All it will cost us is money

When your house is burning down you don’t worry about saving water or what you are wearing. All that matters is getting out alive and saving what you can. A house fire is an emergency and our rules for everyday behaviour don’t apply.

We now live in a time of climate emergency. All the scientific evidence shows that the world is warming because we have put too much greenhouse gas into the air. The North Pole might be ice-free in summer in a few years. Arctic permafrost is already warming and may start to release masses of CO2. The problem could get away from us. Disappearing polar ice and thawing permafrost will cause further warming that might be unstoppable.

A new book, Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action was launched two months ago by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser. Its authors argue that since the world is already too hot we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero as quickly as possible. We also have to remove a lot of greenhouse gases from atmosphere and we have to cool the earth.

This sounds extreme yet most governments around the world have accepted the science on which it is based. But they underestimate their citizenry and water down their response. They are bogged down with dialogue and time-lines that stretch uselessly into the future. But this isn’t a pay-rise or used car we’re talking about, it’s the world. You can’t negotiate with physics.

The fact is that humans have a great capacity to respond to emergency. We are hard-wired to act quickly and tirelessly – even selflessly – when the situation demands it. Polls show that we are very worried about the problem and are happy to pay money to fix it. Nobody wants a ruined planet.

Reducing global greenhouse emissions to zero in 10 years or less will not be easy but it can be done. The obstacles are not technical, but political. We can be inspired by the way the Allies mobilized in World War 2 or how the Americans landed a man on the moon just eight years after getting a man into earth orbit.

At the current price for renewable electricity Australia could make all of its power without burning fossil fuels for a total cost of around $12 billion a year. This is just a bit more than we got in our latest tax cut, which I’m sure most of us have forgotten about already.

Making electricity causes 34.7% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions. So for the cost of that forgotten tax cut we could cut our total emissions by over one third. Surely cutting the lot to zero wouldn’t cost more than $50 billion or so. This is five per cent of our Gross Domestic Product. By contrast, during World War 2 Australia spent 30% of its GDP on the war effort.

But it’s also a bit harder than it looks. Australia has grown rich by burning fossil fuels. If we want poorer countries to stop using them we’ll have to make it worth their while. Since we use about five times our share of global emissions we should pay for the renewable energy transition of at least 100 million people in the developing world. This might double our transition budget, bringing it all the way up to 10% of our GDP.

Now that we are approaching the scale of the economic transformation that was needed to defeat fascism in the 1940s we should remember something: this time nobody has to get killed. We can have a planet with a safe climate and more justice and equality than we’ve ever had before and all it will cost us is money.