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Prof Colin Butler BMed, DTM&H, MSc, PhD

16/5/14, Royal Society of Medicine, London

Prosperity challenged: Energy transition & public health

How and why health workers can

accelerate the energy transition

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Summary

Predicted “limits to growth” crisis has started, yet

scarcely recognized:

1. End of cheap energy & food

2. Overloading Earth system (gases +)

Climate change & health: three classes of effects

Ideology: “Earth poisoners” vs the rest.

Hope: keep within carbon budget (about ½ way)

Health workers: call for urgent energy transformation;

part of wider sustainability transition

2

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Kenneth Boulding (1910-93)

The Economics of Spaceship Earth

3

“the only person who believes in

perpetual economic growth is either a

madman or an economist”

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Prosperity challenged

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World food price index (deflated) (1961-2014) (data FAO)

First oil crisis

decline in price due to

Green Revolution

oil, speculation,

rice panic

5

extreme weather events

price plateau: high energy

price, climate change, yield

limits and other evidence of

limits to growth

Index

CRICOS #00212K1998 2000 2004 2008 2011

Adapted from Murray & King, Nature. 2012; 481: 433-5.

Apparent production cap

2005: Plateau Oil

Production

(million barrels/day)

Oil price (US$ per

barrel)

6

$1 billion a day, from Europe, Nth America

3rd carbon age? (M Klare) risk to

water, catastrophic climate change

Prosperity challenged

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Ratio energy in, energy out>5:1

..not counting wasted food

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150

125

100

75

50

25

Extreme events – i.e. climate change?

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“Peak health”

(?)

President Royal Society 2005-

2010

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Unemployment more than tripled.. to 24.3%

10

Lancet, 2014

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A man looks through dustbins in central

Athens , 2012

Photograph: Andy Hall/Guardian11

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“Hoovervilles”

U.S. 1930s

“Bushvilles”

U.S. now

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pp 1693–1733

“Climate change is the biggest global

health threat of the 21st century”

but why?

14

Prosperity challenged -again

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Secondary

Primary

15

“Tertiary”

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1995 2000 2005 2010

EURussia

Chicago

despair, economic loss,

exposure to asbestos,

mould

“Primary” health effects

16

deaths

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Overall reduction,

but control more

difficult in highlands

Malaria: the great recession (Boyd, 1930)

17

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“The dangerous impacts of

climate change can only be

discussed in terms of

nonlinear behavior.’’

18

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

“The difference between 2 and

4 degrees of warming ..

is civilisation’’

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64

36

20

80

Percentage change in yields to 2050

-50 -20 0 +20 +50 +100

UN Devt Prog, 2009

CLIMATE CHANGE to 2050: MODELLED CHANGES IN

CEREAL GRAIN YIELDS

Poor Countries Projected to Fare Worst

19

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Waterscarcity

Regions afflicted by problems due to environmental stresses:

• population pressure

• water shortage

• climate change affecting crops

• sea level rise

• pre-existing hunger

• armed conflict, current/recent

From UK Ministry of Defence[May RM, 2007 Lowy

Institute Lecture]

Climate Change: Multiplier of Conflicts and Regional Tensions

20

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Climate change will 'lead to battles for food',

says head of World Bank (April 2014)

Jim Yong Kim

21

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“dangerous”

catastrophic?

IPCC 2013

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me

my nephew

a baby

23

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Burden of

Disease

(proportion)

Year widely accepted

now 2050?

PRIMARY (eg heat, injury,

productivity)

SECONDARY (e.g.

vector-borne diseases,

air pollution, allergies)

TERTIARY: (a

“systemic multiplier”)

famine, conflict, large-

scale migration,

economic collapse

24

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what about adaptation?

25

A mirage that threatens to trap us in dry

sand?

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Adaptation: dreams vs reality

Declared

• dream crops

• dream co-operation

• dream geoengineering

• dream technology

Revealed

• PR campaigns

• militarisation

• fortress world

26

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cyclone shelter, Bangladesh dyke, Netherlands

currently acceptable faces of adaptation

unwanted person camp,

AustraliaArmed border fence,

India - Bangladesh

or a fortress world?

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“Exxon Mobil's response to climate change

is consummate arrogance”

Bill McKibben, 2014

Unprecedented wildfires are burning in the American west

What does big oil have to say about climate change?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his

salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

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Adaptation (to peak oil) obvious

benefits to air, health; climate

mitigation – opposed by big

carbon

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Joining the dots: creative destruction,

stranded assets and dysfunctional

lock-ins; technological and social

“canal mania”

30

“creative

destruction”

(Schumpeter’s

gale)

“coal

mania”

“railway

mania”

Eroding the social license

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“free-market advocates seem to experience a peculiar

loss of faith whenever the subject of the environment

comes up” Paul Krugman, 2014 (Nobel Laureate economics)

Subsidies (IMF) (2011)

Fossil fuel $480 billion (0.7% global GDP; 2% govt

revenues)

Renewable energy: $88 billion ratio: >5:1

Subsidies (IMF) (2011)

Fossil fuel $2 trillion (factoring in externalities)

Renewable energy: $88 billion; ratio: >20:1

31Hurricane Sandy - $50 billion

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Why We’re in a New Gilded AgePaul Krugman

US political class actively

working to restore

patrimonial capitalism

Emman

Capital in the

Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty

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Gini

co-efficient (%)

China

US

world

Global Gini data (US$) Butler, 200233

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Global Energy Assessment, 2012Global Energy Assessment, 2012

Unmet electricity need

3535

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Peabody Energy: “Coal Can Help Meet Millennium

Goals (Burson-Marsteller)

Mandela: overcoming poverty "is not a task of charity, it is

an act of justice".

36

Mandela – in favour of economic boycotts over apartheid

AND big carbon

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Global Energy Assessment, 2012

Solar (1975-2007

2007-10)

NUCLEAR

US$/kwH

(2005

dollars)

37

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April 29, 2014: Natural Resources Defense Council,

BlackRock and FTSE Group launch 1st equity global index

series excluding companies linked to fossil fuel reserves.

May 7 2014

Stanford University will divest its $18.7 billion endowment of stock in coal-mining

companies.

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urgent

Inequality, dirty energy, limits to growth & climate change are core

interlinked public health issues

sustainability solutions will deliver many co-benefits

need radically new ways of thinking and doing

James Hanson

arrested again

“society .. like a sorcerer no longer able to control the powers of

the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (Marx, 1848)

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colin.butler@canberra.edu.au

http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/health/courses/public-

health/staff-profiles/butler-colin

www.bodhi.net.au

https://twitter.com/ColinDavdButler

http://globalchangemusings.blogspot.com.au/

http://www.cabi.org/bookshop/book/9781780642659Healthy People, Places and Planet: Reflections based on Tony McMichael’s four decades of

contribution to epidemiological understanding (ANU E-Press) (co-eds Jane Dixon, Tony Capon)

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