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The scope of change required to meet the GHG reduction targets currently being set is enormous. Targets of 80% reductions (by 2050) are even today being labelled “minimum” as new evidence emerges that the IPCC (et al) calculations, predictions and calls for action err on the side of optimism. Indeed, there is emerging evidence of the need for large-scale sequestration of existing atmospheric GHG concentrations, supporting a “> 100%” net decline in anthropogenic emission rates.

Regardless of whether the required target is 80%, 110% or otherwise, it is clear that given the reliance on emission heavy activities, energy sources and construction materials the degree of required change will be disruptive. Achieving the required GHG cuts will require a mixture of direct and indirect market interventions. Direct intervention will generally be in the form of regulation that controls, limits, and apportions polluting activities. Indirect intervention will be achieved through pricing in and accounting for those factors, which are currently regarded as market externalities. As a result, the current assumptions that make supply chain choices et al what they are today will shift seismically, leading to a new reality. Achieving that new reality involves changing the energy supply/consumption model - creating the requirement for new skills, while inherently also requiring behavioural and system changes in order for the change to gain momentum and to be successful.

The bulk of any country’s school systems are utterly unprepared to adequately equip those currently being educated by it with regards to climate change science, overall environmental degradation, resource depletion. This is largely due to a twin failure of government policy failure and a lack of meaningful parental and social pressure. Due to that fact, almost no schools have given adequate thought toward any potential curriculum changes designed to better provide graduating students with the practical and theoretical skills that will be useful in a world struggling to implement the changes necessary to avoid catastrophic ecosystem failure. In short, the majority of any country’s education systems are failing in their duty to provide today’s students with the skills and knowledge required for survival and success in the future.

The required responses to climate change are framed over the coming four to five decades. Unless the students of today are set on a different path and enabled to actively take part in supporting these changes the time at which social inertia is overcome will be further delayed. Climate change predictions and science indicate that urgent action is required and further delay will be catastrophic.

It is worth being mindful of the fact that the impacts of climate change will be felt over an extended period of time (albeit one measured in very human time scales). The same is of true of the implementation of the required changes to the behaviour of people, to our processes, and our use of technology. Given that the GHG reduction targets are framed over a 40+ year timeframe we would do well to recognise that those individuals in our school systems in 2009 will be the business leaders, workers, and adult members of society of 2050. The skills that they will need to have will be different than those valued today.

The cross-generational shift of valued skill sets is not an unknown phenomenon; society’s history since the industrial revolution is littered with examples of tectonic technology shifts making long valued skill-sets obsolete within a single decade. Over the last 30 or so years we have seen this phenomena within almost every business and organisation – manifesting itself as the widespread use of ICT (Information Communications Technology) has moved from EDP back office processing and academic research to being a ubiquitous face of commerce and daily activity. The terms “digital natives”, “digital immigrants”, and “digital ignorant” have been coined to refer to the various generations moving through the workforces of the 1980s through today, and their relative comfort levels with ICT.

Mirroring the way that we have seen the emergence of the Digital Native, we will see an evolution in the understanding of climate change and effective avoidance strategies in future generations. Such a change however, will not occur by itself. Inherent inertia must be overcome, and a thoughtful and planned approach taken toward guiding the path of development.

Borrowing from this idea of “Digital Natives”, and recognising also that the skills required to enact the changes necessary to meet the GHG reduction targets will be different again from those that will be useful in the longer term, the labels “emission ignorants”, “emission transitioners”, and “emission adepts” are useful ones - capturing the essence of the required shifts in skills sets over time.

Emission ignorants are those who remain unaware of either the facts of climate change, or the scope of the necessary changes. A subset of the Ignorants may be moved to the Transitioner category through education.
Emission Transitioners are those individuals who will play an active role in enabling the necessary GHG emission reductions. They are a visible minority today and their waxing influence will straddle the decades between now and the current emission reduction target date of 2050. The activities of Transitioners will be defined as one of “dealing with change” as they seek to understand the scope of the necessary changes, and then unravel the current organisational and structural behaviours and systems, replacing them with the new.

Emission Adepts will eventually replace Emission Transitioners. Adepts will live in a world where the majority of the necessary changes have already occurred. As the economic externalities of emissions have been internalised, the basic assumptions that drive every day activity will also have changed. In essence, Adepts will have internalised those assumptions and will live within a society, an economic model, and a world that has structurally adapted to the new reality.

Those that are the relative “early transitioners” must apply their individual and collective skills toward to the efforts to better understand our current state, the needs of the future, and the efforts to communicate and engage with the Emissions Ignorants. Co-operation is key between academia, business, and political parties if we are to harvest the skill sets that currently exist in the marketplace, and to move ahead with the pace and accuracy required. An effective sharing of academic knowledge related to climate change will accelerate and broaden awareness and knowledge in society at large, amongst business leaders, and regulators. Meanwhile, academia will benefit from further understanding the evolving needs of the marketplace and therefore in what ways and at what pace curriculum should alter. Nimbleness will be highly important, though it is currently lacking.

Read more here in a whitepaper entitled “Setting the framework for skills change” (PDF format).  Setting the framework for skills change considers the need for an evolving set of practical and theoretical skills amongst the workforce and the broader community in order to support an adequate response to climate change.

Henry David Thoreau said, “We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice”.

And so it is with technology and the energy supply model underlying it. What wonders the profligate use of petroleum based fuels and coal has brought to mankind over the last century. Borrowing profusely from the energy stores of the past has allowed us to break free from the limits otherwise placed on us, had we needed to continue relying solely on plant based energy sources for fuel, and animals (and human slaves) and the occasional use of wind, water and gravity for motion. Supporting as it has the major technology innovation driven macro economic cycles of the 20th century we must recognise that even our current plans (such as they are) to move to widespread use of renewables for electricity supply would not be possible without the construction and technology innovations fuelled by the petro industry.

Our current perilous state is the end result of two human failings.

Firstly, we have treated as an externality the economic and environmental cost of the pollution generated through burning coal and petro fuels. The treatment of pollution as an externality is not just a problem of human behaviour; it is clearly also a systemic failure of market fundamentals, and one that must be addressed even as we seek a way out of the current global economic unravelling.

Secondly, we have failed to plan sufficiently for the eventual and entirely logical decline in the availability of oil supplies. The extent to which we have collectively found it convenient to ignore the clarion calls regarding the peaking of oil supplies is breathtaking.

Yet here we are; facing the environmental unravelling that results from a century of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the collapse of the market systems as a result of self deception as their true operational nature, together with the real likelihood that peak oil is a “now” not a “later”. You couldn’t plan that nexus better if you were the scriptwriter for a Hollywood disaster movie.

While the irony of our current problems should not escape us the technology that it has allowed us to develop might however provide the means for us to avoid some of the worst of the potential resulting scenarios. It may be argued that in the long term (meaning: really long term) human society needs to evolve to an entirely different model (and why not - we have seen already in human history the existence of several different models that have been effective in their day, given the needs and limits of the time). However in the short to medium term we must recognise that we cannot simply stop doing every activity that is currently performed and that in this new reality is recognised to have an unacceptably large ecological footprint. To attempt to do so would be far too disruptive of the current social order to be acceptable. Instead, we must use technology in different ways in order to provide low GHG emission alternatives to current heavy GHG emission ways of working and living.

Of all of the changes we must make, the two areas that will require technology-supported alternatives to most desperately are travel and electricity supply, and they are in fact linked.

Lets first look at travel. The four most common forms of polluting travel are (road based) vehicular, sea-borne bulk carriers, air, and rail. Which is worse is a moot point as far as progressing the discussions along in the short term, especially given the debate over the actual impact of jet propelled, high altitude flight. For simplicity’s sake it is worth assuming that they’re all bad, and they will all need to be drastically curtailed and/or re-engineered if they are to remain viable.

Sea-borne bulk carriers are the easiest to deal with, so lets get that topic out of the way first. The easiest way of avoiding pollution resulting from an activity is to not perform the activity in the first place. The vast majority of bulk carriers are either carrying crude or refined petrochemicals or derived products or coal; raw or semi refined minerals; components that are destined to used somewhere else as part of a highly distributed supply chain; or completed manufactured goods. The shipping of petro products and coal in bulk will clearly decline anyway as we remove these products as primary energy supply sources. Highly distributed and long tail supply chains look increasingly unviable when we recognise those costs that are currently treated as economic externalities, and in doing so account for those costs in the price of the resulting product and service. Already companies are beginning to re-examine their supply chains in light of GHG emissions, and work is underway to further refine the Scope 3 calculations of the GHG Protocol by the World Resource Institute in order to provide further clarity regarding the details of supply chain reporting. In a similar fashion, we can expect a reduction in long distance shipping of manufactured products, especially as the embodied footprint of such products is more commonly calculated, reported, and as a result priced in to the product. In such a scenario a locally produced product will become more desirable than an equivalent product manufactured remotely. The accounting for the pollution resulting from the fuelling of the remaining shipping movements will naturally encourage a re-examination of nuclear driven ships, and the use of wind power.

Rail meanwhile needs to be powered by either clean sources of electricity, or through acceptable bio-fuels. These same two energy sources are also required for road based vehicular transport. We must however get much smarter in our use of technology if we are to make rail transport again acceptable as a common form of mass human transport. Currently rail journeys are more often than not an exercise in frustration, uncoordinated as they are with bus services, and with the thicket of overlapping rail service providers that has resulted from privatisation of the rail network in many countries. Successfully getting from A to B via rail services is an unnecessarily complex wrestle with numerous timetables, ticketing systems, and interchanges - none of which have seen much effort to simplify. It needn’t be so. If we made the same effort toward taking the friction out of rail transport as we have to making car travel easier and more enjoyable we would go a long way toward making mass rail services far more attractive as a form of human transport. Coordinated web based services for timetables and ticketing is a start. Telecommunications based services to enable information to be readily available to travellers is also required - why can we buy a GPS mapper for a vehicle for $100 but can’t be similarly helped to navigate from one train to another or from train to bus to address. Location based services must be extended to encourage commuters out of their vehicles and onto public transport. Meanwhile, we must also look to move much of the bulk transport of goods off the roads and back onto the rails. The decline of the use of rail as a viable bulk material transport method is illogical, should be reversed, and will certainly become more attractive as road carriage costs are internalised into the economic model.

Road travel in its current form will only continue if fuelled by either acceptable bio-fuels or clean electricity. It is likely however, and perhaps desirable in the greater scheme of things if we also achieve a drastic reduction in the overall use of cars as a form of transport. It is important to recognise that we have managed to engineer into society an unnecessary reliance on vehicular travel. Urban design must be rebalanced such that the use of a car is not required for much of everyday living. It is illogical that we have decimated the economy of the local shops through the adoption of huge shopping centres for which we have no alternative but to drive to in order to use. There is much talk today by the USA’s Obama administration regarding the links between Wall Street and Main Street. The reality is that the death of Main Street (or the High Street if you’re in the UK) has more to do with this engineering out of local economic resilience as it has to do with the failures and corruption of the banking and finance markets.

Removing cars from the road will however also require us to provide technology-based alternatives to many activities. For a start, telecommuting must be made more common and far easier. This will require many changes and the provision of enabling services, not least of which will be the provision of secure broadband services to everyone. In fact, high speed communication links are perhaps the most important enabler of change if we are to at all engineer our way out of both the problems of climate change and those presented by peak oil.

And what of “clean electricity” supplies? Aside from altering the fuel stocks used for generation, away from coal and natural gas and toward renewables, the most important change we must make will be a fundamental change in the energy generation and distribution model. In order to engineer the required resilience into a smart grid system we must move from the highly centralised and concentrated generation model that we have today, and move to a highly fragmented and widely distributed micro-generation model. Such a network will have a dynamic and rich mix of renewable generation sources as well as tapping into the stored energy sources that are parked (electric) vehicles and the like. Successfully achieving a resilient and balanced power supply that supports both baseload as well as peak demands will require co-ordination of the supply and demand “nodes” as well as the grid that connects them. This co-ordination is what is meant by the term “smart grid”. Telecommunications infrastructure is again the enabler, providing the means to monitor and manage the various consumptive or contributory nodes.

That just leaves us with the little problem of air travel. Simply put, even if we develop an acceptable source of biofuels the days of mass air travel are rapidly drawing to a close. All the highly publicised experiments by various airlines in the use of biofuels are nothing more than a distraction and a con. Airline travel will be severely curtailed. Humanity may eventually get used to that - keeping in mind the fact that for all the protestations to the contrary by holiday makers and airline executives the reality is that international and domestic long distance travel is something that we have only recently managed to fall so deeply in love with. Those same airline executives as well as the forty-something holidaymaker would do well to be reminded that as recently as their own childhood humanity managed to do quite OK without racking up half a million air-miles each per annum. Again however we must face the reality of the short term, and again telecommunications must step up to meet the demands now built into our personal and business structures of behaviour. Telepresence enabled communications provides a useful alternative for the business executive, and with the right investment may even provide some acceptable alternatives to flying around the world in order to have Christmas dinner with that distant relative whom you didn’t really like all that much anyway.

Telecommunications therefore is perhaps a great saviour in many ways as we re-engineer our current personal, working and industrial models. However there is also one more role it needs to play - that of helping us to accurately account for the embodied ecological footprint of the goods and services we consume. As the embodied footprint of a product is linked to the distance that we transport it and the mode by which we transport it, location based services will increasingly be relied upon in order to accurately account for that travel. We must become far more aware than we are today of the complex shifting back and forth of products that takes place before they reach their final consumption point.

All that remains is for us to find the will to move forward. A reasonable question might also be to ask whether our various telecommunications providers have the vision and the strategy to play a role in delivering the infrastructure and services we will need from them. Lets continue to shout the demand down the phone line to them, and hope for more than confused static in return.