by Noah Raford
2 New data and analysis over the last three years has led many climate scientists to conclude that we are on the brink of definitively blowing by any possibility of limiting global warming to two degrees centigrade (above preindustrial levels) over the next twenty to thirty years, and are on track for at least three to four degrees by early in the second half of this century, if not sooner—and if we continue with business as usual for very much longer, we may well entrain six to eight degrees of warming by the end of the century. Andrew Jordon, Tim Rayner, Heike Schroeder, Neil Adger, Kevin Anderson, Alice Bows, Corinne Le Quéré, et al. “Going Beyond Two Degrees? The Risks and Opportunities of Alternative Options,” Climate Policy 13, no. 6. (2013), 751–69, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2013.835705 and Camilo Mora, Abby G. Frazier, Ryan J. Longman, Rachel S. Dacks, Maya M. Walton, Eric J. Tong, Joseph J. Sanchez, et al., “The Projected Timing of Climate Departure from Recent Variability,” Nature 502 (October 10, 2013), 183–87. Also see the following three articles, all in Four Degrees and Beyond: The Potential for a Global Temperature Increase of Four Degrees and Its Implications, edited by Mark New, a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World”; Richard Betts, Matthew Collins, Deborah L. Hemming, Chris D. Jones, Jason A. Lowe, and Michael G. Sanderson, “When Could Global Warming Reach 4°C?” and Mark New, Diana Liverman, Heike Schroder, and Kevin Anderson, “Introduction: Four Degrees and Beyond: The Potential for a Global Temperature Increase of Four Degrees and Its Implications.”
For general summaries, see International Energy Agency, “Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map” and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “Too Late for Two Degrees?”: “The PwC Low Carbon Economy Index evaluates the rate of decarbonization of the global economy that is needed to limit warming to 2°C.… The global economy now needs to cut carbon intensity by 5.1% every year from now to 2050 to achieve this carbon budget. This required rate of decarbonization has not been seen in a single year since the mid-20th century when these records began. Keeping to the 2°C budget will require unprecedented and sustained reductions over four decades. Governments’ ambitions to limit warming to 2°C appear highly unrealistic” (3).
For terrifying discussion of the unexpected 2012–13 rapid increase in the level of methane release from defrosting Arctic and Siberian tundra, see Dahr Jamail, “Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice?” TomDispatch.com, December 17, 2012, www.tomdispatch.com.blog/175785. For an earlier warning on this, see K. M. Walter, et al., “Methane Bubbling from Siberian Thaw Lakes as a Positive Feedback to Climate Warming,” Nature 443 (September 7, 2006). For the most recent, most advanced computer simulations of interactions among multiple mutually exacerbating feedbacks, see David Wasdell, “Sensitivity, Non-Linearity and Self-Amplification in the Global Climate System,” (Presentation to the Club of Rome, Ottawa, Canada, September 20, 2013). In any scenario approaching the foregoing level of warming, “average temperatures over much of the inland United States would be a scorching 20°F hotter. Soil moisture would drop 50 percent or more over much of the country. Prolonged drought would ravage much of our cropland, turning breadbaskets into dust bowls. Sea-level rise of 80 feet or more would be inevitable. We would exceed global temperatures before the Antarctic ice sheet formed, when sea levels were 70 meters (230 feet) higher on our planet.” Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming—the Solution and the Politics—and What We Should Do about It (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 94.
For a recent comprehensive review of environmental problems and threats to societal functioning, see Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, 280, no. 1754 (2013), http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845, and their response to criticism from climate change–denier Michael J. Kelly (a professor of engineering) several months later, “Future Collapse: How Optimistic Should We Be?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, 280, no. 1767 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.1373. See also World Bank Report, “Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts and the Case for Resilience,” June 2013, www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climatechange/publication/turn-down-the-heat-climate-extremes-regional-impacts-resilience; and The Overseas Development Institute, “The Geography of Poverty, Disasters and Climate Extremes in 2030,” October 2013, www.odi.org/poverty-disasters-2030.
3 Nils Gilman, Doug Randall, and Peter Schwartz, “Impacts of Climate Change: A System Vulnerability Approach,” GBN white paper, www.gbn.com/consulting/article_details.php?id=61. Brahma Chellaney, Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013; Jeffrey Mazo, Climate Conflict: How Global Warming Threatens Security and What to Do about It (London: Routledge, 2010); Nils Gilman, Doug Randall, and Peter Schwartz, “Climate Change and National Security: An Analytic Framework,” in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, edited by John Dryzek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4 Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Thomas Pogge, “Poverty, Human Rights and the Global Order: Framing the Post-2015 Agenda,” www.crop.org; Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality, 2005 and Miklanovic, “Global Inequality Recalculated and Updated: The Effect of New PPP Estimates on Global Inequality and 2005 Estimates,” Journal of Economic Inequality 10 (2012); see also Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006); UNDP, Human Development Report 2007/08: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Diane E. Davis, “Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World,” Contemporary Security Policy 30, no. 2 (2010), 221–45; Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (New Society, 2011); and Steven Solomon, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). Paul Ehrlich has also observed, “The 2.5 billion people projected to be added to the human population by midcentury will have a much greater destructive impact than the last 2.5 billion. People are smart and therefore naturally use the most concentrated, highest-grade resources first. So each additional person must be fed from more marginal land, equipped with objects made of metal won from poorer ores, supplied with water from more distant sources or expensively purified, and so on.” Paul Ehrlich, “On Closing the Culture Gap,” SEED Magazine, April 8, 2010, http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_closing_the_culture_gap.
5 Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?” New Left Review 61 (Jan/Feb 2010): 39–40.
6 David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25, 29, 39, 102, 241–42 (italics in original).
7 The term wicked problem was coined to reference social-policy planning issues and dilemmas that are so complex—with so many uncertainties and/or irregularly fluctuating moving parts and feedbacks—as to defy any firm conceptualization or analytic purchase, much less any reliable plan of organized attack or preconceived solution/end-state. H. W. J. Tittel and M. M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–69. Super wicked appears to have been coined by K. Levin, B. Cashore, S. Bernstein, and G. Auld in “Playing It Forward: Path Dependency, Progressive Incrementalism, and the ‘Super Wicked’ Problem of Global Climate Change” (2007) later published as “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change,” Policy Sciences 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 123–52.
8 Laurence Smith, The World in 2050 (New York: Dutton, 2010), 108–9, citing an article by prominent hydrologists, P. C. D. Milly, Jul
io Betancourt, Malin Falkenmark, Robert M. Hirsch, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, and Ronald J. Stouffer, “Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?” Science 319, no. 5863 (2008): 573–74.
9 James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Allen Lane, 2009). For somewhat less apocalyptic visions of collapse, see Dmitry Orloff, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2013); James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (New York: Grove Press, 2012); and Ross Jackson, Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012).
10 From 1980 to 2015, total global carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption will have doubled, from about 18 billion metric tons to about 36 billion metric tons.
11 Indeed, that time-frame has very likely already passed, at least in terms of avoiding increasingly frequent major natural disasters world-wide beginning in ten to twenty years and continuing throughout the balance of the century – absent miracles in the development of CCS.
12 Typical in this respect is Anthony Giddens, The Politics of Climate Change (London: Polity Press, 2009, 2nd ed. 2011), a book filled with sage advice about the governmental policies that ought to be implemented but with almost nothing to say about the political obstacles to achieving these policies, much less about how those obstacles might be overcome. The same might be said of Juliet Schor’s useful handbook on alternative economics, Plenitude (New York: Penguin, 2010). Even those who stress the need for fundamental change in our civilization typically do not take on the question of the political requirements—or even highlight the centrality and magnitude of that issue, beyond one-sentence acknowledgments. See, for example, the otherwise admirable Nick Brooks, Natasha Grist, and Katrina Brown, “Development Futures in the Context of Climate Change: Challenging the Present and Learning from the Past,” Development Policy Review 27, no. 6 (2009): 741–65. Thomas Homer-Dixon goes further than most in explaining that politics is a big part of the problem (without making this point central to his overall argument), see The Upside of Down (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 214–19.
Discussion of the essential political problem has begun to appear since our earlier version of this paper. See John Barry, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Paul G. Harris, What’s Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It (London: Polity Press, 2013); John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg, Climate-Challenged Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Roger E. Kasperson and Bonnie J. Ram, “The Public Acceptance of New Energy Technologies,” Daedalus (Winter 2013): 90–95.
13 The 2014 IPCC Report is being published as we complete this paper. It makes clear that the 2007 Report generally underestimated the rate of climate-change acceleration and the risks posed thereby. According to the IPCC 2007 Report, reaching a sustainable level of GHG emissions – one that will keep CO2 to under 450 ppm – would require reducing emissions by 80 percent over the subsequent 25 years or so. That estimate is now overcome by the combination of growth in GHG emissions since 2007, the more rapid than predicted arctic snow and ice melt (and consequent albedo reduction and transfer of solar energy from the hard work of melting massive ice to the easier work of heating liquid water), and the elimination of any prospect of near-term front-loading of emissions reduction. Such front-loading is crucial because the great majority of the CO2 added to the atmosphere remains in on-going circulation between the atmosphere and short-term “sinks” on the Earth’s surface (or just below) for from hundreds to thousands of years. Only small amounts of atmospheric carbon per year are naturally sequestered in long-term (more or less permanent) “sinks.” Once emitted into the atmosphere, CO2 is a gift that keeps on giving, coming back again and again after relatively brief vacations incorporated in living things and surface water (the short-term “sinks”).
14 Techno-salvationists are constantly proliferating optimistic scenarios, most of which are more or less in the realm of science fiction. For example, various people have proposed that massive programs of carbon sequestration could help; they would indeed, except that the technology doesn’t yet exist and promises to be highly energy-intensive. More recent discussions have centered on “geoengineering” options—for example, putting shields in outer space to block incoming solar radiation or somehow fixing carbon from the atmosphere on a massive scale. Even if these solutions became technologically viable, the political obstacles to implementing them would remain vast—a point that the engineers usually remark on only in passing. See Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: Playing God with the Climate, (Allen & Unwin, 2013); David Biello, “What Is Geoengineering and Why Is It Considered a Climate Change Solution?” Scientific American (April 6, 2010) and David G. Victor, M. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, John Steinbruner, and Katharine Ricke, “The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort against Global Warming,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2009).
15 The claim that all the necessary technology already exists is put forth so often, and with so little justification, that it seems unfair to pick on any particular advocates. But here are a few high-profile ones: Sir John Houghton, “Overview of the Climate Change Issue,” Presentation to Forum 2002, St. Anne’s College, Oxford (July 15, 2002), www.jri.org.uk/resource/climatechangeoverview.htm; Katie Fehrenbacher, founding editor, Earth2Tech, www.economist.com/debate/days/view/208; and the European Green Party, www.greens-efa.org/cms/default/dok/134/134192.climate_change_facts@en.htm.
16 See the interviews of Mark Delucchi and Mark Jacobson (coauthors of the widely noted “A Plan to Power 100 percent of the Planet with Renewables,” Scientific American, November 2009) in John Wiseman, Post Carbon Pathways: Conversations with Leading Climate Change Researchers, Policy Makers and Activists (Melbourne, Australia: Centre for Policy Development, April 2013), http://cpd.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Post-Carbon-Pathways-2013-interview-transcripts.pdf, 32–37, 92–95.
17 The basic ideas of “ecological modernization” have become commonplace over recent years, but the term itself is not well known outside the academic field of environmental sociology. Ecological modernization theory first appeared among German and Dutch environmental sociologists and social theorists in the early 1980s, in response to neo-Marxist theories of the irremediable ecological destructiveness of advanced capitalism. By the mid 1990s, ecological modernization was a flourishing academic field with a broad literature. See Arthur P.J. Mol, Gert Spaargaren and David A. Sonnenfeld, eds., The Ecological Modernization Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009). The school of thought had precursors among policy intellectuals in the mid-1970s, reacting to the 1973 energy crisis and the growing first-world environmental movement of the time, such as the work of Amory Lovins on “soft energy paths” and “natural capitalism.” See Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” Foreign Affairs (October 1976); Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (New York: Little Brown, 1999).
18 See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (London: Polity Press, 1998).
19 Ecological modernization theory dovetails with (and at times explicitly relies upon) the neo-modernization theory of Ronald Inglehart and the “creative class” theory of Richard Florida. See Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). Inglehart posits that a
turn away from high-carbon “more” toward post-materialist values is a natural and inevitable feature of a maturing modernity. The “creative class,” as depicted by Florida, is made up of highly educated knowledge workers committed to social tolerance and diversity and an upscale, neo-bohemian lifestyle that includes positive appreciation of nature. Florida casts the creative class as a vanguard that will lead an eco-friendly technological revolution that will make economic growth endlessly sustainable.
20 Breakthrough Institute web address, and see, e.g. Earl Ellis.
21 The classic statement of this position is Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958). This understanding of modernization and modernity, based in Talcott Parsons’s and Edward Shils’s translation of Durkheim and Weber into social systems theory, is still present at the heart of Ron Inglehart’s influential revitalization of modernization theory over the last twenty years.
22 Not to mention the question of how such overindulgence has been historically constructed and reproduced—not out of purely natural, spontaneous human impulse, but by the exercise of power—and how what transition to higher needs has occurred has been due to bitter political struggles and partial historical victories by various movements that, in effect, demanded that “higher needs” (like civil rights) be put ahead of material affluence. Moreover, there is now an extensive literature in social psychology questioning the presumed contribution of material affluence to human happiness. Summarized in Juliet Schor, Plenitude (New York: Penguin, 2010), 176–180.
23 By this, we do not mean to reject the upscale neo-bohemian lifestyle of the “creative class” (satirized by David Brooks’s BoBos in Paradise [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000]) as without integrity. It is arguable that this lifestyle—at least in outline—is a version of the good life that stands up existentially and that would stand up normatively if it were universally available and could be pursued without violating norms of justice, but it’s not and it can’t—not on this planet after the history that’s already happened. No technological fix is going to overcome these limits—that is, there is simply no reason to believe that there is a possible technology, waiting over the horizon, that would allow six or seven (much less eight or nine) billion people to all live like Bobos on this planet. Any such way of life will continue to be limited to a privileged minority; its pursuit—by anyone anywhere—will continue to violate norms of justice.
