The Hames Report

Days of Miracles and Wonders

Are you quite sure you don’t mind giving this interview? 

I turned my attention to the monitor, or more precisely, to the young woman on it. She was new to Al Jazirra and had obviously been told I rarely gave interviews.  Following the Great Crisis of 2037, all unnecessary media contact by Academicians had been tacitly discouraged. 

I smiled. 

No, of course not. 

The young woman glanced down at her notes and cleared her throat. The red studio light blinked ON AIR.

Today we are pleased to welcome to the program one of our most eminent integral philosophers, Kazim Khalili.  Kazim, your mother sought asylum in Australia in 1999 having fled the Taliban. You never knew your father who was shot by the regime for adhering to liberal ideals. You were born, and spent your early years, in a detention centre in South Australia. Your release from detention came just before Christmas 2004 in a widely-publicised effort by the federal government to assuage growing concern in the community about conditions in those centres. Traumatised, you hadn’t spoken a single word while captive. Your first words were, ‘Wire not here. Is Kazim here?’  You were four. Your face, dubbed the ‘Face of Hope’ by journalists, became known to millions around the world.

Forty six years later and your life still remains something of a mystery.  Last year you were Time Magazine’s ‘Face of the Future’ - yet most people probably wouldn’t recognise you if they saw you in the street. Yasmin, your Vietnamese-born life partner, is a widely-published ethicist and former actress who also happens to be one of the most glamorous women in the world – yet the two of you seldom appear in public. You are a moral philosopher to some of the most powerful corporations on the planet and one of only 20 elected Sages of the Gaian Academy – yet you eschew political power, which could be yours for the taking. How can this be?

What a question!  I cast my mind back to those early days… 

After my father’s death, my mother, five months pregnant, gambled her life’s savings on securing safe passage to Australia. Like all politicians at the time, Australia’s political leaders were too egocentric, too taken up with their own self-importance and petty differences, to care much about refugees. All my mother wanted was freedom. Even this basic human right these, so-called civilized, people denied her. Dismayed and depressed she eventually set herself ablaze in full view of visiting dignitaries. Her suicide was an excruciating cry for the plight of all refugees; the kind of protest that causes even the most powerful to shudder. How could I not live my life wisely after such sacrifice?

How did you find growing up in Australia?

Oh, I can’t deny it was tough – just ask any immigrant from that time. My foster family, though kind, were not affluent. I wore clothes bought at the local market and because I spoke with an accent I was bullied unmercifully at school. Most Muslims were pilloried, receiving the kind of treatment dished out to greedy and corrupt officials today. I worked my way through college doing jobs nobody else would do. Cleaning public toilets, driving taxis, sweeping the streets…  Whatever was available. 

You studied philosophy and bioethics at University?

I did. I devoured every book I could get my hands on. It was a revelation.  Today we accept the idea that human purpose is bound up with experiencing and respecting all life, learning to grow and take responsibility for stewardship of the whole Earth and for each other. But we simply didn’t know that then. Indeed, such views ran counter to almost everything we took for granted and assumed about reality. Back then, for instance, it was widely assumed that biological control came about through dissecting life down to the minutest particle. By the end of the 20^th century James Lovelock’s Gaian hypothesis was more or less accepted by a majority of scientists.  But other significant thinkers, like Lipton, Sheldrake, Buchanan, Watts, Strogatz and Wolfram, for example, were considered wackos by many mainstream scientists. Bruce Lipton’s thinking, in addition to the pioneering ideas proposed by Roy Madron and John Jopling in their book The Gaian Democracies, provided the tipping point for Australia’s venture into a new form of "Gaian" democracy. It was Lipton, you recall, who first showed genes did not control biological expression and were but a small part of the equation. That was an amazing discovery. It was Lipton, too, who insisted long before anyone else, that by looking at the physical world through reductionist eyes, we had ended up viewing the world and human beings as though matter and the material world were the only things that – well, matter. Then there were remarkable breakthroughs in economics with the establishment of the first Commons Trusts, derived from the thinking of people like James Quilligan and Ken Wilber.

Today, we openly admit that all knowledge and all ways of knowing contribute to our comprehension of who we are; that understanding arises from perceiving both the material and immaterial worlds. We accept that love and joy promote growth, while fear and stress lead to breakdown of the system as easily as we accept constructs in quantum physics. This is why the Gaian Academy, which arose out of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and has become the key advisory body on global affairs, is necessarily based on a philosophy of wholeness. 

So the noetic sciences are more important to you than philosophy?

On the contrary. Both are absolutely integral to the Gaian worldview.  Noetic science brings emotions, aesthetics and spirituality into the ambit of science. But it is philosophy that shows us how to maintain a viable civic society. A love of philosophy helped me to understand how I might live my life with greater wisdom; how I might tread more lightly on this Earth. In terms of a career, though, it was a disastrous choice. Employers sought accountants, engineers and lawyers back then. Everything had become focused on individual and material progress, you see. Greed, competition, prejudice, ignorance and fear were rife. You can’t begin to imagine what it was like unless you’d lived through it.

The Great Awakening changed that didn’t it?  In fact it seemed to impact most things.

It certainly did. Oh, we’d had more or less ongoing ‘red alerts’ regarding issues such as climate change, the impact of pollution on the biosphere, terrorism, corruption in business and politics, and the dangers of genetically modified foods, for example. But in spite of the fear propagated by governments and activists alike, enthusiastically aided and abetted by the media it must be said, society had become complacent. We trusted that money, or smart technologies created by even smarter brains, would fix all our problems. The Great Awakening really forced us to come to terms with the stark reality of the human condition. After the collapse of the climate negotiations in Mexico in 2010 it became clear to most people that we couldn’t go on as before. But what to do?  In essence, we needed to find a different way to live our lives, and quickly too. The fallout from global climate change happened far faster than anyone had predicted you see. The Great Awakening also allowed us to develop new kinds of governance that moved beyond classic parliamentary models – what we now refer to as Gaian democracies.  Old governance and political models had long outlived their usefulness, it’s just that we hadn’t realised it.

What was it like living through the Great Awakening? How did it feel?

It felt…  Actually it felt as though the end of the world had come – like all those old science fiction films you see about Armageddon. Really, nothing can do justice to the sense of sheer dread shared by the community at that moment. The most damage occurred between 2020 and 2028. Scorching summers, protracted droughts and severe storms, cyclones and bushfires gripped the country. There were crippling water shortages. Power blackouts lasted days rather than hours. Entire National Parks were destroyed. Corals in the World-Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef were bleached white by the warm acid waters. Tourism collapsed completely. Almost 68 per cent of farmers went bankrupt – especially those that were still reliant on European-style crops and farming methods. It really did feel like the end had come. But without those disasters I doubt that significant change could have occurred. Mind you, we were fortunate in having Gaian principles and noetic sciences available to us. This knowledge, once considered heretical, now made perfect sense – even to those who had been sceptical about its unorthodox scientific pedigree. Severe problems we’d never imagined we could figure out, like soil erosion and desalination, for example, seemed suddenly possible to resolve. Our knowledge and our technologies had both shifted. As science assumed genuine systemicity, so researchers started incorporating diverse topics, relationships and methods in their work. One discovery followed another in quick succession. The innovation commons enabled ordinary people and small communities everywhere to start using low-cost democratic technologies bypassing any involvement from massive and uncaring corporations. It was so liberating you see...

What kinds of problems are you talking about here? Can you give us some examples?

By all means. One of the first things we did was to completely redesign and rebuild local energy systems so that they drastically reduced carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions. Breakthroughs occurred in the generation and distribution of solar, wind, hydrogen, and other forms of energy, together with new policies and financial instruments to accelerate the transformation process. The implications of this were staggering, especially in urban conurbations where every internal combustion engine, every coal-fired power plant, every methane-emitting landfill was transformed or replaced with an alternative that was climate-neutral and environmentally benign. At the same time we developed a globally- coordinated system for managing the global carbon balance at scientifically determined acceptable levels.

That system marked the beginnings of the Academy and its subsequent influence on global geopolitics, if I’m not mistaken?

Correct. That degree of global cooperation was simply unprecedented. The only way we could have started to deal with some of these problems was through agreed global policy settings. It worked. Indeed, it worked so well that the Academy is now the most influential global institution as far as applied holistic science and governance is concerned.

What other early Gaian policies emanated from the Academy?

Oh, far too many to list during this interview. But I can give you a feel for the scope of new policies back then. International efforts shifted from the previous focus on emissions (which was never going to succeed) to scalable and actions relevant to different situations and locales. The production and use of chemicals was completely overhauled so that no known toxins could accumulate in the biosphere. A tax was levied on carbon. Then there was a concerted effort to completely eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons and materials from escaping into the biosphere by finding new ways to transform highly radioactive and long-lasting materials like plutonium into more benign materials. The fact that nuclear energy is once again one of the most common forms of energy on the planet is a testimony to the innovations that have been achieved there. 

But not in the UK, US and Canada surely? Wave-power generators now produce most of their electricity?

That’s correct. Unhappily Australia had no mandated green-power targets at the time. Legislation still favoured fossil fuel polluters. So yet another Australian invention was commercialised overseas for lack of local investment capital.

Sorry Kazim, I interrupted you.  You were talking about the new policies emanating from the Academy…

I suppose the most important dual issues were the elimination of global poverty (largely through the application of sufficiency economy principles) as well as the threat of war. We shouldn’t underestimate the efforts that went into this – even though politicians only started taking it in earnest once they’d realised that poverty was creating all kinds of ecological destruction while increasing social instability and diminishing our humanity. War is far too dangerous in an era of globally destructive weaponry. In the first assembly of the Academy we agreed that nothing less than the full elimination of these two scourges would be sufficient to attain sustainability and establish the full proof of our maturity as a species.

And the physical environment, which is also an area close to your heart?

Because I’m an Australian, the physical landscape is a potent part of my personal identity and consciousness. Landscapes have both a tactile and an aesthetic beauty that is almost spiritually palpable, for me as for most other Australians, I suspect. My inaugural address as a Sage included policies designed to protect absolutely the integrity of the Earth's natural and agricultural systems. In Australia and New Zealand, hard boundaries were drawn around biodiversity preserves, critical ecosystems, and places of awe and wonder like Kakadu and Uluru, for example. I proposed that farmlands and food production should be protected from displacement by urban sprawl and colonization by overzealous profiteers. And I called for human habitations to become completely self-sufficient, no longer drawing down resources at unsustainable rates or destroying places of living mystery with thoughtless extraction, pollution, or overuse. All of which is now government policy I’m pleased to say.

But what of the Australian landscape itself. Does it look any different today?

Superficially speaking, probably not too much. Urban environments are designed far more elegantly. Most buildings are extremely energy efficient and look more sculptural than in the past. I suppose visitors from the 20^th century might be surprised by the lack of green in our inner cities. We no longer try to mimic European landscapes as we did then. Even our Botanic Gardens are full of native species. New legislation and methods of farming as well as broad acre permaculture projects have ensured the survival of critical ecosystems. The rivers are clean and the oceans have abundant fish.  There are probably more forests today than there were even 20 years ago.  The main difference is the fact that we’ve been able to produce a system whereby native and introduced species of flora and fauna can coexist. We haven’t had to opt for one or the other.

Kazim, can you say a little about how all of this has been achieved?

There were perhaps four critical elements, without which none of this could possibly have worked. First was the platform for change provided by the Great Awakening itself. Second was the new Gaian paradigm which balanced individual wealth with new commons and trusts and futures banks (designed to protect the rights of all people to things like fresh air and potable water) and repositioned the role of governments in that regard. The third had more to do with a critical mass of people from all walks of life, change agents if you like, who dared to take seriously the challenge of personal life-style transformation: the activists who called our attention to those issues about which society was in denial; the artists who helped us feel the gravity of our predicament and inspired us to strive for better things; the scientists and technologists who found breakthrough ideas to rapidly transform our way of life; the designers who fused beauty and functionality in a transformed world; and the business people who re-imagined and redirected capital flows, investment and talent in ways that recreated the world while enhancing global prosperity. Fourth, and perhaps most important, was the introduction of third-generation, people-powered, political systems as well as the establishment of participative processes and collaborative global institutions, such as the Academy. I doubt very much whether we would be here today if we were still enmeshed in the ego-based, corrupt political systems of the late 20^th century.

Kazim, thank you so much for your time. It’s been fascinating to talk to such a distinguished Sage about the evolution of Gaian society. In today’s world of preferential networks, collaborative communities and the tendency to downplay ego as a natural response to the 20^th century’s individualistic excesses, it’s not often we have access to such fascinating and inspirational personal insights. Is there anything you would like to say in conclusion?

Only that our journey continues still. So many dreams have been realised over the past half century. Humanity’s impact on nature has declined dramatically. We have learned to live as stewards of the biosphere rather than as ravagers of it. Wealth is being created in ways that were simply unimaginable barely 25 years ago and poverty is almost a thing of the past.  Society is transformed and it enriches us – spiritually, socially, economically. There is still much to be done though. Perhaps we will never completely understand why we are here. But what we’ve discovered already is quite profound and we are living together more compassionately and developing wealth more equitably as a result.

Kazim Khalili, thank you so very much for your time.  Namaste.

Namaste.

 

 

New Life for Sale

As Lily and Bart enter the polling station to cast their votes for the bioregional council elections of Gippsland they are assailed by a plethora of party volunteers. A throng of partisan hands clamour to re-program their hologram ‘how-to-vote’ cards – a necessary aide given that there are a total of 247 candidates standing for election. Bloody politicians, muses Bart. It’s no different from the days of the old state-based ballots.

In Australia State governments were abolished in 2024 following a national referendum held early in Gemma Pinnell’s term as the nation’s first “green” Prime Minister. With hindsight, their demise was inevitable. One fiasco had followed another in rapid succession, particularly in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Besides, most important political agreements were now hammered out either by the expanded Asia-Pacific Regional Council (APRC) located in Beijing or by the World Forum in Abu Dhabi.

Public anger was originally sparked by the deteriorating state of public health care. An inability to address problems related to paramedic services and the costs of acute hospital care came to a head in 2013 when an emergency meeting of the States’ health ministers led to the closure of several major hospitals, including Melbourne’s Austin & Repatriation Hospital and Sydney’s Royal North Shore. An estimated 172 people died during the crisis from ‘inadequate or unavailable’ treatment.

Then the ongoing debacle over water allocation and pricing, sewage outfalls, desalination issues, environmental flows and the apparent inability of State politicians to stem the profligate use of water in the cities - particularly in more affluent suburbs. This led to widespread agreement about the importance of the “green” agenda and contributed to the final demise of the States. The new laws had outlawed the automatic sprinkling of garden lawns in the hot summer months, for example, and made it illegal for city residents to own top-loading washing machines or to use non-recycled water for flushing toilets. But such strategies were largely viewed by an increasingly sceptical community as too little, too late. Australian cities were still running out of water.

The resulting erosion of public confidence, the continued decline of the tax base, and the handing up by Federal Parliament of many of its powers (including economic regulation and the various Commons Trusts) to the World Forum and the APRC, meant that the bioregional community councils were now the primary stamping ground for political aspirants.

Lily and Bart are third generation members of an intentional community on 500 acres just outside the town of Sale, in what was previously called Victoria, now the Gippsland Bioregion. Such communities proliferated on the coastal fringes of Australia at the start of the twenty-first century in response to a growing dissatisfaction with urban sprawl, transport gridlock, pollution levels and the indiscriminate verbal and physical abuse immediately categorised by psychologists as “city-rage”.

New Life, Lily and Bart’s community, is one of a growing number of self-governing, sustainable social ecosystems around the world. Around 130 New Life communities exist in areas that were previously in need of economic revitalisation, including Gippsland, Tasmania, Sicily, Ecuador, New Zealand, Brunei, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Zimbabwe. New Life members are responsible for developing their own infrastructure needs, including health care, aged care, education and technical support, while food and energy comes from a combination of permaculture and concentrated solar power energy production.

Unemployment is a thing of the past in these communities. ‘Reciprocal contributions’ between residents and the community are agreed before the Community Residence Contract is signed. Once accepted into the New Life fraternity, each member receives support by the community for life, while the community continues to benefit from the member’s trade, knowledge and life experience. Income is typically generated from the sale of ceramics and other crafts to visitors (these communities are still a source of curiosity for many city dwellers), local barter schemes, currently administered (and taxed) by bioregional councils, as well as global on-line consulting projects. Consulting work is paid for in World-Credits, whose transfer, like all financial flows in the global financial system, are taxed by the World Forum at a rate of 1 per cent.

The New Life community in the Gippsland Bioregion was recently profiled in the e-zine ‘Grassroots’ for their innovative use of lunar and planetary phases to increase crop yields, using data collected by World Forum funded satellites operating around Earth’s moon and at the edge of the solar system. Lily and Bart were delighted that this initiative was receiving so much attention, particularly as they had both played such a significant role in its development. They were now preparing to fly to the New Life community in Sicily where the Council had requested an urgent inter-community knowledge transfer.

Lily’s brother, Jack, was nothing like his younger sister. He had never been particularly drawn to community life. In fact the Sale community had always considered him to be quite a recluse. For his part, Jack had always hankered to live in the city and leaped at the opportunity to start a course in entrepreneurial metabonomics at the Asia-Pacific University of Medical Technology a few days after his 38th birthday. He now lives in a high security apartment suburb in inner city Sydney that, like all five-star energy rated developments, is protected from toxic pollution levels by an atmospheric dome.

Jack and the 2,000 other residents of this suburb-complex (typically single or childless couples aged between 35 and 70 ) are mainly global professionals working for the diplomatic, trading or civil society divisions of global corporations. He earns enough to pay for his studies by working evenings as a specialist ‘hawk’ for Urban Seed, an organization funded by private corporations who’s mission is to keep track of some 50,000 ‘crakes’ (destitute adolescents inhabiting the city fringes) by means of radio frequency ID tags. ‘Hawking’ is fairly dull and routine work for Jack, but at least he can visit live concerts from the comfort of his media-cocoon while scanning the radio waves for delinquent crakes.

Jack’s apartment, his pride and joy, is part of a fully self-contained neighbourhood with restaurants, bars, cafes, lifestyle stores and parklands clustered around a central ‘village-square’. Jack tends to avoid the village square on Friday evenings when holographic street entertainers, meticulously restored in every detail from actual clowns and buskers of the late 20th century, draw huge crowds – crowds that once attended sports events in their thousands before apathy turned to indifference and cocooning became so popular.

Basic commodities, such as toiletries and educational services, are purchased on-line using virtual supermarket walk-throughs. Like most residents in the complex, Jack has no need for a kitchen, eating out in the conveniently located café’s within the complex or “ordering in” one of the 5000 synthesised meals programmed into the nano-café that replaced kitchens in most Australian homes in the mid-21st century.

Jack rarely leaves the complex – he has no real need as his community provides everything he could want or need. There is still the odd occasion when he hankers for contact with ‘reality’ even if it is sanitised somewhat and viewed through the safety of the electrically powered smart car supplied by the Body Corporate. He does, however, take full advantage of the luxurious health and fitness facilities available free of charge to all residents.

Energy to his complex is sourced from the global energy grid that, under a World Trade Organisation agreement in 2012, allows China, India and a few South American countries to continue to produce coal-generated power until 2080. This was only possible due to the advances in sequestering technology and the collocation of associated industries into energy eco-parks based around the waste from energy production. While Australia has four of these parks (located at Bowen, Lithgow, Moe and Jaranderup) most domestic energy contribution to the global grid is from Desertec Ltd's massive concentrated solar power complexes located in strategic hot spots around the world.

In Australia, the largest Desertec facility is located in the Great Sandy Desert. It supplies around 80 per cent of Australia's total energy needs and also exports under licence to New Zealand and several countries in the APRC bloc. The remaining 20 per cent is supplied by the conspicuous kilometre-high solar towers dotted across the landscape. These towers are built, owned and operated by Enviromission Ltd. Located in some of the most arid parts of Australia, these futuristic structures overcame early protests to become something of a tourist attraction - if still something of an eyesore for local residents.

While Jack’s complex no longer produces any non-recyclable or non-reusable waste products, there still remain many communities in remote Australia who continue to live off the proceeds of waste-storage contracts with such inner-urban communities. These agreements were entered into earlier in the century after pilot waste dumps on the Moon proved too costly.

Jack sees little of his partner, Rani, who spends most of her time away from home. While the Holonet enables techno-touch, it somehow isn’t as real as the real thing. A graduate in food technology, Rani is a senior food production adviser to the World Forum, which was established in 2030 as a result of a merger of the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation and The World Social Forum. Rani moves between serviced diplomatic-communes operated by the Forum throughout the world. Her work mostly entails inspecting production processes to ensure compliance with the detailed regulations established by the World Forum.

Currently, Rani is working on a contentious plan to set enforceable production limits on local communities producing organic food stocks in an attempt to provide a stimulus to the synthetic food industry, which is suffering after a major world-wide recall of synthetically produced noodles, soybeans and rice. Tensions between local bioregional and urban communities and the World Forum have escalated recently as global companies seek to lobby the Forum for increased limits on the autonomous production of energy, food and water resources by local bioregions and communities. The Forum has also had to intervene recently in countries such as Australia, where the Federal Legislature of Twelve failed to successfully meditate between bioregions in Southern and Western Australia over water rights.

The Blue Mountains Bioregional Council for example, is moving to implement the result of a citizens initiated referendum requiring the decommissioning of reservoirs in the region, now that it is entirely self-sufficient in water through rainwater collection, water recycling and moisture farming schemes. Naturally, the Federation of Sydney Suburban-Complexes is fiercely opposed to the plan, as they rely heavily on such external water sources.

While external relations between communities are often fraught, well-defined communities such as New Life are, on the inside, remarkably cohesive. A recent plan to regenerate the remaining grape crops of the loss making wineries of the Barossa Valley Bioregion into eco-parks and establish small-scale manufacturing plants for the now pervasive e-beverages (which provide the same psychophysical response as alcohol, at half the cost and without the side-affects) was developed by a broad cross-section of Barossa Valley community members, with generous assistance to those wineries and workers who will be disadvantaged.

The singularly passionate (and at times parochial) nature of many communities has become a headache for organisations like the World Forum whose mandate is to create equality across communities in basic human needs such as food, water, housing, education, opportunity and spiritual development through the administration of the various Commons Trusts designed to protect and maintain the wealth of the commons. The Forum also seeks to promote mutual respect and tolerance of different worldviews.

One instance of such provincial thinking occurred recently when a World Forum initiative to promote understanding of the diverse spiritual traditions practiced throughout the world was opposed by traditional religious groups who felt that the promotion of some of the smaller, more controversial sects was an attack on the validity of their own beliefs. Likewise, communities such as those of Lily and Bart, while incredibly knowledgeable about their own domains of interest such as astrodynamic agriculture, Wiccan-Islam and community capacity building, tend towards over-simplification and generalisation when it comes down to issues and people outside their direct sphere of influence.

The breakdown of filial bonds between Lily and Jack over lifestyle choices is mirrored from family to family and community to community. While some, like the New Life communities, are geographically congregated, others are credo-based, connecting only in cyberspace. No one foresaw the potential in the launch of the Holonet in 2020 for the emerging electronically connected communities to close out any perspective but their own – thus isolating themselves into a perpetually self-reinforcing worldview. With security the key issue at the turn of the millennium, the lock-out and lock-in cybergates meant it was keep taps on what goes on in these holo-communities, or to connect with them in any meaningful way.

A recent protest held by the civil society division of the global company British Hydrogen in support of a World Forum proposal to prohibit all forms of personal transportation vehicles requiring a dedicated energy source in favour of public transport modes, was portrayed by Bart as another case of those bloody hydros wanting to take us back to the dark ages.

Bart suspects that this is a view shared by many of his neighbours in the Gippsland Bioregion. Irrespective of how he might vote in the forthcoming election, he is convinced the coalition government (comprising the Community First Party, the World Forum Disarmament Party and two “Our Way is the Best Way” independents) will be returned. The more things change, the more they stay the same Bart muses as he leaves the polling station. I often wonder why I even bother to focus on anything but New Life for Sale.

The World After Copenhagen

Throughout my 35 years in sustainability it has always seemed odd that while so-called economic rationalism reigned over our political, economic and business worlds, rational thought wasn’t applied to issues like climate change.

The risks were always clear, as defined by rational science, while a logical analysis of the economics showed acting early was cheaper than acting late. Yet a strange kind of religious and ideological zealotry took hold, as otherwise sensible, educated people ignored rational thought. It was a failure of reason.

While Copenhagen failed to deliver any agreement however, it may well mark a return to rational thought and with it some profound shifts in markets, politics and our approach to sustainability. Perhaps historians will mark this point and refer to the world BC and AC – Before Copenhagen and After Copenhagen.

What will historians say changed at the end of 2009? And if we could read their conclusions now, would it change our present responses – not as historians but as the creators of that history? Perhaps they will write something like this:

The old world ended at Copenhagen. It was the moment a critical mass of people came to accept that the old way of doing things was finished. They started to prepare for a new world, and for the shift to the war footing that would deliver it.

While Copenhagen failed to deliver action on reducing emissions, it delivered a very clear outcome. It shattered assumptions that had previously framed the debate and so provided an historic shift in the approach to the issue.

For a start it was the end of the debate about the science. Copenhagen marked the victory of reason over ideological and religious zealotry. The debates continued on the detail and that was of course a healthy part of the process. There is always uncertainty in science and such debates test the strength of assumptions. But After Copenhagen there was a critical mass of powerful and influential people who accepted that despite the uncertainties, it was time to act.

They kept debating 1 vs 2 degrees of warming and levels of CO2 at 350 vs 450ppm but they stopped debating the rules of physics and chemistry. They knew if you increase the thickness of the atmosphere’s blanket the world gets warmer. While many remained frustrated at the lack of action despite this acceptance, this was a critical turning point because the mathematics of what accepting the science meant for the economy were profound.

It was also the end of any chance of a measured and careful transition. That moment probably passed in 2000 but it was firmly dead and buried with the lack of an agreement in 2009. With actual emissions reduction now years away, the lags in the climate system dictated that a crisis driven, war like response was now inevitable, even with the high 2 degree target. As a result, assumptions about the pace of change and the process by which it would be delivered were finished.

It was clear After Copenhagen that when the change came, the pace would be rapid, the process chaotic and the transformation radical. This meant the level of national economic and company business risk posed by delay was now much greater than the risk posed by the change itself. As a result, business came on board at Copenhagen, now seriously worried that delay would lead to such rapid change, their companies faced catastrophic commercial risk.

Perhaps the shift of greatest historical significance was that it was now clear the pursuit of global consensus was an illusion. The major powers had played along with the UN process because the complexity of reaching consensus gave them an excuse to avoid action. They could profess support for a global deal, knowing it wouldn’t happen. But once there was a danger of it becoming real, they dropped that idea like a hot potato. There was nothing in history to suggest they were ever going to let large numbers of small, poor countries help determine the rules. As history shows, those with power don’t give it up lightly.

Instead they started the process of forming what was to become the Coalition of the Cooling, a group of powerful nations and their friends who had sufficient economic and political muscle to define the inevitable economic transition. If power was going to shift away from the sole superpower, it was in the interests of both the US and the group of large emerging powers to form a new club to guide the future. With the addition of their various allies, the future could then be negotiated with 10 people in the room. China had arrived.

What those in power missed until much later though was the strength of public concern and as a result the rising influence of civil society. Tens of thousands of advocates had gone to Copenhagen, assuming their intellectual and political contribution would help leaders get the right outcome. They left angry at the failure of world leaders but determined to force change from the bottom up.

The combination of civil society, particularly the youth movement, along with the simple mathematics of climate science, led to what most investors missed completely until it was too late. After Copenhagen, coal was finished. It was surprising so many missed this because the data was clear for all to see. Investment in clean energy outstripped investments in fossil fuel energy every year from 2008 on. More importantly, once 2 degrees was accepted as the maximum target, it was all over for coal. There just wasn’t any room in the remaining carbon budget for coal to keep growing. So once the world’s powers decided the science was in, coal was out.

This was the case anyway and would have unfolded over the decades to come, but when civil society decided to give up on the direct political process and focus all of its attention on coal, sentiment shifted quite rapidly.

It was of course technically illogical to focus just on coal, after all it was only 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But it was already clear the market would kill off oil, with electric cars and / or peak oil. All the alternative NGO campaign targets were too complex and missed the key ingredients : a powerful enemy that can be demonized, a simple NO campaign and definable physical targets to focus on. The movement had learnt the dangers of diffusion by putting so much into Copenhagen for so little tangible result.

So the group with nothing to lose, the Angry Islanders joined with the youth driven movement Our Climate Our Time and directed its powerful emotional message entirely onto coal.

Campaigns erupted everywhere – targeting every coal mine, every coal company and every coal train and ship. It was a market smart campaign with investors targeted as owners, banks as lenders and coal executives as climate criminals. It took a few years to build momentum but once the US and China jointly announced a ban on new coal plants, the house of cards came tumbling down.

The valuation of coal companies collapsed, under the combined weight of public disdain, regulatory threat and shrinking market, with alternative technologies now competing on price. With investors running scared having seen their coal investments drop 75% in value over a month of carnage, the industry went into terminal decline, confined to the margins thereafter.

The litigation against directors and fund managers however, carried on for a decade more. Regulators took action against directors who hadn’t explained the key risks to investors. Shareholders asked why these risks weren’t obvious to directors given the science and why they were misled about the commercial potential of CCS.

So back to the present as we head into 2010.

Who knows how the future will actually unfold, but some parts of the above are clear. The focus on Copenhagen failed to deliver for the global climate movement. It was always going to, as I argued in my last column, but even I didn’t think it would fail quite so spectacularly. So a shift in focus is inevitable for climate campaigners. We don’t know where it will shift to, but we’ll find out in 2010.

The business community are the biggest losers from Copenhagen. Despite their really serious focus and coordinated calls for action leading up to Copenhagen, they now face heightened risk of discontinuous change.

The lack of a regulatory result, combined with the political acceptance of the need for even stronger action than before, creates a huge gulf between present reality and the inevitable future. That gap will close at some point and do so suddenly. For companies determining their business strategies this poses massive risk. It makes the coal scenario painted above far from fanciful. Markets are driven by sentiment and sudden sentiment shifts are now inevitable. The challenge is working out where and when they will strike. I’d certainly be nervous if I was a coal executive or investor.

For policy makers it’s back to the drawing board. With no genuine global agreement anytime soon, perhaps they will abandon trading schemes and revert to the much simpler approach of national carbon taxes and bilateral deals, following the trade model. Meanwhile all but the lowest carbon economies now face ever increasing risk from delay. When the global market shift gets momentum, being stranded with high per capita carbon emissions could be competitive disaster for nations that are slow to act.

On a personal level, part of the challenge is dealing with despair and frustration. Community activists, corporate leaders, policy makers and scientists have put so much effort into action on climate change, for little result. Sure we’ve seen great progress in understanding and have many new allies on board but negligible action to even delay the now inevitable crisis. The climate responds to emissions not to political accords.

So take a moment to grieve for the lost opportunity, shed a tear like Bill McKibben did and say thanks to all those who have thrown their all at it. We have led the horse to water but it’s not yet thirsty enough to drink.

But don’t stay there. We don’t have time for despair. We now have to move on to the new world, the one After Copenhagen. So after some Christmas rest and reflection, decide what you’re going to do and get back to work. We have a civilisation to save.

This guest post was written by Paul Gilding and is reprinted here with his permission. The post was first published in The Cockatoo Chronicles on 23rd December 2009.