They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an “Oh, shit” moment–an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself.

It’s especially alarming when people who, ahem, know their shit, speak about their own personal “Oh Shit” moment.

Take Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, and a physicist whose specialty is chaos theory.

Speaking in July at an invitation only conference in New Mexico, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it.

Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues’ study states that the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020. Yep, that means quit carbon completely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035.

The world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050.

This kind of timetable is lightyears from what the IPCC is proposing, and failing to get agreement on.

But even this “brutal” timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber admitted, wouldn’t guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so–”worse odds than Russian roulette …But it is the best we can do.”

To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner.

“I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers,” Schellnhuber said. Hans’ suggestion to push past that rising “Oh Shit” feeling and avert paralysis? “War-time mobilisation.”

So, time to share: what’s produced your latest “Oh Shit” moment? Or have you, like many of the Australians polled in the latest Lowy Institute survey, managed to ignore the bad news and pushed climate change down the list of your concerns, to, oh, seventh — just behind job security, the economy, terrorism and the threat of nuclear weapons?

Oh, shit.

Is it about trading emissions permits? Is it about technology policy? Surely it’s not about arguing over who can support polluters more! Is it even about reducing emissions, then?

While you can mount arguments for all of these, fundamentally, in my opinion, the goal is none of these.

Fundamentally, the goal must be to make sure we can pass on a safe climate to our children, and our children’s children. If our legislative action doesn’t play a key role  in delivering that safe climate outcome, then it’s not really climate action.

With that in mind, the Greens have spent the last many months putting together a legislative package entitled the Safe Climate Bill which, taken together, would see Australia play its responsible role in delivering a safe climate.

I’m very conscious of not simply using Rooted as an outlet for spruiking the Greens and our initiatives, but given that the mainstream media gave our Safe Climate Bill, which we launched yesterday, diddly squat coverage, it needs every opportunity to get an airing through other media. We need to find some way of holding the Government to account for their climate failure, if the MSM won’t do it (and the Opposition clearly won’t). We need to show Australians that there is an alternative if they want serious, meaningful climate action.

You can read all about the bill at www.safeclimatebill.org.au or via the text links in the post, but in summary it is a collection of 12 linked bills based on the pillars of a safe climate target, renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and protecting green carbon, supported by a real polluter pays emissions trading scheme.

The 12 bills are:

The Safe Climate (Emissions Trading Scheme) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Renewable Energy Electricity) Amendment Bill 2009 [Renewable Energy Target]

The Safe Climate (Renewable Electricity Feed-in Tariff) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Renewable Energy Infrastructure) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Access and Savings Initiative) Bill 2009 [The EASI household energy efficiency scheme]

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency in Non-Residential Buildings) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Opportunities) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Energy Efficiency Target) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Sustainable Transport Infrastructure) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Fringe Benefits and Fuel Credit Restrictions) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Native Forest Carbon and Biodiversity Protection) Bill 2009

The Safe Climate (Green Carbon) Bill 2009

You can download them from our website.

The Safe Climate Bill is intended, in its parts and its whole, to be an exposure draft and we strongly invite public comment and discussion. We’ll be developing it further over time and plan to campaign strongly around it as a counter to the Rudd Government’s claim that its CPRS is a reasonable response to the climate crisis. [By the way, did everyone hear Prof Garnaut refer to it last night as "has been one of the worst examples of policy-making we have seen on major issues in Australia"? Yet somehow he still reckons it's worth supporting.]

As I’ve written here recently, climate campaigning has been damn hard recently because it has had to be so negative, that being the only responsible way to react to policy failure that is the CPRS. We very much hope that the Safe Climate Bill can give us all a boost with something positive to rally around!

Please read the detailed briefings, download the bills and give us your feedback!

There’s a lot of burn-out in the climate movement right now. A lot of tired people, a lot of grumpy people. I know – I am one!

I can completely understand why – we’ve had a year of not only hard campaigning, but also a particularly distressing one. Dashed hopes aren’t easy to bear, a split movement is difficult to deal with, and too much of the year has been spent campaigning ‘against’ something instead of ‘for’ something else.

But, hard though it may be, Id argue that now is the time when we need to pull out all stops and start campaigning stronger, louder and better!

The CPRS has gone down once, but it’ll be back soon, followed swiftly by the Copenhagen Conference.

We all agree (even the Government) that the CPRS is not good enough to seriously deal with the climate crisis, but the voices saying that it is “better than nothing” are growing louder. And, disturbingly, there seems to be a feeling almost of resignation growing in parts of the rest of the movement – a feeling that this is going to happen and we might as well not try to stop it. But for all those who argue that it should (or might as well) be “passed now and improved later”, I have one critical question:

How?

We cannot sit back now and assume that, if the CPRS passes in its current form, we’ll simply be able to improve it further down the track. If we agree it is not good enough, we must lay the groundwork now to improve it later. We need a strategy, not just a vague hope.

As part of the effort to find a way forward – the best path for us, as a movement, to ensure that we get strong, ambitious, science-based climate policy – here are the options as I see them for what may conceivably happen in the Senate in the coming months:

• The CPRS fails again because all non-Labor Senators oppose it, leading to a possible early election;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government working closely with the Greens to make it environmentally effective and economically efficient, securing Senate support through bringing to bear their moral authority with a bill that matches the scale of the challenge;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, and the Greens supporting it because it is better than nothing;
• The CPRS becomes law with the Government browning it down even further with the Liberal Party, but opposed by the Nationals and Greens for different reasons.

Let’s take these one by one, looking at the implications for any campaign to achieve ambitious action.

In the extremely unlikely event that we face an early election on climate change and the CPRS, the implication for us all is clear: we need to be ready to run a powerful campaign calling for the strongest possible action from the next Parliament. We need to make it abundantly clear that there is an appetite in the Australian community for meaningful government action on the climate crisis, and that the community will not accept the CPRS or anything worse. If we fail to deliver a mandate for strong action and a rebuke to the CPRS, we cannot believe that we will see anything stronger than the CPRS actually implemented.

On the second option, if you don’t believe that the Government has no intention of working with the Greens to green up the scheme (and I can tell you from personal experience that they don’t have any such intention), you will at least acknowledge that the Government has no political reason to do so in the absence of a strong public campaign calling for them to do so. It is just imaginable that, if such a campaign were to build this month and grow to a crescendo by November, the pressure on the Government would be such that they would at least consider their options in the Senate. With silence and division in the climate movement, it is absolutely guaranteed that they will not do so.

Taking the third and fourth options together, it seems pretty clear to me that, once the CPRS passes, the heat will very swiftly go out of climate debate in Australia. Mainstream opinion will be that something is being done. It will be incredibly difficult for us to bring the issue back to the boil in time to deliver a safe climate.

If the Greens, and the climate movement more broadly, fall silent now, or, worse, support the CPRS now as ‘better than nothing’, I believe that it will be simply impossible to rescue the situation and strengthen Australia’s climate response in the little time we have left. We will have allowed the Government to frame the CPRS as action on climate change, the best that can be achieved at this time, and we will have given away the only thing we have: the fact that we are right.

However, if we campaign hard against the CPRS now, highlight its flaws and promote a positive alternative, it may just be possible to continue and build on the frame that this is a polluters’ paradise that must be swiftly replaced with something meaningful. The stronger our opposition now, the more clearly articulated our alternative, the more likely it becomes that we can succeed down the track.

The clear lesson from this analysis is that we must strengthen our resolve and work now to build the strongest possible campaign for ambitious climate action. Now is the time to provide a counterweight to the continued and accelerating rent-seeking of the polluters. We need to throw everything we have at this – from details critiques and analyses to NDAs and other protests, from continuing letters to editors and calls to talkback to doorknocking campaigns.

We can debate for months (as we have already) whether the CPRS is better than nothing or worse than useless, but one thing is clear: if the CPRS passes and is not rapidly strengthened, it will legislatively ensure that Australia’s emissions cannot and will not start heading downwards until 2013.

I am convinced that, if we reject that bill to lock in failure, we will be able to achieve faster emissions cuts sooner than the CPRS could ever deliver.

But, within an hour, Minister Wong had thumbed her nose at the Senate and the planet, telling CE Daily that the Government “had already undertaken the largest economic modelling exercise in Australian history. Given that fact, the Government does not intend to undertake further modelling, and believes it is now time to get on with the huge job of reducing Australia’s emissions.”

What is with this Government’s studied ignorance? Why do they consistently refuse to even model 40% cuts, which the Greens have asked for repeatedly over many months? What are they afraid of?

We can be guaranteed that the Government will not consider moving to 40% cuts if they haven’t modelled the economic impact. So of course they will continue to refuse to do that modelling.

But how can the Government expect the Senate to be willing to pass their deeply flawed CPRS if they thumb their nose at the Senate’s request for this modelling?

But the mainstream Australian discussion of the Copenhagen Conference later this year has thus far focussed entirely on the need for a “successful agreement”, and not at all on how you might define such success.

It is incredibly important that we do not let ourselves believe that achieving any kind of diplomatic “success” at Copenhagen is enough. If Copenhagen does not deliver the kind of ambitious global agreement that will see our generation pass on a safe climate to our children, it will have failed. An agreement to do too little, or an agreement which countries can ignore, will be a failure.

This dichotomy was brought home firmly by statements in Australia yesterday by Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Climate Minister (see here, here, here and here), who is touring the world building momentum for the conference she is to host in just a few months’ time. Hedegaard is so keen for a diplomatic success that she has abandoned the goal of environmental success. Having been thoroughly briefed by the triumvirate of Penny Wong, the Climate Institute and the Business Council of Australia, Hedegaard backed the Rudd Government’s Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme as “crucial” to the success of Copenhagen, saying developed countries must sign up to at least the 25% cuts by 2020 that Australia has now put on the table as a maximum offer.

And that’s where the problem starts.

If the old parties close ranks with the old polluters to pass the scheme that is currently before the Parliament, Australia will go to Copenhagen having legislatively prevented itself from agreeing to a target stronger than the 25% minimum that the world requires from rich, high-polluting countries. The only impact this can possibly have on the negotiations is to lower the level of ambition from other developed countries, encouraging Canada, Japan and Russia to also refuse to take on science-based targets. This in turn makes it less likely that China, India and other very large developing nations will sign up to slow their increases in emissions. They have already made it clear that they expect rich countries to commit to targets in the order of 40% by 2020 and more before they agree to move.

And the chances of agreement all of a sudden look very grim indeed.

The Rudd Government’s conditional 25% offer is part of the problem, not the solution. If legislated, it would see Australia return to global negotiations demanding that the rest of the world goes very hard – other developed nations cutting emissions in the order of 40% and developing nations like China reducing emissions 20% below business as usual – while we once again get away with a weak target.

Of course the world needs to go hard! We need a global agreement that is, in fact, considerably stronger than the one that Australia’s conditions set out. But if such an agreement is reached, it will by necessity see Australia commit to far more than 25% cuts by 2020.

Chinese chief negotiator, Su Wei, told The Age just last weekend that Australia’s conditionality on the 25% was unacceptable. By demanding that China make commitments before we do, we breached the spirit of the UNFCCC’s 1992 agreement on common but differentiated targets. European nations have privately raised concerns with the Greens about Australia’s unacceptable attitude to burden-sharing amongst developed countries.

Now, Australia is not the be all and end all. If the US and China agree to start moving (as may now be about to happen), we will swiftly become irrelevant in the global game and be left behind as the world marches on. But, if the CPRS has any impact on the global negotiations, it will be a negative one, not a positive one. If Australia’s contribution to global climate negotiations is once again to lower the level of ambition, it will be a great tragedy.

In yesterday’s hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy, Philip Sutton, as part of a roundtable of environment groups, made the point that, just like Kyoto, a weak agreement at Copenhagen will hold back progress, not encourage it. On the other hand, if negotiations fall apart this year, it can only spur on stronger efforts in the months afterwards to reach a truly effective agreement.

If we are to have any real hope of preventing runaway climate change, the global community must agree to return the atmosphere to 350 ppm CO2 as soon as possible. That will mean developed nations getting onto a trajectory towards zero net emissions as fast as possible. Once developed nations take on that challenge, developing nations will swiftly come on board as that is where the markets in the coming decades will be.

Let’s not set our sights too low for Copenhagen in order to achieve some kind of agreement. That approach is doomed to failure – if it does not lead to the collapse of negotiations, it will, in the end, lead to climate catastrophe. Let’s aim for the truly ambitious agreement that we need and keep working until we achieve it!

1. The scheme will be delayed until July 2011.

All the advice that the Government has seen on the economics of climate change shows that the sooner we cut emissions, the less expensive it will be. Early action is much cheaper than waiting. This was a central tenet of the UK’s Stern Review and our own Garnaut Review.  We need to move quickly, especially if we want to create new green jobs and new investments in clean tech and renewable energy in Australia.

2. In 2011-2012 the carbon price will be set at $10/tonne and there will be an unlimited amount of permits;

This is almost a joke  – $10 a tonne! To change energy supply here modelling (from ROAM) suggests we need a carbon price north of $60 to promote renewables. What does that mean?

A $10 carbon price won’t even be enough to make the switch from brown coal to less polluting black coal – at $20 that will happen. At a carbon price of $50/tonne gas will displace coal fired power. At $60/ tonne we get some wind technology and solar thermal. This is of course factoring in the current $10-$11 billion worth of subsidies the Federal Government currently gives the fossil fuel industry per year (Chris Reidy, Institute of Sustainable Futures report).

In the European Union ETS, where prices are so volatile, carbon permits are currently trading below $15/tonne. They have found that this is not enough to keep renewable energy projects going.

3. Emissions trading will be begin proper in July 2012

It’s important to note that a carbon price is not enough as a central policy. The UK recently announced a ban on coal without CCS. Price mechanisms to date have been totally inadequate to drive significant transformation – the age of cheap energy (coal and oil) is catching up on us. We need to come to terms with that and get serious about complementary measures.

4. There will be “recession buffer” where industries eligible for assistance at the 60% rate “would receive a 10% buffer for a finite period”, while those eligible at the 90% rate “will receive a 5% buffer for finite period”.

The Government should be standing up to this kind of pressure. If we are giving billions of dollars more to our most polluting industries, then the rest of the economy will have to bear the brunt of emission reductions. Furthermore, this makes it much more difficult to actually achieve emission reductions because the amount of assistance that the worst polluters are getting offers little economic incentive for them to change their behaviour. Lastly – revenue from the ETS should go to large-scale renewable energy and clean tech projects, and to assisting developing countries to deal with climate change.

5. The Government has added an extra option to its target range (previously 5-15%) of 25% by 2020 over 2000 levels if the world reaches an agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions to 450 parts per million.

The one shimmer of light, of course, is that the target range has been upped from 5-15% to 5-25%. Well, kind of. If, and only if, the rest of the world shows leadership and creates a global deal at the UN Copenhagen climate negotiations in December this year, then Australia will do 25% reduction by 2020 (over 1990 levels). That is, the 5%-15% target reduction range will be kept unless an agreement consistent with 450ppm CO2-e is agreed to, in which case Australia will do a 25% reduction.

Those targets are simply not strong enough to actually do the job of solving climate change. If the UN Intergovernmental Panel on climate change says the minimum that industrialised countries like Australia should do is 25-40% by 2020 over 1990 levels, and even that only gives us a 50/50 chance of avoiding a 2 degree temperature rise, than even the 25% target falls far short of what is needed.

While this might be a superficially attractive comparison, it is as far from reality as Minister Wong’s statements about economic transformation are from the reality of the scheme her Government has designed.

Certainly, there are some similarities between the republic and climate change. In both cases, we see a strong public desire for radical change that is not reflected in the Government. In both cases we see a serious lack of bipartisanship. In both cases, we see a Government whose heart is not in it put forward a minimalist option that disappoints and disempowers the people.

But there is one fundamental difference which makes a mockery of the whole attempt to draw a parallel. Urgency.

There is only one reason why the Republic was on the agenda in the 1990s, after a century-long campaign – because Paul Keating and a few other determined individuals put it there. While there is and was broad public support for a move to a republic, the fact that we did not make the change last decade and may not in the next decade is a great pity, but it is no tragedy. John Howard’s undermining of the referendum took the wind out of the sails of the republic push in a way that is deeply unfortunate, but nothing disastrous will happen if the push does not increase again rapidly. No-one will die for lack of an Australian republic.

Climate change, on the other hand, is on the agenda because it is a scientifically demonstrated threat which is increasingly impossible to ignore or sideline. If we do not act fast, we invite social, economic and environmental catastrophe on a scale most of us find hard to imagine.

If the current proposal falls over, as it should unless significantly improved, we have no choice but to try again in the very near future. Public pressure will only grow stronger as the threat becomes ever clearer and as the globe begins to act.

The strongest parallel between the republic and the climate is that in both cases the Australian people are being presented with a dodgy, ‘take it or leave it’ option that they are unwilling to accept. In neither case should they be forced to accept it because it is the only option at the moment. In both cases, accepting the minimalist approach effectively shuts off the option of making the radical change that is necessary.

Let’s reject the minimalist approach in this case, as we did with the Republic, and tell the Government to come back with a better option. This one is unacceptable.

In a speech to the Lowy Institute today (not yet on her website, but will be here), in which she bravely painted a picture of a fictional world quite unlike our own, Minister Wong set out for her audience the history of emissions trading plans in Australia. She raised the original proposal put to the Howard Government a decade ago, discussed Peter Shergold’s report in the Howard Government’s final year, and detailed her own Government’s Green Paper and White Paper process.

But she completely failed to mention the Garnaut Report.

Excised from history. Oh dear.

Here is what Christine Milne had to say about the speech.

He’s done it very carefully, of course. The usual Ruddsterness of saying effectively ‘oh, I don’t think it’s a problem, but everyone else does, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work out right.’

John Howard’s prime dog-whistle was telling everyone he disagreed with Pauline Hanson while saying that her views were legitimate and had to be heard. Here we have Rudd pronouncing to the world that we can’t wait to take action on climate change while lamenting that that others obviously think we have to wait until the financial crisis is over. Howard took the opportunity to adopt Hanson’s policies and attitude. Rudd is adopting a target that he admits is deliberately weak because of the GFC.

Dog-whistle politics at its best, folks. This is how it’s going to be for the rest of the debate…

Robinson put forward the view that we should be investing many tens of billions of dollars in replacing, or at least supplementing, Australia’s coal power infrastructure with gas power. She argues that, since gas power’s greenhouse emissions are in the order of 30% less than the most efficient coal power, this would do a power of good for Australia’s emissions profile.

That’s an argument that may have been made effectively a decade or 15 years ago. Indeed, it is an argument many environmentalists supported for years – natural gas as a transitional fuel into the renewable energy age. However, it is now an idea whose time is well past.

If my ears didn’t deceive me, Robinson put the price of a single large LNG processing plant at $25 billion. Obviously, the transportation of the fuel is an additional large cost, as is the power station infrastructure, even if it is simply retrofitting coal power stations for use with gas. For that amount of money, we could build some 20 GW of solar thermal power! With various renewable technologies and a smart grid roll-out, we could be halfway(a quarter of the way)* to decarbonising Australia’s entire energy demand with zero emissions renewable energy for the price of one large LNG processing plant which would still have unacceptably high emissions.

You have ask what is the point of a transition fuel when the energy sources that we are supposed to be transitioning to are already available and are, on these figures, cheaper than the supposed transition itself. And you have to ask what kind of short-sighted, nonsensical decision-making would invest massively in polluting infrastructure now when the clear scientific and ecological imperative is to go to zero emissions fast.

Well, since you ask , it’s the kind of short-sighted and nonsenical decision-making which lies behind the Rudd Government’s emissions trading plan – the so-called “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.

One of the biggest problems with setting a weak emissions reduction target, one of the elements that makes it worse than useless, is that it will lead to short-sighted investments in ‘low emissions’ infrastructure which, a few years down the track, will have to be discarded as sunk costs when we finally realise we have to move to zero emissions. This is why it has been convincingly argued that a steeper emissions reduction trajectory is actually cheaper than a slow one, as we learn faster and don’t make these short-sighted investments.

Add the huge pile of free permits and other protections for existing industries, and you get a situation where the investment signal that is supposed to be sent by an ETS – investment in truly clean industries and infrastructure at the expense of polluting ones – is dampened and deadened to the extent that hugely troubling investment decisions are made. We may see many billions invested badly thanks to the CPRS.

It is a great irony that the best line the Government can muster up about its own emissions trading plan is that it is ‘better than nothing’. But it is an even greater irony that it’s actually untrue – it is worse than useless.

*(sorry, I got carried away, it has been pointed out to me that, due to the differing capacity factors, we’d only be able to do a quarter of Australia’s energy demand with solar thermal for $25b. The point, however, remains!)