Climate change: what can Buddhists do?

Read to about 1000 people at the
United Nations Day of Vesak celebration
Sydney Town Hall May 27, 2012


Venerables, Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends in the dhamma.

First I pay homage to the triple gem; second, let me thank the organisers of this United Nations Day of Vesak commemoration, in Sydney, for their wisdom in including the topic of climate change. I listened to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in this same building, in 1982, in his first visit to Australia. That shows the reality of impermanence to me, and also that 30 years is not a long time.

Climate change and its shadow, energy security are among the largest threats to human well-being this century, especially in so-called developing countries. Some nations at special risk of climate change have large Buddhist populations, but this is not the main reason that we should be concerned.

The feature of Buddhism that attracts me most is compassion. Whether we call this metta, loving kindness, or bodhicitta, it is important to all Buddhist schools. It is very important to understand that the wish to be of benefit to others is not restricted to people who look like us, speak like us, think like us, and have the same faith. Nor should this wish be confined to human beings. Many species beside our own have a degree of awareness, they have emotions, and they suffer. And just as we recognise our own suffering as unwanted, such as when we are sick or bereaved, we should also reflect that the suffering of others is painful.

It is possible to develop, through meditation, compassion for other people and other species, and even for Earth itself, so that one feels their pain very deeply. I don’t recommend doing this in excess, as I think life would become unbearable. However, I do think that as Buddhists we should practice enough of this form of meditation to recognise the crisis occurring on our home planet, and to generate motivation to do something to reduce this crisis, which takes many forms.

Few of you are scientists, and probably many are unsure how big this problem is, or even if it exists at all. In Australia, there are many climate change sceptics; probably some are here today. I’m not going to explain why we should believe climate scientists, but ask sceptics if they have the same lack of respect towards other professionals, such as the engineers who designed the vehicle you will next travel on, or the doctor who will treat your next illness. The coal and gas industries also actively suppress understanding.

I think much scepticism about climate change is because of deep-seated selfishness. A major implication of climate change is that we have to be less selfish in sharing Earth’s resources, and we have to become more frugal. This message is very unpopular. As Buddhists, however, we should understand that happiness comes more from internal factors than from buying excessive material things. Scepticism is also fuelled by carbon trading, which is very open to abuse. I will not take carbon offsets seriously until funds raised are used to wean Australia off its addiction to using coal for electricity and to selling it.

From a Buddhist view, we know that impermanence or anicca, is fundamental, so the fact that the climate is changing is not surprising. Climate is not the same as weather, nor seasons. Climate is like long-distance weather; weather observed over many years or decades. The change in climate is so slow that many people do not notice it, but one role of science is to provide careful measures and these show that the average temperature of the world is rising, and also that rainfall patterns are changing.

The environment is not more important than humanity. Buddhists should not worship the Earth. But we should try to understand that human prosperity, and even world peace, depends on an environment that has sufficiently abundant goods and services, especially food, to provide for everyone. Causes and effects of climate change Climate change is happening mostly because we are burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, at a great pace. We have become excellent at finding buried energy sources and then destroying them. The invisible waste products of these fuels trap heat in the air and acidify the oceans, harming marine life. Rainfall patterns are changing, with more intense droughts and more flooding too. This makes it harder for farmers to grow food, and this, along with dearer energy, is one reason food prices are dearer.

The sea level is rising, as the ocean warms, and the polar ice melts. By 2100, unless climate change is slowed, sea level rise will make some coastal parts uninhabitable, such as in Bangladesh and the Nile delta. Bangkok is also at risk.

The other important reason for climate change is forest destruction, in places like Indonesia and Brazil. This removes carbon stored in the trees, returning it to the atmosphere. Some politicians claim carbon in the air is essential for plants, so that more is good. This is a very simple and wrong understanding. There is an issue of dose. One pill a day might be useful, but five a day might make you sick.

Forests are also being destroyed to grow palm oil, used for fuel. This is not extra energy, as it takes a lot of energy (mainly from coal) to grow these crops and to make the fuel. In the last century we have destroyed enough fossil fuels and forest to give us a taste of human driven climate change. We should now urgently alter the global energy system to one that does not rely on oil, coal and gas, but instead mainly on solar. Delay places at risk the well-being of the poor and future generations, even in rich countries.

Health and climate change

I finish by describing three main forms of health effects due to climate change; primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary school is the most basic form of education, young children can understand it. Then comes secondary and tertiary. During the 2009 heatwave in southeast Australia, more people died of heat stress than the terrible fires. Too much heat is bad for your health.

A secondary effect is that diseases like dengue fever or malaria are likely to become harder to control, as rising temperatures and increased rainfall gives more chances for mosquitoes to flourish. In human health terms the extra harm from these things is not large. Malaria is important, but not because of climate change.

However, the tertiary effects of climate change are likely to be extremely large, even catastrophic. There is growing fear that climate change, with other factors, such as rising energy costs, will increase under-nutrition and famine. In fact this is already happening, such as in North Africa. In India, a country especially significant to Buddhists, there is already enormous problem of poor nutrition, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Climate change is also likely to drive considerable migration this century. And that might contribute to conflict and war.

Solutions

In 1989, I heard a joke about an ecologist and an economist falling from a tall building. The ecologist is panicking, but the economist is very calm. “Don’t worry”, she says, “demand will create a parachute”. But in order for that to happen, we have to see the ground.

Solutions exist, and I list four. First, I think world leaders need to recognise that the global economic system is seriously flawed. I don’t just mean because of the global financial crisis including in Europe. The main error is to think that the world economy can keep on growing for ever. It can’t – unless we redefine growth.

Second, we need to be less selfish, to really start to practice metta and the middle path. Metta should not just be for ourselves and family, but for people we do not know, and will never meet. We cannot have a truly peaceful, prosperous planet when so many people live dreadful lives. Of course, we live in samsara, the world has problems, but collectively we can reduce them.

Third, we need new forms of capturing energy, especially solar, that do not harm the climate, and can slow the rate at which we are wasting fossil fuel. Australia could be a world leader here, but our political leaders are slow to understand this. But we can’t just blame politicians, we need to realise that they behave like this because most people do not care enough about these issues to try to change their behaviour.

Finally, Buddhists must combine meditation and peacefulness with action. It is not enough to pray for a more peaceful world, we also need practical action. For example, if we are comfortably well-off, we should try to spend some of our time and money increasing the chances for others to also become prosperous. I am not saying we can all be bodhisattvas or saints, but I am sure many of us can give practical help to others.

I am not saying we should foster dependency, but there are many ways to help people less fortunate than we are in ways that will increase self-reliance. One way is to try to improve education, especially for girls, in low-income countries such as India.

Thank you again for this chance to speak to you today.

The cornucopian enchantment

The cornucopian enchantment: "the conceit that ingenuity will always trump scarcity".


I just heard an interview with Prof Robert Shiller on ABC Radio National. Schiller mentioned Montesquieu foreshadowed Adam Smith by suggesting commerce would help civilise society. However Smith warned against capitalist criminals - monopolists, market riggers and so on (the Goldman Sachs traders of his time).

Schiller refers in passing to everyone being "fed well" as a component of that civilising effect; to me this implies also a reasonably fair distribution, today shared abundance has to be more than food, especially in rich nations with abundant calories, in order to produce civil happiness. The manifest unfairness of Wall St legitimately fuels the backlash of the Occupy movement, just as the unfairness of the French court legitimately fuelled the French revolution. Montesquieu and Smith are right - capitalism is potentially a better driver for happiness and abundance than complete market control - but as Keynes (as Smith) understood it needs regulation to reduce the unfairness, and a lot of that regulation must be self-organised by social norms and moral framework. But those governors have been substantially, deliberately undermined since the late 70s – as Paul Krugman describes in various essays about the 'return of the gilded age".

Philanthropy is useful, but of course rarely is of sufficient scale to repair the damage to public goods that enables the philanthropists to acquire their wealth in the first place (and then to rig the market to further lock in the inequality.) Shiller talks (without calling it that) of the groupthink dominant in the US early in his career (but still after the return of market deregulation) and also in the rise of irrational exuberance (by the way attributed to Greenspan in 1996 not Shiller in 2002).

There is an even stronger form of irrational groupthink operant today – I coined the term “cornucopian enchantment” for this sometime around 1999 (the term appears in my PhD, Inequality and Sustainability). This is the conceit that ingenuity will always trump scarcity. Unless society can rapidly produce a suite of energy, technological and social rabbits then global scarcity will deepen, and indeed hunger will return, not just to Niger and Somalia, but more generally. Then followed by conflict, despite Montesquieu's hopes (and those of Steven Pinker, for that matter). In that context reducing unfairness is essential.

This period of enchantment can be traced roughly to the late 1970s when Limits to Growth started to be ridiculed. We should be awakening from it by now, but in privileged parts of the word we keep dozing on. Europe bleeds $1 billion a day importing energy. This is a greatly under-recognised causal factor in the global financial crisis, and looks as if it will get worse. Not only my opinion, also that of Sir David King (former UK chief scientist.)

100 doctors for the planet

Last month (in late 2009) I was named by the French Environmental Health Association, as part of their "100 doctors for the planet" series. I was nominated after my talk to a working group of the World Medical Association, considering the issue of climate change and health. This led to their Delhi declaration. I was interviewed about this by Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny.

Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny : What do you think about Global Warming ?

Dr BUTLER : Global warming is not the emperor of global problems, but is certainly one of the princes. It combines with its brothers and sisters (eg weaponisation, human greed and our tolerance of poverty and inequality) to threaten the foundation of civilisation. There are many plausible pathways by which global warming is likely to contribute to collapse, such as regional food scarcity, famine and food riots and relentless sea level rise and massive population dislocation. Unless we are very lucky we will initiate feedbacks which worsen both greenhouse gas emissions (such as by warming the tundra) and governance (such as by bad short-term reactions to long-term problems). The interaction of these issues threatens to overwhelm us.

Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny : In your everyday life, how do you act to help the planet ?

Dr BUTLER : I have spent much of my life as a physician trying to get doctors and the public to understand the peril we face, by writing, speaking and doing. In 1983 I was arrested in Australia’s largest environmental protest. In 1989 I stood for the Greens and co-founded BODHI, an NGO which raises funds to help ‘change agents’ in low-income countries improve health, education, rights and justice. I try to be a role model, including by cycling to work and buying electricity sourced from renewable energy. We chose not to have children. I try to minimise waste, especially of food and paper, and I eat mostly vegetarian food and fish. I try to buy ethically sourced products. I own 130 acres of forest which I have protected from clear-felling.

Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny : As far as you are concerned, what are the more important risks of the climate change?

Dr BUTLER : I would stress that civilisation – especially its economic system – has not evolved necessarily mature progress indicators. In 1989 I heard Paul Ehrlich use the analogy of two men falling from a skyscraper, one of whom is an economist. The economist says ‘not to worry : demand will create a parachute’. Twenty years later some of us are desperately hoping for a parachute as we fall to Earth, but most of us don’t realise the danger we face. We are getting richer in income but impoverishing nature. We may realise our predicament so belatedly that desperate acts are required such as emergency geo-engineering. The ultimate risk is that climate change-exacerbated resource competition will drive regional or global nuclear conflict.

Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny : At work what do you do to fight against climate changes ?

Dr BUTLER: I work at a university which is one of the ‘greenest’ in Australia. Despite the good work there is still unacceptable complacency. Our university could be a role model – peppered with cyclists on paths, photovoltaic cells, solar hot water heating and even solar-thermal generated electricity (we have a research project on this). We run awareness campaigns for double- sided printing, recycling and to turn out lights but have far too many carparks ; we don’t even source ‘green’ electricity. In my department, many cycle to work and most understand the ecological footprint concept. Some colleagues are declining conference invitations unless they can attend virtually. I am an agitator but it’s easy to alienate people by pushing too hard.

Dr Sandrine Segovia-Kueny : Do you know your ecological footprint ?

Dr BUTLER : I know my international travel makes it very, very high. Increasingly I ask if conferences can arrange electronic attendance, but that choice is still rarely available. Earlier in my career if was difficult to decline invitations, but I am now increasingly selective. I try to find several reasons to travel anywhere by air. I almost always use public transport if available. Before I moved to Canberra I had solar hot water and a well-insulated house. I now live in an apartment, but am trying to persuade the body corporate to install photovoltaic cells – and also my university. I console myself by thinking that most of my work, for many years now, has focussed on trying to alert people to the dangers of overpopulation and over-consumption.

Thank you for answering this interview. We would let you know as soon as possible of its date of broadcasting.

A four degree world

In the last fortnight several things have occurred which are deeply troubling. The floods in southern Taiwan (Typhoon Morakut) have been followed by very heavy rain in the northern Philippines (and there is another storm there right now), and record flooding in Karnataka, India. These events are very likely to have adverse agricultural effects and hence harm nutrition and health. The number of hungry on the planet has passed a billion. Climate change is a likely cause. In the short run the Sumatran earthquake and the Samoan tsunami have distracted attention, but climate change has not gone away.

We have also had the Oxford conference on a 4 degree world (to which we contributed a paper about health).  The podcast there called "4°C of climate change: alarmist or realist?" is very good; the conclusion was that an 8 degree world is alarmist, but a 4 degree world is all too plausible. As one participant said: we see a 70 kg person climb into a 1,000 kg car to drive two miles in order to collect a newspaper - and then we want to fix the problem with geo-engineering! (The most plausible form of geo-engineering is to pump large quantities of sulphur into the atmosphere, which may harm the monsoon.)

On the positive side, this morning I participated electronically in an electronic conference held by PAHO (the Pan American Health Organisation) using elluminate software. It was great. In real time I could hear, see powerpoint slides, and send short messages and symbols (eg smile, applause) to other participants (10 English, 70 Spanish).

On the negative side, I just heard Ian MacFarlane, that gravelly voiced member of the Australian opposition, go on about the alleged harm to the Australian economy if we were to take tiny baby steps in reducing our use of fossil fuel. The short and narrow sightedness of so many people in this country (because let's face it, MacFarlane etc represent a great number of Australians) is shameful. The 4 degree conference warns of carbon dioxide levels of 700 ppm or more by 2100. With it will go crop failure, marked sea level rise and millions of environmental refugees. This is a terrifying future – and not far away.

One commentator at the 4°C conference, a journalist, warned that too much emphasis on catastrophe was paralyzing. But others pointed out that we can go too far in the other direction, and that just fuels complacency. A consensus seemed to emerge that scientists must try to convey the full picture, as far as possible.

I also spoke this morning on ABC overnight talk back radio http://www.abc.net.au/overnights/ for 30 minutes (60 channels throughout Australia) about population. Almost every caller thought we have a problem. One asked why population is scarcely mentioned in the context of climate change. I think he had a very good point – but while only a small fraction (maybe 20%) of the global population contribute substantially to climate change there are three reasons to be concerned about the fertility rate of the other 80%. First, rapid population growth in poor countries will make those countries more vulnerable to climate change. Second, in the long run, the climate contribution of several billion poor people is still significant – especially if they do start to want and to afford our kind of lifestyle. Finally, the acceleration of the demographic (fertility) transition in the South (low income countries) is a matter of justice and global human rights. See too our paper on this in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation (Climate change and family planning: least developed countries define the agenda).

Buddhism and science

About 15 months ago (at the United Nations Day of Vesak celebration in Hanoi, 2008) I was asked to be a science advisor to the International Association of Buddhist Universities. I have finally got around to posting something on their website http://www.iabu.org/content/introduction

Part of the reason I am happy to do this is because there seems such little understanding of science in the Buddhist world. I gave a talk in Bangkok on Buddhism and the environmental crisis in May 2009 and at the end I asked if anyone in the audience (about 60 people) had a science degree. Not a single person raised their hand.

This is an extract:
The best Buddhism (in my opinion) and the best science (in my view) have a lot in common. Both are concerned with understanding the nature of phenomena. Both are concerned with causes, and the causes of causes. Both can reach a profound level of understanding, and yet both also reach a point at which mystery is reached. Neither science nor Buddhism can explain everything; or perhaps Buddhism can but that understanding can never quite be put into words. Certainly with science there is a vast mystery remaining. Albert Einstein is supposed to have likened scientific knowledge to a grain of sand on a beach. What is unknown is the rest of the beach. Yet, he said, that one grain is very precious.
One thing I think science can learn from Buddhism is ethics .. I think the best science is ethical. I also think Buddhism can be a lot more ethical - but that is another story.
Just in case any of you don't think science is of any value to a good Buddhist, you might reflect that the fact that you can read this is because you have acquired secular knowledge. Or, put it this way. You have acquired knowledge, both secular and spiritual. The world needs both forms to thrive, and even if you may be a monk, some secular knowledge, including of science, can help you to be of more value. Now, if you perhaps think that being Buddhist and being of value are incompatible, then your understanding of Buddhism is different to mine. If, like me, you think Buddhism can help you practice metta, bodhicitta, or loving kindness, then you might reflect that science too - at its best - can also help this practice. After all, if you have ever had an antibiotic, or a vaccination, then you have benefited from ethical science.


I published a longer article, here.

Beware of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development

Sharon Beder's classic book "Global Spin" has many examples of how conservative forces distort public opinion, and also lists cases of misleadingly named lobby groups, which purport to protect the environment, but actually are fronts for ongoing environmental destruction, such as the "Wise Use Movement".

Now there is a entire journal which appears to be acting in a similar way - called the "Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development" .

You might think, with a name like that, that this open-access (thus well-funded), peer reviewed journal would work in the interests of sustainable development. But after reading most of the articles in the current issue, I think exactly the reverse is true. The current issue focuses on the population debate. It has an article by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which warns of the peril which civilisation faces. I was a reviewer of this paper, and I am in broad agreement with it. (See: The Return of the Population Bomb for a shorter version, including the brilliant proposal for a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior to globally examine and publicly discuss the failures of cultural evolution to direct society towards sustainability - something not in their longer article.

However every other article in the current issue of this journal is much more dismissive of any Limit to Growth. It is true that there is good scholarship in some of the articles. But there is also much bias - particularly revealed by what is not mentioned. For example, the paper on the global food prospect has no discussion of climate change or surface level ozone - two enormous risks to food security especially in the tropics and polluted parts of China and India. Nor does it hint at the worsening current food crisis - the number of people with protein and energy undernutrition is now thought to have passed a billion.

The essay is far too optimistic.

Who is funding this journal? The answer is that it is a co-production of International Policy Network and the University of Buckingham

This university offers 3 year degrees in 2 years, which always makes me suspicious. There is no free lunch. The International Policy Network is supportive of free markets, including presumably, the market forces which have allowed Goldman Sachs to make US$1.58 million in profit per hour, despite the spreading gloom of unemployment in the US and elsewhere.

In fact, an essay by Matt Taibbi published two days ago in Rolling Stone brilliantly describes Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".

The financial resources available to those who oppose sustainability, and who deny limits to growth are vast. Profits from destroying nature and enslaving people can be used to pay for lobbyists in order to manipulate the law and the application of the law (eg by threatening libel) in order to keep doing the same, that is to keep taking money from the poor and from the future. A tiny amount of this money can easily find its way to support journals such as the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, thus also providing academic evidence to support more of the same.

In short, my suspicion is that this journal is deeply subversive, but in the wrong (unsustainable) direction. I haven't read the two earlier issues of this journal, but advise caution. On the positive side, though, this journal does include at least one paper which recommends we take great care of the Earth, including by slowing the rate of human population increase.

Global Health: challenges and solutions

Problems .. food, pollution, climate change and conflict .. excessive numbers of humans on the planet, inequality, indifference and fraudulent banksters. The list is long..

National Geographic June 2009 has an excellent feature on the global food crisis. This mentions CAFOs in China, by the way, plus the eminent demographer Professor Tim Dyson, warning the the spectre of Malthus has not vanished. Adolescents in Pakistan are being reported as being used as suicide bombers to perform payback murders in feuds [I heard this on the BBC .. I hope this is exagerated - while I can't find that link, there is abundant evidence of the exploitation of children for such barbaric purposes, not only in Pakistan but also by the Tamils in Sri Lanka], while more certainly, child soldiers are common instruments of war, waged by adults in several parts of Africa, including Somalia. Problems are multiplying.

Solutions

What about solutions? I suggest we start by tithing 10% of our effort and - if we can afford it - 10% of our wealth to these issues. The election of Obama is very encouraging, but the infestation of the media and web by climate change deniers is deeply disturbing. More on that later, in another post. Though, for a taste, see Michael Ashley's brilliant review of Ian Plimer's book "Heaven and Earth".

Meantime, please support groups that try to look at deep causes of our interlinked global crises. If you live in a high income country (the North) - see PS - unless in parts of Scandinavia or the Netherlands [countries that already exceed the target], ask your government to give 0.7% of its revenue to foreign aid, as they long ago pledged .. and not "phantom" aid as Action Aid calls it. This target has been challenged - but while I haven't read more than the abstract it is clear that high income countries can be more generous .. that is, if they want low income countries to catch up, which of course they don't..

And, please, be sensitive to the beliefs of others. Look for what you have in common with others. When I was a medical student at a Christian Mission Hospital in Nigeria, in 1985, a practice had just been ended, by which patients (even if not Christian) had to say a Christian prayer before undergoing surgery. I'm glad that practice stopped. Yet I don't think this means every cultural practice followed by others should be uncritically accepted. If it were we'd have to acknowledge the right for some societies to practice female genital mutilation, or to keep slaves, or to have housemaids with no names and no rights. Or even to practice waterboarding in Guantánamo.

While the naming and defining of universal rights is tricky, to say there are no such rights is clearly worse.

If any of you have an academic bent, please visit the Faculty of 1000 Medicine [global health] to see some interesting academic perspectives on global health (disclosure: I am one of the faculty members - but this position is voluntary; I get no royalties!)

bye for now,

Colin

PS I will try to post a link re the North and South shortly - Butler CD. The North and South. In: Hedblad A, editor. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan Reference; 2007. p. 542-4.