Guest Series - Speeding toward Paris: emissions accomplished?

We're kicking off a series of special posts featuring guest voices on climate change with Professor Paul A. Morgan, Ph.D.

In just a few weeks, representatives from more than 190 nations will gather in Paris for COP21, the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The stakes are high. This may be the last best chance to reach a global agreement to reduce emissions enough to avoid overshooting the target of a two degrees Celsius average rise in global surface temperature above preindustrial levels. Beyond that number we invite “climageddon.”

The good news is that for more than a year now there has been a remarkable quickening of awareness and action on climate change. In September 2014, I joined hundreds of thousands of people in New York City for what was hailed as the largest climate march in history. A primary aim of the mobilization was to pressure world leaders gathered at the United Nations (U.N.) to take bold action on climate change. 

Less than two months later, the U.S. and China announced their intentions to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These commitments from the planet’s two largest emitters generated much needed momentum for the UNFCCC’s COP20 held in Lima, Peru in December 2014. After the relatively successful conclusion of that meeting, there was steady progress and guarded optimism.

To ensure success in Paris, though, there must have been calls for divine intervention. How else can we explain the phenomenon of Pope Francis and the release in June of Laudato Si’, his encyclical on climate change and the environment?  In September, the planet’s new climate change rock star went on tour, traveling to the United States where he spoke with moral authority on climate and other issues in the first ever papal address to a joint session of Congress. This was followed by a speech at the U.N. General Assembly that coincided with the formal adoption of the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has been an extraordinary year for climate action and sustainability.

Of course, the story does not end here. Even if there is an ambitious agreement reached in Paris, it will only be a beginning, a commencement. There will no doubt be setbacks and much difficult work for years and decades to come. Still, can we now say that the momentum has finally shifted in favor of sustainability, climate sanity, and a fossil free future? I wish it were so. I can’t be the only one who has had the experience of being jolted awake and catching a glimpse a different reality outside the protective bubble of affluence, distractions, and day-to-day consciousness. It’s usually brought on by a sobering news report, an alarming article, or an eye opening presentation. The overwhelming realization is that there is a very different story unfolding outside the bubble. 

To begin, there are serious doubts about whether national emissions reduction pledges, the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), will add up to what the science tells us is needed. Moreover, there are credible doubts about whether a two-degree Celsius target is too high. In a provocative and, yes, eye opening article that came out this summer, climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues called that goal “highly dangerous.” These shortcomings could possibly be addressed in subsequent meetings, but there are even more volatile forces at play that can’t be so easily remedied with an international agreement.

By 2050, when today’s young people will be in their prime, the human population is projected to reach at least 9 billion and perhaps as many as 11 billion. The Earth may be able to handle that number, but the vast majority of those people will aspire to live like . . . me. Unfortunately, it’s not possible. The global development project of the last century has been a planetary Ponzi scheme. We in the wealthy industrialized countries got in early and have established a consumptive culture that simply cannot and should not be replicated. Yet there will nothing in a Paris agreement that compels cultural transformation or a reassessment of an economic system premised on endless growth.

There’s also the question of justice, which is more than an interesting topic for the leisured theory class. The effects of climate change are already affecting communities throughout the world. As more and more poor people experience the impacts of droughts and rising sea levels, they are going to look to the countries that have historically contributed the most to climate destabilization. That’s us. The current refugee crisis in Europe is just a taste of what may become a chronic crisis of climate refugees. The introduction of such a chaotic variable could quickly lead to conflicts and the unraveling of the social fabric, thereby rendering any climate agreement a quaint relic of a relatively stable past.

Such a scenario is imagined in a bracing 2014 book by Naomi Oreskes of Harvard, and Erik M. Conway of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Titled The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, they have crafted a work of science-based fiction that is more than a little frightening. Their premise is as follows:

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and--finally--the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment--the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies--failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.

If that seems preposterous, consider this passage from Hansen’s article cited earlier:

We conclude that continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization. This image of our planet with accelerating meltwater includes growing climate chaos and storminess, as meltwater causes cooling around Antarctica and in the North Atlantic while the tropics and subtropics continue to warm. Rising seas and more powerful storms together are especially threatening, providing strong incentive to phase down CO2 emissions rapidly.

What these passages tell us is that science fact is beginning to align with science fiction. The framing of climate change as an existential threat is now commonplace in popular culture, even if the frightening implications haven’t penetrated the bubble. One of the biggest movies of last year was Interstellar, which followed a team of NASA astronauts searching the stars for another planet where humans might be able to relocate, now that climate change has made Earth almost uninhabitable. Interesting, but NASA and Space X are having trouble getting rockets off the ground, and this year’s big movie, The Martian, only reinforces how absurd it is to think we can simply pack our bags and move to another planet if the situation gets too dicey. None of this bodes well for the future of humanity.

Meanwhile, if you’re a species other than a homo sapien, these are the worst of times – the worst in 65 million years anyway. It’s difficult to tell just by looking outside, but we’re in the midst of a mass extinction event. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction, chronicles what is surely the most overlooked and most important story on the Earth. Of the planetary boundaries that have been crossed, the global loss of biodiversity is the most distressing because it is irreversible. Extinctions are permanent, and the news is not getting any better.  Kolbert’s 2014 book was eclipsed in June of this year with the publication of a study concluding that the sixth mass extinction is underway and that “the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 100 times higher than the background rate.” The last mass extinction was caused by an asteroid. This time it’s an “usteroid.” It’s human-induced. Our increasing numbers, our consumptive culture, and our uncontrolled experiment with the climate have radically changed the conditions in which life has flourished for millions of years. We’re often reminded that each of those species plays an important role in the provision of ecosystem services. It’s true, but they also have a right to exist, despite claims that they are our ‘natural resources.’

There you have it, a sampling of the story that is unfolding outside the bubble of privilege, affluence, distraction, and consumption. No Paris agreement can possibly get at the scale and urgency of the challenge. There is an enormous gap, a chasm, separating the severity of our climate challenges and even our best responses. It’s an absolutely unique historical moment. As Jon Kohl puts it, “for the first time in human history, a particular worldview . . . is becoming conscious of its own impending fall (all previous civilizations collapsed probably without ever understanding why) and has the opportunity to consciously re-forge its worldview to confront the threat.”

To get a sense of what this means, imagine a set of railroad tracks extending into the distance.

 Our civilization began chugging along these tracks as a steam locomotive more than a century ago. Since then, more and more people have boarded and for those in first class, we have transformed that locomotive into a sleek high-speed civilizational train hurtling into the future. For the past several decades scientists in the front cars have warned us that there may be trouble ahead, but today, there is no doubt. The science is clear. The tracks will eventually end at the edge of a precipice. If we continue on these tracks we are headed for certain catastrophe. 

How have we responded to his news? Some people are a little freaked out because they see what’s coming and are walking toward the back of the train. Many of us, myself included, have been busy greening the train. We are changing light bulbs on the train; we are making it a hybrid train; we are installing energy-efficient windows on the train; we are putting a green roof on the train; we are installing waterless urinals on the train; we are serving local, organic food on the train; and we are even talking a lot about sustainability and climate change on the train. What’s the problem?  We’re still on the train. Contrary to an often repeated claim, our greening efforts are not making the train – our civilization – more sustainable; we’re making it less unsustainable. As John Ehrenfeld has argued in his writing, reducing unsustainability does not create sustainability. There’s a fundamental fallacy at work, a kind of magical thinking that believes doing more of what we are already doing will eventually, magically, get us where we need to go.

We have been focused on greening because, frankly, we don’t know what else to do. Greening is comfortable and fits how the problem has been framed. Climate change has typically been framed as a normal problem, a tame problem that can be addressed with the usual tools and strategies – technology, policy, education, and behavior change. A normal problem can be extremely serious and difficult, such as AIDS, but you can chip away at it and make steady, measurable, linear progress. A game changer, on the other hand, is different. It requires that we focus not on what surrounds us, what is easy to see on the train, but instead on the often invisible but powerful assumptions of our culture. These are the tracks that give direction to everything we do. Our climate crisis isn’t simply human-caused; it’s the result of people who are enacting specific answers to fundamental cultural questions: What kind of world is this? How do we fit into the world? What is happiness and how can it be achieved? What is progress? What is our vision of the future? Built into the answers are all kinds of questionable assumptions, for instance, about the possibility and desirability of limitless economic growth. It is becoming clear that this worldview is not designed for the long haul because it is out of sync with the way the world actually works. One consequence is climate change, a wicked problem that has to be addressed with more than ‘climate action.’ It will require a systemic transformation, a change of state.

Where do we go from here? We are currently locked into a rendezvous with catastrophe because we literally cannot imagine life off those tracks. A vision of the future has been implanted in our heads that promises a gleaming techno-utopia of flying cars and endless iPhone innovations. It’s the dream of the Jetsons, Back to the Future, and countless other fantasies that assume we can take leave of the real world of ecosystems, watersheds, soils, and other species. The Jetsons promised a future in which white people fly around in a world without trees eating food out of machines. It’s not desirable, but we are so entranced by such fantasies that they go unchallenged. Is our destiny to fulfill the story of the future we have been conditioned to accept as desirable and inevitable, even as it consumes the world? If not, our most urgent task is to wake up from our techno-utopian trance and envision a new future. This is primarily because we can’t create what we can’t imagine. 

The unprecedented challenge before each of us is to operate in the old game (on the train) – where we have our jobs and a habitual way of life – while simultaneously helping to create fertile conditions in which a radically new way of being, a genuinely sustainable culture, might begin to emerge. On a practical level this means increasing the pressure and turning up the heat. The temptation is to focus exclusively on winning the old game of policy proposals and technological innovation. While these may buy us time, eventually we must begin creating a new game, a new set of tracks, with a new set of assumptions that can provide humanity and all species a viable future for the long haul. A tea kettle will not boil (change state) if we turn down the heat every time we celebrate a new Tesla or a new international climate agreement.

For inspiration, we should imagine the story people will tell two hundred years from now – in 2215 – about how we managed to get off track and begin making a new culture. The COP21 in Paris may be mentioned, but the real story may be how regular people woke up and catalyzed a cultural transformation of epoch-changing proportions. At the heart of this will be something that Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, highlighted in a talk he gave several years ago. He said, “Because of climate change and other mounting ecological threats, everything must change. We may be entering the most creative period in human history.”  

Paul A. Morgan is a Professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania (pmorgan@wcupa.edu)