BigBlog

Too many technical difficulties with Bigpondn has led me to move my blogging on to WordPress.Com  You can find the presentation I gave at Future Fuels and all subsequent blogs at http://profjohncole.wordpress.com   See you there.

Tomorrow at the Customs House in Brisbane I will be speaking at a Future Fuels Workshop organised by engineers and scientists from The University of Queensland.

Attended by delegates from around Australia and overseas, the workshop, comprised mainly of fuels researchers, aims to share information and ideas about the opportunities to be exploited in the alternative fuels sphere.

Mindful of the issues of peak oil, energy security and the geo-politics and economics of energy flows around the world, much of the focus in the workshop is on gas to liquids, coal liquefaction, and biomass to liquid sources of fuel.

The title of my talk is ‘Future Fuels: Moving Beyond Ideology to Meet the Sustainability Imperative' and the theme of my presentation is pitched in the following abstract.

Current human development is both unsustainable and calibrated increasingly with inefficient energy intensity and wasteful consumption of non-renewable resources.

Over the coming half century any possibility of humankind achieving sustainable development as well as effectively addressing the causes of anthropocentric global warming will require disruptional levels of technical, economic and social innovation in the human fuel cycle.

Ending energy poverty, de-carbonising the global economy, pre-empting peak oil and climate change impacts while embedding the efficient use of clean sustainable energy is an ambitious agenda which require more than new technologies.

To start with we will not meet the challenges of sustainable development by having an energy debate couched in the old ideologies.

Indeed, the requirements of a sustainable fuel cycle for 11 billion people necessitates a future so different to the past century that the challenge itself can be reduced to a question of whether we humans wish to survive or not.

Assuming humankind has not yet lost the primal instinct for survival, the real questions become ones of at what cost, how, when and at what speed will we resolve the future fuels conundrum?

All of this involves pathways and choices and costs and benefits,  decisions about which should be made using scientific and empirically valid evidence stripped of political prejudice.

The future-defeating claims of fading industries and the distorting gifts and subsidies of pork-barrelling politicians also have no place in building the sustainable energies of the future.

Because on one thing we can be confident: there will be room for all the major energies - nuclear, chemical, photo-mechanical, biological, thermal and hydro - as well as vastly transformed generation and distribution, and utilisation models.

And if the 20th century was an era of proliferation in fuel sources and applications, the 21st century is likely to witness a move toward convergent technology pathways and the hybridisation and integration of differing technologies - all with a view of making the future human condition energy efficient.

It means that in our research and development, we should focus on ensuring future pathways that lead to open doors and optimal options for sustainable resources utilisation, economic and technical efficiency and healthy social dividends.

The technology and investment choices nations make in the next two decades will be important - determining their eventual competitiveness and broader resilience in a late 21st century world almost unimaginably different from today.

The Gillard Government's carbon package has more than a few rough edges and shows all the signs of the political trade-offs needed to secure a carbon price in one of the most carbon intensive economies on the planet.

In creating a politically defensible platform from which to lead and steer change as well as resurrect its standing with the Australian people, the Government has traded away some economic and environmental efficiency to placate the coal interest, at least in the short to intermediate term.

That said, today's carbon package is a welcome and significant first step by Australia on the road to decarbonising its economy as the international community slowly but surely comes to grips with the human dimensions of climate change.

There is no shortage of targeted assistance measures to help a range of industries do what they should already be doing, namely, achieving savings through energy efficiency, capturing fugitive emissions for co-generation, and planning for  competition in a world which will increasingly value low-carbon products and services.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of promoting economic and social reform in a country which feels entitled, averse to change, and complacent about what it has to do to assure a sustainable future, the 'rational optimist' in me sees market based reforms to be more enduring, efficient, and a lot less wasteful than government sponsored direct action programs.

The overall output of today's announcement is a politically practical no frills deal which recognises that there is no silver bullet for dealing with the complexities of climate change, economic reform and decarbonisation. 

Unlike the Rudd-Turnbull CPRS deal though, Carbon Price Mark II shows evidence of political lessons learned and a far greater emphasis on transitional arrangements, change incentives, and interim process certainty.

Carbon change the Australian way took a major step forward today, but this is not the end of things to be done.

There are many more steps to take and this is not even the end of the beginning of an economic, technological and social reform process that will roll out over a generation.

But it is the start.

Premier Anna Bligh today announced that proponents were being sought for a massive $6.2 billion expansion of the Abbott Point coal port.

Seeking to cash in on the Asian demand for Queensland coal the Premier said that up to four additional coal terminals would be built with a combined capacity of 120 million tonnes per annum.

  
She could have mentioned that those 120 million tonnes of Queensland coal would generate over 300 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and pollute the global atmosphere.

The Premier claims that when combined with other planned expansions, the extension at Abbott Point will give the port a capacity of close to 300 million tonnes of coal per annum.

For those interested in the global warming contribution, it amounts to about 860 million tonnes of greenhouse gases being mined from the earth's crust in Queensland, shipped through Abbott Point and released through the power stations and factories of Asia into the planet's atmosphere.

The Premier says being the world's largest exporter of coal is "critical to the economy and wealth of Queensland".

"Coal exports create thousands of jobs and help pay for our schools, hospitals and roads," she said.

But already there are the early signs of a strategic movement in China and South Korea - two major markets for Queensland coal - away from a reliance on fossil fuels to cleaner renewable and nuclear energy.

So what do we do when the boom goes bust and the world says "No more" to carbon?

What will we Queenslanders do for an economy then? How will we pay for our schools and vital infrastructure without the royalties kicking in from the coal miners? 

Shouldn't we be thinking about the alternatives and building the basic blocks of that other economy now.

 
Maybe after Q3 there will be a Q4 but it might also be too late for our kids to capitalise and provide competitive products and and services in global markets wanting anything but carbon intensive commodities.

Earlier this week I did an interview with Des Houghton a columnist with Queensland's Courier Mail. Below is what I told him and some of it was published in his article "Numbers tell the story on carbon" Courier Mail pp 22-23 Wednesday 27 April)

I told Des:

"The Gillard Government is heading headlong toward a brick wall and a voter backlash because of its silver bullet approach to addressing climate change and emissions reductions.

It's put all its eggs in the carbon tax-ETS basket when a broader mix of measures is required to phase in the transition to a low carbon economy without creating too much shock to the economy and the voter.

Rather than launch a genuinely low carbon transitional strategy for the intermediate and longer term, it is embarking on a ‘crash through or crash' carbon pricing strategy which says more about the politics of minority government and a three year electoral term that it does of anything to do with climate change.

Even before the carbon tax and the compensation package to emitters is introduced, the Federal Government is spending more than 12 times as much propping up fossil fuel industries as it is on climate change programs.

Advocates for the fossil fuel lobby have waged a relentless campaign against the so-called costs of renewable energies by saying they can only happen with subsidies.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

International Energy Agency reports show that fossil fuels get six times the subsidies given to renewables or more than $312 billion a year for polluting technologies versus just over $57 billion a year for cleaner energy infrastructure.

The negative impacts of fossil fuel subsidies have not just been identified by green groups.

Back in 1997 Reserve Bank board member and leading Australian economist Warwick McKibbin worked out that global carbon emissions could be reduced by about 8% through eliminating price subsidies for coal across the world.

This has been confirmed more recently by the International Energy Agency which said in its annual world energy outlook for 2010 that cutting fossil fuel subsidies could "make a big contribution to meeting energy security and environmental goals, including mitigating carbon dioxide and other emissions".

Subsidies encourage energy inefficiency and wastefulness in households, offices and large industries.

The IEA has concluded that if fossil fuel subsidies were phased out by 2020 it would result in a reduction in primary energy demand at the global level of 5.8% and a fall in energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions of 6.9%.

This is the low hanging fruit we need to kick start the transition to low carbon living, smarter energy use, and the take up of cleaner alternatives.

The only Australian government that has actually done anything delivering on the 2009 Pittsburgh declaration has been the Bligh Government which at about the same time scrapped Queensland's half billion dollar fuel pump subsidy in favour of more pressing priorities like health and education.

The Rudd-Gillard Government has fudged on the Pittsburgh commitment to do something serious about eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. It has decided that diesel fuel rebates for miners and FBT rebates encouraging motor vehicle usage don't actually count as subsidies.

If these are not subsidies intended to assist the resources sector and the local car manufacturing industry then why do we have them in the first place?

Subsidies and taxes on energy create massive economic churn and administrative waste with almost $ 700 billion a year - or roughly 1% of world GDP - being spent subsidising consumption and a further $100 billion more than that being levied in petroleum taxes just in the OECD alone.

No wonder average consumers have no idea just how much the real costs of energy are, the whole pricing and taxation system is designed to shield the market from pricing realities.

How can the Government expect people to support a major economic reform like a carbon tax when existing pricing distortions are ignored and clear figures on the costs and benefits have yet to be presented?

If Australian Governments are ever to achieve genuine reform with carbon, energy and water, the first thing they will all have to do is come clean with the real costs of providing daily basics we have taken for granted for so long and expect to receive for a trifle.

Getting rid of the subsidies that masks the reality would be the most useful first step any government could take'.

Diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my knee, this week I am going off to an orthopaedic specialist for treatment.

[The following post appeared first as an Op Ed article in the Courier Mail Monday 7 February 2011, p 27 under the title "Climate is more than one storm"]

Through weeks of record rains, winds and floods protagonists on both sides of the climate change debate have claimed Queensland's sorry summer as vindicating their case.

With the notable exception of Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, most people it seems want to see Queensland's flood prone coal mines back in business as soon as possible.

Across the regional districts of central and southern Queensland floodwaters have overwhelmed towns and communities and effectively shut down a major industry - the mining and export of coking coal for steel production in Japan, South Korea and to a lesser extent China and Europe.

The impact of the floods is not restricted to Queensland.

The economic tremors ripple through to overseas markets too and there is now the real prospect of prices for coking coal spiralling with flow on effects to the cost of steel.

Closer to home in the coal mining heartland of the Fitzroy River Basin, where there are 42 coal mines, it's an impact that is being felt locally in jobs.

And of course there is the government interest, too.

A slowdown in coal exports means a daily loss of just under $10 million in royalties sorely needed by the State Government facing a recovery bill from Australia's greatest natural disaster.

With governments under the pump literally, Queensland's peak mining body is now using the prospect of job losses and further lost income to argue for what amounts to a few short-cuts being taken in the environmental management of the flood recovery.

The implication is that our natural environment can pay for the neglect of the basic principles of precautionary risk management by some mining companies.

Regrettably, mistakes in environmental governance by both industry and government have contributed to some of the delays to restoring production - and it did not have to happen.

In the mining districts the flood impacts have been felt since long before Christmas with many central Queensland miners seeking dispensation from the Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM) as early as late November to release floodwaters from mine sites into neighbouring creeks and rivers.

At the end of December acting environment minister Andrew Fraser joined forces with Queensland Resources Council chief Michael Roche to assure Queenslanders that mine releases in the flooded Fitzroy Basin would not harm the environment.

Given the enormous volumes of water then traversing the basin, the miners' chief lobbyist likened the releases to throwing a "thimble in a swimming pool".

At the time, I was publicly critical of this approach, not because of the likelihood of significant environmental damage, but because emergency releases of such water would not have been necessary had the mining industry and the government applied best practice standards to the development of mine sites in the first place - particularly in respect of managing weather risk.

"Dilution is the solution" to management of contaminants stopped being part of industrial environmental management back in the 1970s and is no longer acceptable except in the most extreme and unavoidable of emergencies.

With a new coal seam gas industry about to start in the Surat Basin that each day will bring upwards of 400 million litres of often times briny water to the surface, the Bligh Government has to be careful not to be setting precedents for a resources sector that has more than its fair share of major risks to manage.

We don't want a future flood situation, for example, where Darling Downs farmers end up paying for the unpreparedness of resources companies wanting to pump potentially contaminated water straight into the environment and good farmland.

In dry times or floods, coal miners are always dealing with water and each mine site will have some version of a site water management plan.

Open cut coal mines are massive sites stretching across thousands of hectares, yielding millions of tonnes of coal a year.

Depending on the size of the mine and number of pits each site can host dozens of dams, each holding groundwater which is pumped from pits, treated with technologies like reverse osmosis, and used for dust suppression or even irrigation.

Without adequate levee and diversionary protection, in times of severe flood these same dams as well as the pits can be inundated from cross-plain floodwaters or over-flowing rivers.

With the approaching summer rains and the predictions of reputable weather forecasters freely available, in late 2010 the miners knew they were in for a La Nina season.

It was only a few years since their last major flood, a 1 in 500 year event in 2008 which saw the Fairbairn Dam at Emerald overflow.

During the interim not a lot seems to have changed at the level of site operational management.

Instead of building precautionary protective infrastructure or instituting best practice water management in mines most at risk, the miners argued with the government's environmental watchdog about rules and conditions.

When the heavy rains came the impact was predictable.

According to DERM it has been notified of 15 coal mines and 4 coal seam gas operations in the Fitzroy Basin that have released water outside of their EA conditions since 30 November.

Now, nearly two months after the first flooding rains of the 2010-2011 summer, many parts of the industry in central Queensland remain hobbled by residual floodwater on site and DERM's understandable refusal to be fast tracked past its own due diligence in dealing with possible environmental contamination.

DERM advised on its web site update on 25 January that most of the 42 coal mines in the Fitzroy Basin were "operating within their Environmental Authority (EA) conditions", but of course that does not mean those mines have fully recovered - it means they are not breaching the environmental regulations that apply to their operations.

Premier Anna Bligh has insisted that "every single mine is required to have an environmental authority to release water" and while permission has been granted to 20 coal mines to pump out excess floodwater at least another 16 mines reportedly are still awaiting consideration from DERM.

When serious rain events happen that threaten the capacity of a mine to comply with its regulated operating conditions the company can apply to DERM for a permit to act outside its normal Environmental Authority by, for example, releasing flood waters from the site.

These are called Transitional Environmental Programs (TEPs) and are in place for a specified timeframe and are statutory in the obligations set upon DERM and the companies.

While environmental issues and TEPs will vary from site to site, the general idea is to get the mine back to work without damaging the environment.

DERM reports that the mines which have received approved TEPs since December are: Ensham (Ensham Resources), Poitrel (BHP Mitsui), Isaac Plains (Vale), South Walker (BHP Mitsui), Cook (Cook Resource Mining), Callide (Anglo Coal), Moranbah North (Anglo Coal), Minerva (Yancoal Australia), Kestral (Rio Tinto), Carborough Downs (Vale), Burton (Peabody Pacific), Peak Downs (BMA), Dawson South (Anglo), German Creek - Oak Park (Anglo Coal), Goonyella Riverside (BMA), Lake Lindsay (Anglo Coal) and German Creek (Anglo Coal).

The saltiness of the waters being released from mine sites seems to be the most common issue of concern to the environmental regulator, and while it varies from site to site, with evaporation the contamination becomes more of an issue.

The longer the water is left on site the more likely it is to accumulate nasties like heavy metals.

DERM acknowledges that there have been a number of unauthorized releases and while not ruling out enforcement action, it says "the risk of environmental harm is very low" and "on-going monitoring...has not indicated water quality concerns at this time".

On the face of it, the important question here is not one of containment and treatment of toxic contaminants - most of the water has not been in the mines long enough to become too salty and tests across the industry show that it is no different to background water outside the mine.

The real issues have more to do with environmental governance and risk management by the coal mining industry and the willingness and capacity of the government to set environmental standards that are applicable in practice, enforceable and reflective of best practice internationally.

For the Queensland Resources Council CEO Michael Roche the regulator is not moving quickly enough to get TEPs in place and this week he upped the pressure on the government by saying the was now an "urgent need" to get the water out of the mines and people back to work.

To take full advantage of the prospective return of rail services, Roche says some of the coal mines and some coal seam gas sites need further dispensation from DERM "to pump flood water into nearby creeks that feed strongly flowing watercourses".

But here's the rub: with the return of normal flows the dilution factor for waters pumped out of mine sites will be nowhere near as safe as it was at the height of the floods some weeks ago.

Back on 8 January the Premier indicated the desirability of dewatering mine sites during times of high flow: "Sometimes, the best time to discharge is when the water is moving quickly through the river so it can move out.... We're working with hydrologists, mining scientists and with the companies to do everything we can to get these mines operational. They are some of the state's biggest employers".

To the frustration of some in the industry the Premier's resolve as been slowed by the environmental regulator's determination that the site de-watering will be done according to an agreed permitting process - which takes time.

Critics of the departmental approach say DERM's position is unsuited to a flood disaster recovery.

But on the other hand, there remains the slack housekeeping and poor site management evident in parts of the industry that helped some of these mines get inundated in the first place.nb

Unfortunately it is a lose-lose situation that harks back to an earlier flood.

After the coal industry in central Queensland got itself into strife with the EPA (now DERM) back in 2008 over management of that year's flood, the State Government appointed an expert panel chaired by Professor Barry Hart from Monash University to review and recommend any necessary changes to the regulatory regime for mine site water emissions.

While the Hart Review showed the releases were justifiable, they were not without environmental risk in the form of potential negative impacts like poor drinking water quality and the increased likelihood of "serious adverse effects" on the fish in the Fitzroy River.

Equally importantly, the Hart Review identified issues with the EPA's (now DERM's) processes for developing the TEPs, citing the "limited involvement of key stakeholders, a lack of transparency, and poor communications with key stakeholders and the community during the response to this issue".

Predictably, after being given a good bollocking from politicians on both sides of the fence and from interested stakeholder groups, DERM's response to the Hart Review has been reflected in a far better consultative process for issuing TEPs.

But for a department that is understandably more risk averse in dealing with mining pollution, the follow-up to the Hart Review has also delivered a much tighter prescriptive list of "dos and don'ts" for how the miners might deal with flood water releases.

Unfortunately, there is one important omission that makes the current regulation quite impractical.

The new conditions developed by DERM through 2009 only consider releases of water from mine sites in low or normal flow events.

There is no prescription for releases from mine sites during the high flow events that can reasonably be expected during a La Nina season.

Fixing the background regulatory context is not going to help settle the current stand off because the high flows have largely passed and decisions on releases will have to be made with waterways getting back to normal - barring another serious rain event later this summer.

For the future though, DERM should improve its regulatory expectation by adding conditions for mine site water management during high flow events.

It's a provision that is simply essential because of central Queensland's severe weather variability and the prospects for the region because of climate change.

Frustrations about an absence of conditions for high flows aside, the industry says DERM has been for the most part very responsive to the resources sector's needs although the QRC is now saying that "further leeway is required to deal with this emergency".

It is not a leeway that DERM should be rushing to provide.

The conditions imposed since 2008 require rigorous monitoring and reporting requirements on the mines, but with DERM waiting for information to be provided by some operators so that it can make consideration, observers could be forgiven for wondering how seriously some in the industry have taken their obligations.

Beyond the governance process improvements that should arise from the recent floods, the broader policy context for mine management requires a shakeup to jolt the industry out of its complacency about weather risk probabilities.

Coal miners should reflect in their infrastructure and practice the warning of the Queensland Government's Office of Climate Change that climate change for the mining region means "more intense rainfall on days with heavy rainfall over many areas" and "an increase in the proportion of severe tropical cyclones, with a possible decrease in the total number of cyclones".

After 2008 the rules for new mines were tightened so that all new mines had to build protective levees to deal with 1 in 1000 flood events - but in the face of industry opposition the requirement was not extended to existing mines - although the prospect for improvement is always there when companies go into DERM negotiating amendments to their existing approvals.

This precautionary requirement should be extended to existing mines with the industry given a five year time frame to retrofit existing sites with 1 in a 1000 year flood protection.

The cost of the upgraded levee and channel protection would be more than offset by the savings of avoided lost production and insurance costs.

Why cannot an industry that specialises in digging enormous holes in the ground and moving millions of tonnes of earthen materials, not be able to build the levee banks and diversionary channelling necessary to keep flood plain running water into its large open cut pits?

The point is that such water should not be in the mines in the first place.

It is a subject that the Insurance Council of Australia should look closely at because its members are the ones left carrying the baby when the miners' insurance claims are settled.

Government has got a role to play in making sure there is as comprehensive climate weather and hydrological information possible, but these miners are big companies, they should be up to the task of bringing about a safer more robust approach to managing mines in Queensland extremely variable climate.

Beyond the physical infrastructure, there is improvement needed too in management culture and operational discipline.

Specifically, those miners which have not done so already should upgrade their site water management systems to something equating with latter 20th century risk management.

The companies should be applying the same rigour to water risk as they do to worker safety and key executives back in head office should be accountable for its management.

Under the terms of their environmental authority mines are obliged to notify DERM of any unauthorised releases, but the day- to-day management of water has not attracted the interest of head office mining executives as much as it should.

Talk of best practice site water management and it is not possible to point easily to a Queensland coal mine that would fit the bill.

If I were a coal mining executive looking to avoid possible future penalties or a regulator looking to save the community unnecessary impacts, I would want serious answers to the following questions:

• What is the capacity of the site's current water management system?
• Have all measures been implemented to ensure the diversion of clean water away from the mine site?
• What is being done to manage the water being held on this site?
• What is the quality of the water?
• How could it be improved?
• How much water is normally carried on site?
• What is the excess currently being carried?
• What are the concerns of interested stakeholders?
• What is the company and the government doing to transparently communicate relevant water data?
• How will we deal with a 1 in a 1000 year flood event?

For good measure, it should be part of the Environmental Approval process for all mines in Queensland, not just new mines, that the companies post this information on their corporate web sites to be freely available to the public.

It is something all miners should do because only then will we have some basis for assessing whether they have properly priced and accounted for the risks of their operation.

Now, the miners can apply "force majeure" to their customers and blame the suspension of sales on an Act of God and hold ups in supply on the regulators.

But with a site specific and transparent water management and reporting regime in place, at critical times like these all stakeholders would be able to know whether there was good reason to be permitting miners with "the leeway" to potentially pollute Queensland's environment.

Those stakeholders would include the Queensland Conservation Council which has rightly called for an independent study to appraise the likelihood of similar mine flooding events occurring in the future, an immediate moratorium on the construction of new coal mines on floodplains, and regulations requiring that all water released from mine sites must meet and match localized environmental water quality conditions - prior to being released to waterways.

Given the failure of environmental governance by both industry and the regulators leading up to the mines being flooded, the Queensland Conservation Council's concerns and proposals seem well grounded.

A month ago former Liberal staffer and now research fellow at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Guy Pearse, gave an excellent dissection of the growth of the coal industry in Queensland. Titled "The Dumb State? Queensland's continuing carbon addiction", Pearse's presentation broke down into bite size chunks the mega numbers bandied around by coal's promoters.  Presented as a materials and pollution flow happening on a minute by minute process, the development of Queensland's coal export industry into a carbon behemoth rivalling Saudi Arabia throws up some very confronting numbers.

Courier Mail columnist Des Houghton, someone not known for his particularly "green' credentials or background, gave Pearse's speech detailed coverage in his column last Saturday and immediately earned the ire of some of the coal industry's stalwarts for deigning to suggest that Queensland's environmental record should also include the impacts of its exports. 

As someone who spent the better part of a decade working for the Queensland Government's EPA promoting eco-efficiency in industry and the household, I  wonder at the relatively small impact of all those initiatives we launched to engage the community in reducing its carbon footprint when compared to the global emissions to be generated from the current rush to exploit the massive coal resources of the Bowen, Surat, and Galilee Basins. 

Defenders of coal keep pointing to Australia's relatively small emissions impact (1.5% of total global GHG) as a reason not to move early or unilaterally in forcing a carbon price or emissions abatement target.  Of course conveniently overlooked in the argument is that the nation's principal carbon impact is increasingly being developed as exported emissions to China and India. 

Maybe our own local emissions are not worth worrying about, but as Guy Pearse reminds us, we ignore the implications of an economy built on their export at our peril.  See his talk at http://www.guypearse.com/ and you can read Des Houghton's piece at http://www.usq.edu.au/acsbd/news

This week I got involved in the national discussion about China's decision to impose export quotas on its rare earths, a decision which has strategic significance for many high tech industries globally and also for the embryonic Australian rare earths sector.

The National Science Media Centre in Adelaide organised a media briefing involving a range of experts and I was invited to provide a sustainability perspective, the grab from which resulted in a little media coverage on mining landfills. 

Actually my take on the issue started with the assumption that the rapid rise in global dependence on technologies using rare earths raises some sustainability issues, particularly the application of the precautionary principle and full cost pricing in ensuring that valuable materials are not wasted on low level disposable products - many of which end up in a landfill because they are not being designed for re-use or recycling. Ipods and mobile phones come to mind.

I also ventured that there were dangers in building a pathway to the future which may not be sustained because of resource exhaustion.

Technological sustainability is put at risk also when geo-political and commercial interests collide as seems to be happening with the Chinese decision to link rare earth exports to inwards investment in higher value adding infrastructure.

Given the sensitivities around rare earths and their myriad applications in most critical sectors from defence to health and communications and cleantech, we should discourage a rush to utilise these materials in applications for which there may be substitute or competing technologies - although there is not much of that on the horizon at the moment.

Indeed that was another point I made: we do not do ourselves or future generations a service by building too narrow a technology path into the future.

Like resilient natural systems the technological options should be diverse and competing.

In public policy terms, there is no doubt also that resource optimisation for rare earths means full recovery and re-use and indeed in future there may be a case to be made for digging up landfills and retrieving these elements along with all the gold and silver and copper in disposed computers and electronic gear - although much of that is now being recovered through second and third world cottage industries.

The issue also begs the question as to whether Australia needs a strategic policy on materials that might simply be too important to export willy nilly. With something like 10% of the known rare earth deposits Australia will be a serious player in time and we should be investing in materials sciences that will give us the knowledge and the skills to base advanced materials manufacturing here in this country.

After all these are high value outputs that do not require sweatships to make them competitive on global markets. You can hear the briefing at http://www.aussmc.org/2010/11/media-alert-rare-earth-minerals-squeeze-are-our-gadgets-at-risk/

Yesterday Michael Cathcart on ABC Radio Nationalrsquo;s Bush Telegraph did a follow up panel interview with a representative of Arafura Resources - a rare earths miner, Professor Brent McInnes, economist and geologist at Curtin University in Western Australia, and me.

You can hear or download that piece at http://www.abc.net.au/rural/telegraph/content/2010/s3067706.htm

This post appeared as an op-ed in The Courier Mail Wednesday 10 November 2010 p25 under the title "Climate retreat causes ripples".

 _____________

Last week's election in the US ended any chance of a cap and trade emissions program for the American economy leaving the Obama Administration to re-think how it will "skin the climate change political cat".

For Australian opponents of emissions trading and carbon taxes, America's retreat from putting a price on carbon is giving new credence to what Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his environment spokesman Greg Hunt call "direct action" - like buying and closing down obsolete brown coal fired power stations in Victoria.

Prime Minister Gillard says that Australia does not need to follow America's lead and she is keeping emissions trading and carbon taxes on the table.

There is good reason for the Gillard Government not to give up so quickly on the market options in fighting climate change.

Gillard simply does not have the constitutional flexibility available to Obama.

Gillard must work within a Federal framework to achieve an outcome that delivers anything close to the emissions targets Australia has set itself.

In Australia the primary governance of the environment rests with the States and not the Commonwealth.

It is exactly the reverse to the US situation.

To secure a major deal on climate before he leaves office, Obama has a back pocket option which he is unlikely to use or even threaten to use until his re-election

That option is to use the power of the US EPA to regulate emissions reductions across the board.

When a President is determined to use its powers, the US EPA is without peer as an environmental regulatory body with sweeping powers to protect human health.

Even before the "carrot" approach of a carbon pricing approach was killed off by the Republicans mid-term win in Congress last week, the Obama Administration was quietly redrawing its principal environmental initiative into an old fashioned regulatory "stick".

It is an approach that can only be stopped by a Republican presidential win in 2012 because Obama has the power to veto any attempt to change the Clean Air Act as some representatives from coal states have been advocating.

That Obama has the power to regulate American greenhouse gas emissions is certain.

Using provisions of the powerful US Clean Air Act last December EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson found that "the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases...in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations".

She also found that "the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare".

Less certain is whether President Obama will ever have to use the EPA to bludgeon an outcome on US greenhouse emissions.

More likely is a re-elected Obama threatening to let the EPA off its leash and using that prospect to drive a politically negotiated outcome involving a mix of regulatory and trading options.

It's the kind of political lever Prime Minister Gillard can only dream about.

Yesterday morning when driving up to Toowoomba and listening to ABC's Tony Eastley on the AM program I was fascinated to hear from a Chinese fellow named Ma Jun.

For years I have been telling anyone who will listen that the current standard of living being enjoyed by people in western countries has been massively subsidised by Chinese workers and their environment.

The massive transference of resources and the cheap prices we have paid for manufactured goods could only be achieved by emerging economies sacrificing their people and their natural systems.

So it was good to hear Tony Eastley in his introduction give voice to that simple fact.

He said:

"There's no question that a large percentage of Australian imports now come from China.

"But the big international companies like Walmart, Nike, GE and their local suppliers who are exporting goods out of China have been copping a steady barrage of abuse lately because of the amount of toxic pollution they create just so that consumers in countries like Australia can have cheap goods".

But the real and surprising story as Eastley explained, was that "much of this bad publicity is being driven by just one man. Now, both multi-national and Chinese companies are beating a path to his door in the Chinese capital, seeking advice on how they get off his list".

By publicising on the web official Chinese Government reports about Chinese companies that are flagrantly violated environmental and social laws, the small Institute for Environmental and Public Affairs founded by Mr Ma Jun has brought to international notice more than 60,000 companies many of which are suppling global corporations and western consumers.

No modern corporate wants the odium of a dirty supply chain and the business impact from Ma Jun's exposure has been dramatic.

Hundreds of Chinese companies that were happy to violate their governmen's laws are finding that their customers are more essential and having been told to clean up by their large Western customers, many are doing just that.

Here is a moot lesson in business sustainability being taught by one Chinese activist who is showing the relative power of supply chain pressures in driving performance in a way not achieved by the country's environmental laws.

The implications for business evident in this story will be among many that feature late next month in Brisbane when I will make my first foray into executive training from the vantage of the business sustainability centre we have set up at USQ over this past year.

Having spent over twenty years working as advocate and strategist for the Australian cleantech and sustainable development sectors, including a decade in government, a logical next step for me now is to utilise a university platform to share the knowledge to promote more innovation.

When still at the EPA in Queensland, for several years I helped Professor Andrew Griffiths set up his very successful four day corporate sustainability course at the UQ Business School.

We demonstrated to sceptics, mainly in the UQ Business School, that there was a market for executive training in sustainability, particularly when it was delivered by people with proven backgrounds in the field.

But at a time when few busy people can afford to take a week off for professional and strategic development, there is a need for shorter more intensive courses or workshops on specific aspects of leadership, management, investment and technology for business sustainability.

That is where the training model of the Australian Centre for Sustainable Business and Development is being directed.

The mission of the ACSBD is to accelerate the adoption of sustainable development by proving the business case for sustainability.

Our first offering in Brisbane on 22 November will do just that by utilising our strengths in strategy, accounting and reporting, project management, and financial analysis.

Leading contributions will be provided by two of our Adjunct Faculty - the UK Royal Mail's Martin Blake and Hatch's global sustainability director Philip Bangerter, both of whom have proven best practice achievements in business sustainability innovation.

There is no doubt that businesses face market and consumer expectations which are increasingly complex or unexpected.

Who would have thought, for example, that it would be global businesses and not local EPAs that would be more effective in driving higher standards of environmental performance in the emerging heartland of Asian manufacturing?

Issues like sustainability, carbon performance, changing investor expectations on corporate reporting and accountability and greening markets are beginning to figure in the business context and yet many in the private sector glaze over at their mention.

Of course in Australia their attention to these issues has not been

 helped by continuing policy confusion and an enduring sense of separateness (perhaps tyranny of distance) from global trends - which is curious given the export disposition of our economy.

Many SMEs particularly think such topics are only for the big guys to worry about - but they ignore (potentially at their peril) the supply chain implications of changing business to business demands - many of which happen rapidly.  Remember ISO 14000 and global auto supply chains.

Another enduring truism to be remembered in this space is that business should never look to government to tell it what the future will look like.

Most politicians are too busy looking at the past working out how to promise more of the same to electorates they do not want to challenge, so that by the time they work out what is happening with broader themes of change, the general impulse of government becomes one of transferring the adjustment costs to other sectors - and normally the one that can pay is business.

So waiting for governments to fix the future normally involves business paying.
A far more profitable strategy is for business to focus more on building its own future and by staying ahead of regulatory and government learning curves.

So if you are in business you can rightly ask yourself is your organisation dealing with factors that are reflected in changing regulatory, market and supply chain expectations.

Are you also looking beyond your own business?

Because as the global financial crisis showed in dimensions completely unexpected, the changes and challenges facing your suppliers and customers has more impact on your business prospects than anything you do personally.

Building resilient competitive capacity is the hallmark of a sustainable business and that requires a ‘systems savvy' that is intrinsic to understanding and using sustainability as a strategy for business.

Those people who register for ACSBD's first venture into executive education will learn how different sector leaders here and overseas are building their competitiveness, exploiting new opportunities, and adapting their business using sustainability strategies.

It is expected that delegates will leave at the end of the day up to speed with some of the practical financially rewarding steps they can take to build sustainable businesses.

In four main sessions we plan to cover:

1. The main trends and likely directions for business globally that arise form a mix of sustainability pressures, emerging economies, changing demographics, climate change, carbon pricing, and greening markets;
2. Current and future directions with regulatory and voluntary accounting and reporting for business sustainability, including the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System, Global Reporting Initiative and Carbon Disclosure Project,
3. How sustainability factors are changing project evaluation, planning, design, pricing, and standards;
4. How to translate carbon performance into a profitable emissions abatement strategy through smart purchasing, energy efficiency savings, and the elimination of redundant technology and practices.

Along with me to provide briefings will be:

Dr Martin Blake, formerly Head of Sustainability at the Royal Mail Group, UK and leader of one of the biggest corporate sustainability projects in the world; Martin was appointed ACSBD's first Adjunct Professor ion April 2010

Professor Julie Cotter, Deputy Director of the ACSBD, Professor of Accounting at USQ, a specialist working in corporate sustainability reporting, sustainability accounting systems and broader governance for sustainability. Julie is also chairing a technical panel advising the Climate Disclosure Standards Board; and

Philip Bangerter, Global Director of Sustainability at Hatch - a leading international engineering and services consultancy. Philip has worked all over the world on major infrastructure and mining projects.

The one day board room briefing will cost $595 which includes briefing notes and catering. It will be held on Monday 22 November starting at 8:15 am and finishing at 5:30 pm. The venue will be The Sky Boardroom, at the Hotel Urban Brisbane, 345 Wickham Terrace, Brisbane.

Registration forms can be downloaded from http://www.usq.edu.au/acsbd/news/seminars

I remember about ten years ago hearing a talk about organisational change and innovation by Harvard change leadership guru Professor John Kotter.

In explaining how a change process had to have a genesis and be grounded in action, Kotter gave an insight provided by Konosuke Matsushita, the Japanese industrialist who founded Panasonic.

Evidently, Matsushita was once asked how long would it take to clean up corruption in Japan's political life.

He reportedly answered it would take a very long time, possibly even centuries.

The incredulous journalist seemed a bit fazed by the seeming eternality in Matsushita's assessment and replied: "Well if it is that difficult and will take that long, why should anybody bother?"

To which the industrialist said: "All change, no matter how hard or long, starts with a first step and it is precisely because it may take that long that we have no time to waste - which is why we should take the first step now".

There is relevance in that message for anyone contemplating the changes that come with a conscious strategy for sustainability in a business or organisation.

But before changes are anticipated or planned, the first step must be to learn so to better understand the context, the issues, and opportunities.

(A version of this article was published in The Courier Mail 22 October 2010 p 55 as "Insulation blunders sap energy").

Last week's report by the Commonwealth Auditor General into the Rudd Government's botched home insulation scheme found incompetence in the public service but left unanswered the bigger question of how best governments might restore public confidence in home sustainability programs.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the Energy Efficient Homes Package was supposed to quickly soak up low skills unemployed by flushing $2.8 billion of stimulus funding through a largely unregulated industry.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spruiked the positive role energy efficiency could play in fighting climate change and in reducing household energy budgets.

The fatal flaws in the plan, however, lay in the capacity of the insulation industry itself and a completely unrealistic timetable for the scheme's implementation. 

How could a small sector of about 200 businesses be transformed and in just two short years achieve the energy efficiency upgrading of 2.7 million Australian homes without some serious risks being taken?

Of course it could not and the upshot was an influx of shysters into the industry, tragedy in the deaths of four young installers, thousands of fraudulent claims, and more than 200 house fires.

As many as a third of the 1.1 million installations have been left with "with some level of deficiency" rectification of which will cost another $740 million.

Understandably, thousands of Australian families have been turned off home energy innovation by the sorry episode, leaving a longer term legacy of higher household electricity costs and greenhouse gas emissions polluting our environment.

This at a time when the International Energy Agency is saying that if the major economies got serious about energy efficiency by 2030 they could cut global carbon emissions by nearly a third and save money doing it. 

Insulating buildings ranks among the IEA's key recommendations for achieving energy efficiency.

Cooling the Queensland home already accounts for up to 27% of the average household electricity bill and yet almost 600,000 homes, many of them occupied by people least able to pay higher electricity prices, are not insulated against the tropical heat.

For Queenslanders shuddering at the recent double digit annual increases in power bills, the prospect of even more energy intensive lifestyles means even higher bills.

Energex and Ergon are spending more than $12 billion over the next five years just keeping the electricity infrastructure up to speed with the pace of increasing consumption, particularly spiralling peak consumption which is ramped up by home air conditioning.

A smarter alternative is to constrain household energy costs by making our houses perform more efficiently.

Ceiling insulation might not remove the need for air conditioning on the hottest days, but it makes it more efficient and affordable.

As we grapple with reducing our personal carbon footprints, home insulation will save Queensland households anywhere between 0.6 and 1.6 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.

Had the Rudd Government's solar hot water and insulation program been rolled out properly over five years, the upgrading of Australian houses may well have achieved cuts of up to 50 million tonnes of greenhouse gas by 2020.

Back in the early 1970s a young American physicist, Amory Lovins, showed how it would be smarter to build a "soft energy pathway" to the future grounded on the avoided costs achieved through energy efficiency, rather than on the costly alternative of ever escalating consumption.

Climate change and the inevitable pricing of carbon make Lovins' message even more compelling.   

Rather than lose sight of what the insulation program was meant to achieve, the challenge now is to revive the national appetite for household energy innovation - but this time framed on a realistic and better regulated approach.

There are many things about the current state of Australian politics and the Federal election campaign which are just downright frustrating and annoying.

Our national political debate has become a pageant of political puppetry and mime punctuated mainly by competing vituperation and spending announcements aimed at targeted interests, mostly in marginal seats.

The political messaging of the major parties is more about denigrating opponents than of substantiating policies or articulating values and vision.

Particularly galling is the relegation of vital nation or future-building issues from the political discussion.

Some would say there is a leadership vacuum with politicians seeking power as an end in itself rather than as a means to achieving a better future for the country.

Cast against the big issues modern Australia should be addressing, the campaign so far has confirmed veteran columnist Laurie Oakes' depiction of the election as a contest between "political pygmies".

It is almost as if we Australians, having found the future too confronting and difficult, are content to rediscover the complacency and comforting hypocrisies of Donald Horne's "The Lucky Country" of half a century ago.

Particularly missing from modern elections is any real dimension of citizenship.

Beyond paying tax no serious political party ever asks anything of us as Australians; rather both sides set about out-promising each other about what they will offer back from the great emporium of possibilities funded by those taxes.

And the easy option will always be the one taken.

With infrastructure bottlenecks choking our cities, and with regional Australian screaming out for skilled labour, a country spanning a continent with a population of just 22 million people has to have a population debate rather than focus on a decent public transport policy.

Even the word "sustainable" has been hijacked from its rightful place in the progressive change agenda and restyled as conservative code for keeping out immigrants.

It seems the pollsters are finding that climate change is too hard for people to understand so both major political parties have agreed to put off doing anything substantial.

Instead we will just have some ‘direct action', a survey group to test "consensus" and more token investments in green projects when it's economic innovation and the price of carbon that really matters in fixing climate change.

Content to follow and avoid the risks of leadership, our political "leaders" tell us though what we want to hear.

People lament the performance of our politicians or they blame the media for trivialising the big issues of our time into meaningless sound bites.

But the truth is we the people are the most responsible for determining the quality of our national political discussion.

Over twenty years ago, I sat in the advisers' box in Parliament House Canberra and looked around the chamber at our representatives.

What struck me about the members was how closely they resembled the constituencies they represented; every shade of opinion, prejudice and perspective - as well as all the degrees of talent - was to be seen and heard among the then 148 members of the House of Representatives.

We elect politicians to represent us not lead us - as much as they pretend to do the latter.

And so the political malaise we suffer at the moment must shoot directly home to us because we have let it happen.

The dumbing down of the political process has been exacerbated by the rise of the full time working family and the concurrent decline of community capital and socially aware citizenship.

Too many people do not have time to help or care anymore, leaving the individual and sectional interest to triumph over the public good.

Further compounding the decline of citizenship over recent decades has been an erosion of educational standards and general knowledge.

People unversed in basic geography, history, and science understandably will struggle and tend to indifference when the brave politician speaks about something in more detail than a ten second sound bite.

We hear so much about politicians having to communicate better, but do not we the electorate also have an obligation to take more interest in understanding, considering and discussing the issues.

Regrettably, for many Australians the notion of citizenship as a privilege with rights as well as obligations and responsibilities has been truncated to mean just the first part.

And so paradoxically we are a nation which will  recognise proudly and sombrely the sacrifices of our Diggers from Fromelles to Afghanistan, but at the same time be annoyed that we have to take time out of a Saturday to vote.

If we Australians are going to be up to the job of reclaiming our democracy from the professional politicians, the spin doctors, and the circus that doubles for national affairs, we will require a broader more involved and informed view of our country and its context.

Benjamin Franklin reminded us over two hundred years ago, the seeds of a vibrant democracy start with the printing press and a literate society.

He could have added that values and vision help, particularly for electors.

The following article appeared on 4 August 2010 in the Courier Mail Viewpoint section in a series entitied "Future Fix" about what needs to be done to shape Queensland's future.  It was called "Green is only way for state to go".  In the weeks ahead I will flesh out some of the themes canvassed below.

Next week two thousand people living somewhere else in Australia or the world will make Queensland their home.

They will be the first of another 3 million people who will join us over the next 20 years .

Most of them will want to settle in the south east corner of Queensland which is already caught in a "growth emergency".

There a massive $134 billion public investment is upgrading just about everything - transport, health, education and training, energy, water and community facilities.

In the coal and gas districts of regional Queensland, a similar picture is emerging of a rush to riches with associated growth and infrastructure pains and shortfalls.

At such a dynamic time with so much in the project pipeline we can usefully ask: "What needs to be done for Queensland to develop sustainably?"

The idea of a "sustainable Queensland" means making sure that the things that really matter continue indefinitely.

For most Queenslanders a sustainability shopping list would include having good jobs, a clean environment, nice quality of life, and reasons to be hopeful for their children's future.

Pitched as a policy agenda that same list could include improving the productivity of our farming communities, preventing urban sprawl, protecting our waterways and the Great Barrier Reef, encouraging clean green industry and reducing spiralling amounts of consumer waste, as well as respecting the rights of indigenous communities to their sustainable development.

On everyone's list there should be a compelling call to take climate change seriously and reduce the carbon intensity of our economy and lifestyle.

There is good reason to do so. Of the many places on Earth to be affected negatively by climate change, Queensland presents among the highest on the risk profile for drought, summer heat stress, severe storms, and coastal inundation impacts.

Climate change also threatens the Great Barrier Reef and much of our native flora and fauna.

It follows that Queensland cannot be sustainable environmentally while our economy increasingly concentrates on the extraction and production of fossil fuels that cause global warming and climate change.

Of special relevance to Queensland at the recent Copenhagen Climate Summit was the commitment given by two of our big energy markets, China and India, to significantly reduce the carbon intensity of their economies by 2020.

With more than $120 billion in oil and gas projects slated for development over the foreseeable future, over the coming decade Queensland will find itself in the schizoid position of markedly boosting its greenhouse impact while working to diversify away from fossil fuels.

That is the toughest sustainability challenge for Queensland, because our greatest source of economic strength in the short to intermediate term is the root of our longer term vulnerability - economic, social and environmental.

Addressing this dilemma though could feature in achieving a cornerstone of a sustainable Queensland - a diversified and decentralised economy.

A carbon decoupling strategy for our economy emphasising renewable energy could deliver real development opportunities for regional Queensland with up to 20,000 new clean energy jobs.

To do that we will need to source at least 20% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 and the strength of Queensland's energy utilities as well as existing subsidies should be directed to making it happen.

Queensland is the state with sunshine everywhere, hot rocks for geothermal out west, biomass along the coast and lots of wind in places from the Bunyas all the way to Mt Isa.

The building of a transmission line from Mt Isa to Townsville could be the start of a rush of up to $9 billion in cleantech investment in regional Queensland.

The second cornerstone of Queensland's sustainable development must be to take climate change seriously and to get real about reducing our carbon footprint - one of the highest per capita in the world.

By losing their right to vegetation clearing, Queensland's farmers are the only group to have done anything significant about carbon emissions.

The rest of us have squandered those savings in suburban McMansions, air-conditioned electricity guzzlers which double as the modern Queensland home.

Thankfully the Queensland Government has taken important steps toward making housing growth pay its way through efficiency and smaller footprints by upgrading building and development codes.

But with another three quarters of a million homes to be built over the coming decades, it is imperative more is done to drive consumer efficiency by charging the true cost of utilities.

To avoid the ‘socialisation' of wasteful inefficiency, a sustainable utilities system should be paid for by customers not taxpayers.

Already Queensland taxpayers have had to cough up for the $7 billion water grid just installed in south east Queensland and face further exposure in the $15 billion our energy utilities will have to spend over the next decade upgrading the network just so we have the power we want anytime of the day anytime of the year.

A smarter more sustainable alternative to spiralling cost blow-outs can be achieved through energy conservation and demand management initiatives.

Over the next ten years these could save us a new power station, and up to $4 billion in network expenditure - as well as 24 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and lots of water.

Fixing our carbon footprint also means tackling the disgrace that is the state of waste minimisation in Queensland with less than a quarter of our waste being recycled.

Waste volumes have spiralled by 40 per cent over the past five years for the simple reason Queensland has not joined other eastern States and imposed a waste levy to encourage waste minimisation and recycling.

The polluter pays principle has been around for nearly 50 years and it is time we Queenslanders applied it to ourselves in our management of waste.

That these anomalies of modern environmental management exist in Queensland reflects disappointingly a gap between what Queenslanders understand about sustainable development and what actually has to happen for our State to be assured of a sustainable future.

In part that has been the result of governments of all political persuasions traversing over these issues by promising certainty, little change and no pain and the result has been predictably under-performance and public scepticism on the issues framing Queensland's sustainability.

Governance for sustainable development requires more than government; it needs most of all a well informed, engaged and constructive people accepting of the obligations of citizenship and willing to innovate to solve the defining issues of our future.

The posts below are best read in sequence starting with "Is Asia really up to the climate change challenge?" which is about 6 posts below.

Current thinking across the region sees a carbon price discouraging Asian competitiveness, but given the triumph of national approaches at Copenhagen, the simplest way to avoid the possibility of future entanglement in trade and environment embargoes is for industrialising Asian economies to factor in at production the price of carbon. With OECD countries going the same way, this will equalise a potentially divergently developing global marketplace and forestall interventions from America and Europe. Huw Slater (2010) from the Crawford School at ANU suggests that some in the Chinese Government are looking at carbon pricing being introduced progressively in China, perhaps "as low as 20 Yuan per tonne" to begin the market process of phasing out coal and accelerating renewable energy and to ensure the success of the next Five Year Plan.

The potentially transformative role of that plan is already understood by expert agencies like the IEA which has calculated that "if all the measures under consideration in China's 12th five-year plan are enacted, the country would contribute more than a quarter of the emissions reductions needed by 2020 to put the world on course to keep greenhouse gases below 450ppm" (Financial Times, 10 November 2009).

Conclusion

Looking back to Copenhagen what is really significant about its outcomes was that so much was contributed by key Asian countries when there are so few domestic political drivers for their governments to offer anything. The challenge for the region in fact is to move beyond the high level infrastructure strategies and business investment drivers and install the governance systems on the ground to educate, regulate and hold accountable municipalities, industries and businesses. For this to happen there needs to be a more open discussion of what's at stake so that communities across the region can be empowered and involved in resolving the many outstanding issues of unsustainable development.

Given the magnitude of cultural change involved in that proposition it seems likely that an emerging ‘cleantech revolution' will co-exist with continuing environmental-economic trade-offs in the Asia-Pacific over the coming decade. As well as mitigating the causes of climate change, increasing energy and resource security, and progressively building the manufactured technology, human capital and governance systems for sustainable development will stand as the focus of this agenda for the better part of the next generation. New businesses and markets will appear in decarbonising the economy, better educated consumers will demand greener products, and the distorting impacts of perverse subsidies rewarding inefficiency will be progressively lessened. That is the great transition of the future. It remains the unrealised proposition of the original report of the 1987 UN Commission on Environment and Development, "Our Common Future".

ENDNOTES

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Asia's current exposure to the contingent risk of eventual trade limitations on carbon results from UNFCC rules that accrue embedded carbon emissions of an internationally traded good or service to the producing country. The parties to the UNFCC have assiduously avoided linking trade and climate change because of the complexities, not least of which include the difficulties of measuring and verifying embedded carbon and managing a consumption-based international emissions trading system. By parking the fairness concept, parties to UNFCC have decided there are simpler more expedient paths to take.

But the difficulty of implementing a consumption- based emissions abatement system does not deny that consumers in developed countries have effectively ‘leaked' or outsourced their carbon footprint to developing countries. Net exports were the source of 24% of China's GHG emissions in 2004; carbon pollution which amounted to as much as Japan emitted and twice that of the UK and which was generated for the benefit of consumers in Australia, America and Europe (Wang and Watson, 2009 p 88).

The Asian economic miracle has been built on international trade and an export to GDP ratio more than twice that of western countries. One third of China's GDP and one fifth of India's derives from exports. The trade exposure of the ‘tiger economies' of the ASEAN and of dynamic South Korea is even more acute at between 50% and 100% of GDP (Llewellyn and Santovetti p14). For commodities exporters like Australia which provide the raw feedstock for much of the region's energy and manufacturing, their economies enjoy the same contingent risk potentially arising from a linkage of climate change strategy with trade rules constraining the trade of carbon intense products.

If trade were to be linked with carbon in any practical sense, there would need to be much more sophisticated and transparent accounting and governance frameworks, necessitating higher levels of trust and disclosure between countries - in short a governance regime internationally that does not yet exist and is unlikely to happen with serious rapid environmental feedback from the climate system.

While China remains the critical constituent in the governance of climate issues, across the Asia Pacific there are encouraging "green shoots" posting the beginnings of a transition away from fossil fuel dependence and carbon intensive economy. If the Indian Government's commitments are implemented, for example, that country's clean energy pathway will be characterised by an investment of 2% of GDP in "green growth" over the next five years, new building standards and mandatory fuel efficiency standards, and significant investment in wind and nuclear energy. Already the fourth wind energy nation, India is seriously investing in solar and wants 2000 MW installed annually by 2017. India is also looking to introduce market focussed solutions and plans to create a domestic market for environmental credits later this year (Pew Centre, 2008).

South Korea is not waiting for international agreements on climate change to move vigorously on energy efficiency and energy diversification with an annual 2% of GDP investment in cleantech. This level of investment makes possible its 2009 commitment to achieve a mandatory 4% emissions cut on 2005 levels which by 2020 adds up to reducing its total greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. A mandated emissions trading scheme covering the majority of South Korea's carbon pollution is likely to start from 2012 with 600 of the nation's biggest emitters (ecobusiness.com 4 May 2010).

The ASEAN nations have a range of programs already in place contributing to greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation - all of them aligned with the robust economic goals set by each member state. Such plans extend from the Philippines building on a strong renewables base in which geothermal and hydro already account for more than a third of the country's power, to the Thais securing 20% of their energy from renewables by 2025. Energy starved but geothermal and biomass rich Indonesia has a 2025 goal of 17% of its national primary energy mix coming from non-fossil fuels along with an overall emissions reduction target of 26% by 2020.

Neighbouring oil and gas dependent Malaysia seems least ambitious in the energy diversification field with plans to double hydropower to 17% of generation by 2020 while taking tentative steps into solar. It boasts a range of tax incentives for energy efficiency and conservation technologies (see Llewellyn and Santovetti, 2010 and UNFCC web site for National Reports).

Not all things renewable deliver net environmental benefits. Much controversy has attended the promotion of biofuels derived from palm oil plantations established in Indonesia and Malaysia at the cost of vast tracts of destroyed rainforest and loss of biodiversity. Negative consumer reaction in western countries to the environmental implications of palm oil products raises the possibility of discriminatory market intervention through eco-labelling or even regulatory impost. As an issue it is litmus to a much bigger question of whether environmental goals and performance should be embedded in World Trade Organisation protocols.

Because environmental externalities have not been factored into the costs of production, most economic development has progressively intensified its consumption of energy by resorting to the cheapest fuels available, inevitably coal and abundant oil. A price on carbon and the end of cheap oil changes that scenario dramatically and just as developed economies transitioned into the energy efficiency curve in the 1980s and 1990s, fast industrialising countries like Japan, Korea and India are seeing the best dividends to be had initially by jumping on the eco-efficiency bandwagon.

At Copenhagen the IEA's Tanaka promoted the carbon productivity bonus to be achieved by energy efficient economies, telling delegates that "the bulk of the emissions reduction could be delivered by energy efficiency, accounting for over half of total abatement by 2030 in the IEA 450 Scenario". The energy agency estimated that an additional US$8.3 trillion of investment in energy efficiency would deliver US$8.6 trillion in savings up to 2030 (IEA 2009). Tanaka commended the energy efficiency initiatives of China, India, Brazil and South Africa. He could also have mentioned his own country, resource scarce Japan, which has long understood the advantages of clean manufacturing and energy efficiency.

When Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama pledged in 2009 to a 25 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020, he delivered on climate policy but also resounded on a core Japanese aim of achieving resource security in part through efficiency. Japan's climate governance is indelibly linked to its national energy strategy which involves improving energy efficiency by 30%, significantly reducing dependence on imported oil and increasing nuclear in the national energy mix (Hughes 2009). And at back of mind for the Japanese is the enormous commercial and trade opportunity beckoning in China as that country launches on its own low carbon strategy and environmental clean-up.

The challenge for China will be to achieve its efficiency targets. Over the past decade energy efficiency has grown significantly but off a very low base. The future holds higher benchmarks, and there is no certainty China will rise to task - if for no other reason than the scale of its growth in energy consumption keeps expanding. It is not for a want of investment in innovation that has caused China to struggle to meet its 2010 target of a 20 per cent reduction in energy intensity. The rate of growth and change has simply over-run efficiency dividends and, if the IEA is to be believed, until 2007 the carbon intensity of China's energy system was still increasing (Jotzo, 2010). This was possibly because China's energy efficiency drive was driven politically without much of a detailed implementation plan in place, including the governance and measurement and reporting mechanisms to manage such a major transformation.

While anecdotal reports indicate China is building a new coal fired power station every week or so, its massive green infrastructure and technology plans, including unparalleled boosts to renewable energy, point to its quest for resource security as essentially framing its climate change action. Now importing more than half of its oil requirements, China like Japan is far from energy secure. And the insecurity extends to other critical commodities including freshwater (Wong, 2010 p 16). But few in the region are arguing for the environment to be put ahead of economic development. The smart strategy will be to align problem solving on the two fronts as China is now attempting.

China's emissions abatement strategy is based on 2005 benchmarks and besides energy efficiency, emphasises increased utilisation of renewables and nuclear to 15% of the total energy mix and expanded forest coverage by 50 million hectares - an area 5 times the size of Tasmania.
Some in the West see a geopolitical implication in China's rush to invest in renewable energy, a prospect they hope which will engage investment drivers for climate change action in their own countries. Just a few weeks before the Copenhagen Summit, American environmentalist Robert F Kennedy Jr wrote provocatively of "The New Arms Race", raising the spectre of a dominant China working to free itself of reliance on foreign resources, by taking the opportunity of energy security and commercialisation of enabling innovation much more seriously than the US.

Kennedy contrasted the relatively creative and strategic GFC stimulus spending disbursed by China with the short term ‘quick hit' approach of many OECD economies: "China's economic stimulus package targeted 38% of spending on greentech, as compared to a miserly 12% of the U.S. stimulus program. By 2013, greentech will account for 15 percent of the Chinese GDP.... by 2020, China's solar generation is projected to increase 20,000%" (Kennedy, 2009).

Set against the massive expansion of its energy sector, the Chinese renewable energy target of 15 per cent by 2020 by any comparable standard is both ambitious and transformative in its impact. Major solar players including BP Solar, GE and Evergreen have set up in China to take advantage of a market in rapid transformation. Over the past 12 months investment in renewable energy has taken off across the globe, but it has rocketed in the Asia-Pacific by 172% compared to 63% in Europe and 19% in the US (de Boer 2010).

Quite pragmatically China is investing massively in both fossil fuels and renewables and as some observers are noting this dual strategy is beginning to be reflected also in the corporate culture of the country: "One sign is a shift in criteria by which local officials are evaluated: promotion now depends not just on meeting production or investment goals, but energy and environmental goals as well" (Randolph, 2010). The corollary is a host of municipal initiatives in public transport, electric vehicles and hybrids, and new construction codes boosting energy efficiency.

Presenting the International Energy Agency's Outlook in November 2008, IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka made very clear the central role Asian economic development would play in energy intensification and expansion over the coming two or three decades. Tanaka told an Australian conference that on a ‘business as usual' projection "non-OECD countries will account for 87% of global energy demand growth between 2006 and 2030. He added that China's energy demand would outpace all others. (Tanaka, 2008).
The Chinese Government understand the limitations of its current emphasis on unsustainable growth. In 2006 the Worldwatch Institute reported that "environmental degradation" was costing China nearly 9% of its annual gross domestic product" (Turner and Zhi, 2006 p153). In other words, as much as China grows economically, it is losing an equivalent value and capacity through diminished natural capital. There is evidence already of environmental degradation depleting resources, particularly croplands and freshwater, with flow on impacts to local economic resilience and in some cases giving rise to social unrest and cultural tension.
The Japanese Nomura Bank summarised China's dilemma as its need for "sustaining fast investment growth" by demanding large consumption of Chinese product domestically or in exports. But the same report also concluded that China is uniquely big enough to create its own endogenous markets and, if it chooses, through policy innovation stimulate low-carbon investment so that it makes "a major contribution to maintaining rapid GDP growth" and enables the achievement of "ambitious" emissions abatement targets (Llewellyn and Santovetti, 2010).

For most western advanced economies, the politics of climate change and rising public interest in the issue had pre-ordained Copenhagen to be the venue for negotiating a comprehensive legally binding treaty to supersede Kyoto. For the developing countries of Asia, South America and Africa, however, it was more about avoiding the economic costs of post-industrial carbon abatement targets before having first industrialised themselves. Even though there is but one Earth to warm and one atmosphere to pollute, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao spoke for most developing nations in his assertion that:

Developing countries only started industrialisation a few decades ago and many of their people still live in abject poverty today. It is totally unjustifiable to ask them to undertake emissions reduction targets beyond their due obligations and capabilities in disregard of historical responsibilities, per capita emissions and different levels of development (Jiabao 2009).

There is an inherent plausibility underlining this argument because in the 150 years to 2000, the United States and the European Union accounted for 60% of fossil fuel emissions, while China contributed 7% and India 2% (Pew Centre, 2010). Chinese per capita emissions are still just one sixth of their American or Australian counterparts.

Culminating a process begun a decade earlier by the United States in its repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol, and in the absence of a developed world consensus on how best to proceed multilaterally, at Copenhagen an emergent China essentially dismissed the multilateral process and the notion of a negotiated and harmonized global strategy. Instead China reiterated its historical insistence on non-interference in sovereign matters. In the Chinese view, which is shared by many in the developing world, an orchestrated international response to the global warming challenge could only be delivered fairly by upholding the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" according to each country's stage of development. Premier Wen Jiabao chided his colleague leaders, especially those from the developed West, to "pay attention to the practicality" of achieving the targets (Jiabao, 2009).

There was a commitment from the developed nations to bolster the last three years of the Kyoto Protocol with US$30 billion in assistance to poorer countries for emissions abatement and climate adaptation programs - but beyond that the lingering impacts of the global financial crisis ensured there was no rush to launch multilateral climate banks or programs.

While much was made by Western country media of frustrated expectations, Copenhagen did see progress made toward a political consensus about the need for concerted action and in building a broader international coalition that can deliver measures that make a difference on climate change. This group now includes the major emerging economies like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and South Korea. It means that the emissions included in the global abatement process increased from about 25% under Kyoto to nearly 80% under the Copenhagen Accord.

China tabled its intention by 2020 to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of its economy by 40-45 per cent over 2005 levels. This was an approach India echoed in a commitment to reduce in the same time its carbon intensity by 20-25 per cent. This is no small deal for the two biggest players in the emerging world and the two largest sources of new future emissions.

Particularly beneficial to the Asia Pacific region also was the extension at Copenhagen of an action plan for reducing emissions from deforestation and land degradation (REDD) to include forest conservation and carbon sequestration functions (Climatico, 2010). With impacts from land use change and forestry (LUCF) in many Asia Pacific countries accounting for more than half of their greenhouse gas emissions LUCF strategies are among the most cost effective greenhouse abatement mechanisms and will attract attention from developed countries through offset investments.

A number of elementary factors mitigate against the Asia Pacific providing transformative leadership on global environmental issues. Public opinion is not a strong driver of action on climate change. A worldwide Gallup survey in 2007 found that in Asia disinterest in climate change was strongest with two in three adults, irrespective of educational background, thinking it was not an issue of serious concern (Pugliese and Ray, 2009). And beyond the almost universal ignorance of the climate change issue, there is also a widespread scepticism throughout the region about the on ground effectiveness of multilateral strategies. Poor national and local follow-up on the UN poverty and environmental agenda particularly has seen such initiatives discredited among the regional populace of the Asia Pacific (Nomura, Harashima and Kamal, 2004).

Further diminishing the prospects of rapid resolution of the environmental versus economic conflict in the Asia Pacific is a lack of governance and institutional capacity across region at the provincial and municipal levels of government. A survey of Asian environmental professionals from 15 countries pointed to "the gap between international discourse and local needs", "considerable differences between actors and sub-regions", institutional incapacity at the vital level of local government and NGOs, and perhaps most importantly "the ‘lack of a mutual trust relationship' and ‘undemocratic government' as being "recognised by Asian actors as major obstacles to promoting partnership" and sustainable outcomes (Nomura et al 2004).

Many of these factors have not changed. The Asian preference for engineering infrastructure and technology competitiveness strategies should not be confused with progressive governance on sustainability issues. Any number of vital indicators on human health, air and water quality, biodiversity protection, resource depletion and civil stability point to the environment and population as potentially debilitating of the regional vision of economic growth. And a critical missing ingredient is broad community understanding of the systems relationships and consequences of rapid unsustainable economic development and poor environmental impacts. There is a need for what the IEA in its 2009 report termed "proper policy frameworks" for the benefits of innovation to be realized.

These structural weaknesses in environmental governance draw very much from the "limited emergence of informational governance arrangements in environmental protection" in Asia Pacific countries (Mol 2009 p 116). While state of the environment monitoring and reporting is slowly becoming a government competency across Asia, on most measures of environmental governance there is still great scope for improvement. This is particularly the case in systems verification, performance accreditation, labelling, corporate disclosure of compliance standards and public communication of environmental information by business and government. Without environmental information being freely available and understood it will be difficult to build the public consciousness and capacity that will both inform and deliver strategies for sustainable development. The upshot is that environmental governance in the Asia Pacific remains very much a ‘top down' state instrument and this was closely reflected last December in the contributions of leading regional players at the Copenhagen Climate summit.

The future of Earth's environment is being determined right now in the urban industrial revolution that is transforming rapidly much of rural Asia into the heartland of the 21st century global economy. "If you are the sort to worry at night about man-induced climate change", The Economist recently opined, "then book a stay at any of the new high-rise hotels going up on the edge of China's big cities - start looking for them around the third ring road". Reflecting on how the design and construction of Asia's cities will determine just how much global warming greenhouse gases end up in Earth's atmosphere, The Economist pertinently asked whether Asia could "change its habits before it is too late for all of us" (3 July 2010 p 29).

If humanity is to rise to what former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, rightly termed "the greatest moral challenge of our generation", the biggest most significant moves will be taken in the Asia Pacific region where energy consumption over the past decade has jumped by 70%, largely drawn from fossil fuels, and where according to the Asian Development Bank close to a million people a week move from the countryside to cities. What hope is there for significant emissions abatement in a region which each day of the year transforms steel, timber, concrete and asphalt into 20,000 new dwellings and 250 kilometres of new roads? (The Economist, 3 July 2010).

The message is clear. Effective climate policy in the Asia Pacific cannot be detached from managing runaway urbanisation, dematerializing and de-carbonizing double digit economic growth, capping unsustainable levels of population growth, remediating inestimable levels of environmental degradation, and reforming a cultural indifference to governance and market innovation that might diminish prospects for short term economic advantage. Otherwise we all continue on a warming trend which scientists say presents us with "serious, and perhaps even existential, risks" (Steffen, 2010).

Two months ago the US Energy Information Administration made the sobering prediction that without a significant modification of existing national climate strategies, global emissions could grow by 40% by 2035. Most of the increase is slated for the Asia Pacific region and it will happen simply because "increases in output per capita and relatively moderate population growth [will] overwhelm projected improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity" (Kirkland, 2010).

The implications for the future are enormous. Climate change and the resource impacts it will deliver adds a geo-physical dimension to concerns about future regional and global security - something hinted at by President Barack Obama to a Nobel Peace Prize reception when he said climate change "will fuel more conflict for decades" and that our "common security hangs in the balance" (Obama, 2009) . If there is a security challenge facing the Asia-Pacific, it is the insecurity that comes from the climate change impacts potentially of significantly diminished food and water and a need for massive amounts of additional energy that is neither fossil fueled nor cheap.

Business as usual for the region means almost certainly more frequently severe droughts and floods, crop failures, photochemical smog fouling the air, rainforest destruction for palm oil biofuels, and a creeping poverty in the services provided by a properly functioning natural environment. In re-conceptualising notions of future regional security, the pivotal relevance of human caused climate change must be front and centre. And yet, there seems only embryonic interest in the Asia Pacific to develop the political, governance, and market frameworks necessary to achieve the significant socio-economic innovation needed for major emissions abatement.