In May, visiting US ecologist Bill McKibben spoke at a packed forum at the University of Sydney. He put a compelling case for emergency action on climate change. In short, we must act now and act decisively. Otherwise the planet will become uninhabitable.
McKibben is a prolific writer, and now an activist, on environmental issues. He is probably most famous for writing one of the first books about global warming — The End of Nature — in 1989.
He explained that, when The End of Nature was published, global warming was a likely, but still unproven, theory. Yet by the mid 1990s, the world's scientific community had arrived at a solid consensus. Climate change was very real.
More recently, new research has shown how dangerously close the planet is to an irreversible climate change disaster. "In the last 18 months that consensus has turned, at least on the leading edge of the science, into a kind of panic", McKibben said in May.
"Scientists that I have known for a quarter century who have always been concerned and worried and sober about all this are now frightened and are willing to say so quite loudly ... it turns out the planet was more finely balanced than we understood."
If the best climate scientists are frightened, we should be too. And we should be appalled and angry at the big corporate polluters and pro-business governments who continue to wreck the planet for profit.
A growing recognition of the scale of this threat — and the limited choices it leaves — has sparked the rise of the grassroots climate action movement. The "leading edge" of the Australian movement bases its campaign outlook squarely on what the leading-edge science dictates.
In January, representatives of the 150 climate action groups that met at Australia's Climate Summit adopted a series of campaign objectives intended to meet the climate emergency. One hundred percent of Australia's energy must be drawn from renewable sources by 2020 with a long-term goal of stabilising atmospheric carbon at close to pre-industrial levels, it said. Also, Australia's overall emissions from all sectors must fall by at least 6% a year.
This presumes a far more ambitious transition to a carbon-neutral economy than anything that has come from the climate action movement before. But the demands are based on a firm realism about the radical situation we face.
A year ago, Dr James Hansen, perhaps the world's top climate scientist, put a timeframe on the challenge. "We have at most 10 years — not 10 years to decide upon action but 10 years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions."
A campaign that forces the government to do something, but not enough, will still lead to a catastrophic result. Climate change won't compromise or negotiate. Politics has to fall into line with this reality.
It's in the context of the climate emergency that Plan B: An Agenda for Immediate Climate Action should be assessed. Plan B is a new climate action policy that was launched on June 11 by the majority of Australia's peak environmental groups.
Greenpeace, the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth, together with the Conservation Councils of every state and territory, are Plan B's co-authors.
The best feature of Plan B is its call for government action to cut emissions without delay. It entirely rejects the Rudd Labor government's "fatally flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme" (CPRS) because it "ignores the science, perversely rewards big polluters and will result in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise".
Plan B departs sharply from the indefensible policy of the Australian Conservation Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and the Climate Institute. Absurdly, these three conservative groups waited until May, when the government made the CPRS even more favourable to the big polluters, before they endorsed it.
Running interference for PM Kevin Rudd's business-as-usual climate policy hasn't won these groups any concessions for stronger climate action. But it has left them discredited in the grassroots movement.
In contrast, Plan B calls for measures that include a rapid drive to improve energy efficiency; an end to native forest logging and land clearing by 2011; funding programs for sustainable farming; a gross feed-in tariff to make renewable energy cheaper; and an immediate moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants.
It also calls for government incentives and capital grants for renewable energy and public transport; sustainable urban planning; a plan to produce tens of thousands of green jobs and a doubling of the government's mandatory renewable energy target to 40% by 2020.
While many of these proposals are necessary, they still fall alarmingly short of a real climate emergency response.
Plan B's renewable energy target is well below the climate summit target. Incentives for renewable energy such as the gross feed-in tariff will make a small difference, but won't drive the transition at the fast pace required.
The government tax incentives and grants proposed in the policy don't deal with the fundamental problem: the big decisions about sustainable investment would still be left to private businesses motivated by short-term profit instead of long-term sustainable outcomes.
It's a recipe that would leave Plan B's best proposals around renewable energy hostage to corporate manipulation.
What's missing is a vision of direct government investment and, crucially, public ownership and democratic control of all branches of energy production.
The pace of research must be forced. New infrastructure must be built. A plan that ensures a just transition for workers now in emissions-intensive industries must be put into action. And it must be done at emergency speed.
In many instances, this would mean the climate movement demanding the nationalisation of privately owned companies for the public good.
Can the climate movement win such a momentous change? Only if we grow far, far stronger. But we can be sure that leaving the task of building a carbon-neutral economy up to the market is as good as saying it can't be done.