Environmentalists have failed to transform the underlying social values that drive environmental destruction. Fifteen companies produce 30% of Australia’s greenhouse gases. Mountains provide 60% of our fresh water, but not for much longer.

Who is really destroying the environment?

Are environmentalists as culpable as governments for failing to protect the environment?

A recent essay by Georgina Woods provides a serious critique of environmentalists’ current goals and ways of working. Has the profusion of professional, relatively well-funded, relatively well-staffed environmental organisations, mostly based in capital cities, undermined vigorous local activism, led to a restricted range of bureaucratic goals that are largely based around regulation and failed to engage the public with the task of achieving the changes required? Has there been inadequate attention on building social solidarity and changing the societal values that drive environmental degradation? Basically, Woods asks, have we set ourselves up to fail? The examples Woods cites are predominantly Australian but her concerns are global.

I have extracted some quotations below to give you a flavour of the arguments Woods advances, but I strongly encourage you to read the whole essay.

“In Australian public life ‘the environment’ tends to be regarded as either wholly decorative (look at this adorable animal!) or a radical threat to our way of life (protecting the environment will wreck our economy!).

“Australian environmentalism is not offering a shared account of its role in society and the nature of the change it seeks. At times, the work appears to be about the preservation of islands of great beauty or diversity, discrete locations separate from society, places to visit. Otherwise, perhaps ‘sustainability’, tweaking the rules of exploitation such that it can carry on indefinitely. Missing from both of these is a necessary conceptual leap to radically reorient our understanding of the world we inhabit.

“In most cases, to make change, environmentalism has to convince someone else who does have power. The range of tactics available to environmental campaigners reflects these limits.

“The outcomes sought by environmental campaigns have tended to be bureaucratic and regulatory. In the absence of a deeper focus on values, that turns out to have been a grave mistake. We have sought to develop relationships with people who wield power and win them over, or to conduct outreach and communications campaigns that ‘make the environment an election issue’ but have failed to transform the underlying social values that drive environmental degradation. We have opted, in short, to create ‘green tape’ – gazetting rules and regulations but leaving Australia’s misunderstood and broken relationship with itself unhealed. The technique of ‘campaigning’ is narrowing, directing the focus of attention and political action to a highly specific goal: ban mining on the Reef, make this forest into a National Park, prohibit land clearing.

“Environmental advocates squander what little power we have when we recoil from confronting the illusions and lies at the heart of Australian society.

“Campaigns against the causes of climate change in particular have been wandering in circles because we have shied away from challenging the underlying drivers of environmental exploitation. Climate change cannot be addressed in one election cycle, nor can it be stopped with rules or machines. It is not an environmental ‘issue’. It is a manifestation of a fundamental error that characterises our lives: we are alienated from the ground we walk on and contemptuous of the teeming natural world we inhabit. To be effective, climate change advocacy must bring to the surface the contradictions and fragilities that modernity disguises beneath its shiny surface, its technological and bureaucratic confidence. In Australia, this also means confronting the ongoing process of colonisation, since the two are historically and conceptually linked.

“In any case, a system that values workers, children, rivers, marsupials and coral reefs only as far as they are productive economic units is not a system that should command our loyalty. To the extent that environmental advocates actively participate in upholding the illusions of industrial modernity with enthusiasm for renewable energy giantism, private electric cars and accelerated development, they become, in Milan Kundera’s words, ‘the brilliant allies of their gravediggers’.”’

The law is a powerful tool for environmental protection, probably the best one we’ve got. But the law depends on the lawmakers and most of our current Australian parliamentarians don’t genuinely care about the environment. Woods reminds us that we need to elect MPs who are already committed to environmental protection and sustainability. That will not occur until people value and vote for the environment and a stable, healthy climate. The environmental movement’s current strategies and methods of operation, Woods suggests, are failing to make this happen.

Who emits the most GHGs in Australia?

Fifteen Australian companies are responsible for producing 132 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 equivalent emissions per year. That’s just under 30% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Who are these companies? Which are their dirty facilities and where are they located?

Let’s start with the companies (table below). Five produce more than 10Mt of emissions per year. AGL is way out in front despite the closure of their Liddell power station in the Hunter Valley two years ago. AGL alone produces about 7% of all Australia’s emissions but, to be fair, they do produce by far the most electricity in Australia. Collectively, the top five companies produce 20% of all GHGs. Five more companies each generate 5-10Mt of emissions per year, totalling about 33Mt.

Next, which are the high emitting facilities? The graph below displays the individual emissions of 20 electricity generating facilities (bottom axis) and their cumulative emissions (dotted line and top axis). While all emissions are significant, it’s clear that the cumulative emissions of the top three facilities are about the same as those of the bottom 14. No surprise to see that the remaining brown coal power stations are all very dirty.

Sure, there are plenty of good reasons for all of us to do whatever we can to reduce our own emissions, but the major problem that needs sorting is how we produce our electricity, not how we use it. The scatter plot below (from the Bloomberg Green e-newsletter on 15 March) plots the wealth of a range of countries (in GDP per person) against the amount of CO2 they produce in generating their electricity (grams of CO2 per Kilowatt hour). Australia’s power system produces at least 10 times as much CO2 per unit of electricity as the cleanest systems and compared with similarly wealthy countries (around US$60,000 per person) generates the most emissions.

Olympic Cold Medal for anyone who knows what this machine is called, what it does, why it’s needed and what it’s got to do with climate change.

World’s water towers draining away

Flushing the toilet is one of the greatest conveniences in my life. I frequently reflect on how lucky I am to live in a country with an efficient system for removing household sewage (although its subsequent management could be improved in some Australian municipalities). Sadly, however, more than 40% of the world’s population lack access to safely managed sanitation.

According to a recent UNESCO report, over a quarter of the world’s population also lives without access to safe drinking water. Twenty-five countries, home to a quarter of the world’s population, face “extremely high” water stress every year, and half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part to the year.

READ MORE/SEE MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/environment-humans-contempt-for-the-natural-world-drives-environmental-destruction/

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