Climate Emergency

How Societies Create the Crisis

Mark Harvey

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781800433335
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800433328
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The recognition that climate change is now a climate emergency has been endorsed by a wide range of scientists and the United Nations. Natural scientists focus on the aggregate impacts of human activity resulting from burning fossil fuels and producing food, and hence speak of anthropogenic climate change. Climate Emergency analyses the socio-economic and political forces driving the climate emergency, developing the complementary concept of 'sociogenic climate change' to show how societies both create the crisis and are challenged by it in different ways. Harvey demonstrates how societies inhabit different resource environments, whether for fossil fuel reserves, or for land, sun, and water, differences which condition their histories and cultures.

In introducing the sociogenic approach to climate change, Harvey re-examines history through the lens of climate change, re-writing the climate impact of the British industrial revolution; US settler colonialism; slavery and Native American genocides; the electrification of societies and infrastructures for fossil-fuelled transportation; and changes in our eating habits. In the big historical picture, different societies and political economies have both created an unequal world and so continue to make an unequal contribution to climate change. This can only be understood by showing how societies have come to distinctively exploit planetary resources in different ways. Societies create the crisis and have to be politically involved in addressing the crisis.

1

CLIMATE EMERGENCY

Climate change has become a climate emergency. A long history of the human impact on the earth's climate has met with global and national political failure. Following the 2015 Paris Agreement, awareness of the rapidity and extent of climate change and the need to keep warming below 1.5°C called for much more drastic national and international political action to be taken. Instead, there has been stalemate and prevarication, before and especially since the election of climate change denying presidents of the United States and Brazil (Trump and Bolsonaro).

Now, from December 2019, the world has been hit by a very different kind of emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic. In general, the contrast in political responses to the two emergencies could scarcely be greater. The grounding of most of the world's airplane fleets, ironically immediately and sharply reducing CO₂ emissions, was a reaction to the immediate, rather than long-term, threat of hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide. Lockdowns across the world have drastically reduced vehicle traffic on roads, plunging the demand for oil, when only weeks before Russia and OPEC were fighting the United States for market share in a price war. Another significant reduction in CO₂ emissions, and sharp reduction in air pollution from nitrous oxygen in many of the world's major cities, ensued as an unintended consequence. The International Energy Authority estimates that there has been a 25% drop in total energy demand in lockdown countries, by far the biggest drop in 70 years (IEA, 2020). One might ask whether we need the threat of an immediate culling of the world population to stimulate a politics adequate to deal with the climate emergency.

This contemporary confluence between climate change and a pandemic prompts a reflection on a historical parallel, if one of a much greater scale: the Black Death and the Little Ice Age. Although by no means scientifically consensual, the reduction of human activity arising from a loss of between a quarter and a third of the global human population resulted in abandonment of land, reforestation and the reduction of methane emissions from livestock (Ruddiman, 2010).¹ The resultant if time-lagged cooling of the planet then produced a vicious cycle of crop failures and famines. In turn, apart from the major economic and social consequences of the scarcity of labour, the economic collapse had a dramatic impact on the finances of European (and other) states. It has been argued that the plague-induced financial crises of states in Europe, China, India and Africa lay behind decades of political turbulence and national and civil wars (Parker, 2013). And, finally, in a dark resonance with the present, there were the historical equivalents of lockdowns, with plague banishments and forced isolations.

The significance for climate change of these two pandemics, differing in scale and hopefully duration, is that they dramatically reduced human activity, either by political fiat as in today's case, or by the relentless and recurrent depopulation of the earlier period. While the advance of scientific knowledge might solve the immediate biological threats by means of vaccines and therapies, the political capacities to resolve the resultant economic crisis are deeply uncertain. Likewise, for the climate emergency, in spite of the overwhelming scientific understanding of the effects of particular kinds of greenhouse gas emitting human activity, steps to reduce or replace that activity have proved substantially inadequate. It is clear that, unlike curing a disease, there is no straightforward technical fix.

A central argument of this book is that in important ways there has been a failure to diagnose the complex and varied nature of the climate emergency. Or rather, there have been enormous advances in the natural scientific understanding of the climate change, and a relatively laggardly development of social scientific and historical understanding of what has been and is a complex, multiple and varied combination of historical societal processes. As we shall shortly see, environmental sciences have rightly focused on physical processes of burning fossil fuels, deforestation and land-use change, and their effects on the planet's atmosphere, inducing global warming. To understand the physical processes, in a sense it doesn't matter who is doing it and why. It is reasonable for natural sciences to bracket off the who and why, and just observe and analyse the physical effects as a consequence of human activity in general. Hence, within these disciplines it is quite justifiable to speak of ‘anthropogenic’ climate change, climate change induced by ‘the human’, the no-matter-what human. The crucial insight that a new geological period has been entered when a unique species has, for the first time, had the capacity to fundamentally alter the earth's atmosphere dictates their choice of a name: the Anthropocene. There is, natural scientifically speaking, no problem with these terms. But they cannot be imported into a social scientific account of the climate emergency, which needs to complement, rather than contest, the conceptual and empirical work of natural science with that of social science.

The who, the how and the why are the central questions for any social scientific understanding of climate change in the first place, and then the why it has become the climate emergency. So the perspective advocated here adopts the term ‘sociogenic’ to embrace the complex dynamics of how societies make the climate change crisis. Likewise, rather than adopting a geological time-frame of ‘the anthropocene’ – and we will see that there are debates amongst environmental scientists as to when that began – an historical and comparative social science approach needs to delineate historical phases and different historical societal trajectories accelerating and modifying the physical processes of climate change.

One of the key arguments of the book therefore grasps what has been called ‘the great divergence’ as a key period of history affecting climate change (Pomeranz, 2000). It was the time when Northern Europe both began to industrialise and to expand and colonise the New World, relying on the development of mass plantation slavery (Harvey, 2019). This political, social and economic transformation both accelerated climate change and created new levels of inequality, both between and within societies across the globe. Northern Europe diverged from China, India, Japan and other societies which had been roughly equal in prosperity before then. Inequality and climate change are coeval, an entanglement which, as we shall see, is central to any social scientific analysis of climate change and to the political obstacles to overcoming it.

Before setting on this road to social scientific understanding, and developing the concept of sociogenesis, it is worth recognising fully where natural science has now got us in understanding the climate emergency. In 2000, the term Anthropocene was coined, recognising fully for the first time that human beings were the one species capable of altering the planet's atmosphere (Crutzen, 2002; Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). At the time, it was suggested that the new geological epoch, ‘supplementing the Holocene’, began in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the culprit was identified and named: James Watt, designer of the coal-fired steam engine, icon of the British industrial revolution. However, even in these early papers, the ‘expansion of mankind’ was predicated on the expansion of agriculture. Conversion of ‘wild’ nature into cultivated nature through domestication of plants and animals released CO₂ and the much more powerful greenhouse gas, methane, and was seen as a major source of climate change. Indeed, even those papers that advocate the eighteenth century as the commencement date for the Anthropocene allude to the fact that while the human population increased by 10-fold over three centuries, the number of cattle emitting methane grew at a much faster pace. By the time the global population had reached six billion the number of domesticated cattle reached 14 billion.

Imagine a planet without the transformational activity of humans. All things being equal, the earth is subject to regular periods of glaciation followed by warming during the interglacial period, reaching a peak, before atmospheric temperatures decline towards the next glaciation. The current interglacial period, the Holocene, was already turning on a downwards cooling pathway. Without setting a formal date for the commencement of the Anthropocene, those arguing for an alternative perspective for initiating anthropogenic climate change point to the atypical presence of CO₂ and methane (CH₄) in ice cores at levels that can only be plausibly accounted for by human activity. Widespread deforestation with the spread of agriculturalist human societies, the domestication and cultivation of rice in China 5,000 years ago, and the domestication and rearing of livestock, it is argued, resulted in planet-warming if slow changes to earth's atmosphere, countering expected regular cooling leading towards glaciation. Nearly 40% of the land under rice cultivation today was already in cultivation a 1000 years ago; and the area of land dedicated to raising livestock nearly tripled between 3000bc and 1000bc (Fuller, 2010; Fuller et al., 2011). We will call this the Long View, as propounded by Ruddiman, Fuller and others, as distinct from the Industrialisation View.

Although scientists may argue between the Long View and the Industrialisation View of anthropogenic climate change, none dispute the rapid acceleration occurring from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. It was a change of pace beyond compare, historically speaking. However, the importance attributed to domestication of plants and livestock advocated by the Long View provides a significant counterbalance to regarding the rapid acceleration of the later period as a consequence of industrialisation with the totemic coal-fired steam engine. The Pomeranz thesis points to the colonisation of the New World, which, together with the expansion of agricultural land in Eastern Europe, resulted in an exponential increase in deforestation and land-use change for agriculture. In different ways in different societies, industrialisation and urbanisation only developed in combination with agricultural expansion and intensification. Industrialisation and land-use change are dynamically related, so it is mistaken to consider either one or the other as responsible for the rapid acceleration from the late eighteenth century. Overall, between 1700 and 1890, the area brought under cultivation increased 466%, again, historically speaking, a rate of change beyond compare. The figure for North America, given the minimal spread of agriculturalism there before colonisation, was a statistically extreme increase of 6,666% (Meyer & Turner, 1992). Yet this fanciful figure masks a crucial societal and climate change event, discussed further below (Chapter 3): the genocidal replacement of hunter-gatherer Native Americans by the white colonists of slave cotton production and cattle ranching. The first and gradual emergence of agriculturalism displacing hunter-gatherer societies contrasts with the brutal rapidity and scale of change in nineteenth century North America. To date, there has been no natural scientific estimation or modelling of the relative significance of the industrial burning of coal and agricultural expansion between 1750 and 1850, but as one depended on the other, it is only their combination that matters when natural scientists observe the aggregate impact on the Earth System.

Given the fundamental differences between the temporalities of geological interglacial cycles and the irregularities, disruptions and variable temporal and spatial scales of human societal histories, in the end it does not make sense to fix a start date for when human activity initiated a shift into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Geological time and historical time operate on radically different temporalities. It is enough to know that, unless a pandemic eliminates the human species, the physical impacts of human activity on the Earth System are climate changing. The Anthropocene could never have the same kind of beginnings or endings as the Miocene, the Pliocene or the Pleistocene. It is clear – again from within a natural science perspective – that anthropogenic impacts on the earth's planetary system go a very long way back, and that there have been periods of acceleration and deceleration over the millennia.

Setting aside when all this began, therefore, this is how leading earth scientists construct the boundary between environmental and social science:

While recognising that different societies around the world have contributed differently and unequally to pressures on the Earth System and will have varied capacities to alter future trajectories, the sum total of human impacts (my emphasis) needs to be taken into account for analysing future trajectories of the Earth System.

(Steffen et al., 2018, p. 8252)

Environmental scientists and cosmologists measure gases in ice-cores, sea temperature and levels, satellite maps of shrinking polar ice cover and mountain glaciers, land-use change and deforestation, and other physical indicators in order to model the effects on the Earth System, conceived of as a physical system. In this way, as the quotation indicates, they bracket off the socioeconomic processes, even societal differences, which generate greenhouse gases only to consider the aggregate total impact of all human activity. They do what social scientists do not and cannot do, leaving the challenge for social science to analyse the historical social/societal processes. There is a division of labour implied in the concepts of ‘anthropogenic’ and the Anthropocene, not a denial of the significance of historical social/societal processes.

Similarly, pointing a finger at James Watt's steam engine burning coal might be seen as defending a kind of technological determinism of climate change. But, as we shall see there are very different technological trajectories in different societies (Chapters 3, 4, 5). Major new technologies, such as oil as a fossil fuel for terrestrial and air transport or the electrification of domestic and industrial equipment (Chapter 5), or nitrogen phosphate fertilizers all combine to produce an accelerating aggregate impact, but have been developed and adopted in different ways, at different times, in different societies. Nitrogen phosphate fertilizers are a classic instance of the political and social shaping of technological development and adoption. It has been argued that without the invention and adoption of chemical fertilizers the world's population could not have grown from 1.6 billion in 1900 to over six billion by 2000 (Smil, 2004). For 70 years prior to this, European agriculture had increasingly relied on guano and mined nitrates from Peru and Chile. After Britain had encouraged war between Peru and Chile, it gained a 70% control of exports, threatening German production of food. By 1914, nearly 2.5 million tonnes were being imported, mostly to Britain (Clark & Foster, 2009; Melillo, 2012). Consequently, pressure to escape from this British stranglehold stimulated two German scientists (Haber and Bosch) to develop a way of fixing nitrates from the atmosphere, leading to the revolutionary development and use of chemical fertilizers. Already at its birth, nitrogen phosphate fertilizer was therefore a profoundly geopolitical event, not just a technological or physical process event. And it remained so. The politics of food self-sufficiency in China in the contemporary period created an ecological and climate change crisis through overproduction and overuse of chemical fertilizers in rice production (Chapter 4). Nitrogen phosphate was from its birth to its current use in China, a further major source of global warming, quite apart from its significance in enabling urbanisation and industrialisation in different societal contexts. It was equally a physical process, produced by a technology releasing nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere, as analysed by climate scientists (anthropogenic); and a sociopolitical process (sociogenic).

A further natural science concept of great importance is that of ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015), which sets out a range of thresholds and boundaries for the exploitation of earth's resources beyond which human sustainability is threatened. It aims to define ‘the safe operating space for humanity’. As with the complementary concepts of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic climate change, the unit of analysis is The Planet, the total earth system and aggregate human impacts on it. The concept broadens the understanding of the nature of the Earth System crisis by proposing nine different planetary boundaries, of which climate change and biosphere integrity (broadly preventing a catastrophic loss of biodiversity) are core. Land system change (deforestation and loss of carbon sinks); freshwater use (unsustainable levels of ground and surface water extraction); ocean acidification (as an effect of seawater temperature rises); atmospheric aerosol loading (especially urban and industrial particle pollution, notably affecting weather systems such as monsoons); stratospheric ozone depletion (as exemplified by the now regulated use of CfCs in refrigeration); novel entities (the least defined boundary, but highlighting a risk of novel chemicals or biological entities threatening human and other species life); and finally biochemical flows (in particular flows of nitrogen and phosphates from chemical fertilizers). As with the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea of planetary boundaries and the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ is framed in terms of achieving a stability of the interglacial Holocene geological epoch. In other words, it is setting limits to the impact of the Anthropocene on the Holocene, aspiring to revert to the safety of geological time.

In developing the concept of planetary boundaries, the multi-disciplinary group of scientists have emphasised that there are first thresholds which, if crossed, say at a level emissions of CO₂ or a scale of deforestation, would lead to a zone of high and uncertain risk, but a zone which still allowed for policy steps to be taken to revert to the safe zone. An historical example of banning CfCs in refrigerators to help restore the hole in the ozone would be an example of going beyond a threshold but not irreversibly transgressing a boundary. Another example would be the UK banning the use of coal for urban domestic heating, so reducing aerosol loading, eliminating notorious city smogs. Not so, in today's Delhi or Beijing, or even parts of central London from diesel fumes.

In their analysis of empirical data concerning the planetary boundaries, determining the current state of the Earth System, it is striking that there is high certainty in their judgement about climate change especially from CO₂ emissions. The Earth System is still within the threshold of reversibility, as it is with land-use change (deforestation), oceanic acidification and ozone depletion, but with uncertainties about atmospheric aerosol loading (except those affecting monsoons), and novel physical or biological entities. However, it is equally striking that biochemical flows especially from agricultural fertilizers has gone beyond the boundary into the zone of high risk, as has the rate of species extinctions and loss of biosphere integrity. The modelling of the state of risk in each of the planetary boundary dimensions has been sophisticated further by showing where and how widesprea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Societynow
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• 1. Climate Emergency
• 2. A Twenty-first-century Historical Materialism Fit for the Climate Emergency
• 3. Historical Pathways to Climate Change
• 4. Feeding the Crisis: How Opposites Attract, the Trajectories of China and Brazil
• 5. Fuelling the Crisis: Electrifying Societies, Motoring in Societal Spaces
• 6. Inequalities of Climate Change
• 7. Into and out of(???) the Climate Emergency
• Glossary
• References
• Index