When the new carbon price policy was announced, I was fairly skeptical about it – especially given the failure of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Media reporting suggested that there were serious deficiencies in the policy, as many or more as the CPRS.

However, I’ve taken the time to acquaint myself more closely with the “Clean Energy Future” carbon price policy and am now much more supportive. It is a good step in the right direction, and while it is not perfect, it is a significant and important platform to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution.

There are a few elements of the package that I really like:

• Higher 2050 target: The new target is 80% reduction in carbon emissions on 2000 levels
• Creation of a $10 billion clean energy finance corporation, to directly stimulate the clean energy sector
• Fixed initial price that moves to a emissions trading scheme: a permanent fixed price would be a disaster and an ETS means a total cap on emissions
• Limitations on overseas carbon offsets that can be used in Australia, from 80% to 50%
• Individuals and groups can purchase and retire carbon permits, thereby hastening carbon reductions

Will this help us reach our target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C? Not by itself. International action is still required.

Bottom line: I’m glad to see that Australia has gone from being a laggard to a leader with this policy.

Related posts:

1. Investment in clean energy jobs three times more effective than oil and gas
2. 100% renewable energy in Australia by 2020
3. Costs to reduce pollution cheaper than expected: Grattan Institute

Over at Grist, there is a report that confirms (yet again, as if more proof was needed) that investment in clean-tech is three times more effective than government spending on oil and gas jobs.

Cleantech generates 17 jobs for every $1 million spent on it, compared to just 5 for every $1 million we throw at an oil and gas industry that doesn’t need it but will fight to its dying breath to preserve the government largesse shoring up its bottom line.

… Robert Pollin, an economist who studied the impact of green stimulus dollars for the Commerce Department, said clean energy gets a better payoff because kick-starting a new industry requires a lot of manpower.

The slide above is from the LEAN presentation, focusing on US Commerce Dept data. In my view, the case is clear. Australia needs to end our inefficient, polluting subsidies to the fossil fuel industry if we serious about job creation.

The argument that I’ve heard bandied around – that there are fewer jobs in clean energy than fossil fuel – is wrong. Let’s not forget that the fossil fuel industry slashed jobs and destroyed communities in the 1980s when privatisation happened. The fossil fuel industry is no friend to workers – their primary concern is to make a profit, not build communities. The creation of jobs is a by-product of their destructive profit motive.

Related posts:

1. Clean Energy Jobs and Climate Dinosaurs
2. Assessment of the “Clean Energy Future” policy
3. 100% renewable energy in Australia by 2020

I came across Bill McKibben’s opinion piece in the Washington Post and an associated video of the piece, narrated by Stephen Thomson that are well worth looking at.

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. (Photo from: http://pollutions.asia/)

McKibben (of 350.org fame) takes on the current reluctance of climate activists and action advocates to link specific extreme weather events (floods in QLD, Pakistan and the US, fires in Victoria and Texas, droughts in the US, Europe and elsewhere) to climate change.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Bill McKibben is right to challenge this. While no individual event is directly caused by global warming, they are made more frequent and more intense. The systemic problem that McKibben talks of is that global warming is the cause of the record breaking extreme weather events – two “hundred year” droughts in the Amazon happening within five years.

Actually, rather than read McKibben’s op-ed, watch the video created by Stephen Thomson which narrates the opinion piece and adds powerful images to it.

It is preaching to the converted, but after the failures of Cophenhagen, defeat of climate action in the US Congress, Australia and elsewhere, and the rise of climate deniers funded by extremists like the Koch Brothers, it’s important to remind “true believers” that we still need to do something.

(Thanks to Grist for highlighting the op-ed and video.)

Related posts:

1. No slowdown in warming
2. Weathermen amongst most trusted authorities on climate change; many are skeptics
3. Get involved in politics to make a change

I know almost nothing about 1Sky, but I do know that 350.org is one of the more successful new climate action global organisations that sprung up in the lead up to Copenhagen in 2009. 1Sky looks to be a similar organisation – entirely US-based – the coordinates public action focused on climate change.

Now it looks like they’re merging:

For too long, the fossil fuel industry has had its way on the climate issue–its money has overwhelmed the scientific facts, delaying action on the largest challenge humanity now faces.

Right now, the the Clean Air Act is being threatened, the EPA is under attack, and big polluters are mounting an all-out onslaught that threatens to destroy our lands and scorch our planet. In short, we are losing ground.

In the face of these challenges, one thing is clear: if we want to win, we will have to come together like we never have before.

That’s why we at 350.org and 1Sky have important news to share: starting today, our organizations are officially merging. We’ll be called 350.org, and together we’ll be smarter, bolder, faster, and more creative than we were before.

Over the last three years, 350.org and 1Sky have frequently teamed up for U.S. campaigning. Many of you have been with us every step of the way. Together, we’ve coordinated over 5,000 climate demonstrations in all 50 states. We’ve helped protect the Clean Air Act and won a campaign to get solar panels back on the White House. We’ve launched creative projects to get science at the center of the climate debate, trained thousands of new leaders, and built a network of strong local groups.

No doubt there will be almost no change for 350 Australia or most of the global action. The battle in the US however has challenges of a different scale to the ones we face in Australia: the US Chamber of Commerce and the Koch Brothers.

We hear that your next campaign targets the US Chamber of Commerce, how does that reflect the new organizations long-term mission and goals?
Our long term mission remains to create the power and space needed to craft and enact solutions to climate change and create a clean energy future.  In the United States, we have realized that the biggest thing standing in our way is the power that has been built through lobbying and campaigning dollars pouring into influencing Congress and the U.S. government as a whole. We need to hold politicians who take advantage of those dollars accountable for their voting in favor of dirty energy industries, we need to expose who is being represented by those votes, and we need to make it clear the difference between standing up for corporate profits and standing up for the American people.

This merger makes me ponder: what is the role for tiny climate action groups compared to larger, more resourced groups? The point of 350.org (and presumably 1Sky) is local community coordinators who connect regionally and globally. To combat the giant polluters, do climate groups need to get bigger?

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on website development for unions
2. The importance of 350
3. Abbott’s “direct action” frame and carbon pricing

Tony Abbott has used his “direct action” plan as the counterpoint to Labor’s carbon price plan.

Apart from the obvious purpose of “direct action” being Abbott’s desire to directly transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds to private hands, his proposal should fail the “common sense” test.

Climate change is like a fire – it is getting out of control and threatens our safety. The Australian Government (and other Governments) are like firefighters. It can take action by putting the fire out promptly before it gets to big and dangerous, or it could waste time until its too late. The Liberal Party and Tony Abbott (and the Republicans in the USA) are like fire fighters who don’t believe that fire exists. They can’t possibly get the fire under control.

The various policy tools being proposed are like fire extinguishers.

The carbon price is very broad, and affects the entire economy. It’s like lots of fire extinguishers aimed at the fire, so it doesn’t matter if you’re very accurate – you just point it at the fire. Lots of the fire gets extinguished and it makes it easier for other efforts (like fire blankets, water hoses – or energy efficiency and renewable energy targets) to work.

Direct action on the other hand is very narrow. It only affects one part of the fire, so if it’s not aimed at the hottest, most intense part of the fire, or the part of the fire closest to combustible fuels, then it won’t have any affect at all. Direct action means its harder for other measures (like fire blankets or water) to work because it’s too hot and intense to get to the fire.

Direct action won’t work to stop climate change, just like a single fire extinguisher won’t put out a large fire.

Of course, Tony Abbott supports climate change because of his extreme authoritarian conservatism. Direct action is based on the system of rewards and punishments. In the George Lakoff formulation, Tony Abbott is the “strict father figure” who needs to personally act to solve the problem: rewarding businesses who behave and punishing those who don’t.

It’s the role of Government to ensure that we’re safe. By ignoring the fire or proposing measures that won’t put it out, Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party and Republicans are putting us all in danger.

Related posts:

1. The “why” of carbon pricing
2. The Liberals’ “crisis pragmatism”
3. Tony Abbott on Facebook

Last week’s Crikey had an article by former Australian Institude head-honcho Clive Hamilton, arguing that Australia needs “a new brand of environmental radicalism”.

Hamilton writes:

After a high-pressure meeting in Canberra, in which the government dangled the carrot of a 25% cut in Australia’s emissions, the Southern Cross Climate Coalition — comprising the ACF, WWF, the Climate Institute, ACOSS, and ACTU — agreed to support the government’s scheme.

How could major environment groups back a scheme that was so compromised and inadequate to the task — a scheme that handed out billions of dollars to coal-fired power plants, endorsed a strong future for the coal industry, allowed offshore compliance and would deliver, according to Treasury, no reductions in Australia’s emissions until 2035? All this was agreed by the ACF, WWF and the Climate Institute in exchange for a hypothetical 25% cut in emissions that Blind Freddy could see was never going to be delivered.

I think there are three reasons that explain how these groups could support such a travesty.

The punchline to last year’s conservative, climate-denialist takeover of the Liberal Party, was climate group after climate group condemning the Australian Conservation Foundation, World Wildlife Fund and Climate Institute for “selling out” on Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

These environmental groups – leaders in the area of climate change advocacy and action – had devolved to accept the neoliberal ideology of carbon trading and the efficiency of markets. They had “abandoned their interest in a different type of society” and focused only on “incremental change” of the existing (sick) capitalist system. Worse still, they had succumbed to “professionalisation” – basically the charge of “careerism” – where the interests of big donors mattered more than the grassroots.

Worse still! These so-called environmentalists “find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying” – they are Manchurian Candidate climate change denialists who “filter the science to rob it of its sting” and “cling to false hopes”.

Hamilton’s diatribe – which could have been written by any of the current crop of climate action vanguardists – unfortunately pushes a party-political barrow, and utterly ignores the science of organisational and behavioural change. What’s more, Hamilton denigrates that hard work of a lot of dedicated, honest and passionate people working at the organisations he attacks.

Getting governments, industries and whole societies to change how they work, operate, think and behave is the largest behaviour change challenge imaginable.

Human societies naturally resist changes – especially radical ones. This is why conservative policy-makers use times of crisis to push through unpopular reforms like cuts to welfare, restrictions on collective bargaining and reduction of environmental protections. (Cf. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.) Even relatively popular policy changes are subject to resistance from organised sectional interests. Look at the resistance to the introduction of superannuation in the 1990s, or the gun buy-back scheme after the Port Arthur Massacre.

The very excellent resource “The Psychology of Climate Change Communication” describes it as the “default effects” on decision making: our “tendency to stick with the option that is selected automatically instead of choosing an alternative option”. In public policy, this is called “path dependency”.

When faced with a change situation, a common response is to resist that change. For governments facing a change situation (the global climate crisis), the resistance is both active and passive. It is further complicated by the fact that humans are hard-wired to focus near-term goals and threats (i.e. situations where the costs/benefits are in the present, rather than when the costs/benefits are not realised until some future, possibly indefinite, time).

Active resistance in our political system for example comes in the out-and-out climate denialism of Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin and Corey Bernardi. However, we can also see it in the path-dependency of some Ministers with carbon portfolios (mining and energy for instance) – where public policy continues to be framed around short-term benefits (of increased coal exports), over long-term benefits (of increased investment in renewable energy technology exports).

More insidious is the passive resistance of government, where the defaul option is to just simply wait. Waiting until Copenhagen. Or waiting for India or China to act. When the default action leads to short-term reward (such as more mining royalties), the pressure is even greater to do nothing.

Combined with political imperatives of immediate risk-minimisation (doing nothing – or little – to avoid the short-term pain of a political campaign waged against you by the mining industy for example), and path dependency (or “default effects”) are exceptionally powerful.

These challenges are well known by researches and activists involved in behaviour change programs.

Hamilton’s demon of “incrementalism” is actually a key element of getting someone to change their behaviour. Small changes that are managable are important steps towards larger changes.

We also know that behaviour changes lead to attitude changes. It doesn’t matter how much someone knows that smoking is bad, it’s still hard to stop smoking. Similarly, every one knows that recycling is the right thing to do, but without recycle bins at work, on the street or at home, few people would bother to separate their rubbish from their recyclable cans and bottles. Reducing your calorie intake can be hard, but by making the small adjustment of switching to smaller plate sizes, you can start down the path of eating less.

What’s more, people are also hard-wired to not respond to criticism well. Most people are automatically defensive when criticised. We are more likely to harden in our pre-existing views about an issue when we’re told that we’re wrong – especially something that relates to us personally (our religious or political views, work practices, etc). Similarly, we are more likely to respond well to praise. No matter how rational we like to think we are, our emotions are powerful drivers of our opinions, attitudes and actions.

Politicians and policy-makers are no different.

The Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions suggests to good starting points for people or organisations seeking to change public policy on climate change. They are soundly based on the psychology of behaviour change.

Make the default option the optimal option. When faced with multiple options, people will typically choose whatever is the default. By making the default option the sustainable, climate-friendly option, we can positively influence individuals’ decisions. In a political context, this means ensuring that decisions that are made by our political leaders which are positive towards climate action are applauded in public, with criticisms made in private. This is a recognition that any progress – even small progress – is better than doing nothing. The power of symbolism is also important, as it reduces resistance to further change as existing change appears easy, positive and the default.

Provide near-term incentives. A challenge for installing solar panels on every roof is that the pay-off period can be a decade or more. It is economical, but not right now, and that is a large hurdle to overcome when trying to motivate action. Similarly, in a government and political context, programs and changes that will have an impact two or three elections away is a hurdle to action now. Politically, climate activists need to try to make the payoff for political action today pay-off today. Promoting policies that have an immediate impact is also good, such as incentives (tax breaks or rebates) for personal or industry clean energy projects are important.

There are a lot of other ways that the psychology of behaviour change should be adopted by climate activists. The totalisation of climate vanguardists is typically not helpful. The radicalism of the Vietnam protests only made a difference politically when the grandparents, public servants, teachers and suit-wearers started to go to rallies. As climate action becomes more “mainsteam”, the huffers and puffers like Clive Hamilton can do more damage than good.

It is certainly counterproductive to attack and undermine the hard work of progressive organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation or World Wildlife Fund.

Related posts:

1. The economics of climate change
2. Latest polling on climate change
3. The Greens Party support citizens’ assemblies on everything but climate change

The climate denialists in the Coalition has a simple message about the carbon price:

It’s a tax.

Taxes raise prices.

Prices on electricity, fuel and other things therefore will go up.

What about the alternative? The problem for progressives is that our arguments are nuanced. We don’t necessarily see the world in Manichean absolutes, black and white, good and evil.

It's not rocket science.

Electricity prices without a carbon price will continue to rise. Doesn’t really make intuitive sense, but that’s without knowing that degrading energy infrastructure pushes up prices. We haven’t had a carbon price in the last three years (or really, at all) yet elecricity prices have continued to go up – because of the old power lines, substations and other infrastructure.

Energy produced from non-renewable sources cost more than renewables because you need to continually mine coal (or gas or uranium).

Once you build the wind farm or soal plant, you don’t need to pay for the fuel.

The wind and sun are free, so there are almost no ongoing cost.

A carbon price will lead to lower energy prices… because it will mean we use more wind, solar and geothermal energy that don’t have expensive fuel costs.

Whatever our message, we on the progressive side of politics need to significantly simplify our key message about the carbon price and renewables.

Related posts:

1. Gas should be included in carbon price
2. Exchange rate movements had bigger impact than a carbon price
3. Assessment of the “Clean Energy Future” policy

Hopefully your family doesn’t have a climate denialist uncle or relative, but if it does, and you’re stuck sitting next to him (or her, if she’s an aunt) at Xmas Lunch, here’s some excellent graphs that you can use to help debunk his (or her) climate denialism (courtesy of NASA).

There are some other really startling graphs and visualisations at the NASA website, so I encourage you to go there.

Related posts:

1. Latest polling on climate change
2. A decade of cooling?
3. The economics of climate change

One of the premier climate change policy blogs, Climate Progress, has gotten ahold of a leaked email from Fox News boss Bill Sammon, which appears to direct staff to report that climate science has been “called into question” by its critics.

Screenshot via @climateprogress.

Climate Progress reports:

This morning, MediaMatters released the bombshell e-mail “sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon … less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was ‘on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.‘ “

Al Gore blogs, “Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis. The leaked emails now suggest that this bias comes directly from the executives responsible for their news coverage.”

More on the Media Matters investigation at Politico.

Related posts:

1. Latest polling on climate change
2. Good news for Tony Abbott: Off the deep end on climate change
3. Should we be “climate hawks”?

The Grattan Institute has released a report that confirms that costs to reduce pollution, especially carbon pollution, are cheaper than governments anticipate.

The report examined six market-based pollution reduction schemes, including the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme, the EU carbon trading scheme and the US sulphur trading scheme.

In each case the outcomes diverged significantly from government and industry predictions. Environmental markets routinely led to lower emissions and achievement of targets at lower cost in practice than in  forecasts. Forecasts tended to underestimate commercial innovation once money was at stake. In some cases the targets and regulations required relatively less change to business as usual than governments expected. Because it was relatively easy to achieve targets, the market price of emissions was lower than forecast. The price crash in European carbon markets was not just a “one-off” result of peculiarities in its initial design. The same pattern recurred in a variety of environmental markets.

The experience from these cases suggests:

1. Market based carbon prices are the cheapest way to reduce emissions. Forecasts about costs were generally much higher than the actual costs. The Grattan Institute also reports that market-based systems also encourage innovation across the community that “converge on the cheapest reductions”.
2. There should be lower limit on carbon prices in a market scheme. A “reserve” price “effectively tightens the pollution target” and presumably would stop price crashes that occurred in the European Union.
3. Technological innovation is key. The Grattan Institute argues that market-based carbon reduction systems are “consistently effective at identifying lower cost opportunities, promoting innovation and responding flexibly to changes.”

This report is not earth shattering – I’ve read similar statements from climate change policy experts over the last few years that say the same thing. We already know that currency price fluctuations have a bigger impact on our economy than a carbon price. We also know that it is technically feasible for Australia to reach 100% of its power from renewable energy sources by 2020.

There are consequences to introducing a carbon price – one which many on the irrelevant left and loony right don’t understand.

The pattern repeated across each of these schemes is that forecast prices for pollution permits and clean energy certificates are much higher than actuals. Forecasts consistently assume a continuation of “known” technologies, and market forces routinely deliver surprising innovations within a few years, resulting in achievement of targets at substantially lower cost than expected. In some cases the targets and regulations required relatively less change to business as usual than governments expected.

When we see the same features repeated across eight phases of six different schemes, we are entitled to suspect there might be a pattern. We can probably predict that in future the forecasts for environmental schemes are likely to overestimate the costs of reducing pollution, and are likely to be wrong about which actions will deliver pollution reduction at the lowest cost. (p.20)

The take away message for the CPRS from this report is that rather than set a carbon permit limit, the Government should set a price floor.

Experience also suggests that in designing trading schemes, governments should set price floors. The market price of carbon is likely to be lower than government forecasts. When governments over-estimate the cost of reducing emissions, they tend to choose a weak cap, or target, and make it easy to generate offsets. Governments (at least in theory) set pollution caps so that the expected benefit of reducing pollution is the same as the expected cost of reducing pollution. If the cost of reducing pollution is less than expected, it would be rational to set a lower cap. A floor price automatically corrects this tendency. A floor price effectively reduces the number of permits issued if the price falls to the floor. (p.21)

The experience of pricing schemes also suggests that floor prices should be delivered by setting a minimum price at which permits will be issued. This is preferable to setting up a government agency such as a central bank of carbon that intervenes in the market whenever prices fall below the floor price. (p.22)

This report comes at at time when the Australian Government is looking anew at the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. I wrote back in 2008 that the Federal Labor Government needs to “stand up to the self-interest of big business and the climate change skeptics in the Opposition.” I also wrote in 2008 that Labor looked as though it would squib on making the hard choices it needed when crafting the CPRS legislation.

I hope that the new Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, and Prime Minister Julia Gillard, show more courageous leadership this time around.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on carbon price talking points
2. Assessment of the “Clean Energy Future” policy
3. Labor needs a strong stand on emissions trading

There are many reasons that I’m voting Labor this Saturday, but they ultimately boil down to the fact that Labor is the only party that will take real action on climate change, rather than spouting slogans (Greens Party) or denying there’s a problem (Liberal Party).

Labor’s climate change policies could be better – I’ve committed to working to make them better – but they amount to real reductions in carbon pollution. Labor has real plans for stimulating clean energy jobs, and for the phased shutdown of Hazelwood.

If elected, these plans will go ahead – unlike the too-good-to-be-true Greens promises (the first sign of a scam is that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is). Similarly, Labor will invest in wind and solar farms in Victoria, while the Liberals want to make it more difficult to build a wind turbine than a new coal mine.

Labor has always been the party of progressive reform, and while there may be hurdles along the way, it is Labor that ultimately will take Australia to the clean energy future we need.

Related posts:

1. The Labor-Greens deal
2. Bob Brown decides to throw mud at Labor
3. Labor in Melbourne

Over at Climate Progress – probably the best climate focused blog out there – Joe discusses a recent move to rename those who advocate swift, decisive action on climate change as “climate hawks”.

“It’s time to be patriotic about something other than war.” John Edwards.

The term was coined by Dave Roberts from @grist and the entire post  – “Introducing Climate Hawks” – is worth reading.

Should we be "climate hawks"?

First, the term needs to be broad but shallow. That is, it needs to be broad enough to encompass everyone worried about these issues, but at the same time shallow enough that it doesn’t imply a bunch of other positions or commitments. It has to be something a business executive in Akron, Ohio, or a Navy Admiral will apply to themselves. You can’t smuggle a bunch of other stuff in; people just won’t use it.

So that pretty much rules out “planetarians” and “sustainablists” and “sky-huggers” and the like. The last thing we need is something that says, “like an environmentalist, but even more crunchy!” (It seems not to have occurred to lots of our readers that there are many Americans who don’t want to be nurturant Earth mother types.) Along the same lines, I’m somewhat fond of “transitionalist” or something else involving “transition,” but a) you’d have to stop and explain that to 99.99 percent of people, and b) once you explained that you’re talking about a ground-up re-engineering of human culture, you’re going to get a lot of, “oh, I just wanted a solar panel …”

So: broad but shallow.

Second, I’d just as soon avoid a term that has elite condescension built right in. You may have noticed that elite condescension is one thing lots of folks dislike about the left! This is why “Brights” blew up in Daniel Dennett’s face — if you call yourself Bright obviously the implication is that everyone else is dumb. Similarly, while I appreciate everyone’s wit, “sane” and “educated” and “sensible” and “realist” just won’t do. Yes, climate denialists have tried to claim “climate realists,” but to my ears they just sound defensive and pathetic. Of course whatever position you select, you think you’re right. That’s why you selected it! No need to go preening about it.

Third, if the term’s going to catch on, it has to sound natural, something an Average Jane could say in conversation and be understood without a bunch of additional explanation. This, I’m afraid, rules out most of the neologisms — “neodynamist” or “P4CE” or “energeers” or the like. It’s very, very difficult to get a brand new term like that in circulation, mainly because the first few people to try sound like total douchecanoes. Maybe a few NYT trend pieces could do it, but I’m pretty sure Grist couldn’t.

Fourth — and I didn’t get this until I read through the thread — I’d really like to avoid any “ist” or “ism.” An -ism is a tribe; an -ist is an identity. Those are substantial commitments. What’s direly needed is a way for people to be able to adopt climate and clean energy as concerns without being forced to make those additional commitments. This, I have to say, is what a lot of environmentalists don’t seem to get. Most people don’t want to be part of a tribe defined by ideological or political commitments. Environmentalism already strikes many folks as a kind of quasi-religion. We don’t want to create another -ism with similarly high barrier to entry. This, I’m sad to say, rules out “decarbonist,” which was one of my faves on purely descriptive grounds.

Now, a few things I like about “climate hawk” (which I should note was first suggested by my colleague Jon).

First and foremost, it doesn’t carry any implications about The Truth. It doesn’t say, “I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m smarter and more enlightened than you.” Instead it evokes a judgment: that the risks of climate change are sufficient to warrant a robust response. By definition, everyone must make such judgments on their own. Rather than being a Manichean choice — you get it or you’re stupid — it becomes about values, about how hard to fight and how much to sacrifice to defend America and her future. That’s the right conversation to be having.

Given the growing disaster that appears to be Obama’s White House climate policy, the visceral, evocative and proactive rhetoric behind “climate hawks” is clearly appealing.

But how appropriate is it for Australia and other non-US countries? Does it still carry the same short-hand connotations of “aggressive science-driven policy”? Are the military connotations a dead hand?

Should advocates of strong action on climate change in Australia start self-describing as “climate hawks”? Are climate activists ready to use a muscular, jingoistic and patriotic label like “climate hawk”? Are the deniers, delayers and lukewarmers “climate doves”?

Other links:

• Beware the Climate Hawk, Salon.com, via Climate Spectator
• Climate Hawks, Washington Post
• Climate Hawks Take Wing, PLOS
• On the quest to keep politics out of climate science, Grist
• Beyond (or Beside) Environmentalism: Rise of the ‘Climate Hawks’?, Treehugger
• Joining the Climate Hawks, Rortybomb

Related posts:

1. Lessons from behaviour change research: Why Clive Hamilton (and others) are wrong on climate “radicalism”
2. Latest polling on climate change
3. Essential climate graphs for dealing with your denialist uncle at Xmas lunch