we had never met – but she heard I was consulting to the company she worked for - a well known Australian corporation. She told me that she was a front line employee in the company and had been trying to find out if the company had a policy on environmental sustainability. She had asked her supervisor and her supervisor’s boss but they didn’t know. She asked me if I knew, as I was consulting to them. I was somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn’t because I was consulting to them on another issue and hadn’t asked. However I said that I would try to find out for her and call her back to let her know. So I called a member of the Board who said: “Well, yes, the Board had just started discussing it and is considering some initiatives. However we don’t want to publicise this until we have achieved something”. So I called her back and told her I had found out some information but that it was confidential and I couldn’t answer her question. She quickly responded by saying: “Well, I’ll give them six months. If they haven’t done something by then, I’m outta here. I won’t work for a company that isn’t committed to sustainability!”

In the end, if all else fails, you can vote with your feet and, when you leave, let the managers in the organization you work for know why you are leaving. But try some positive initiatives first; you may just connect with others who want change too.

So let’s look at the other two areas I identified apart from the world of work – the community and the marketplace. Let’s start with the community.

The Community: We are all citizens and can vote – I know that Climate Change Balmain-Rozelle has tried to find out what position candidates in your area are taking on climate change. Find this out and vote accordingly. Climate change is the number one political issue of this century; help the politicians realise that. Help vote the slow learners out of office.

Don’t fall for all the greenwash from the stealthy saboteurs about being saved by nuclear power and clean coal. We don’t need those options in Australia – these technologies will deliver too late if at all and they will both leave a toxic legacy for your kids.

(By the way, if you trip over a piece of clean coal on your travels, please let me know. I haven’t seen any yet).

Spain’s electricity grid is much the same size as ours. This month Spain’s wind power generation rose to contribute 27% of the country’s total power needs, surpassing the contribution of nuclear and coal. We have lots of scope for wind power and also have an ideal climate for solar energy production. So solar and wind could certainly supply a very large proportion of what we need. Let’s discourage politicians from looking for the one expensive silver bullet solution – and instead let’s go for reducing demand through more efficient power usage and for a variety of distributed, local and relatively cheap forms of energy generation from the sun, the wind and the tides.

Let’s put solar panels on our roofs so we produce most or all the power we need and demand that we are paid adequately for what we export to the grid. Let’s put in water tanks to collect the water from our roofs to supply our domestic needs and pressure our councils to catch runoff water and use it for municipal gardens and to wash council vehicles. As we start to change our personal lives we will become part of the solution and be increasingly committed to be more innovative ourselves rather than leaving it all to others. Let’s abandon the great Australian AORTA – you know: “AORTA do somethin’ about it!” When we point our finger at someone else, let’s remember that we have three fingers pointing back at us. Responsibility starts here.

We are all citizens but also parents and grandparents. We hold this world in trust for our children. We can help them learn to love and respect the earth and to appreciate their impact on it. The most powerful way we do that is through our own behaviour – what we do sometimes shouts so loud that our children can’t hear what we’re saying. Our daily domestic practices reflect our commitment, or lack of it, to creating a sustainable world. How we use energy, water, food and other vital resources is a daily educational reality for our children. We can make it a basic practice at least to turn off lights, take appliances off standby, dry clothes in the sun, use efficient light globes, save water and use it on the garden, keep a worm farm and so on; then we can progress to solar water heating and grid connect solar systems if we can afford that.

We too can avoid being free loaders and bunker wombats and actively adopt more sustainable ways of living. We can influence our schools, as you are, to adopt sustainable practices too so that they model healthy environmental practice. As we create everyday sustainable living practices, they will become second nature for our children. Let’s ensure that our kids learn how they can contribute to a keeping the world healthy by watching us model environmentally responsible behaviour. Candle lit dinners where we talk to each other can not only reduce our energy use but be an occasion to really meet each other. Better than the line-up of zombies stuffing food in their mouths in front of the power-guzzling TV set.

We are all together on spaceship earth which is becoming increasingly crowded. The spaceship has the capacity to renew its resources and sustain us all – but we are damaging its self-renewal systems and starting to consume the emergency rations. Everyone has to stop doing this and become a useful crew member. On spaceship earth now, there is no room for free loaders – only active contributors. If you have been a laggard in this area, consider catching up at least and perhaps even switching to be a leader instead.

The Marketplace: Our final potential sphere of action is the Marketplace. We are all consumers and consumption is a large part of the problem. Our society is based on a theme of “greed is good”. TV stations tell us that we will fail the taste test if we don’t use this expensive brand of toothpaste, won’t get that man unless we use this exquisite brand of perfume, will be seen as a loser if we don’t drive this super-dooper sports car. Our kids are learning the same lessons – their lives will be insufferable unless they wear the right sneakers, play with the right doll, eat the right cereal. Let’s learn to say a big NO to all this. We all need love, companionship, healthy food, fulfilling activities that help us learn and grow throughout our lives; we need shelter and health care. What else do we need than a supportive environment where we can love, work and laugh?

If the world is to survive, we need to participate in the consumer revolution – to say NO to what we don’t need and will only waste, to say YES to what is truly healthy and fulfilling. As far as food is concerned, prefer what is fresh and local to what is highly processed and shipped in at high carbon-cost. If must you buy that shirt in the plastic box, take it out of the plastic box on the counter where you bought it, pull out the plastic infills from under the collar and cuffs, pull out the sheet of cardboard in the middle, extract the pins and then dump the whole mess on the counter. Tell the salesperson to courier all the garbage back to the manufacturer with an invoice to cover the cost and a request to put the shirt on a returnable hanger the next time.

To save the world we don’t need to wear a hair shirt and straw sandals; there is enough for all of us if we consume only what we genuinely need and share the world’s bounty, peacefully, with others.

Tonight I’m challenging you to think of one initiative – just one – that you could take in the next two weeks to contribute to reducing global warming; it can be quite small; but something – and to let someone else here know what you plan to do and find out what they intend doing. It’s time for all of us to move our awareness into action; talk is important but cheap – action is what will count in the end.

Conclusion:

Tonight is a start. We are doing without a wasteful blaze of light across our city for one hour. Will we die as a consequence? No, in fact we gain through the companionship and a sense of purpose. And our children may actually discover how wonderful it is to look up to the sky and see the stars.

I remember years ago as a young boy standing with my Dad on the edge of Kanangra Walls in the Blue Mountains. We stood in awed silence looking down over the great cliff edge and the deep chasm below – late afternoon – the sound of a stream cascading into the depths and a lyre bird calling below - the sun setting and the valley filling up with blue haze. I can still hear my father’s voice saying: “Son, we must save this for future generations.” It took years but he and his mates did just that. We can make a difference.

We inherited a beautiful blue and green planet floating through a mysterious universe stocked with sparkling stars. We have found no other like it out there in space. Since our species drifted out of Africa, this earth has been home to us for thousands of years. The greatest inheritance we can leave our children is simply to give them a healthy planet that will support their lives as it has supported ours. Future generations deserve nothing less.

Thank you.