Climate Change or Attitude Change?
Jon Ward, General Manager Business, Innovation and Technology, Sustainability Victoria.
I recently conducted a search of Melbourne’s daily newspapers for articles containing the words climate and greenhouse gases. Not surprisingly, the results revealed that the number of these articles doubled in 2006. This media interest, prominence in Federal polls and the inescapable reality of drought all indicate that the broader community understands that this is the critical problem for our generation. What is less understood is what we can all do about it.
The focus on catastrophic events and deep cuts in greenhouse emissions, paints a daunting picture and there is some evidence that all of this is having a negative effect on the community to turn off and leave it to someone else to solve. As engineers and scientists in government, research and business, it is up to us to put the problem and actions required into some perspective.
Policy proposals for 60 percent cuts to greenhouse emissions by 2050 are indeed challenging. But this isn’t 2050. Commentators paint two main pathways to achieve these deep cuts; starting now on a more or less straight line reduction or, alternately, business as usual resulting in another 10 to 15 years of emissions growth followed by more rapid reductions through carbon trading and market mechanisms. And Sir Nicolas Stern made the point on this, that the acting now option was by far the best economic outcome in the long term.
If we don’t look at the size of the problem in 2050, but focus on 2007 through to 2010, then the difference between business as usual and the pathway to 60 percent reduction, requires something like a 10 - 15 percent improvement in resource intensity across the economy.
So what tools are at our disposal today? Sustainability Victoria’s work with business over many years has shown numerous examples where business can introduce cleaner technologies and practices with reasonable paybacks to achieve better than 15 percent gains. Up to 60 percent of the eventual impact of products is locked in at the design stage, but few products are really designed from the outset for sustainability. Our supply chains often accumulate 40 plus percent losses across multiple processing stages because of the lack of a whole of life cycle view of the process.
We have the tools and economic reasons to tackle climate change now. While this isn’t the entire answer, working positively to change the climate is the role of engineers, rather than just reading about it.
For more information go to www.sustainability.vic.gov.au
