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The Planet Will Warm Past 1.5°C. What Now?

The only way of ensuring that the overshoot is temporary is to decisively defeat the fossil fuel cartel.

This essay was originally published by The Nation, here

The 1.5°C temperature target is difficult to honestly and openly discuss. Within the climate movement, it has become a locus of anguish, confusion, and even despair. Long a symbol of mobilization and hope, 1.5°C has become central to both activist campaigns and scientific analysis. Yet it’s now clear that the planet will almost certainly warm more than 1.5°C.

This is a rough prospect. It will likely condemn countless communities, many of them largely innocent of responsibility for the climate crisis, to suffering and destruction on a vast scale. It will trigger major ecological crises, extinctions first among them—the coral reefs, to pick just one example, could almost entirely vanish as the warming breaches the 1.5°C line.

These are not encouraging words, but they should not be taken as invitations to despair, or to a strange denialism in which, fearing hopelessness, we soft-pedal the severity of our circumstances. Because the truth is that the planet is not doomed, and neither are the world’s most climate vulnerable people.

The message here is that it’s time to act. Fortunately, significant action seems finally to be possible. At the last climate summit, after a grand push from the Global South coalition (the G77 + China) and the climate movement, the long-deadlocked battle to establish a “loss and damage” fund was finally won. That fund could finance disaster prevention and disaster mitigation in regions that have been pushed beyond their adaptive capacities. There will, of course, be limits to such interventions, but this could be the beginning of real climate internationalism. And it would not be alone. To cite just one other justification for cautious optimism, the renewable technology revolution has finally arrived.

Still, implacably, year by year, the “emissions budgets” are being drawn down, and the IPCC’s new “Synthesis Report” has made this undeniable. We’re going to hit 1.5°C. Thus, if 1.5°C is still achievable, it is only by way of an “overshoot and decline” pathway in which the temperature, in time, drops back below 1.5°C. As Peter Thorne, a physical geographer at Maynooth University in Ireland, noted at the report’s launch, “Almost irrespective of our emissions choices in the near term, we will probably reach 1.5 degrees early in the next decade.… The real question is whether we reach 1.5 degrees and then maybe go a little bit over and come back down or whether we go blasting through one and a half degrees and two degrees and keep on going.”

The challenge now is to limit the depth and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot and thus the destruction that occurs during and after it. This means, among much else, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, a tremendously challenging prospect that will disrupt economies and political alliances around the world. Such a phaseout can succeed only if it unfolds in a manner that is widely accepted as fair.

Continue reading “The Planet Will Warm Past 1.5°C. What Now?”

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Why you should read The Deluge

The first thing I want to say about The Deluge, Stephen Markley’s doorstop of a novel on the climate emergency, is that the prestige reviews it has thus far garnered, at least in the US – I’m thinking in particular of the Times, the Post, and the LA Times – are all a bit irritated by it, and all of them in irritating ways. Especially the LA Times, which actually complains that The Deluge “drowns us in catastrophes”. Don’t get me wrong – there are good criticisms to make here — but somehow these reviews avoid, or miss, or downplay, the point that should be highlighted, which is that you should absolutely read The Deluge. In fact, should put it at the top of your stack. This book is an event like few others, and you don’t want to miss it.

I’ll not go into the details. This isn’t my job and in any case I don’t want to drop any spoilers. Which seems to be a part of the problem that seriously reviewing The Deluge poses. How, for example, do you talk about the ending? Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, which was always going to conclude with an uptick – Stan’s point is to show that we are not doomed, that we could absolutely make a different future – The Deluge is more an extrapolation of the current storyline, the one we’re trapped in, and let’s just say that this extrapolation ends on a razor’s edge.

Many things here are just absolutely fucking great. One of them, a big one, is its take on the climate movement. We talk, some of us, about “the movement ecosystem” – how the frontline activists work in implicit if sometimes hostile coalition with the legislative activists, how the technologists are essential, but prone to exaggerate their own importance, how the climate movement, as it become the climate justice movement, is passing through some challenging cultural water, how eco-desperation can decay into eco-terrorism – but rarely, if ever, has there been a fiction that more intelligently centers these cross currents, even as it shows the resulting mélange being tossed about in rising waves of seemingly unstoppable fossil-fueled fascism.

Also, the writing can be sublime.

What criticisms would I highlight? Well, the description of Kate Morris, the charismatic activist at the center of the tale, can in extreme moments collapse, or almost collapse, into caricature. On the other hand, I have to add that I would really like to have been on her staff, back before everything went to shit. Also, if you’re sick unto death by the suggestion that the US will have to lead the world out of these dark precincts, you’re probably not going to love the pathway forward, which includes an embattled US Administration managing, despite all, to nonetheless lead negotiations that actually achieve a viable international climate accord. Which, given the strength of the winds blowing against it, isn’t really all that bad.

Here’s a quick summary, as that deal emerges out of some very delicate talks in the tumultuous year 2037:

“The framework was not a new idea. Each country would bring its per capita carbon emissions into alignment so the carbon budget of developing countries could rise minimally while developed nations would have to drastically reduce theirs. The CSDF [ Climate Stabilization and Development Fund] would pay for zero-carbon infrastructure in the Global South, while debt forgiveness would be tied to each participant’s decarbonization and biodiversity preservation. Free riders would be dealt with, first with limited sanctions and then with economic boycotts. If the major economies could stick to this, it would flush the carbon out of the world’s economy to limit warming to 2.5 degrees.”

Do note that terrifying number. Because, by the time we get to this point (page 814) in the tale, the Paris temperature goal is fading history. And note too that even holding this desperate line — 2.5C is not where we would choose to turn the tide — involves winning an endlessly deepening and dispiriting battle against insane new forms of sociopathic Christian authoritarianism. It also involves a culture dominated by virtual reality, an AI-assisted surveillance state, identity politics, heroic but cantankerous scientists, very clever bombs, cap and dividend, a democratic revolution in China, the methane emergency, solar radiation management, and the widespread acceptance, won at very high cost at the very last moment, that there is no way forward save the realization that we really are in this together.

The Deluge is long. But it’s written by a real novelist – this is not climate fiction as usual. And it is imbued with a realist sensibility, tinged with hope, that I for one found to be quite congenial. It deserves way more attention than it has thus far received.

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Al Gore’s Rant at Davos

Al Gore has had his moments before. It’s always good to recall that — back in 2007, when the Kyoto Protocol was still a thing, and the realists of the day were telling us the equity challenge would have to wait — he used his access to the pages of the The New York Times to remind us that

“Countries will be asked to meet different requirements based upon their historical share or contribution to the problem and their relative ability to carry the burden of change. This precedent is well established in international law, and there is no other way to do it.”

His latest moment came at a panel at this year’s Davos jamboree. It was called Leading the Charge Through Earth’s New Normal and it began with Johan Rockström and Joyeeta Gupta introducing critical new research on “Safe and Just Planetary Boundaries”. Watch their presentation, noting that the planetary boundaries work now contains a much greater emphasis on justice than it used to — Joyeeta says “redistribution” twice! For more info on this work, see here, and here, and here. But first skip forward to 37:00 (or 39:00 if you have absolutely no attention span) to hear Gore’s rather brilliant rant. And I mean this in the best possible way.

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Threading the Needle at COP27

Almost nothing – but something real – changed at this year’s climate conference

There is something in the modern radical mind that wants the climate negotiations to fail. Such a failure, after all, would seem to prove that this wretched system cannot be reformed, that only a revolutionary break can re-open the human future.

COP27, the climate conference in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt, was not, however, a failure. I say this despite the fact that my inbox contains, among much else, an alert from an international organization I generally support (and will not name) that tells me that “For the 27th time in its history, COP, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, has failed. The rapid degradation of our planet by our industrial economy will not be held in check.”

Alas, this email’s date stamp, November 18, places it two days before COP27 ended. During those two days, the rich countries that had blocked the establishment of the Loss and Damage fund folded under immense political pressure, thus allowing COP27 to finally create the fund.

The United States, the greatest of the miscreants, was the last to stand down. By some reports, it only did so after a last-minute threat by European negotiators to abandon the talks. But despite this win, the endless U.S. stalling did immense damage. In particular, it allowed the Egyptian presidency, no friend of humanity and nature, to play out an end-game gambit in which, finally, the core mitigation text—which is far too weak—couldn’t be challenged without putting the new fund at risk.

This was a failure, no doubt about it. But it was not a systemic failure. It wasn’t the fault of “the COP”—as in “COP27 is a COP out,” one of the least inspired of the recent headlines—unless this accusation extends to the UN system itself, which condemns the climate talks to consensus decision-making. This might be fair enough, save for one thing – blaming the UN lets the governments themselves off the hook, and this will not do, because the governments could yet change the rules.

Still, the Loss and Damage fund is a very big deal, or will be if we manage to provision it – to fund it adequately. As Mohamed Adow, the executive director of Power Shift Africa, put it, “What we have is an empty bucket. Now we need to fill it so that support can flow to the most impacted people who are suffering right now at the hands of the climate crisis.”

This is exactly right, and not just because a great deal of loss and damage finance is needed. So too is a great deal of mitigation finance. And adaptation finance. And just transition finance. But after COP27’s loss and damage finance battle, something very large has shifted. Back in the old days, when it was still possible to honestly imagine that mitigation alone would be sufficient, it was also possible to argue that the redirection of private capital flows would more or less suffice. But those days are over. Today, no one honestly believes that a meaningful flow of loss and damage finance will come through private channels, and this realization spills over to the transition portfolio as a whole.

The decision to create the loss and damage fund has thus queued up the real financing battle, in which international public finance takes center stage. Further, it did this even while it pushed the linked battle to phase out fossil fuels to a qualitatively new level. That battle was lost at COP27, but this was just an initial skirmish. Indeed, at COP27, the government of India, which will soon hold the G20 Presidency, came out, again and unambiguously, for the “phase down” (not “out”) of all fossil fuels, not just coal. The politics here are complex and fraught, and they promise to remain so, but this was unambiguously good news. The old days in which all major G77 politicians could be expected to reflexively argue that fossil energy is essential to development are, it seems, over.

Continue reading “Threading the Needle at COP27”

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Fair Shares – Lessons from Practice, Thoughts on Strategy

The climate fair shares idea is no longer novel. But as the planetary crisis deepens, its profile is changing. Humanity is facing a civilizational emergency – a polycrisis with both climate and injustice at its core – and we need big ideas that can help guide us out of it.

This discussion paper, which was prepared by the Climate Equity Reference Project for the Climate Action Network International, is focused on one such idea: climate fair shares. Its purpose is to support analysis and campaigns for equitable climate action, including – quite explicitly – greatly increased international climate finance flows.

Note here a political premise — the equity challenge cannot be set aside while we concentrate on “implementation.” To be absolutely clear — we are in trouble, but a rapid global climate transition can still be achieved. We have (all) the money and (most of) the technology we need. But it is hard to see how any sufficiently rapid transition will be possible unless the benefits and promises and also the unavoidable pain and disruption are shared amongst the people of this world in a way that is widely accepted as being fair, or at least fair enough. We can not follow, yet again, the all too often repeated pattern in which most of the benefits are captured by those who are already wealthy and powerful, while most of the pain and suffering is born by those already marginalized and oppressed. 

Some highlights:

  • Lessons and Thoughts contains a careful executive summary, which is good, because the paper as a whole is pretty long.  By today’s standards. 
  • It contains a tidy chapter on planetary inequality – which is what you get when you have a world of nations, some of them wealthy and some of them not, and all of them internally stratified between rich and poor.
  • It contains a brief history of the equity debate within the international Climate Action Network, which is at this point a global network of more than 1,800 civil society organizations in over 130 countries.
  • It reviews the various fair shares projects that have been done over the past few years — in Norway, Canada, the US, the UK, Quebec, New Zealand, France and South Africa.  The lessons are both varied and interesting.
  • It contains a brief — if somewhat technical — explanation of why, when thinking about national fair shares in an emergency climate mobilization, it might help to lean into the Climate Equity Reference framework.  As opposed to some of the alternatives.
  • It lays out some preliminary — but not entirely preliminary — thoughts about “climate realism”, which is considerably different from the traditional variety.  Given the future we’re looking at, as we shoot far beyond the boundaries of a safe climate system, this conversation needs real attention.
  • It offers some advice on framing the financial costs of stabilizing the climate system, and why these costs – though certainly denominated in trillions – might be far more tractable than they appear.  Particularly given how much money we waste today, on the militaries and, of course, on the rich.
  • Finally, it asks a group of big strategic questions, and invites reflections on difficult equity challenges that go beyond even climate fair shares.

Tom Athanasiou, for the Climate Equity Reference Project.

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Adam Tooze: “There Is a Fix for Climate Change. But Can We Afford It?”

In this interview from Global Reboot, the Foreign Policy podcast, its editor in chief Ravi Agrawal asks the economic historian & critic & polymath & general know-it-all Adam Tooze some key questions and then lets him run, which is basically all you can do with Tooze.

The key topics here are:

1) the financing demands of the global climate transition, which for the purposes of this discussion limited to mitigation. Hint: 2 to 4 trillion dollars a years in additional investment, about half of which is “inefficient”, which is to say that it is insufficiently profitable or risky or otherwise unwise to count on, at least in a business-as-usual world.

2) the political conditions under which this mitigation finance might be mobilized, and why, in Tooze’s view there are only two ways it might actually happen. The first is something like a global green new deal; the second is a massive public / private “derisking” enterprise of the kind that Blackrock’s Larry Fink dreams about.

The first, of course, is ruled out by the realism of the day, while the second would stink to high heaven.

In any case, this is short and focused — an interesting piece of the puzzle.

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Solving the Climate Crisis with Nuclear Energy Won’t Work

Back before the pandemic, the Abalone Alliance — the West Coast anti-nuclear alliance I was active with back in the day — had a reunion, and I was asked to speak. I came prepared to explain to my assembled co-fogies that, while we absolutely didn’t need to build any more nukes, we shouldn’t rush to shut down Diablo Canyon either. What with the global climate emergency and all.

I was asked to restrain myself, and to my shame I did. I feared that that distinction between keeping existing nukes operating, subject of course to real safety procedures, and building new ones would strike most people as scholastic, and that in any case the pro-nuke ideologues would love nothing more than repeat, with all their requisite distortions, that the old anti-nuke crowd was walking back its defining opposition to nuclear power.

Anyway, if you spend any time fielding suggestions that the anti-nuke movement had been, say, wrong, take a few minutes to read Robert Pollin’s short and decisive Solving the Climate Crisis with Nuclear Energy Won’t Work. You’ll be glad you did.

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Points of Comparison — Can we Afford a Fair Global Climate Transition?

 

“Anything we can actually do, we can afford”.

John Maynard Keynes

How to create the political backing for the international effort necessary to achieve a fair and rapid global climate transition, even though that support would be properly denominated not in billions of dollars but rather in trillions, or even as percentages of Gross World Product?

One eye-opening approach is to proceed by way of comparison – to show that the likely costs of the climate transition, great though they may be, are small when considered against the alternatives, and entirely affordable when considered against other, even larger expenditures, which we routinely accept as inevitable, even though they are often ill-conceived and sometimes criminally frivolous, and tend increasingly to be self-destructive on a monumental scale.

In a way, we all already know this, for we never tire of pointing out that the damage costs of inaction will far exceed the costs of any plausible mobilization. But other comparisons are also helpful, comparisons against the sums mobilized for other purposes, and also against the trillions that are wasted, on every front, when luxury consumption sets the terms by which expense is justified.

The good news here is that such comparisons are now routinely being made. Since the 2009 global financial crisis, and especially since the COVID pandemic, large governmental and inter-governmental financial interventions have, in the face of cascading emergencies, become almost routine. In both cases, very large numbers of people, and even significant fractions among the political elites, have been jolted into understanding that major mobilizations of public finance are sometimes absolutely, indisputably, necessary.

However, it’s still not possible to talk honestly and openly about the scale of the climate finance that’s actually necessary, or to keep the formal climate finance conversation from devolving into one in which private investment gets all the airtime. To be sure, there are many people who believe that transformational levels of public finance will be necessary to stabilize the climate system. But many of them also accommodate themselves to a policy world in which, so the thinking goes, the challenges of public finance can be safely set aside. In fact, public finance, and public planning and coordination more generally, will be absolutely necessary to the economy-wide transformations the climate crisis requires. Major debates remain before this point is so clearly established that it can no longer be reasonably contested, but at the same time, the conversation has clearly shifted. “Trillion is the new billion,” and this helps a great deal.

The key point here is that money is not the real problem. Keynes’ declaration made during World War II, “anything we can actually do, we can afford”, applies here as well. That said, the institutional and political challenges of providing the public finance and technology support necessary to achieve 1.5°C would be immense. The issues here sprawl, but I think it’s fair to say that Keynes would also have considered them to be entirely solvable. 

For the moment, here are a few useful points of comparison:

Environmentally destructive subsidies. Every day, governments spend massive amounts of money to subsidize the destruction of our world. How much money? If you count not only fossil subsidies but a variety of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, across a range of sectors including agriculture, forestry, water management, and fisheries, activities leading not only to climate destabilization but also biodiversity loss, land degradation and global inequality, the latest expert estimate appears to lie north of $1.8 trillion a year, or about 2% of Gross World Product (GWP), all of which goes into directly supporting unsustainable production and consumption.

Of this $1.8 trillion, about $640 billion comes as explicit subsidies to the global fossil industry. Actual cash. But there’s more to this story, as far as fossil fuel subsidies are concerned, in part because some of it comes as consumption subsides designed to protect the poor (a fact the fossil cartel takes full advantage of, in its endless claims to be a great benefactor of humanity) and in part because there is another, truer way, to estimate fossil subsidies. This time it’s the IMF that has run the numbers, and despite criticism, stuck to its insistence that hidden damage costs must be counted as subsidies, and in 2020 calculated the real fossil subsidy was about $5.9 trillion, almost 7% of global GDP. Which comes to about $11 million a minute.

COVID Recovery spending. According to the International Energy Agency, pandemic recovery spending, as of October of 2021, had reached $16.9 trillion. Of that, about $2.3 trillion went into long-term investments, of which only about $470 billion was for clean energy and sustainable recovery – about 3% of the total. Much of this was a one-time outlay that will not be repeated, so it’s notable that fossil energy subsidies significantly outpaced clean energy subsidies. It’s also notable that the overall economic recovery was fantastically inequitable. According to the World Inequality Lab, the richest 1% of the global population have, since the beginning of the pandemic, captured 19 times more of global wealth growth than the whole of the bottom 50%. The extremity here is frankly amazing – Oxfam, in its Inequality Kills report, notes that “The increase in Bezos’ fortune alone during the pandemic could pay for everyone on earth to be safely vaccinated”.

Military spending. Military spending is the gold standard of wasted economic potential, so it’s notable that, in early 2021, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated the world military spending had risen to almost $2 trillion in 2020. And this figure is growing fast. The US military budget is the largest in the world (it recently came to about 40% of the global total) and“ according to a projection by the Congressional Budget Office, Congress is projected to spend about $8.5 trillion for the military over the next decade – about half a trillion more than is budgeted for all nonmilitary discretionary programs combined (a category that includes federal spending on education, public health, scientific research, infrastructure, national parks and forests, environmental protection, law enforcement, courts, tax collection, foreign aid, homeland security and health care for veterans)”. But rapid growth is also taking place in China, where the military budget is about $229 billion and “modernization” programs are driving its growth up by an estimated 7.1 percent per year, and of course in Europe, where the Ukraine war has led a new prioritization for all things military.

Odious Debt. The poor are in all ways disadvantaged, and this of course means adequate climate action is often beyond their grasp, as is sustainable development itself. For some key current details, see the 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report, which begins not with the COVID pandemic but with the “legacy of inequality” that already hung over the poor countries when it arrived, a legacy that only deepened as the COVID crisis cascaded into broader economic instability (supply chains, inflation, higher interest rates) and then into the instabilities and economic dislocations of the Ukraine war. The chief point here, to be undiplomatic, is the billions in debt interest that the developing countries must every year pay to their creditors in the wealthy world, a burden that is sometimes so odious that the term “debt slavery”  seems more a simple honest description than any kind of hyperbole.

How large is the developing world’s external debt? Estimates vary, as does the legitimacy of the debt – how valid was it, really, to transfer South Africa’s apartheid debt to its inheritors, most of whom never had any part in negotiating it, or benefiting from it?  What is clear is that the total external debt of the developing countries reached $10.6 trillion in the wake of the pandemic, and that the servicing of this debt consumes resources that are now desperately needed for both development and the climate transition. In the low-income countries alone, external debt sharply increased during that pandemic, reaching $860 billion in 2020. No wonder a new wave of defaults has begin, and that widespread debt distress appears to be on the horizon.

Dynastic wealth. This brief list would not be complete without a mention of dynastic wealth, which is passed down from generation to generation within families, and of course within castes and classes. The numbers vary tremendously from country to country, but the US figures alone are boggling enough. Wealth managers estimate that “nearly 45 million U.S. households will transfer a total of $68.4 trillion in wealth to heirs and charity over the course of the next 25 years”. And of course, much of these transfers will be protected from taxation – according to one keystone study, “these wealthy families will avoid as much as $8.4 trillion in estate and generation-skipping taxes between now and 2024, by using dynasty trusts and other currently legal loopholes”.

Tax Avoidance. Speaking of the rich, we should mention hidden wealth, which is shielded by tax havens and secrecy laws, and has now been estimated to be about 8% of the world’s household financial wealth, or 10% of GWP . In 2007, this came to about $5.7 trillion. More generally, and this is probably the best bottom-line figure for this brief summary, taxing the world’s richest could raise about $2.52 trillion a year. It’s not enough to support all the ongoing social services associated with a just and sustainable global society, but it would definitely help. It would certainly cover the core of the climate transition. And if we may add a country specific data point, note that the wealth of the US billionaire class increased by an estimated $1.7 trillion since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and that, under current laws, almost none of this new wealth will ever be taxed.

Blood Fossils. Finally, given Russia’s war on Ukraine, it seems appropriate to note that a good fraction of the untold billions that are spent on fossil fuels are diverted, sometimes immediately, to support the worst kinds of infamy. The exact figure varies with the price of gas and oil, but as of this writing, good estimates held that “Europe’s ongoing energy purchases send as much as $850 million each day into Russia’s coffers” (estimates vary, but see the citation to the Bruegal think tank’s numbers here). This, of course, is clear evidence of an intolerable dependence, and voices everywhere have risen to denounce it. What is not clear is how many of them will denounce the larger dependence, which hems us in on every side, with anything like equal vigour. Russian oil and gas, after all, is only the tip of the fossil iceberg.