Countdown to 2017
2012
The International Energy Agency is not a political body, not a campaigning group and not given to radical stands and statements. Its conservative credentials are impeccable. So when an organisation like this issues a dire warning that time is running out if we are to contain global warming, the familiar accusations of ‘eco-alarmism’ and ‘green zealots’ cannot be made. In the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure, the International Energy Agency has given the world a 2017 climate deadline.
Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, states emphatically that "The door is closing. If we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
Climate change deniers repeat that there is no ‘conclusive evidence’ in favour of human induced global warming. The statement is vacuous, given that science does not deal with ‘conclusive’ evidence of this kind; the statement is deliberately misleading in the implication that science can and does offer ‘conclusive’ evidence. Deniers often ask for ‘proof’. Proof is something that can only be delivered in mathematics. What climate science is offering is overwhelming evidence. And that’s as much as science can offer. And that is what is now being offered.
The issue is now a matter of practical wisdom and prudential judgement. It is our political and moral responsibility to decide and act in light of the available evidence.
The IEA is the world's foremost authority on energy economics. Its conclusions are gloomy in the extreme. In the next five years, so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings are likely to be constructed as to make it well-nigh impossible to contain global warming within safe levels. As a result, the chances of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever".
Birol’s warning pays particular attention to the ‘lock-in’ effect, which indicates how anything built now that produces carbon will continue to do so for decades to come. This ‘lock-in’ effect will be the single most important factor in bringing about irreversible climate change. Without a rapid change in direction within the next five years, the consequences are likely to be disastrous.
If the world is to stay the right side of a 2C warming, the threshold which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then carbon emissions must be held to 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Whilst the level is currently around 390ppm, the lEA analysis shows that the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget".
The lEA's calculations are grim in their apparently inexorable inevitability. If current trends continue, and if we carry on building high-carbon energy generation, then at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure by 2015. By 2017, we will have lost our room for manoeuvre - the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for.
The argument is conditional. If we carry on as we are, if we refuse to change our ways, and if, therefore, current trends continue, then, and only then, will the gloomy end be inevitable. Only at the end of this process do we lose our room for manoeuvre. We have that room now, and the implication of the IEA’s analysis is that we should use it.
The IEA report said: "There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is under way. Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010."
Birol's warning is another warning from the world of science to the world of politics. As international negotiations on climate change approach, world governments prepare to postpone necessary decisions and to avoid drawing the necessary conclusions. Kyoto’s 1997 provisions expire in 2012, but governments are nowhere near to agreeing a successor.
As the world's foremost authority on energy infrastructure states clearly that ‘the door is closing’, the world of politics responds with evasion, foot-dragging and a growing consensus in favour of postponing talks. The situation in the world of economics is even more depressing. In the UK, Europe and the US, plans are underway for new fossil-fuelled power stations that would ‘lock-in’ significant global emissions for decades to come. It is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. The world is suffering the worst economic recession for 80 years, yet the records for carbon emissions are being broken, at a time when we need a dramatic reduction. An IEA analysis in May 2012 found that carbon emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010, and that a record 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide had been poured into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels in 2011, a rise of 1 GGt on 2010. In light of these figures, Birol considers the idea of constraining global warming to moderate levels to be "only a nice Utopia". Drastic action is required.
The IEA’s new research adds to those previous findings, detailing clearly the extent to which current choices on building new energy and industrial infrastructure are likely to set the world on course for much higher emissions in the decades to come. It is not just that most industrial infrastructure already in existence is contributing to the high level of emissions, it is that it will do so for decades to come. In its annual World Energy Outlook, the IEA identifies this "lock-in" effect as the single most important factor in increasing the likelihood of runaway climate change.
Certain newspapers and certain journalists peddle stories which allege that climate science is a pseudo-science and is merely a disguised left-wing politics. Of course, such articles play to the galleries and are worthless as serious argument. Such swivel-eyed political prejudice has nothing to say when confronted by a body such as the IEA. The IEA is the world’s foremost body on energy infrastructures and economics, its data is regarded as the gold standard with respect to emissions and energy. Boo words like ‘green zealots’ and ‘eco-alarmists’ are bandied about in certain publications, yet the IEA is one of the most conservative bodies in the whole field. When the IEA sounds the alarm, it is time to wake up, remember what it is to be alive and start being human again.
Hope George Frederic Watts
One of Barak Obama’s favourite paintings, the version of this in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is one of my favourites. The young lady has just the one string left to play, and she struggles to hear the sound it makes. Hope hangs by that slender thread. Things look bad; but there’s always hope.
Climate scientists have established a temperature rise of 2C as marking the limit of safety. Beyond this threshold, climate change becomes irreversible. Not that 2C is safe. Even a warming of just 1C could cause dangerous rises in sea levels and bring about a higher risk of extreme weather.
We are not deficient in scientific knowledge and intelligence, only political will and organisation. Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace said: "What's seriously lacking is a global plan and the political leverage to enact it. Governments have a chance to begin to turn this around in Durban later this month for the next round of global climate talks."
Whilst the IEA figures underline the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres is careful to stressed the progress that has been made in recent years. "This is not the scenario we wanted," she said. "But making an agreement is not easy. What we are looking at is nothing other than the biggest industrial and energy revolution that has ever been seen."
The fact that international socialism, backed and financed by the world’s trade union movement, couldn’t achieve such a revolution, despite the most strenuous and heroic of efforts, does not encourage much by way of hope. We have five years to achieve what the workers of all lands couldn’t achieve in a century. But at least they tried. Can we say the same of ourselves? We will have to start with the difficult; the impossible may take a little longer.
Conventional politics is a busted flush. It’s hooked to the capital economy and its expansionary dynamic. The house is on fire, and all the politicians can do is pay people to throw buckets of petrol on it. Indeed, with tax inducements and prices held below true costs, the world’s politicians are helping us pay for the petrol. Even Nostradamus could predict where this will end.
Far from carbon emissions being curbed by governments, they are rising by record amounts. This, despite the worst recession for 80 years. For years, scientists have warned that we must get more efficient in our use of fossil fuels. Far from heading their advice, and getting better in our use of energy, we are getting worse. And, to cap the madness, subsidies for fossil fuels are rising, dwarfing those for clean energy by six times.
Previous warnings from scientists that the world's governments are not moving forward fast enough fell on deaf ears. Indeed, far from heeding the warning, governments turned around and started to speed in the opposite direction. As Damian Carrington, head of the environment at The Guardian, writes: governments ‘are now reversing at speed towards a hellish future.’ (A deafening warning on our climate, Guardian 10 November 2011).
The fact that innumerable warnings from the world of science have been ignored should make it crystal clear that science alone is not going to be enough as a game changer. Time and again, scientists supply the world of politics with knowledge and intelligence, only for governments, politicians and electorates to continually fall abysmally short of what is required, pick what can be accommodated to the prevailing system and ignore the rest. It is a failure of government, of political institutions and political practice, but, ultimately, a failure on the part of the world’s citizens to reclaim politics for themselves and transform the nature of ‘the political’ in a way appropriate for the new age of ecology. The world is crying out for what Jeremy Rifkin back in 1992 called Biosphere Politics. The old politics of economic growth and parliamentary elections has failed abysmally and will continue to fail. The new warnings coming from the world of science need to spark new political action in the right direction.
In Models of Democracy, the political theorist David Held developed the concept of ‘crises with transformative potential’, that is, crises which entail challenges to the very core of the political and social order. (Held 1987 ch 7). One would have thought that the deepest recession in 80 years, coming at the end of successive crises – the end of the long boom in 1973, the mass unemployment and sluggish growth in the 1980s – would have caused people to examine the fundamentals of the prevailing political and economic system. The fact that this crisis torn economy is also instrumental in bringing about the looming climate crisis is even more reason for a search for alternatives. A Green New Deal offering a transition to the low carbon economy has been put on the agenda, and largely ignored. As the economic crisis has deepened, tackling global warming has receded from the political frontline, with politicians and voters alike transfixed by a superstitious belief that the moribund capital economy may yet spring back to life. It’s a cargo cult.
What makes the stark warning from the International Energy Agency all the more alarming is the fact that the IEA is a deeply conservative organisation. Bear this in mind when we read a journalist like Leo McKinstry, who writes this in the Daily Express: ‘Left-wing ideologues have eagerly seized on climate change because, with traditional economic socialism so discredited since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they have been desperate to find another stick with which to beat the capitalist West.’ I presume McKinstry means communists and socialists and not the mere tautology that anyone who supports climate change is by definition a left-wing ideologue. In point of fact, many ‘left-wing ideologues’ were the most vociferous in their rejection of Green politics as a middle class politics. This was the line taken by Living Marxism, which carries on in such spin-offs as the Institute of Ideas and Spiked, toadstools which have sprung out of the putrefaction of the now defunct LM magazine. The left in politics have been very slow to give their support to environmental politics, often seeing the old right wing Malthusian and environmental determinism lurking behind the ‘neither left nor right’ slogan of Green politics. The ecological notion of limits savours more of conservatism than the socialist idea of freedom through the unfettering of the productive forces. Back in the 1980s, the political left accused the Greens of political evasion by referring generally to industrialism rather than to capitalism specifically and by employing the slogan ‘neither left nor right’. The political left saw Green issues as a threat to working class struggle and to employment in the manufacturing industry. I had countless arguments with socialists, marxists and Trotskyites back in the late 1980s and on into the 1990s on this view of Green politics as a middle class evasion. Ecological politics predates the fall of the Berlin wall by decades. The fact that many socialists have now become Green does not alter the fact that Green politics predates the demise of socialism and possesses an autonomy of left wing politics. There was nothing remotely left-wing about Edward Goldsmith and The Ecologist, quite the contrary. And there is nothing remotely left wing about Zak Goldsmith, Conservative MP and author of the excellent book on the ecologically sustainable society, The Constant Economy (2009).
It is the capital system’s ecologically destructive impact that lies behind any anti-capitalism within Green politics. Since the capital economy damages the planet, follows that any political movement concerned with the planet will be anti-capitalist. McKinstry is typical of those who think that the human economic sphere and technosphere have achieved an autonomy from the biosphere. That’s the kind of thinking that is presiding over the systemic destruction of the ecosystem upon which all life depends.
So it’s hardly surprising that there is a red and green alliance around the cause of social and environmental justice, aiming to extinguish the harm that the capital economy is inflicting upon the original goodness and beauty of our natural home. That red-green alliance is in our origins, that equity of each and all within nature’s interconnected web of life.
Abstract Tree Forms 1931-32 Emily Carr
Subject to the external imperatives of the capital system, the civilisation we have carved out of nature is just one big factory, a psychic factory that imprisons our subjectivities, shapes our mentalities and has us endlessly pursuing the almighty dollar. Time is money, and we never have enough of either. Which is why we are always running, further and faster, never getting anywhere.
Anti-capitalist? The greatest liberal economist of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, began his career as his ‘Satanic free trade majesty’. But Mill was an intelligent man and learned to shed his illusions about free markets and endless economic growth.
I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth… It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object; in those most advance, what is economically needed is a better distribution.
Mill 1985:114
Arguing that ‘the increase in wealth is not boundless’, Mill identified the stationary state as the ‘ultimate goal’ towards which all progress in wealth advances. The stationary state envisages by Mill entails the freedom of individuals from the imperatives of economic necessity and the freedom of individuals to develop as human beings. Mill argues that ‘the stationary state of capital and wealth’ would be ‘a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on.’ (Mill 1985:113). Mill thus rejected the ‘trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels’ which characterised personal interaction under capitalist relations. These were just a passing phase.
But it is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realising .. the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
Mill 1985:1/4
It is a credit to Mill’s intellectual honesty that when confronted with the way that the liberal institutions of the capital economy clashed with the central liberal principle of autonomy, Mill was prepared to demand changes in social institutions, moving towards cooperative forms of economic activity and ownership, rather than shed the principle. The same cannot be said for those who defend the capital economy, regardless of its autonomy-denying structures and impacts. Mill became an ‘anti-capitalist’ because he remained committed to principles of autonomy.
Social and environmental justice go together in the cause of human and planetary flourishing. A flourishing society in this respect is a society that is simple in means but rich in ends, no longer investing objects with existential significance, but instead emphasises the living qualities of human subjectivity in interrelation within the web of life. This is to approach the good life through an ecological sensibility, valuing the immeasurable sources of joy available through the appreciation of the web of life and appreciating the richness of forms, potentialities and life within mutual relationships, over and against the ability to exploit, destroy and dominate. Human flourishing is therefore set within the ecosystem as a whole, respecting planetary boundaries and natural limits rather than seeing nature as dead matter to exploit, a free lunch. This means the flourishing not just of human beings but of ecosystems, rivers, mountain systems, and the Earth as a whole.
McKinstry’s statement that left-wing ideologues seized upon climate science also contains the implication that the scientific position is prior to and independent of the politics that came after. Whether or not the right or the left seize on the science, and whichever way they do it, climate science is, first and foremost, what it is, science. And it predates any political bandwagon jumping suggested by McKinstry.
Can McKinstry show the distortions in the climate science? He needs to, in order to back the claims he makes. On point of fact, many august bodies with impeccable scientific credentials were involved in checking the supposedly fiddled research of the scientists at the University of East Anglia. The Royal Society for one. There were three major, independent enquiries. They found that not only was the science sound, the findings of East Anglia were strengthened by further research and evidence from other sources. It is for McKinstry to point out the errors in these findings. If McKinstry believes that he can identify the errors in the ‘so-called science’ of climate change, he should indicate how the real science contradicts the findings of the US National Academy, NASA, the Royal Society. Oh, and the IEA, too, the international gold standard on energy and energy infrastructures. Of course, the Daily Express don’t pay journalists like McKinstry for their scientific expertise. It’s not what the owners of these newspapers, or their readers, want. It’s certainly not why these journalists write. To protect the economic system which is nothing more than the anarchy of the rich and the powerful, the lickspittles in the press will denigrate science. And more fool the rest of us if we let them do it. Their social system is over, we shouldn’t let them take civilisation down with them.
The good thing is that science is clearly recovering something of its dangerous, revolutionary quality, pulling the rug from under ignoramuses and reactionaries the world over. And the violence of their denunciations indicates the extent of their fear.
In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski draws attention to the criticism that scientists have always received from reactionaries. Newton himself was subject to biting ridicule and satire. Bronowski states that ‘writers poked fun at scientists, in part from spite, and in part from political motives.’ (Bronowski 2011 ch 7 ).
Bronowski refers to the group of disgruntled Tory writers who formed themselves into a literary society in 1713, the Scriblerus Club. These writers set out to ridicule the learned societies of the day. This group helped John Gay write the play Three Hours After Marriage, satirising a pompous, ageing scientist under the name of Dr Fossile.
We need to identify reactionary ideologues for what they are, reactionaries, and use their carping as an opportunity to state the scientific case clearly and simply, and then ignore them by moving onto the serious business of securing the foundations of a viable, sustainable society. The issues are too serious for us to wasting time on trifles.
The simple truth is, unless we change course quickly, over the next five years, then we will have locked in enough greenhouse gas pollution to condemn the world to a temperature rise that transgresses the 2C threshold deemed "safe" by governments.
Deniers like to shout ‘eco-alarmism’ every time another warning is issued from the world of science. Well, there is cause for alarm enough in the reports that scientists are issuing with frightening regularity. One should place stress on the conditional nature of these predictions, emphasising the room for manoeuvre that is available for us to use in order to avoid the worst outcomes. If - if - current policies around the world with regard to new energy and industrial infrastructures are continued, then the IEA predicts a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.5C. Such a rise would lead to mass migration, water shortages and England with a summer climate akin to Morocco. If the policies we need to change course are not developed, the IEA predicts 6C. And what this means doesn’t bear thinking about. A ‘complete hellhole’ says Stephen Emmott. Armageddon. It’s a pathetic comment on the human species as homo sapiens.
The silence from the world’s governments when it comes to dealing with the energy crisis and climate change speaks volumes about the impotence of current political institutions and practices. It is pointless asking governments to do something that they are either incapable of doing or, in symbiotic relation with the very forces driving the climate crisis, are unwilling to do. One can cry shame here, but that would miss the point. Now is the time to do politics right, and if existing governments are institutionally and psychologically incapable of acting, there is a need for the world’s citizens to pioneer the biospheric transformation of the political.
The likes of Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas are currently referring to human beings as ‘the God species’. It’s nothing more than the old Wellsian fantasy of ‘men as gods’, only this time driven by desperation and panic in face of the climate crisis, not by optimism for the future. Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Yet his book has nothing to do with the ethical and anthropological dimensions of a species coming to live up to its creative powers. Instead, there is the hoary old veneration of technology and technical powers.
Men as Gods? You want to hold the whole world in your hands?
Have you thought what you are going to do with it?
What can be said is that political uncertainty is squandering precious time and money, making the investment needed for a clean energy future more expensive by the day.
All too predictably, stagnation, and even bankruptcy, in the economies of developed nations is becoming an excuse for inaction. Whilst the economy, time and again, trumps the ecology of the planet, both with politicians and the public, the fact is that this is rank bad economics as well ecologically destructive. It betrays the kind of short-term thinking that continually gets us into mess in the first place. As the IEA comments, "delaying action is a false economy". The case for action can be argued in terms of good, sound economics as well as ecology. The IEA calculates that avoiding $1 of energy investment before 2020 will require $4.30 to compensate after that date. Stern has produced similar calculations.
If there is a need for cuts, then we can start with the $409bn that the fossil fuel industry received in 2010 in subsidies. And then we can go after the rest. Nature doesn’t do bailouts, and neither should we with respect to a failing, parasitic, wasteful economic system.