The "Good Ancestor Principle" is based on a challenge posed by Jonas Salk:

...the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors?

Ultimately, the notion of being good ancestors by reducing the chances that our descendants will be harmed appeared in nearly every attempt to answer Jonas Salk's challenge. It's a point that's both obvious and subtle. Of course we want to reduce the chances that our descendants will be harmed; the real challenge is figuring out just what we are doing today that runs counter to that desire. We don't always recognize the longer-term harm emerging from a short-term benefit. So the real problems we're facing in the 21st century are the long, slow threats. We need our solutions to have a long term consciousness, too.

That strikes me as an important value for any intelligent being to hold, organic or otherwise.

Australia’s carbon price mechanism has become law.

While domestically the political noise about this has been deafening, globally, the concept of a market mechanism for pricing carbon emissions is widely accepted. Long standing champions of the carbon tax mechanism include science, economics and business luminaries such as James E. Hansen (NASA), Carl Pope, Gary Becker, Rex Tillerson (Exxon Mobil), Jack Pezzey, Jeffrey Sachs, Gregory Mankiw. Our new legislation has recently been praised in the media by the likes of Peter Voser, the global CEO of Shell, gas giant Santos, Ban Ki Moon (UN), the IMF Deputy Managing Director Min Zhu and more than 334 Australian companies including Fujitsu, AGL, Alstom, Kell&Rigby, Unilever and industrial products and finance group GE.

We are now members of the Global Carbon Club- joining some 850 million people now living with a carbon price. Fighting climate change with a carbon tax are the European countries Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. China, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Chile and South Korea, a number of Canadian provinces, California and 10 eastern US states are either considering developing their own schemes or already have trial schemes to price carbon.

We have nothing to fear being part of this club. If Treasury modeling is right, about half of household carbon cost will be included in energy bills, which are now about 3% of household expenditure. The scheme is supposed to spur businesses to become more energy efficient and cut emissions, and your household will benefit from energy efficiency also. It’s so easy to save energy.

Around $10 saved on your weekly energy will offset all your carbon costs. Apart from all the other tips on this site, simply switching off the beer fridge in the garage when you’re not using it could save you as much as you’ll spend on the carbon tax! And since most households will be compensated for much or all of their carbon cost- any actions will make you a financial winner.

By Ian Lowe

The $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has just passed the Senate and is now law. For all the attention it has received you may not have noticed, but a new industrial revolution is afoot.

A clean energy boom that continues to go from strength to strength saw $260 billion invested last year in renewable energy. That’s a new investment record. In fact, four of the last five years have seen the previous year’s record surpassed.

Last year was the first year global investment in clean energy outstripped investment in traditional fossil fuel energy. In Australia, wind and solar accounted for nearly 60% of the new installed capacity last year.

The CEFC will be at the vanguard of this revolution. It is in essence a public investment bank. It will have at its disposal a suite of innovative financing tools to address the many barriers to investment in clean energy technologies.

By providing loan guarantees, the CEFC can make innovative projects more attractive to commercial lenders who might otherwise worry that the technology is “unproven”. By overcoming these kinds of barriers, it will attract sufficient private finance to make viable the next wave of clean energy technologies in Australia.

Done properly, the CEFC could unlock $100 billion of private investment in technologies like big solar, geothermal or bioenergy, and create up to 100,000 new jobs. Done properly, it will kick-start our shift to a clean energy economy, helping us catch up to countries that are currently way ahead of us, like China, the USA and Germany.

Despite these benefits, however, the CEFC is being criticised from all sides. Its opponents call it the “Bob Brown Bank” and wrongly label it a slush fund. It is also panned by would-be supporters for being ineffectual, because it can’t invest in projects that would contribute above the 20% of our energy supply that will come from renewables by 2020 under the Renewable Energy Target (RET).

As it stands the CEFC is a powerful tool for driving positive change in our energy mix. It could be made vastly more effective if the impediment of the 20% target was removed.

The CEFC will provide many benefits. First, it will deliver us crucial diversity in energy supply. While the RET favours the lowest cost clean energy (at the moment, wind), the CEFC will allow the next wave of technologies to make it to market. These are technologies on the brink of commercialisation; technologies that other countries have supported and proved. Spain, for instance, dominates large-scale solar thermal, despite its average solar radiation only being equivalent to Melbourne’s.

Second, in bringing these new technologies forward, the CEFC will help Australia build new industries, with new jobs and new export opportunities. Why should Spain lead the way in solar technologies and Scotland be creeping ahead of us in wave energy? Why do we sit back and see more solar power installed in Germany than here? Why not use our trademark innovation, ingenuity and manufacturing base to establish these and other clean energy technologies here and export them to the world? Our renewable resources – solar, wind, wave, geothermal energy – are the envy of the world. It is time to develop these to provide clean energy.

Third, the CEFC will deliver a suite of technologies that together will help end our dependence on increasingly expensive fossil fuels. Without a booming and diverse clean energy sector, how else will we achieve the legislated 80% reduction in Australia’s greenhouse pollution by 2050?

All this demonstrates that the CEFC can build new energy supply systems that will transform our economy into a modern, clean and competitive one – an economy that can compete globally in a low-carbon future. But reaching this goal will be constrained in the short term if the CEFC is not allowed to invest above and beyond the 20% by 2020 Renewable Energy Target. This is a limitation that the government must address during this year’s review of the RET.

But this does not mean that there aren’t several excellent reasons to go ahead with the CEFC anyway. A clean energy finance corporation is not a risky, scary endeavour that is unique to Australia. The UK is implementing a Green Investment Bank. The US is now considering a Clean Energy Deployment Agency, having successfully delivered the Loan Guarantees program for clean energy. A Nordic Environment Finance Corporation operates across Scandinavia and the Netherlands is working on a Green Investment Corporation. China is making huge investments in clean energy, with future plans that will leave the rest of the world for dead.

The clean energy race is one Australia simply cannot afford to lose. The CEFC is our best chance to get out in front.

This article was co-authored by Claire Maries. Claire is a climate change campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Will the legacy of our foolishness be the ruination of our civilization? According to a new report recently published in prestigious Nature magazine the earth is on the brink of an 'irreversible' collapse of the global ecosystem.

Scientists have reached near-total consensus on climate change. But according to the new study, once you add other variables – such as population growth, over-consumption, agriculture and extinctions – to that mix, the entire ecological system may teeter on the brink. Everything could, in fact, change in the proverbial blink of an eye (at least, on the scale of earth's history). It's called a “global state change,” and the report estimates it could begin as early as the second half of this century if we stay on our present course.

“It's bad enough for there to be gradual change, but if that change is sudden and irreversible, all bets are off,” Dr Arne Mooers one of the authors said. “If something changes like the temperature, it could then cause a topsy-turvy, upside-downness that causes a new earth.

“A state change in one place could propagate globally like an epidemic. Think about it – think of different ecosystems coming close to a state change. Does that one tip over and cause the next one to tip over, and so on? When about 60 per cent of the earth is converted, that's a magic number in simple systems, for when an epidemic, rather than fizzling out, sweeps through the entire system.”

Until now, climatologists have documented the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on rising global temperatures – and their predictions are dire. But according to the new review, which compiles existing data into a new mosaic, the earth could suddenly and irreversibly shift in a catastrophic chain reaction, once humans have impacted a majority of the planet's ecosystems.

Based on the theory that changing systems can reach a rapid “tipping point” – like an iceberg suddenly flipping, or an epidemic exploding – the study's historic collaboration of 18 paleontologists, computer modellers, mathematicians, biologists and ecologists put their heads together to study whether such state changes could happen on a global scale.

“I would agree that it's fairly dramatic,” Mooers admits, as we chat in his lab at SFU's Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Centre. “At some point we've converted too much of the earth, and the effects will be global.

“This review is dramatic – it's quite stark. The earth may become a much more hostile place for everyone. . . The chances are that this transition would not only be extremely problematic to human society, but the new state might not be conducive to human society at all.”

ref: Nature 486, 52–58 (07 June 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11018 Published online 06 June 2012