Ross Garnaut

Ross Garnaut (born July 28, 1946) AO BA (ANU), PhD (ANU) is a professor of economics at the Australian National University.

On 30 April 2007 the State and Territory Governments of Australia at the request of the then leader of the Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition Kevin Rudd, who was elected Prime Minister of Australia on 24 November 2007, appointed Professor Garnaut to examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy, and recommend medium to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity.

The Garnaut Report is due to be handed down on 30 September 2008, with a draft to be released on 30 June 2008. Prior to receiving Professor Garnaut's report, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd committed Australia to ratifying the Kyoto Treaty.

Professor Garnaut has also been Senior Economic Adviser to Prime Minister R.J.L. Hawke (1983-85); Australia's Ambassador to China (1985-88); Chairman, Primary Industry Bank of Australia Ltd (PIBA) (1989-1994); Chairman, Bank of Western Australia Ltd (BankWest) (1988-1995); First Assistant Secretary (Head of the Division of General Financial and Economic Policy), Papua New Guinea Department of Finance (1975-76); Research Director of the ASEAN-Australia Economic Relations Research Project (1981-83); and Foundation Director, Asia-Pacific School of Economics and Management (1998-2000). His son, John Garnaut, is a journalist for Fairfax Media newspapers. (Credit: Wikipedia).

Article

The green man, by Stephanie Peatling - 21st March 2008
(Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)

He's no soft touch, but Ross Garnaut's climate change proposals may win more friends in the environmental movement than the boardroom. Stephanie Peatling reports.

As a young career diplomat in Beijing in the 1980s Kevin Rudd served for a brief time as wicket-keeper for the Australian embassy's cricket team. His captain was the economist turned ambassador Ross Garnaut.

Two decades on and the positions on the field have been shuffled - the Prime Minister now relies on his former boss to advise the Federal Government on the potential economic impacts of climate change.

A relative novice to the field, Professor Garnaut says he has been "bumping into climate change" for many years, as he has the Prime Minister.

Rudd came to him in Beijing as a rising star of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Garnaut's star was already shining brightly: he was plucked from the world of academia in his mid-30s to be the then prime minister Bob Hawke's senior economic adviser at a time when the Australian economy was being transformed by the floating of the dollar.

Speaking in his office at the Australian National University, Garnaut remembers Rudd as "very conscientious" and "a fine officer". Neither suffered any lasting tarnish from a "lost in translation" moment at an official event when Rudd reportedly described Australia and China as enjoying "multiple orgasms". The two men have kept in touch with regular chats over the years.

So Garnaut was not surprised when Rudd called him last year and asked to see him. But Garnaut, expecting the conversation to cover the usual subjects of economics and foreign policy, was momentarily surprised when Rudd asked him to return to the world of public policy to take on one of its biggest challenges: global warming.

"I thought about it a little while and thought I had been doing the same things for a long time and thought it would be interesting," Garnaut says.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review, as it is officially known, was commissioned by state and territory leaders last year. All were publicly committed to greater action on global warming but lacked any comprehensive research on what needed to be done and what risks could follow.

As Opposition leader, Rudd promised he would back the review if he was elected. He made good on that promise and the review now has the job of examining "the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy and recommending medium- to long-term policies and policy frameworks to improve the prospects for sustainable prosperity".

This week Garnaut presented his vision for an emissions trading scheme which the Federal Government is relying on to significantly drive down Australia's high level of emissions without devastating the economy. He will hand his final report to the Government in the second half of the year.

It is an Australian version of the 2006 report done by Sir Nicholas Stern for the British Treasury which found the cost of not acting to avert dangerous climate change would be comparable to the combined effects of both world wars and the Great Depression. Stern concluded it was no longer possible to arrest climate change developments over the next 20 to 30 years and instead opted for a strategy to reduce the impact. Stabilising the atmosphere would require cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of about 80 per cent on current levels, a figure supported by Garnaut in an interim report he released last month.

The analysis so far and the papers Garnaut has already produced have "put an H-bomb under the debate", says one person familiar with the review process.

"He's been a bit hot and cold. At the beginning he was a bit wobbly, and interested in China and too many issues that were at the margin. But he's smart and he's challenging and he is outside the box. He doesn't take any crap."

Garnaut's relative lack of knowledge about climate change has turned out to be a plus, this person says, because it has allowed him to have a completely fresh take.

"He is fresh. He is challenging our assumptions. Being from outside the box allows him to ask questions like what will happen to Australia if the region gets hammered, and what will happen to trade. He's not just an economist."

Now 61 and a grandfather, Garnaut is back in the thick of political life and finds himself enthralled by a project that neatly draws together the threads of his professional life: academic, economist, diplomat, bank chairman, director of mining companies and part-time farmer.

Garnaut's review team has been hand-picked from around the country and is formally based within the Victorian Premier's Department. But Garnaut prefers his office at the Australian National University with its Indonesian wooden ox and wooden replica of a Han dynasty horse.

His staff like to warn people about the messiness of his office while also saying he takes a certain pride in it. There is no evidence of mess on an unusually warm Canberra autumn day but piles of papers, journals and books, all neatly stacked or shelved, cover almost every surface of the small office in a building named after the great economist H.C. "Nugget" Coombs.

Coombs's career was set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the complete economic collapse that came to a country reliant on agricultural commodity exports for its prosperity.

In the 21st century Australia finds itself again grappling with a huge problem created by its dependence on another resource - coal - for both export to energy-hungry developing countries such as China and for its own power needs.

He gave his first public lecture on his work the day Rudd appointed Penny Wong as Australia's first Minister for Climate Change. In that speech, and since then, Garnaut has shown himself to be deeply smitten by the intellectual challenge climate change presents and willing to recommend much tougher action than the Government may be willing to take.

"Is Ross Garnaut becoming Kevin Rudd's green Frankenstein?" one tabloid newspaper asked recently. He has already impressed the environmental movement.

The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, says Garnaut has "taken a lot of time to read the science, including all the new science".

"In some ways he's giving us a rare gift of a thoughtful perspective from outside of government. His reports are well-grounded in science and the analysis is good … His analysis is taking an international view which is very important. It's in our national interest that Australia is a global leader."

Garnaut's work is based on the economic impact of trying to keep carbon in the atmosphere down to a particular level. He is looking at several different levels and the impact they will have, but no level is below 450 parts per million, the point at which scientists say the world has no better than 50 per cent chance of preventing dangerous climate change.

Henry and other environmental groups say Garnaut should at least model more aggressive scenarios. "We'd say he should go further - at least tell us what those lower levels would mean," Henry says.

A clue to why Garnaut has chosen to model the higher-end limits may come in the former prime minister Bob Hawke's comments to The Australian Financial Review late last year. Hawke could not fault Garnaut's brain, but what fascinated him was that he "operates within the bounds of the do-able not the unobtainable".

These "do-able boundaries" are what Garnaut has set himself. He knows the Government will not accept a reduction in Australia's emissions without an assurance that the economic good times will continue.

For all his fascination with the subject and his cognisance of the latest science which warns the pace and severity of climate change is greater than anyone can imagine, Garnaut is no greenie. He sheepishly admits he still drives a "high-emitting Ford" because he has not had time to switch to a more efficient vehicle.

The only reason his house has energy-efficient light bulbs is because his wife insisted on them; and the choice of trees they planted on their property outside Canberra was not motivated by carbon offsetting concerns alone, Garnaut says with an apologetic smile.

He is not impressed with emotional calls to arms that rely on pictures of polar bears adrift on tiny chunks of ice or photographs of parched and cracked landscapes.

"If concerns for those things is part of what people living in Australia value it's part of the reason for doing something … Environmental issues are very important to quite a few people. With my background I think more about geosequestration and economic issues but I acknowledge that many Australians place a lot of value on the impacts on the environment."

While he says concern about the future of the Great Barrier Reef or the vulnerability of species are "part of our polity's reason for doing something" they are not the type of concerns "that would move governments".

"It has to be analysis that follows the logical and not the emotional … We're not appealing to those emotional dimensions."

In an essay written for the Herald earlier this month the novelist Ian McEwan pondered whether the enormous challenge of climate change would be enough for people to act on a global scale for the sake of the quality of life on Earth for future generations.

"Is this the beginning, or the beginning of the end?" he wrote before concluding on a pessimistic note.

Garnaut says the "international community has a mixed record on these things. It managed on some big things to be successful." But he is not prepared to say whether climate change will be one of the things future generations can claim as a success.

"There's a way through this. That's not the same thing as saying that it avoids all prospects of dangerous climate change. If we do things right there's a chance of avoiding it.

"It's by no means certain we will avoid those risks. It's too pessimistic but I don't know more than there's a prospect of humans getting this right."

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