My keynote talk at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, co-hosted by Public Health England, May 16, 2014 (Almost 80 megabytes, if you want to listen). I have a blog post on this, at http://globalchangemusings.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/energy-transition-royal-society-of.html

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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
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Kenneth Boulding (1910-93)
The Economics of Spaceship Earth
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“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
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extreme weather events
price plateau: high energy
price, climate change, yield
limits and other evidence of
limits to growth
Index

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1998 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)
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$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%
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Lancet, 2014

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A man looks through dustbins in central
Athens , 2012
Photograph: Andy Hall/Guardian
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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?
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Prosperity challenged -again

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Secondary
Primary
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“Tertiary”

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1995 2000 2005 2010
EU
Russia
Chicago
despair, economic loss,
exposure to asbestos,
mould
“Primary” health effects
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deaths

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Overall reduction,
but control more
difficult in highlands
Malaria: the great recession (Boyd, 1930)
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“The dangerous impacts of
climate change can only be
discussed in terms of
nonlinear behavior.’’
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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
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Water
scarcity
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
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Climate change will 'lead to battles for food',
says head of World Bank (April 2014)
Jim Yong Kim
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“dangerous”
catastrophic?
IPCC 2013

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me
my nephew
a baby
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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
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what about adaptation?
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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
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cyclone shelter, Bangladesh dyke, Netherlands
currently acceptable faces of adaptation
unwanted person camp,
Australia
Armed 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”
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“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 Age
Paul Krugman
US political class actively
working to restore
patrimonial capitalism
Capital in the
Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty

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Gini
co-efficient (%)
China
US
world
Global Gini data (US$) Butler, 2002
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Global Energy Assessment, 2012Global Energy Assessment, 2012
Unmet electricity need
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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".
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)
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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/9781780642659
Healthy 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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