Post-Sustainability

Tragedy and Transformation

John Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351584739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

The sustainability discourse and policy paradigm have failed to deliver. In particular, they have failed to avert the dangerously disruptive climate change which is now inevitable. So, if there is still a case for some transformed or revitalised version of sustainability, that case must now surely be made in full acknowledgment of deep-seated paradigm-failure to date. But if we really take ourselves to be living in a post-sustainable world, the issue of 'what next?' must be faced, and the hard questions no longer shirked. What options for political and personal action will remain open on a tragically degraded planet? How will economic and community life, political and social leadership and education be different in such a world? What will the geopolitics (of crisis, migration and conflict) look like? Where does widespread denial come from, how might it be overcome, and are there any grounds for hope that don't rest on it?

The urgent challenge now is to confront such questions honestly. This collection of essays by thinkers from a diversity of fields including politics, philosophy, sociology, education and religion, makes a start.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

Paris: optimism, pessimism and realism

Brian Heatley

ABSTRACT
The climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015 has been widely hailed as a huge step towards limiting climate change to a safe 2°C. It is not; Paris locks the world into a future where at least a 3–4°C rise by 2100 is virtually inevitable. This will mean a world where there will be massive famine and conflict in much of Africa and the Middle East, serious hunger in South Asia, huge migration pressures but manageable problems in the Americas and more difficult but probably still manageable problems in Europe. Globalisation may collapse, which will be particularly challenging for the UK with its dependence on food imports and international trade. In politics the 200-year hegemony of the idea of progress will be over, while our focus will become more local, putting great pressure on the idea of human universalism.

Introduction

A climate agreement has been signed in Paris (United Nations 2015a). After years of squabbling all the Great Powers, followed rather less enthusiastically by almost the entire international community, have, for the first time come to an agreement. Optimistic up beat press releases claim that this at last is the deal that will put us on the way to limiting dangerous climate change to a manageable and safe 2°C, or even 1.5°C. Obama has his ‘turning point for the world’ and the world is on the way to being saved! And enthusiasm for this second great Treaty of Paris and French diplomatic triumph ominously matches that for the Treaty signed by the Great Powers almost a century ago at Versailles.

The rich world’s environmental movement’s public response has largely reflected this optimism: Greenpeace UK concluded that COP21 shows the end of fossil fuels is near (Greenpeace UK 2015). The message from environmentalists up until Paris has been that if the world’s politicians act now, drastically cut emissions and invest massively in renewables, then the climate will by and large be OK, and the massive investment required will spark a new sustainable economic boom, dragging us out of the great recession. Otherwise we are all doomed, on a planet that will fry us. We contemplate nothing in between, or at least try very hard not to think about it, and the main point therefore is to prevent climate change, not to be forced to live with it. As for Paris, of course, there is much more to be done, but the agreement is a big step in the right direction.

In reality, despite the hype, Paris punctures this optimism. The world has not been saved any more than it was in 1919. Too little has been agreed far too late. The real meaning of Paris is that dangerous climate change by 2100 is now all but inevitable, and that after 2100 it will get worse. It was probably already too late before Paris. Many poor world environmentalists already knew this, despite their quixotic but successful quest for a reference to a now impossible 1.5°C rise in the agreement. A lot of us in the rich world already really knew it too, but didn’t like to come to terms with it, or even talk about it. This is probably because it conflicts with our deep belief in and commitment to progress; the idea that the world, for everyone, and despite setbacks, is getting better and better (see also Foster 2015). And with progress in mind, many have a pervasive faith that technology will somehow clear up the problem. However, even if the world sticks to the path implicitly agreed in Paris, at the very best we are now locked in to global warming of at least 3–4°C by 2100, and more thereafter. At worst it may be much more, and either way we face many uncertainties including catastrophic runaway climate change.

The main argument of this piece is that the Green Movement has to come to terms with this awful fact; we have failed in our mission to prevent damaging climate change. Acceptance of that will have profound consequences for our politics:

- while we must of course continue to act to prevent further climate change, we must also begin to prepare for the world as it will inevitably become;

- that world in 2100 will be profoundly altered, where perhaps a billion people in the poor south will die from famine or disease or migrate, and even places less directly affected like the UK will face huge challenges; and

- two cherished political ideas, currency not just of the green movement but also of all on the liberal left, progress and human universalism, and explained in greater detail towards the end of this piece, face crumbling before an assault by brute events.

We first set out why Paris won’t work. Then we speculate on the consequences of a 3–4°C rise by 2100, and more thereafter, for the world system, by first looking at regional climate change and then considering the likely economic and political effects. We turn then to what this means for the UK and its politics and security, ending with a plea for progressives to forget progress, at least for a hundred years, and be realistic about how far human universalism can be preserved.

Why Paris makes at least a 3–4°C rise by 2100 virtually inevitable

The substance of the Paris agreement (the 1.5°C and 2°C targets are no more than pious aspirations; Article 2 of the Agreement makes it clear that these are simply ‘aims’) essentially amounts to a series of unilateral ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs) by individual countries, which will after the agreement comes into effect become registered and monitored actual ‘Nationally Determined Contributions’. They are no more than what each country has been prepared to contribute. The EU countries, for example, have promised collectively a 40% reduction on domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. China says that its emissions will peak in 2030 at the latest, and that it will lower the carbon intensity of GDP by 60–65% below 2005 levels by 2030. And there is a bit more on renewables and forests. The US has undertaken to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels in 2025, and so on. In total, 185 countries covering around 94% of world emissions made such promises (Climate Action Tracker 2015). Half of the remaining 6% is international aviation and shipping not covered by the agreement. There is also an agreement to try to do better in the future: National Contributions will be revised every 5 years, and must always improve on previous aspirations, but they are not legally binding. And the rich countries have promised $100 billion in extra aid to help the poorer countries develop renewables and adapt to climate change – but are not legally bound to provide it.

So what’s wrong with that? Progress moving towards the 2°C target combined with commitments from the biggest emitters seems great. The problem is that quantitatively this simply doesn’t remotely add up to sufficient reductions to contain human-induced climate change within a 2°C rise within the current century. At best it means that the temperature will rise by about 3–4°C by 2100. While this prediction is the result of a detailed calculation to which we will return, the big picture that we will breach 2°C is very simple to understand. To keep within the 2°C limit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that the whole world could not add after 2010 more than a total of about 1000 further gigatonnes of greenhouse gases to the stock already in the atmosphere (IPCC 2015, 10). We now add to that stock at a rate of about 50 gigatonnes a year. Even with the Paris pledges we will go on emitting over 50 gigatonnes a year for the next 20 years, or a total of 50 times 20 which equals 1000 gigatonnes. It defies everything we know about the longevity of energy infrastructure investments and how the economy works to suppose that emissions will just stop altogether in the 2040s, especially in growing economies. So 2°C must inevitably be substantially breached.

An alternative approach to seeing that remaining within 2°C is impossible following Paris is to look at the UN’s own graph (United Nations 2015b, Figure 2, p. 11) produced this October on the effects of the intended national contributions as compared to what is needed to have a two-thirds chance of staying within 2°C. However, while the UN has simply concentrated on the years around Paris, we gain a different perspective by embedding a simplified version of their graph within the whole time period 1950–2100 (Figure 1).

The heavy solid line on the left shows what has happened from 1950 until 2010. The steeply rising dotted line from 2010 to 2030 and then on to 2100 shows what is expected to happen without Paris, so-called Business as Usual (BAU). The still rising dashed line from 2010 to 2030 shows what is expected if Paris were fully implemented. No, it’s not very different from the dotted line. If at Paris it had really been agreed to stay within 2°C, and this started in earnest in 2020 then the reduction would have to follow the steeply descending dashed and dotted line on the graph, with emissions reaching zero by 2040. This is simply not going to happen; such a reduction would imply a commitment in the rich countries to a radical degrowth strategy, which does not exist.

UN Press reports have suggested however that Paris will result in a 2.7°C rise, which looks comfortingly close to 2°C. Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said on 30 October 2015 ‘The INDCs have the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, by no means enough but a lot lower than the estimated four, five, or more degrees of warming projected by many prior to the INDCs’ (UNFCCC 2015). The 2.7°C rise prediction comes from one of a number of scenarios explored by Carbon Action Tracker (Climate Action Tracker 2015). It optimistically assumes countries will continue to accelerate the rate of reduction in greenhouse gases as they have done for Paris, so emissions peak in 2030 and then decline gradually to about 1990 levels by 2100. It is represented by the light dashed line on our graph. This path bears some resemblance to the IPCC’s RCP 4.5, (IPCC 2015) and the assignation of the average temperature rise of 2.7°C to such a path is reasonable, if much too precise.

Figure 1. Historical and projected world greenhouse gas emissions 1950–2100.

However, surely the most optimistic assumption we are entitled to make based on current political agreements and actions across the world is that emissions will continue to rise after 2030, perhaps levelling off later in the century. This is broadly represented by the light solid line on the graph, which is associated with a 3–4°C rise, and follows the IPCC’s RCP 6.0. We might instead expect the future simply to reflect the past, and follow the top light blue line, which is the IPCC’s ‘BAU’ case, where the temperature rise is in the range 4–5°C.

The notion that emissions really are after all going to go down after about 2040 is altogether too reminiscent of St Augustine’s ‘Oh Lord make me pure, but not yet’, or the business plan that predicts recovery, but always starting the year after next, never now. The danger is that ‘BAU’ might yet prevail.

OK, Paris said that everyone was going to try harder next time. But equally there is no international legal machinery to enforce the Paris commitments, and there must be severe doubts whether some countries will actually keep to their commitments; the US Senate, for example, may simply not ratify the US commitment, or the next US President may not even ask Congress. The great powers and their energy companies are simply not suddenly going to turn round and leave pretty much all the remaining fossil fuels in the ground. If the people with money and power in the world believed that really was going to happen, share prices of the major fossil fuel companies would have collapsed by now. They have not.

So the most probable and prudent assumption – still perhaps a bit optimistic – must be that the level of global temperature rise associated with carrying on as we are with emissions limited to broadly current levels – at least 3–4°C rise by 2100 – will now happen. This view is shared by one of the UK’s foremost climate scientists, Professor Kevin Anderson, former Director of the Tyndale Centre. With his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, Anderson’s work on carbon budgets has revealed the gulf between political rhetoric on climate change and the reality of rapidly escalating emissions. His work makes clear that ‘there is now little chance of maintaining the rise in global temperature at below 2°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Moreover, his research demonstrates how avoiding even a 4°C rise demands a radical reframing of both the climate change agenda and the economic characterisation of contemporary society’ (Anderson 2015).

The UNFCCC technical documents simply do not address what will happen to temperatures in the longer term after 2100. They say ‘the use of climate models to estimate end-of-century temperatures resulting from specific post-2030 assumptions (like constant or linear extensions of emissions or assumed constant climate policies) is considered to be out of its (i.e. the report’s) scope’ (United Nations 2015b, para 208). Moreover, a 3–4°C rise by 2100 is the lower bound; there is huge uncertainty about the potential for various types of positive feedback, where warming initiates further warming mechanisms, such as die back of tropical forests, methane emissions from the tundra and methyl hydrate emissions from the deep ocean, all of which could result in runaway climate change leading to a 6°C rise or more in the longer term. And apart from feedback effects, there are major uncertainties about other possible effects, such as how quickly the Greenland and parts of the Antarctic ice caps will melt, radically changing sea levels and altering how far heat is reflected back or absorbed (the albedo effect), or whether northern Europe will continue to be warmed by ocean currents. These are just the ‘known unknowns’; there will surely be other effects no one has even thought of. Because of these effects, there is a case for arguing that a 3–4°C rise simply implies a rise of at least 6°C, albeit slightly later.

Moreover, global average temperatures are expected to continue to rise after 2100 even without feedback effects and assuming optimistically that there are no further emissions after that date. Even a further 1°C or 2°C rise will massively increase the effects of climate change set out in the next section.

So we must now face our future on the assumption of very substantial climate change. This is not to give up on the struggle for mitigation, but it is to recognise that major damage is already virtually inevitable. The focus of mitigation must be to prevent even worse damage. Indeed, focussing on the damage we have already done will increase the case for mitigation.

It’s not just dangerous climate change. Climate change is simply where the environmental shoe is pinching first. But it is combined with a still inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Hope after sustainability – tragedy and transformation
• 1. Paris: optimism, pessimism and realism
• 2. Transformation, adaptation and universalism: reply to Heatley
• 3. After development? In defence of sustainability
• 4. Response to ‘After development? In defence of sustainability’
• 5. Post-capitalism, post-growth, post-consumerism? Eco-political hopes beyond sustainability
• 6. There never was a categorical imperative: a response to Ingolfur Blühdorn
• 7. On the obsolescence of human beings in sustainable development
• 8. Apocalyptically blinded: reply to Ehgartner et al.
• 9. Beyond sustainability: hope in a spiritual revolution?
• 10. Response to ‘Beyond sustainability: hope in a spiritual revolution?’
• 11. Environmental education after sustainability: hope in the midst of tragedy
• 12. Response to ‘Environmental education after sustainability: hope in the midst of tragedy’
• 13. Education after sustainability
• 14. Learning and education after sustainability: reply to Gough
• 15. On preparing for the great gift of community that climate disasters can give us
• 16. Caring for the future? – a response to Rupert Read
• 17. On letting go
• 18. The future: compassion, complacency or contempt?: reply to Foster
• Index