Likening climate change to “a comet speeding to Earth” an international sustainability expert has used a lecture in the West Australian capital, Perth, to praise radical renewable energy efforts worldwide, and encourage Australia to join that groundswell.
Professor Peter Droege, director of the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, is a policy, design, planning and infrastructure leader who was in Perth along with a number of other experts for a national forum examining research from Curtin University’s Sustainability Policy institute, partnered with the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living.
At the conference the Professor described climate change with stark simplicity.
“We succeeded in what was probably the greatest achievement of the past 100 years in melting the Arctic; allowing the cruise ships in the North West Passage through, to admire the melting Arctic,” he said.
“We have begun to think of two, or 1.5 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial era as acceptable.
“But at the current 0.8 degrees of warming the Arctic is melting.
“Assumptions about how much temperature increase the Earth’s system can accept were far exaggerated.
“This is not something we can tolerate as a positive outlook. In the Arctic we have huge stores of methane.
“But they have not melted yet; we do have the chance of keeping most of it in a frozen state.
“That is a massive existential challenge akin to a comet heading to the earth.”
He said some modelling showed a worst-case scenario, a small but real risk, of the Earth losing the capacity to regulate its own temperature through biological processes, resulting in temperatures soaring to even 250 degrees Celsius and an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide, a planet unable to support human life.
The world had now breached the threshold of 410 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The last time the world was at 350ppm was in 1988, and the goal now had to be 280ppm, he said.
The world needed to reduce its emissions 150 per cent, and 2050 was a target too far away.
“It would only get people worrying about it in 2049,” he said.
“By 2020 we have to reach the peak of emissions and that is a massive challenge. It has to start today, or yesterday.”
Professor Droege said this was achievable, but only with 100 per cent renewable energy in the system all over the world.
This was both possible and economically sensible, but policy support was coming in unpredictable global waves.
At the moment there was a slowing of support, and no country had reached the United Nations sponsored Paris Agreement targets, he said.
Professor Droege said, in fact, a recent report from a German based researcher showed that if the WA government approved gas fracking and all WA’s potential unconventional gas reserves were fracked, this would blow Australia’s entire carbon budget under the Paris Agreement three times over.
Professor Droege described places all over Europe that had managed radical change, upgrading existing urban areas on large scales.
The city of Berlin was 100 per cent renewable.
In Spain a whole bioregion had transitioned to 100 per cent wind-farm power in just 10 years.
Frankfurt and Munich ran citywide renewable neighbourhood programs, while Paris and New York City were developing similar programs.
Freiburg, Germany, ran a cooperatively managed social housing project with its own shared electric car fleet.
The USA’s Rocky Mountain Institute had proposed a business model for making entire districts renewable through new technologies and efficiency improvements.
“It is the business model that makes these projects possible, the certainty of return,” Professor Droege said.
“Business models need to be propagated.
“This needs to be the standard for new development.
“Energy is everywhere; the opportunity is to look at the city as an energy landscape.”
Professor Droege said Australian cooperative research had significance beyond pure research.
Renewable technology had advanced exponentially and was on the cusp of global realisation but incumbent industries and interests were holding it back.
“We’re creating a world of incubators to bring technologies to markets. But we need more than markets, we need governments to step aside and open the floodgates to innovation,” he said.
“A cultural transformation can only come from the bottom up but leaders need to recognise the groundswell.
