I few months ago, I read George Marshall's book "Don't even think about it - why our brains are wired to ignore climate change". It's taken me a while to collect my thoughts about the book. In fact, I couldn't really sort them out in a linear way. So I drew up the slide below, and in the process the points I captured shifted around the page as I worked on them, turning them over in my mind and relating them to other points. What emerged in my mind were four groupings of things that seemed to naturally go together. I then labelled each group - self-awareness barriers, social barriers, cognitive barriers and evolutionary barriers. The red text that I then added were some key points for what we can do to move things forward in a positive direction. What then occurred to me was that taking the initiative to break through brings most people up against the taboo on climate conversations. However, if this proves a severe barrier, perhaps an easier "in" is to gently prompt the audience for such initiatives to make themselves space and time to do their own investigations of these four groups of barriers preventing them from finding a better life for themselves and those around them who they know and love. That way, the audience would stand a chance of meeting the communicator of climate change and engaging in a conversation that can go somewhere. Just my perspective on what I got from the book. I hope it might help others. The only reference to finance in my summary is the tendency among many people to avoid short-term costs even when this means there will be far greater costs in the longer-term, because there is some level of uncertainty surrounding these longer-term costs.
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Yesterday I saw a TED talk about the ignorance project by Hans Rosling of the Gapminder Foundation: https://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/ Below are two screenshots showing their views on what others might call the 'economic growth lifts all boats and reduces inequalities' argument. Two humps become one. This is all well and good regarding reducing inequality, although they do point out that this still means there is forecast to be an enormous number of people in abject poverty.
But one thing that is not mentioned in the talk is the likelihood that the economic growth behind the assumptions these data and forecasts rely on might bump up against planetary sustainability limits. The area under these curves represents, approximately, the total amount of global economic activity, for example for the year it shows. Unless we can break the strong link between economic activity and material throughput, if the area under the curve grows too big, we will push through the safe and sustainable limits of our planet. We currently have a situation of unburnable carbon, which gave rise to the 'keep it in the ground' campaign from the Guardian. How long before we might need an 'unspendable money' campaign? The chart above is from the BP World Energy Outlook 2016. It's the most dramatic decarbonisation scenario of three scenarios they forecast through to 2035. It sees global carbon emissions (from the global energy system) peaking in about 2020 (roughly coinciding with peak oil). To the left of the thin grey vertical line are the actuals from 1965 to 2014. BP admits in their analysis that even this aggressive decarbonisation scenario does not achieve the IEA 450 (ie warming kept under 2 degrees) scenario. All BP's scenarios fail to meet that target. However, I think there are two remarkable things about this chart.
The first is that it shows that, for anyone planning for future investment in long-term energy infrastructure (for which there can be forty-year timeframes and Net Present Value calculations), it is no longer Business As Usual. The renewables energy revolution has already started. The second is that gas is clearly considered a growing fuel for a long time to come. I hope that includes effective CCS. As a final consideration, BP's forecasting models the total energy demand based on various assumptions about GDP and population growth (among other things). One way of moving closer to achievement of IEA 450 would be to influence energy demand so that future forecasts can be reduced. That would speed the demise of coal and could potentially reduce the forecast use of gas. Last night I went to the public launch of 1.5 Degrees: Meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement - http://www.1point5degrees.org.uk/
Excellent set of talks, discussions and Q&A on meeting the challenges of keeping global warming to below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Will be interested to see the results of the rest of the conference, especially how the matter of global justice is treated, on top of the technical and geopolitical aspects. The pace of modern life in the mainstream is something most have become accustomed to. It has become 'the new norm' and it's part of the system with immense inertia driving us through sustainability boundaries.
This is like our perception when driving. When we drive fast, our brains get accustomed to that speed. It's as if our brains make decisions on less and less information from each object we pass, but turn their attention more to movements and 'strategic' matters such as the next junction or changing conditions. If we're not careful, we maintain this 'mode' even when we slow down, eg to enter a 30- or 20 mile an hour zone. As a result, everything seems to be moving so slowly when we do this, and sometimes it feels like we're going at 10 instead of 30. The natural inclination, if we weren't taking notice of speed limit signs, would be to still be travelling at 40 or 50 but thinking we were travelling at 30. I read about this effect a few years ago, and then consciously looked out for it, checking myself against speed limit signs before arriving in the next speed zone, and realised that it was a real effect. Without having been primed to look out for it, I might never have noticed it. Unsustainability is a little like this. Unless we check ourselves against it, the tendency is for the speed of modern 'developed/advanced' existence, built on efficient systems of exploitation of natural and ecological resources, and grown largely on the back of fossil fuels and a growth model of the economy, to be something we become accustomed to. Any 'slower', more sustainable existence feels too slow to even contemplate. So the mainstream juggernaut ploughs on ... The UK has decided to leave the European Union.
I hope that, in the ways this decision is carried out, those who do it draw on British values and identities that are admired by many around the world - tolerance, compassion, innovation, open-mindedness, free expression, love of diversity and opportunity, humility, respect for others, a spirit of both adventure and co-operation in seeking to solve world problems. This ushers in a period of renegotiation of the relationship between the UK and the rest of Europe. I hope that relationship, even if rocky in the short-term, emerges better - to the mutual benefit of all countries and peoples, in the context of our shared responsibilities for the Global Commons and each other. Barbara Hammond (Low Carbon Hub), Gemma Adams (Forum for the Future) - both pictured above - and Mike Barry (Marks & Spencer) gave thought-provoking talks about this topic this evening at the Said Business School and then led discussions. Fascinating glimpse into the minds of people in big business and of people working to encourage local community-owned renewable energy generation, and a range of topics surrounding these.
It was good to chat afterwards in unstructured conversations, eg to share ideas about what a sustainable zero-net-carbon world might look like, in Oxfordshire and beyond. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2308
Professor Allen set out the global context: rising cumulative atmospheric carbon - COP21 in Paris – Article 4 expressing the direction of travel towards zero net carbon. http://safecarbon.org/ He posed various questions about the opportunities, responsibilities and part played by businesses in the transition to net zero carbon. His talk, and responses to questions, contained optimism that companies might self-regulate – to deliberately plan for their businesses to flourish in, and contribute towards, keeping the peak global temperature increase to less than a specific number of degrees centigrade. I’m also optimistic – that a global governance organisation might emerge that has teeth and is able to (if necessary) set carbon budgets globally, by region and even by country, just in case self-regulation doesn’t work. If we can imaging it, it can happen. I’m optimistic that we will get to net zero carbon as part of the transition to a sustainable and fair future. It might be messy along the way, and my focus is on minimising the damage and disruption during the transition. I hope many people in the audience today are of a similar view. Their questions seemed to suggest they were. The chart below shows the likely trajectories of several business sectors towards a net zero carbon future, with electricity being the leader and transportation the laggard. Recently, people have responded positively to the IEA’s news that there are a number of countries where there appears to have been some degree of decoupling of carbon emissions from economic growth. For example, Carbon Brief have commented about it here:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/the-35-countries-cutting-the-link-between-economic-growth-and-emissions This got the Planetary CFO thinking about how this relates to finite/closed system aspects of our planetary home. Decoupling is a good thing, but not sufficient of itself to prevent us making our home uninhabitable by a civil and multitudinous human population. What really matters is whether the cumulative atmospheric carbon can be kept within an absolute limit to prevent runaway climate change switching the Earth into a new and much less survivable equilibrium state. Hence we need a cumulative carbon budget, and hence human-generated carbon emissions need to be close to zero within the next couple of generations. There is also the matter of “leakage” – where some countries might be reducing their emissions, but importing more goods from elsewhere with high embedded carbon emissions, which means that they are effectively exporting their carbon emitting behaviours to the countries they import those goods from. A graph, for a particular country, showing its economy growing and its carbon emissions falling might be a little comforting, 35 countries even more so, but it is far from showing that the battle for sustainability is being won. here to edit. Planetary problems such as Climate Change and Global Inequalities need planetary solutions. While nation states remain fractured and isolationist, these solutions at a global level become more difficult to achieve. By contrast, as countries find ways to work together, such as with the EU-wide agreements and targets on carbon emissions (20% reductions by 2020), we move closer to global level measures to tackle these complex problems. The same would be true for financial measures such as a World Balance Sheet. With a strong European leadership in this topic, we would be far more likely to find ways to create a standard for multi-national accounting for things like Natural Capital than if each nation of the EU developed and operated an approach independently of the others. A European standard would take us a step closer to a global standard and the creation of a World Balance Sheet written in a financial language that all countries can understand.
This is not an argument for every aspect of governance to be globalised, but only for those aspects of human activity that require a global approach in order to succeed. Governance of human activities that contribute to Climate Change is one such aspect. That’s why the Planetary CFO will be voting for the UK to stay in the EU. TVs “Big Questions” - How to convince Sceptics it’s time to act on Climate Change – debate polarised23/3/2016 Last Sunday, I watched “The Big Questions” on TV. The title of the question gave me cause for optimism that the debate had moved on from a similar one a couple of years ago, in which there was too much airtime allowed for climate change denial, and not enough for healthy scepticism about the pace and size of the changes and the scale of the response necessary and genuine debate about ‘how much, how soon’ to rein in carbon emissions and start to capture carbon more effectively, and what sort of cumulative carbon budget would be appropriate for humanity.
However, I was disappointed when Nicky Campbell was not firm enough in stepping in to control an obvious climate change denier who, several times, took the airtime without invitation, spoke over other people, very loudly expounding complete denial that global warming is happening (saying things like “the Earth is cooling!” and “the source of the global warming campaign is religious”). To be fair to Nicky, he did then refer back to two of the environmentalists in the room (from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) asking them “how do you persuade someone like this that climate change needs action now?" And I was pleased to hear them respond with a challenge in return along the lines “it is ridiculous to give airtime to the extreme views of climate change deniers because the things they argue about are beyond debate – they are established fact – entering into an argument with them is not a debate – it is not going to change their minds – it polarises discussions and distracts from what we need to be talking about”. Overall, the sense I got from what happened in the programme was that it was not a debate about how to persuade genuine sceptics but rather an object lesson in how frustrating it is when climate change deniers get a platform and exchanges become polarised. This is what Nicky Campbell failed to head off. It's important to distinguish between genuine scepticism and denial. Would the same programme have allowed someone to be so vociferous in denial on other matters of established fact, for example to say "smoking tobacco causes no harm - in fact it's good for you", or "seat belts do not make you safer in a car accident". Scepticism is healthy - it helps us to challenge everyone on the actions we take - which actions, how far, how fast. But denial just creates unproductive and frustrating polarisation. |
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