ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
SOMETIMES you don’t discover your strength until your darkest hour. That was certainly true for me in 2013 when I lost my job as Australia’s first Climate Commissioner. For almost three years I’d been tasked with providing Australians with access to the latest developments in climate science, economic thinking about climate change and political action worldwide. Working with some of the nation’s top scientists, economists, business leaders and bureaucrats, I also met thousands of Australians face to face and helped answer their questions. In addition, the commission produced 18 climate reports and set up a highly informative and accessible website. The first actions of the newly elected Abbott government were to sack me, abolish the commission and take down the website.
I have rarely felt so helpless or frustrated. I knew that the commission’s work was vital if Australians were to understand the huge challenges ahead, but I could see no way of continuing our work, until Amanda McKenzie, one of my colleagues at the commission, suggested that we turn to the Australian people for help. Together the commissioners decided to take up the challenge, and, just five days after being sacked, we launched a crowd-funding campaign. A week later, ordinary Australians had contributed almost a million dollars, and we were on the way to setting up the Australian Climate Council. Its objectives are identical to those of the Climate Commission but, freed of government shackles and with a budget of A$1.75 million per year, it is a far more active and effective organisation.
The establishment of the Climate Council so soon after the abolition of the Climate Commission was a great victory for Australians who care about climate change. The organisation now acts as a major reference point for climate action nationally, and we have helped to change the way many people think about the issue. In 2015 more Australians understand that climate change is a problem than did in 2013, and support for action to address climate change is growing.
Just a few years ago none of this would have been possible. Crowd-funding platforms are relatively new, as are the social media the Climate Council uses to communicate. The take-home message for me is that individuals now are immeasurably more powerful in the battle against climate change than they were a decade ago. This is, in part, because social media can create communities of interest; and communities, being composed of customers and voters, are capable of altering the policies of institutions and corporations. Sheer creativity also means that the number of options for activism has proliferated. Following are just a few possibilities that I hope will inspire you.
If you are one of the 2.6 million Australians who have solar panels on your roof, and you wish to defend renewable energy, you can join Solar Citizens. This group, composed mainly of ordinary Australian retirees or people with mortgages (both of whom are often on fixed budgets and watch electricity prices closely), is becoming a formidable force in politics. When the Australian government recently threatened the nation’s renewable energy target, Solar Citizens began organising action in the 10 electorates where government members hold their seats with slim majorities. Their work has been an important influence on the government moderating its stance.
For young people, there’s a variety of national action groups united under the global Youth Climate Movement. In North America the Energy Action Coalition runs a series of events and actions, including ‘Fossil Fools Day’ which is held on 1 April and is marked by meetings and activities on campuses across the US aimed at reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Their Power Shift conferences and Campus Climate Challenge programs agitate for more renewable energy, while their Power Vote campaign encourages younger citizens to vote for those advocating action on climate change. In Australia, there’s the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC). Membership is restricted to those under 30, and social media is its preferred means of action. The AYCC’s Powershop campaign is typical of its many works. The campaigners use social media to organise people to shop at a particular store at a particular time—say, a supermarket at a weekend—after arranging that the profits from the weekend sales be put towards renewable energy or energy efficiency. Many businesses now owe their solar panels or energy efficiency measures to Powerup. And the program has become so popular with businesses that many have requested that the events be repeated.
Another highly effective project carried out by AYCC involved personal visits to the branch managers of Westpac, one of Australia’s biggest banks. Two hundred of the bank’s 300 branches had been visited by mid-2014. The AYCC campaigners explained to management that they were concerned that climate change fuelled by new coalmines in Australia’s Galilee Basin would affect their futures, and asked the bank not to invest in such projects. News of the visits soon reached headquarters, and Westpac is now fully aware of the extent of community opposition to the mines. Looking back over the past decade, I’m delighted at how effective activism by young people has been. When I wrote The Weather Makers, I remember how helpless many students and young people felt in the face of a climate crisis created by an older generation. If their elders had been half as effective as they are, we would have the climate problem under control by now.
Many options that were hard for people to adopt a decade ageo are now easy. In 2015, for example, installing solar panels is common sense on economic as well as environmental grounds, as is buying a fuel-efficient vehicle. Due to improved infrastructure, options like riding a bike or walking are also easier than ever. In many cities public transport options are increasing, with light rail networks in particular expanding. The various disinvestment campaigns now being waged on university campuses and in superannuation funds offer yet another course of action not available or not effective a decade ago. And, given the drop in the value of many fossil-fuel companies, divestment is looking like wise investment.
The entire electricity sector—from generation to transmission and retail—is being transformed by community action. Auckland-based Vector provides one example of how this is being done. The New Zealand company owns transmission assets in electricity, gas and communications (fibre-optic cables). It is 75.1 per cent owned by a trust composed of the company’s customers, who received an annual dividend of NZ$335 in 2014. Vector is now selling battery storage to its customers, so that its investment in expensive electricity transmission assets can be minimised. In Germany, communities are now campaigning to have ownership of transmission assets (poles and wires) transferred to local governments or co-operatives.
The selling of electricity is also transforming in Germany, where some electricity retailers are already community-owned. In Australia, plans to develop a community-owned electricity retailer in northern New South Wales are also well advanced, and many other examples exist in the US and Europe. The story is the same in electricity generation. The wind industry arose in Denmark in the 1970s with community-owned wind turbines. Thanks to innovative financing models, community-owned electricity generation is spreading rapidly in North America, Europe and Australia, with community-owned solar experiencing a boom even larger than that seen in wind. There’s a touch of ‘back to the future’ about this. Just a few decades ago electricity utilities were often owned by local or state governments. Then neoliberal economics saw them sold to corporations. Now, courtesy of new technologies, power is returning to the people.
If litigation appeals as a means of community activism, it’s worth knowing that the grounds on which governments are being taken to court for neglecting climate change are growing. In January 2015, the Mackay Conservation Group, a small group of environmentalists based in central Queensland, challenged the Australian government’s approval of the Carmichael coalmine in the Galilee Basin. At the heart of the challenge were the impacts of the CO2 on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The litigants claimed that the minister for the environment, Greg Hunt, had erred in ruling that the greenhouse gas emissions that would be created when the coal was burned were not relevant to his assessment. ‘That’s what we say is a major breach of Australia’s environment laws,’ said the group’s spokeswoman, Ellen Roberts.1 It’s the first time that a proposed coalmine has been challenged on such grounds in Australia, and the Environment Defender’s Office, a community legal centre specialising in public-interest environmental matters, is assisting the group. Samantha Hepburn, professor of law at Deakin University, says, ‘This has the potential to be a landmark decision and the Federal Court will be examining the role of the national environment legislation in terms of, ultimately, climate change and global warming.’2
Another potentially far-reaching legal case was recently instigated in the US by the group Atmospheric Trust Legal Actions, an entity created by young people, including law students, at Oregon State University. They took on the Oregon state government, demanding that it protect the climate. Their case was dismissed by a lower court, but in January 2014 three Oregon Court of Appeals judges visited Oregon State University to hear the appeal in its classrooms, giving law students the opportunity to witness an appeals court hearing on their own campus.
The students’ argument springs from Professor Mary Christina Wood’s book Nature’s Trust. Published in 2013, Nature’s Trust argues that citizens have a right to live and flourish. Therefore, a government elected by the people has a duty to protect the natural systems required for their survival: forests, wildlife, soil, water and air.3
Nine lawsuits or petitions based on Wood’s innovative legal theory are currently making their way through US state and federal courts as well as courts overseas. Her framework calls upon the public trust doctrine—which holds that certain resources are owned by and available to all citizens equally—to enforce the constitutional right to a livable environment. It includes the atmosphere as an asset in that trust, and it calls government to ‘restorative duty’, which means not just preventing future damage, but repairing past harms that scientists now identify as threatening to current and future generations.
On 11 June 2014, the US Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the Oregon students’ case. No matter what happens in these lawsuits, Professor Wood argues that legal action:
is not going away for two reasons. First, the climate crisis is intensifying, and courts are going to change their view of their role as more heat waves strike and the legislature sits idle. And second, the public trust doctrine isn’t going away. It’s been around since Roman times. And it is really too deep for any one opinion—even a Supreme Court opinion—to wipe out.4