In this week’s NERI Blog, economist Paul Goldrick-Kelly highlights the gap between climate rhetoric and reality in light of the latest COP. He argues that we must get beyond accepting the science and avoiding its implications for action.
What should we make of the last two weeks at COP26? At the risk of offering a (hopefully) premature evaluation of the event, not that much, despite recent headlines to the contrary.
New pledges to cut national emissions and promises from groups of states to reduce methane emissions by 2030 and phase out coal (with notable exceptions) represent some progress. According to analysis from Carbon Brief, these commitments to 2030 shave around 0.1C compared to our pre-COP position.
Should India meet its new target of net zero by 2070, global temperatures will be 0.2C lower in 2100. An optimistic assessment of all announced net zero targets would limit temperature increases to 1.8C by the end of the century.
However, as Climate Action Tracker point out, there is a major credibility gap between the apparent good news associated with these net zero targets, and actual policy and pledges for 2030.
They estimate that these pledges (including those made in Glasgow) would imply global emissions in 2030 will be double those required by the 1.5C pathway. Even including conditional promises – that is, promises which depend on what others do – policy to 2030 leaves us on a pathway to 2.4C warming. Worse, actually enacted policy would imply warming of 2.7C, which would be disastrous.
This gap points to the potential problem with “net zero” pledges. Net zero targets do not necessarily imply that emissions will cease. They mean that the total level of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere won’t increase. Most net zero scenarios are, in fact, reliant on the idea that we could remove these gases at a pace that at least equals whatever we continue to emit. In most cases, given the limits to natural processes which can capture carbon, this implies a reliance on new negative emissions technologies to draw greenhouse gases from the air.
These technologies are, in many cases, far from readily deployable at the scale required by most projections. These potentially utopian technological promises, coupled with suitably vague and distant net zero targets, can be used to spin business as usual as serious climate commitment.
These distant net zero targets offer a means to “burn now and pay later” and continue to exploit fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. We are effectively taking a punt on our ability to come up with a technological fix, risking failure despite our knowledge of the implications.
This speaks to what Michael Hoexter calls soft climate denialism. Where “hard denialism” casts doubt on the existence of human induced climate breakdown, “soft denialism” accepts the science on climate damage but doesn’t allow this to affect your course of action.
This could encompass ambitious soundbites on reductions which lack detail, continued investment in polluting fossil infrastructures, fossil fuel subsidies, the absence of legally binding targets within these international agreements, a refusal to meet the climate financing promised for states already experiencing climate damage and an overwhelming reliance on market mechanisms.
This could also include a reluctance to face the interaction between inequality and climate change. While per person consumption emissions ought to be 2.2 tonnes by 2030 to remain on a 1.5C pathway, the per head emissions of the 1% (earning over 172,000 2011 dollars) are projected to be 30 times higher by the end of the decade. Incidentally, a conservative estimate of the average per person emissions of a selection of billionaires is 8,000 tonnes annually, thousands of times what would be sustainable.
We are not immune from this dissonance between goals and action. Ireland continues to subsidise fossil fuel use. Even with recent promises to increase climate financing, our contribution represents half our fair share according to Oxfam.
Our Climate Action Plan sets targets for sectors which are meant to be consistent with a 51% fall in overall emissions but includes lower ranges for sectors like agriculture which could undermine the overall goal. Despite widespread recognition of the need to retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings to curb energy use and reduce emissions, support schemes remain inadequate.
We must face up to this disconnect, at home and abroad. We must fundamentally transform our societies, and begin doing so immediately, if we are to avoid the worst of climate change. To have any chance of doing so, we must bring people with us and address long standing inequities in the global economy.
Any approach which hopes to succeed on a practical level must have social justice at its heart and incorporate a Just Transition for workers and communities around the world. To do otherwise is to continue our soft denial of what is truly required to reengineer our societies to respect planetary boundaries. We cannot pretend that existing attempts to minimally disrupt the existing order of things will get us there. We must get our heads out of the sand.