We are winning

in Mumbai

LEADING Australian scientist and climate change campaigner Professor Tim Flannery is a man of many accomplishments. He is a mammalogist, a palaeontologist, an environmentalist, a crusader for sustainable business and environmental practices, an explorer, an activist and an author. His advocacy particularly on carbon emissions and population levels resulted in him being named Australian of the Year in 2007.

In his career as a field zoologist, he discovered 29 new species of kangaroos and 16 other new species in Melanesia, prompting naturalist David Attenborough to say he was in the league of all-time great explorers such as Dr. David Livingstone. His books The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People and The Weather Maker: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change are masterpieces in environmental writing. He is the Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international climate change awareness group of 30 global leaders from business, science and policy. It aims to create awareness about the importance of COP15, the United Nations conference to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009, where world leaders will meet to agree on a new treaty that is to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Flannery was in India in early February on a lecture tour organised by the Australia-India Council. A lecture on climate change at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and meetings with Tata Power and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Delhi were among his programmes. The CII meeting was meant to reach out to Indian corporate groups and involve them in the Copenhagen process in December. While in Mumbai, he spoke to Lyla Bavadam. Excerpts from the interview:

Mammalogist, paleontologist, explorer, activist, author how do you find the time for all this?

I dont know! Its sometimes a bit hard! But no doubt this multidiscipline background makes it easier to put across the problem of climate change. It really does. Climate change is about the metabolism of the planet, biodiversity and the economy and politics one needs to have a broad view of all this.

You have been quite controversial in your views, and in your attempt to simplify you have been accused of being simplistic.

I would argue that I have taken the science and still maintained its integrity but have put it in a way that people understand. It needs to be made simple. People need to understand it because it affects their lives.

Your suggestion to pump sulphur gas into the atmosphere to slow down global warming was criticised as being too drastic and not well-conceived. Could you discuss its pros and cons.

Its not my idea, but Nobel laureate Paul Crutzens. Its consequences are being evaluated by the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australias national science agency that is among the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world], and we will know more when their study is published. But I still stand by it as a drastic partial for a threateningly fatal problem for life on the earth.

Your activism has touched on population problems, land use, carbon emissions, coal being the next asbestos, and so on. What are your goals?

What Im saying is that you need solutions for multiple problems. We have a climate crisis, an emerging food crisis, a water crisis ... And there are solutions. One that I have been talking about on this trip is a technology called pyrolysis. This involves taking any biological material say crop waste, human sewage and heating it in the absence of oxygen, effectively cooking it in the process. What you get out of that procedure are three products a synthetic gas which we use to generate electricity, a crude oil substitute that can be used to make plastics or fertilizers, and charcoal (this contains most of the carbon in the original biological material and if you put the charcoal back into the soil it helps with soil fertility). Experiments done in Australia last year showed that crop yield increased by about 30 per cent just by putting charcoal into the soil. All this is achieved with something like crop waste something that would otherwise rot and go back to the atmosphere. Its better than people burning biomass, adding to the pollution and wasting all that energy. In Australia, there is a plant that uses chicken manure to generate all this.

Could you place this in physical and monetary terms?

There are different technologies and different feedstocks but if you just want to generate charcoal, you can have a plant that takes in four tonnes of feed an hour. This costs about two million Australian dollars [one Australian dollar is Rs.31]. If you want to generate electricity, it would cost about A$10 million but you get a 30 MW power plant. Youve got to weigh all the costs and think what the price of carbon would be. At the moment theres no price for carbon in India but you could imagine and develop a mechanism that pays people for the sequestration. Its about A$20 a tonne in Australia. So, were really into a new world, where carbon will have a cost. As the price of carbon increases, small technologies all over the world will become much more economically interesting.

Will it be financially viable for countries like India and China where such solutions are really in need?

In the early stages, it will probably be marginal or negative because we are just starting out. But like any of these businesses wind energy, solar energy, etc they start off being relatively high priced. There is a role for the government here it has to say that we need to make such investments to develop our own domestic industry until such a time when the prices come down. So the Indian government has a really great role to play to develop R&D [research and development] in this area and push the nation into global negotiations to say we would like to improve the CDM [Clean Development Mechanism] so that we can start developing on an even larger scale.

This is just one of the technologies we have been talking about. The scale of this, if it works, is massive. It is a smart way of using biomass in our generation.

So far, governments have distanced themselves from all this and left it to niche groups and some forward-thinking businesses. So what sort of role should the government play, especially with regard to pricing because that is big deterrent for investors?

The first and foremost role of the government is one of regulation time limits to achieve guidelines, price incentives and disincentives, and so on. In terms of climate change, what we are really asking people to do is to consider the plight of future generations and that is very hard if you live in a society where you dont value fellow human beings who are alive. So this is very much tied up with the issue of how society itself values human life. So the other big role for the government is to insist on the fundamental values of human life where you have a fair taxation system, where you pay to help the disadvantaged, where you have less corruption in government.

So population control is linked to this.

I think so. Ultimately the best contraceptive is affluence. You can offer incentives. It has worked in China.

But they dont have a great environmental record at all.

No, they dont.

When you speak of affluence as a solution, isnt it a little contradictory because one of the changes that would work well for the environment would be to lessen consumption. But the current economic and social fabric unfortunately links affluence with consumption.

All I can say is that even though the West has become more affluent, its environment has become cleaner. And climate change is caused by a class of pollutants greenhouse gases that we didnt recognise until the late 1980s and didnt have the capacity to address. Affluence gives you the capacity to address issues. And it would in India, too. I would argue that you too would have a cleaner environment if you create more affluence because people have more to lose then and so care about the environment more. And thats exactly what we see in China today. I work in China very frequently and I now see that its government policy is very much focussed on the environment.

Could you compare your experiences in China with those in India?

Last October, President Hu Jintao introduced a new policy called Harmonious Society. Prior to this, bureaucrats were judged on the basis of economic development alone. Now they are being judged on the basis of economic development, social harmony and environmental outcomes. China has moved very decisively towards a more green economic policy. They have spent a huge amount of money on cleaning up. They have moved towards very ambitious renewable energy targets and have changed fuel use practices. But most importantly, there is a change in the attitudes of bureaucrats. And so there is a change from the top, slowly. They are also the worlds biggest manufacturers of solar products. Soon there will be solar ferries at Hong Kong harbour.

Is nuclear energy too controversial for you?

I think it is difficult to achieve the required emission levels without ruling out any technology. And the technology for nuclear energy is moving on to safer, more efficient and less polluting models.

Many environmentalists, like the founder of Greenpeace [Patrick Moore] and [the British scientist] James Lovelock, support nuclear energy saying it is the cleanest and most sustainable form unusual views from environmentalists who usually look into the long-term aspect of things.

No energy solution is without costs. Just as I do, Lovelock estimates the costs of nuclear energy to be less than other energy sources, which is why he sees it as the best solution, while I see it as just one among many.

Since no form of energy is likely to be sustainable in the long term, what changes should people and businesses make? Would, for instance, lowering the levels of consumption help?

Efficiency, a stable population and whole of lifecycle thinking will help.

As head of the Copenhagen Climate Council, would suggestions like this be considered anti-business? In this position do you find yourself making more compromises than you would like?

Business without a strong ethical base is unsustainable and can become criminal. I am not anti-business in any way, but recognise that ethics (such as concern for the environment) are central to business success.

Have we passed a deadline as far as global warming is concerned? Have we precipitated it by our actions even if it is a natural cycle?

We have not passed a deadline, and this is not a natural cycle.

Is there any Indian involvement in the Copenhagen process?

Not so far. We have invited India but so far the response has been limited. Hopefully, there will be more. There are some really progressive companies here.

Tata Power is one of them. But it is hamstrung because of government policies.

The biggest hurdle seems to be the general perception that what is good for the planet is not good for business.

I think thats just wrong. There are businesses that believe it is too expensive to control climate change; dinosaur businesses like ExxonMobil seem to believe that.

Have any oil companies joined in the Copenhagen process?

Some have. There is Statoil, a Norwegian company, Duke Energy from the United States

Not Exxon?

They dont believe that climate change is man-made, or is a problem.

Who has influenced you personally?

From those I have met Lovelock, [the American physiologist] Jared Diamond, [the British director] Richard Attenborough. But Lovelock is really my inspiration. Hes 90 now but still going strong. Hes a very great man (smiles). He gets criticised a lot.

Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis [which considers the earth as a self-regulating organism] was not received well initially and he was dismissed by the scientific community; but he was taken more seriously later when a lot of what he said was vindicated.

Do you see a parallel in the way in which he was gradually accepted and the way environmental problems are also gradually getting accepted?

Thats actually very perceptive. I hadnt thought of it that way.

Do you think there have been progressively positive outcomes from Rio de Janeiro to Montreal to Kyoto, and all the various other protocols and declarations?

They have had a positive impact. Rio laid the groundwork for all this. Montreal was a success. Look at where we are now from where we were 10 years ago. We are winning the battle.