{"id":12724,"date":"2015-09-28T07:03:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T12:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12724"},"modified":"2015-09-28T07:03:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T12:03:59","slug":"tim-flannery-the-next-decade-is-going-to-be-really-tough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12724","title":{"rendered":"Tim Flannery: &#8216;The Next Decade Is Going to Be Really Tough&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"first\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Presents\/2015\/09\/28\/Tim-Flannery-Tough-Decade\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Flannery: &#8216;The Next Decade Is Going to Be Really Tough&#8217;<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"tagline\"><strong>A brutally honest conversation with the world-leading climate thinker, who speaks in Vancouver Oct. 14.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"first\">Tim Flannery didn&#8217;t become one of the world&#8217;s most influential climate thinkers by sugar-coating the truth. &#8220;If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century,&#8221; he\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/03\/12\/books\/review\/12zimmer.html?pagewanted=all\">warned<\/a>\u00a0in his seminal 2006 book\u00a0<em>The Weather Makers<\/em>, &#8220;I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.&#8221; But Flannery has always been clear-eyed about the opportunities we have to change our course. &#8220;The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable,&#8221; he wrote. The only things standing in our way are ignorance and pessimism and confusion.<\/p>\n<p>Flannery has written about those obstacles in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian. He&#8217;s convened business leaders at the Copenhagen Climate Council. He&#8217;s advised energy giants like India&#8217;s Tata Power. For such efforts he was recently\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfu.ca\/sfunews\/stories\/2015\/tim-flannery-wins-sfus-2015-16-jack-p-blaney-award-for-dialogue.html\">given<\/a>\u00a0the Jack P. Blaney Award from Simon Fraser University&#8217;s Centre for Dialogue. When I reached him recently over Skype at his home in Australia, he was unflinchingly candid about all the hard work still ahead of us. &#8220;No matter what we do to reduce emissions the problem is going to get worse over the next decade,&#8221; he explained.<\/p>\n<p>But it won&#8217;t be insurmountable. Flannery will describe the ways that our human species can solve it at a must-see discussion he&#8217;s leading in Vancouver on Oct. 14 (click\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ticketstonight.ticketforce.com\/eventperformances.asp?evt=2994\">here<\/a>\u00a0for tickets). Right now I&#8217;m writing my own\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/transatlanticagency.com\/2015\/05\/deal-news-geoff-dembickis-are-we-screwed-sold-to-bloomsbury-usa\/\">book<\/a>\u00a0about climate change, which explores how Millennials such as myself are responding to a crisis that is defining our generation. So I appreciated Flannery&#8217;s brutal honesty when I put to him variations of the question that also happens to be the working title of my book: Are We Screwed? Our conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Flannery: &#8216;The Next Decade Is Going to Be Really Tough&#8217; A brutally honest conversation with the world-leading climate thinker, who speaks in Vancouver Oct. 14. Tim Flannery didn&#8217;t become one of the world&#8217;s most influential climate thinkers by sugar-coating the truth. &#8220;If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century,&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[9343,141,1638,9344,9341,9342,1340],"class_list":["post-12724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-carbon-free-economy","tag-climate-change","tag-collapse-of-civilization","tag-copenhagen-climate-council","tag-the-type","tag-tim-flannery","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12724"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12725,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12724\/revisions\/12725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}