Political and attitudinal change
While the plans to tackle the climate emergency and the institutional structures to deliver them will be essential, the shift we face is not primarily technical or planning. To develop and then implement such an approach – to make the climate safe for humanity - will also require many shifts in how we think about what’s possible in both technical and economic terms. We will have to become comfortable with the idea of ‘emergency transformation’. It will also require shifts in where we focus our efforts - due to the short time we have to slow the rate of warming.
Abandoning ‘accelerated incrementalism’
Our policy and market debates on climate change were framed in the 1980s and 1990s – where it was assumed we had 50 years to fix the problem. The result is ‘Accelerated Incrementalism’ – the belief that our current systems and policy processes along with our current market and commercial institutions would deliver the change.
This framing influences most attitudes today, including:
A focus on the economics of acting vs the economics of not acting;
The assumptions we make about economic change being incremental rather than transformational;
The focus in policy debates on measures that will shift the market gently without significant losses to current players;
Which climate changing gasses we focus on.
This focus on ‘Accelerated Incrementalism’ has failed. Some 30 years after it was clear we needed to act, greenhouse gases are at their highest level and still climbing.
Therefore, doing more of the same, even with greater urgency is doomed to failure.
Adopting ‘emergency transformation’
What is now needed is ‘Emergency Transformation’. This will involve tough and challenging actions when compared to this historical framing and debate. The status quo will be severely disrupted. This is what always happens in an emergency.
The central challenge in getting the elites in the market and governments to understand the need to do this, will be to overturn the question that has framed the debate for three decades – can we ‘afford’ to fix climate change?
What is now clear is that we can’t afford not to. Therefore, in the process of shifting to emergency mode, we will need to constantly remind ourselves of the following. If the action to fix climate change seems ‘tough and challenging’, it will pale by comparison to how ‘tough and challenging’ it would be to deal with alternative of the spiral into global economic and social collapse.
This is primarily a mindset issue not an analytical one. No one argued for a cost benefit analysis for mobilising to eliminate the threat in WW2.
Adding a focus on warming rates to our focus on emissions reduction
Much else will also have to change with an ‘emergency mind set’ that gives us just 10 years to largely fix what is now a ‘climate emergency’.
For example, if we are facing tipping points (e.g.: melting ice sheets or thawing permafrost) where we could lose control of the climate, we need to consider both:
The level of emissions - of which CO2 is the key long term determinant of how hot the earth will get and for how long it will stay that hot; and
The rates of warming - which is the key to how fast the earth will warm and therefore determines the likelihood and timing of climate change spiralling out of our control.
This means that as well as a much more intensive and urgent focus on eliminating all CO2 emissions - we will need to dramatically increase:
Our focus on the shorter lived, but far more potent gases such as methane, and
Our focus on the safest options for geo-engineering the climate.
It is well known that reducing methane emissions allows for fast cooling to take place due to its short life (~10 years) in the atmosphere - and new research exploring more accurate methodologies for calculating the global warming potential (GWP) of methane, indicates that the cooling impact from reduced methane emissions could actually be more significant than previously calculated.
Acting on methane will mean treating fossil fuel sourced ‘natural gas’ as we now see coal – to be eliminated urgently. It will also require a much stronger focus on agriculture – initially targeting both beef and dairy cattle as the main volume source of methane in animal agriculture.
There are two important considerations here in terms of the shift to emergency mobilisation’s economic impact:
Firstly the market is already growing fast in this area, investing heavily in plant based products with dramatically lower climate impact. So as in the case of energy, policy can focus on driving existing solutions to scale, by leveraging market excitement that is already in place.
The second benefit is that the old climate polluting energy infrastructure has huge sunk capital which needs to be written off. This has slowed down change or at least made it more expensive. The benefit with animal agriculture is that it is based on a consumer demand driven product volume, with the ability to shift quickly.
To put it in simple terms, if people consume less beef and dairy but more plant-based products, farmers will breed less cows the very next year reducing methane emissions immediately and warming soon after. Within just a handful of years they will shift to crops that the market demands. The decline in beef and dairy consumption would still involve economic losses, but at a much lower scale than old style energy investments and result in much faster impact on lowering warming.
Addressing warming rates also requires an accelerated focus on the controversial area of geoengineering. Geoengineering aims to cool the planet using techniques and technologies that:
Remove CO2 from the atmosphere and
Reflect solar energy back to space.
Innovation, investment and governance will be required to find solutions that are effective at scale and minimise negative impacts on communities, water or land. Those who have been cautious, sometimes fearful of human’s interfering in the earth’s climate in this way, have reasonable grounds for concern.
We now need to face up to the new context of the climate emergency. We are today controlling the earth’s climate but doing so without awareness or a plan to manage the impacts. We now need to shift to managing it deliberately and safely.