Self indulgence? I've been revisiting my 2007 book The 3rd Degree

Is it just me being assailed by such an overwhelming sense of deja vu? 

Once again the Australian and American political classes are struggling to come to terms with real action on our climate challenge. Action that is commensurate with both the scale and urgency of the threat to human society in the 21st century. In 2007, I'd been optimistic, foolishly as it turns out, that we were moving into a post-climate debate era, that the time for action had arrived. Then the end of 2009 punctured that, and 2010 and 2011 thus far have failed to restore any real semblance of progress.

From an Australian perspective, this is what I was thinking in 2007 in my book The 3rd Degree: Frontline in Australia's Climate War. Tell me, was I just dreaming?

EXTRACT*: The fact is, there are lots of important and sensible things we can do, and the climate-aware know about them. They just can’t agree on which ones, when, and who’ll pay, as incumbents in all camps try to protect their positions. In a democracy, we the people have to prod them into action, deploying our wallets, votes and voices to challenge the old order and outdated thinking. I offer this set of guiding principles from The 3rd Degree war room:

We have to go beyond ideology. Neither capitalism nor socialism nor outright communism or totalitarianism, nor any of the shades in between ever showed any real respect for the environment. Now, in the 21st century, what could be more important than sustainability for people in harmony with the planet and its thin, fragile atmosphere? This is not a new ideology, it’s survival instinct!

Everything has to be on the table. Likening our challenge to a war is very deliberate, and we have to consider all of the weaponry available, while observing the climate equivalent of the Geneva Convention. Our options should include nuclear and coal, along with wind and solar, though all things won’t make sense for every scenario. We need transition options like gas and clean diesel, and some end-game possibilities like hydrogen and fuel cells for a zero-carbon-emission future. We need guerilla tactics on the streets of every nation with mass-distributed small-scale solutions as

well as large-scale centralised ones.

Nothing will be as it was. Accepted wisdom is set to fail. When paradigms are shifting, orthodoxies become irrelevant. If the question is ‘what is required to save human society?’ versus protecting the environment, a new set of answers and price equations will emerge. One piece of accepted wisdom is there’s no ‘silver- bullet’ solution – Al Gore jokes it’s more like ‘silver-buckshot’ – though there actually is one thing worth trying above all others. It’s a carbon market.

Markets work and can help us trade out of trouble. While markets are not perfect, do fail and should never be free from regulation, it’s no mystery that flexible, market-based democracy won the 20th century over undemocratic and command-and-control options. Over time markets are self-correcting, which is what we’re seeing in regard to climate and the environment right now, given the market has failed spectacularly. While many people find trading in pollution counter-intuitive or even fraudulent, it’s been proven to work on problems ranging from acid rain to salinity, and a vast global carbon market trading in emissions worth tril- lions of dollars a year is inevitable and essential. 

Markets won’t work automatically for everyone. A strong argument for ethics and equity arises where economic rationalism won’t work, a key case in point being Africa, already the hardest hit of all continents by climate change but responsible across all of its nations for only 3 percent of global greenhouse pollution. Carbon markets won’t direct much investment in pollution reduction to Africa, because it hasn’t got that much to reduce.

Government intervention in the right places. Precisely because markets and commercial rivalry don’t always work in the broader interests of society, govern- ments will need to intervene strategically to foster new industries, not just protect incumbents. Stand-out opportunities for Australia include capturing the carbon from coal and gas energy generation and sequestering it underground in naturally occurring storage formations; large-scale solar thermal plants, both stand-alone and augmenting traditional coal-fired power stations to heat water for the steam to drive turbines; and a massive orchestrated shift of the vehicle fleet to ultra-clean diesel-hybrid technology for both bio and synthetic fuel, produced in coal-to-liquid plants with carbon capture and storage, and via similar processes using metropolitan waste, sewage and other biomass as the feedstock.

Just slowing pollution isn’t enough. We’ll also need to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and capture it through industrial and natural processes on a massive scale, which means finding somewhere to store it, whether in biomass including trees or new genetically enhanced crops, in the oceans, in the soil, or deep underground. Just not where it can end up in the atmosphere.

Energy security is also vital. With the exception of declining oil stocks, Australia is remarkably immunised from the energy security panic sweeping most of the world. By contrast with the nation’s small population and industrial base, on a per capita basis we are an energy superpower, punching well above our weight with a lot of coal, uranium and natural gas, and huge potential for wind, solar, tidal, geo-thermal and ‘hot- rock’ generation. For most countries – and this will impact on us too – there’s little prospect of solutions to global warming if they are not also solutions for energy security.

What we think and do is only part of the equation. A lot of our climate and energy debate is conducted as though Australia operates in isolation from the world and can do what it likes. Our politicians play shamelessly to a parochial domestic audience, our media often let them do it, and we frequently operate blind to international reality. In truth, we’re a small, trade-dependent economy at the bottom of the world that can’t just give the finger to its far more powerful trading partners in Asia, Europe and the Americas. If the world acts on climate, we won’t be allowed to maintain dirt-cheap electricity prices while we keep on polluting at the same time. The world doesn’t work that way.

*Extract from The 3rd Degree: Frontline in Australia's Climate War, published by Pluto Australia in its NOW Australia series, April 2007. (This book was very 'in the political moment' of 2006-7, so a lot has changed. But it's depressing how much hasn't changed, or has actually regressed. I have a box-full under the house, somewhere, and will happily send a copy gratis if anyone is interested in a little trip down memory lane. Just ask me, that's the least I can do to avoid waste!)

The Great Disruption: My Review of Paul Gilding's Book

This post is my column in WME Environmental Management News published on April 4th, 2011...

Most people engaged in sustainability know the name Paul Gilding: school dropout and Maoist trade union organiser at 17, environmental activist and head of Greenpeace International at 33, entrepreneur, business adviser to global corporations, and now author at 51. His book, The Great Disruption, is released around the world this month. It’s a must read and needs to reach an audience well beyond usual-suspect sustainability true believers. By Murray Hogarth.

Knowledge and timber, it’s said, shouldn’t be much used until they are seasoned. So Paul Gilding waited over half a century to write his first book. I’ve had a front row chance to see his profoundly challenging thesis on the future of our world evolve over the past decade or more, from pub chats, to self-published polemics, to wannabe international bestseller. From what I can tell, just about every significant thought and experience Paul’s ever had is in The Great Disruption. For lesser intellects, that might be a very short book - not for Paul!

Now embarked on a two-month, multi-continent book tour, Paul is confirming his growing status as a global sustainability thought leader. His story is pitched way beyond today’s public controversy and petty political skirmishing over the science of climate change and the cost of putting a price on carbon. It envisages a time, not far off, when argument about our planet’s interconnected environmental, social and economic mega-challenges will be over and the case for extraordinary action will be compelling.

With characteristic lack of modesty, Paul describes his book as ‘a bracing assessment of the planetary crisis that we can no longer avoid and the once-in-an-epoch chance it offers to build a better world’. To his mind the great disruption of his book’s title has already begun, we just don’t know it yet.

For the record, I’m clearly biased as a reviewer. I’ve known Paul for nearly 15 years, and for over a decade our lives and thinking have been very closely entwined as colleagues, friends and creative collaborators. I’ve shared some of his most powerful formative experiences, his highs and lows in life, and I’ve seen firsthand his intellectual evolution from fiery activist, to intuitive business sustainability adviser, to emerging visionary statesman for Gaia. Having emotionally buffered himself, and prepared his arguments with great precision, Paul is now setting out to engage a mass global audience with his thesis. I hope many will want to listen, not cover their ears, because this is an important and excellent book.

As it happens, Paul also has a great sense of timing, or is just plain lucky, because in 2011 few would argue that we’re living in times of other than great disruption. Ongoing post-GFC financial instability in Europe, regime change in the Middle East, extreme natural and then nuclear disaster in Japan, Tea Party anger in America, oil and food prices trending dangerously higher, and the limits to traditional economic growth appearing in many places as sustainability challenges mount. Oh, and then there’s climate change! For Paul Gilding, this is all highly relevant, yet only a taste of what is to come.

I’m not going to précis Paul’s book in full. My hope is everyone will read every last work of it, because we all need to. What I want to focus on is the core of the core, his central thesis of a great disruption leading to great chaos, and out of it a great awakening setting humanity up for ultimately a great future.

As he recounts, Paul has already shed his tears and done his grieving for our world, as we know it, coming to terms personally with his evaluation that we now can’t avoid the traumatic end of economic growth, nor the loss of much of our planet’s current amazing biodiversity, nor massive human suffering. Never a man excessively attached to wealth, possessions or prestige as ends in themselves, I know he’s also downsized his own life very significantly. Getting rid of debt, putting experiences over shopping for stuff, and moving with his family to a rural lifestyle where self-sustaining subsistence is plausible – an element of survivalist preparation if worst comes to worst!

The great disruption of his book’s title has already begun, he writes, with 2008 the kick-off year. Humanity has overshot the carrying capacity of the planet, and a climate crisis enveloping us is only the blitzkrieg ahead of a much bigger, comprehensive sustainability crisis. With brutal pragmatism, based on hardheaded mathematics and immutable physics, Paul lays out why we now can’t avoid the consequences of the overshoot, however much we may wish it were otherwise. As Paul is fond of saying, ‘it is what it is’, and many of us who have immersed ourselves in sustainability over many years will find his logic, his factual base and his interpretations inescapable. Distressing, yet compelling.

So the question that becomes crucial, if like me you accept his ultra-bleak analysis and framing of the end of current-style economic growth as a foregone conclusion, is what happens next? The planet goes on, of course, changed but ever changing, magnificently resilient over evolutionary and geological timescales. What, however, about people, about us and our immediate descendants and the future generations we hope will follow? Will human civilisation collapse rapidly into barbarism with billions of lives lost and no hope of recovery in any meaningful timeframe, as some noteworthy commentators project? Or do we collectively suck up the pain, adapt at speed and rise again with a clean, sustainable, dramatically better economy and society?

Paul’s relentless ‘it’s too late to avoid terrible consequences’ message is balanced by surprising optimism; that we are ‘slow, but not stupid’, and when humanity’s response comes it will be awesome. His hope isn’t an almost afterthought, as I argue was the case with Al Gore’s original film and book An Inconvenient Truth, nor a glib add-on as we see from the likes of The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. Paul deliberately reaches and flags the emotional low point of his book before the halfway mark, and then speaks at least as powerfully and passionately to the rise of a new, better world as he does to the demise of the old, very flawed one.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been zeroing in on the key question of when the great disruption gets really bad, does humanity plunge into the abyss or fight its way back to a better place? I’ve also been exchanging story references with Paul, because his book is tapping into a wider conversation already bubbling up around our troubled world. We’ve been very taken by two pieces, both published by the online US newspaper The Huffington Post, which canvass how badly humanity may react to unfolding disaster, and also how inspiringly good the collective may turn out to be in the face of calamity, even climate change and sustainability calamity lasting for many decades before real improvement can be hoped for.

From Paul’s perspective, the two writers Keith Harrington and Johann Hari reflect a serendipitous outbreak of universal consciousness, meshing very closely with his own contemplations of what may lie ahead. I believe their views also reflect a reality we’re seeing in Australia right now, in how the vexed politics of getting to real climate action is playing out, yet also in how Australians have recently responded to major natural disaster in the shape of the early 2011 floods, especially in the Brisbane region, and also Cyclone Yasi in far north Queensland. On a bigger stage, the heroic so-called ‘nuclear samurai’ at the stricken Fukushima reactor complex in Japan, and the post-tsunami stoicism of the Japanese people, speak to humanity’s better angels.

Keith Harrington: ‘ … when people start rioting about climate-induced food shortages - the first thing on their mind won't be "I demand the government do something about climate change," but, "I demand the government figure out a way to provide us with food security again." Of course, policies to facilitate a rapid switch away from fossil fuels and reduce other climate-change drivers will be part of the government response, but they'll hardly be the main focus.

When people are starving they won't be placated by legislation to cap or tax carbon emissions. Such measures might even take a back seat to more immediate solutions. … In short, when things fall apart, what the public will demand first and foremost are answers from leaders and experts about how to create an economy that will solve the problems that the old one brought on. If left-wing political leaders don't have clear answers for how to build a new economy that provides for human needs, people will do what they've always done: Put their faith in right-wing demagogues ¬- men who will prey on public fears and misery, and channel them into persecution of the Other - i.e. of some imagined internal or external scapegoat. Without a credible systemic alternative we'll revert to fascism, tribalism and violence.’

Johann Hari: ‘The evidence gathered over centuries of disasters, natural and man-made, is overwhelming. The vast majority of people, when a disaster hits, behave in the aftermath as altruists. They organize spontaneously to save their fellow human beings, to share what they have, and to show kindness. They reveal themselves to be better people than they ever expected. When the social scientist Enrico Quarantelli tried to write a thesis how people descend into chaos and panic after disasters, he concluded: "My God! I can't find any instances of it."

On the contrary, he wrote, in disasters "the social order does not break down ... Co-operative rather than selfish behavior predominates." The Blitz Spirit wasn't unique to London: it is universal. … This is likely to be a century of escalating ecological disasters, since each year we destabilize our climate more, in the face of plain scientific warnings. It's hard to extract any hope from the picture this fact presents us with. But there is some. Alongside this impulse to denial and self-destruction, there is something fundamentally good in us. We are humans. We care about each other. We will - at the most crucial and final moment - sacrifice for each other, like the technicians who are trying to prevent the nuclear plant melting down, knowing this is probably personal suicide. That's something to hold onto.’

I like a lot about our planet, and have four children, Paul has five, so at one level I still cling to hope that he’s overstating the great disruption part, and underestimating the great awakening. Yet I can’t find any gaping holes in his analysis of the problem, supported as it is by logic, science and real unfolding evidence. I am heartened, though far from totally reassured, by his well-argued solutions and ultimately uplifting conclusion. One thing I am sure of, however, is the whole world and every constituency in it needs to be having the conversation that Paul Gilding is setting up in The Great Disruption.

If a great awakening is to be expedited, and the worst consequences of our human mistakes are to be somehow reduced, if not avoided, the sooner we get started the better. We are being slow, as Paul contends, and now we’ll have to prove we’re not stupid!

Vantage Point columnist: Murray Hogarth is an independent sustainability strategy and communications consultant through his firm the 3rd degree, a senior adviser to the Green Capital corporate sustainability program and director of energy saving technology group Wattwatchers. The views expressed here are personal ones.

The Great Disruption was released by Bloomsbury in Australia on March 29.

Paul Gilding's book The Great Disruption ... it cometh

I am reading an advance copy of my friend and longtime colleague Paul Gilding's book The Great Disruption, due for for public release in Australia, US and UK in April. It's very good, but a more comprehensive review will come later.

I believe this will be an important and very thoughtful contribution to the often shallow and scarily short-term climate and sustainability debates running in Australia, the US and elsewhere.

What follows is the UK press release for Paul's book (see cover pic at bottom):

	The Great Disruption By Paul Gilding

This Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological change. We’re at it again in 2011, with weather extremes driving record food prices and political tension fueling peak oil driven price spikes. It’s time to face reality – we have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet's ecosystems and resources. The earth is full – and it’s time to brace for impact.

The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the economic challenge facing humanity - yet contains a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering, and conflict with a synchronised, related crash of the economy and the ecosystem leading to food shortages, massive economic change and geopolitical instability. However, they will also bring humanity’s best: compassion, innovation, resilience and adaptability; and more good news - there is life after shopping!

It is true, as some advocates argue, we could choose to let a dog-eat-dog response to the crisis drive us into ever smaller conflicting groups of regions, nations and communities – of defensive and scared people fighting over what’s left, fighting for physical survival. In that scenario, we would lose millennia of human development and have to effectively start again, just hoping the cycle wouldn’t repeat itself.

Or, we can choose to consciously overcome that tendency, as we have in the past. We can draw on what is great about being human and dig deep to express our highest potential – the potential that can take us through the coming crisis and out the other side to a stronger, safer and more advanced civilisation.

Gilding tells us how to choose the latter, and how to fight and win what he calls ‘the One Degree War’ to prevent catastrophic warming. With his background as both a senior global activist and as strategy advisor to numerous global corporations, he describes this challenge both in its social and geopolitical implications but also as a business opportunity greater than any in history.

PAUL GILDING is an Australian advocate for sustainability and climate change who has spent 35 years campaigning for a balanced use of Earth’s resources. His experience has ranged from being the global head of Greenpeace to advisor many Fortune 100 corporations.

'One of those who has been warning me of [a coming crisis] for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment--when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once--"The Great Disruption."'

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times

Can any government spend our tax money well on climate ad campaigns?

Information from the ad world is that right now the Federal Government IS seeking an agency for a 'first quarter' climate change awareness campaign. It is reasonable to assume this means Q1 of financial year 2011-12 (i.e. July-September), given that we are already in March and word of this filtered out late last month.

The 'client' would be the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in Canberra, and the dollars being quoted are '$11.5 million with an annual allocation of $29 million'.

That's some big bucks, so major agencies are sure to be getting their creative caps on! Although in quality terms the recent record in this territory is not great and climate awareness is something of a poisoned chalice.

This call to the market fits neatly with the $30 million allocated by Treasurer Wayne Swan in the May 2010 Federal Budget for a climate change awareness campaign. Seen as a likely pre-election splurge at the time, the money went unspent as the Rudd Government disintegrated on climate change (and then altogether), and an early election on August 21 2010 ruled out a rush job climate ad campaign. You can imagine how that would have gone down at the time!

In recent days travelling Prime Minister Julia Gillard has refused to rule an ad campaign 'in or out', while hard-attacking Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has predicted that the Government will spend big on an ad campaign.

Before the Opposition gets too self-righteously angry about this, it is worth recalling its estimated $25 million 'Be Climate Clever' run in September 2007, just two months before the election the long-serving Howard Coalition Government lost to a resurgent Labor under Kevin (Kevin '07) Rudd. Malcolm Turnbull was Environment Minister in charge then, and the government baulked at the 11th hour on its plan to send a booklet to every home in Australia and just went with a website.

Then in 2008 we had the Rudd Government's estimated $13.9 million 'Think Climate. Think Change' climate awareness campaign. Frankly, this was not a great step forward on 'Be Climate Clever', and neither of them exactly live on in the Australian psyche like a climate version of the 'Grim Reaper' or 'Slip Slop Slap'.

Looking forward to hearing a lot of views on this matter, but to this correspondent's mind it is not of necessity a bad thing to run a substantial public awareness campaign on the most important public policy issue of the 21st century.

What is bad is a Government that can't sell the action we need and an Opposition that does lots of opposing and next to nothing about responding to the great climate challenge.

We don't need the 2011 version of 'Be Climate Clever' or 'Think Climate. Think Change' to slot in neatly with the Greens gaining the balance of power in the Senate and a vote coming on for a price on carbon, be it tax, ETS, or hybrid.

What we could use is a campaign that may be better described as an 'energy awareness campaign', confronting head on the escalating price of electricity, gas and fuel and the energy security challenges that the world and by extension Australia faces.

The Government has the makings of a real strategy for the future here and can sell it ... if it has the will and finds the smarts to do so! It can engage people in the solution as well as the big end of the town.

Here are some key elements to think about:

1. A price on carbon pollution that polluters pay and the $ go to help householders, badly exposed businesses and R&D
2. Scale back/phase out subsidies that tilt energy playing field towards fossil fuels
3. Maintain and ideally accelerate the 20% by 2020 renewable energy target and beef it up politically as an integrated clean energy and energy resilience strategy for the nation in a troubled world
4. Set a national energy efficiency target of at least 30% by 2020 and push it hard
5. Get aggressive about the 'smart grid' - and by that take it to mean a lot more than utility-controlled smart meters - including making this objective a critical component of the National Broadband Network
6. In transport, move to a user pays road pricing model while also promoting plug-in electric vehicles as a key part of the long-term solution (which in turn will require more electricity, an even even smarter grid, and more clean energy in the system). Australia needs an answer to how we rapidly wean our nation off costly foreign oil as reserves decline and the geo-political instability rises, especially in the crucial Middle East region.

Big business and government investment have to be a major part of the solution. But the people have a vital role to play too, especially in the early years, when energy efficiency including through behaviour change across 8 million plus households and hundreds of thousands of small businesses can save the consumers themselves money, take pressure off the grid, and avert the need for more traditional polluting power stations to be built at huge expense.

There's an amazing opportunity here for the taxpayers' $30 million to be spent well. Although past performance by both sides of politics still suggests it will be spent badly.

The energy opportunity outlined above is one view of what the future can be. This needs to be a vibrant discussion. Let's make sure that happens whatever path the next ad campaign takes.

Too much time in shops, hoping to 'buy better'

(Reposting of my post for Environmental Management News, 28/02/2011)

I’ve been spending too much time in the shops lately. Actually, I’ve been checking out online buying opportunities too. Not that I’ve actually bought anything. Rather, I’ve been investigating the state of retailer buy-in to all things ‘green’, ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ in Australia. 

It’s an important question because veterans in the field of sustainability labels and certification schemes, and pioneers in the creation of a greener marketplace, are clear on one thing at least. The big retailers have great power and can be either immensely frustrating barriers to change for the better, or wonderful allies!

To better understand how sustainability, broadly defined, is faring in the retail landscape, I’ve been stalking the aisles and checking out the shelves of stores like Woolworths, Coles, Harvey Norman, Bunnings, JB Hi-Fi, Mitre 10, Kmart and others. I’ve been perusing online retail offerings too, and researching what overseas retailers like Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Walmart and its UK subsidiary ASDA are up to.

So, what is the verdict from my own early in-store investigations? Performance Down Under is less than inspiring. Patchy at best, ad hoc and reactive, and so far away from world’s best practice that it’s sometimes hard to make meaningful comparisons. Far from making sustainability a strategy and a theme to engage consumers, retailers in the main have been responding case by case to a series of external regulatory, commercial and community pressures or other ‘stimuli’.

Examples of this set of rolling responses include, in their own ways, plastic bags, free range eggs and now pork too, container deposits, problems with palm oil and paper-based products, the disappearance of incandescent light globes and the prominence of energy star stickers on white goods and TVs.

When challenged to be more strategic, for example on carbon labeling, the standard major retailer position in Australia is that mainstream consumers aren’t yet asking loudly for environmental, ethical and carbon benefits per se; at least outside of traditional hot button items like animal cruelty, wasteful packaging and the health concerns that drive awareness of and interest in ‘free range’, ‘organic’ and the Mobius recycling symbol among other things.

But what if consumers are always going to be a lagging indicator, a likelihood being voiced in other parts of the world? What if business leadership is the key ingredient for advancing to a more sustainable economy instead of scanning the retail horizons for customer demand to justify action?

And if so, who will break the Mexican stand-off between retailers who aren’t ready to lead on their shelves, and consumers who aren’t ready to demand change at the check out?

I know Australian retailers will argue they are doing good work now in reducing the environmental footprint of their own operations, especially transport logistics, storage and the stores themselves across headline indicators like energy, carbon, water and waste. That’s great, in some cases even admirable, and they’ll doubtless have to do a lot more of it in the years ahead.

Retailers also may feel they are but a way station in the life cycle of many products, sitting between the footprint intensive production stage and the often even more footprint intensive consumer use and post-consumer disposal stages.

Any such excuses and the current performance by retailers, however, are just not good enough given the stakes involved. In our giant consumption value chain, retailers are the crucial interface between production and end use, and a vital intervention point to influence both suppliers and consumers.

Government, for example, can require energy ratings stickers on white goods and TVs, and fuel efficiency ones for motor vehicles. But those stickers become more powerful if prospective purchasers deal with sales people who are knowledgeable about the ratings and actively promote the operating cost benefits on offer.

Retailers also are morphing into major producers and brand owners in their own right, with a rising tide of house brand products. In Australia, too, the biggest retailers like the Woolworths and Wesfarmers groups have extraordinary dominance of the marketplace based on international comparisons, with Woolies and Coles tying up an estimated 70% of grocery retailing for example.

Beyond being big grocers, they are big in others areas too like petrol, alcohol, pubs and gaming, clothing, general merchandise, hardware and office supplies. They are far more than stores, for example playing critical roles in food supply distribution across the nation, in good times and also in times of emergencies.

Putting aside whether consumers are green, leaning that way, still needing to learn more or even intransigent brown bombers, there are some very practical reasons for retailers to get more engaged in the consumer-focused end of sustainability. Cost of living increases in key areas like fuel, electricity, food and even waste disposal are top of mind for many people now and they will drive new products, services and business models, including more and more online alternatives to traditional retailing.

Australian retailers are not generally regarded as being among the world’s great innovators, but we need them to move past tentative baby steps and at least be faster followers.

This is an opportunity for retailers to step up and exert positive influence in the marketplace commensurate with their power. If the established retailers miss the boat on this, others will sail in and seize the advantage.

No doubt we’ll all have lots of ideas about what the retailers should do. I know I do. But in the end what we want is for them to be engaged and innovating for solutions that can work for their businesses and society.
Overseas examples include:

• the ‘Greener Tesco’ initiative and their special ‘green points’ on the chain’s Clubcard loyalty system;
• Marks & Spencer’s far-reaching ‘Plan A - Doing the right thing’;
• the giant Walmart’s Sustainable Product Index, with its ultimate aim to provide customers with an ‘easy to understand rating system so they can make choices and consume in a more sustainable way’; and
• ASDA, the Walmart subsidiary in the UK, with its focus in three key areas – products, energy and waste. ASDA is polling its customers and followers on what should be highest priority, and currently stocking ‘sustainable products’ is in first place, well clear of ‘zero waste’ then ‘renewable energy’.

In Australia we need more sustainable products on the shelves, properly validated through independent certification and other assessment schemes and labels. We need the most blatantly unsustainable products to be ‘choice edited’ off the shelves.

And we actually need to get rid of some of the shelves altogether, replacing shops with online options, and substituting experiences and services for physical ‘stuff’. I’m going back to the shops soon. I hope to see change!

'This is a huge cyclone, the likes of which really have not been seen in living memory'

The quote in the heading above is from Police Deputy Commissioner Ian Stewart, as Tropical Cyclone Yasi gets close to crossing the Far North Queensland coastline very soon.

Perhaps the greatest fear is that the sheer force of the cyclone will drive a storm surge of seawater, with the ocean literally invading the land.

This correspondent's thoughts are with everyone in the firing line in my birth state of Queensland, but especially with my brother-in-law Ross Isaacs, the wonderful underwater cinematographer, and his fiancee Katie.

On better days Ross can be found diving the amazing depths of the Coral Sea. Today, that sea threatens his home in Port Douglas, north of Cairns.

Stay safe Ross and Katie. Stay safe everyone.

See NASA images of the massive Cyclone Yasi as it headed in here

Overweight and Planetary Overload - two sides of one coin

When we talk about the unsustainable nature of the current global economy, the over-consumption and the waste, the 7 billion people and rising, I think many people have been struck by a simple comparison.

People are constantly destroying their own health, in defiance of well known health warnings and doctor's advice, by over-eating, eating the wrong things and so on. Many of us wolf down burgers, and some smoke and many drink and so on too.

What we are doing to the planet as collective humanity is little different to what we do to ourselves. Nor are problems of recognising the evidence much different.

Like eco-systems, our bodies can be amazing resilient to abuse for a long time until the final straw is loaded. Then multi-systemic breakdown switches in and nothing can stave off ultimate collapse.

This thought bubble is going somewhere.

An eminent former Australian Health Minister Dr Neal Blewett has just finished a report on food labelling in Australia. You can see the whole report or summaries here:

http://www.foodlabellingreview.gov.au/internet/foodlabelling/publishing.nsf/content/labelling-logic

Just throwing this out there, but this report is pretty sensible about health issues while largely ignoring the environment, with the exception being new technologies such as GM, irradiation and possibly ones in the pipeline like nanotechnology.

So how do we apply its thinking, risk hierarchy approach, front of label and front of counter (for fast food outlets) solutions to environmental sustainability more explicitly? Lots to mull over. Thoughts?