The idea with my recent writeup on “Global Climate Compensation” was that it should be thought-provoking and it does indeed seem to have provoked some thoughts. Thanks a lot for the feedback! I truly appreciate both the positive and negative comments because they allow me to improve the argument. Listen and learn!
The main points of my article were the following:
- The world currently does not have a realistic plan for preventing catastrophic climate change. The IPCC-scenarios compatible with less than +2.0°C of global warming contain a ridiculous amount of wishful thinking.
- There are no indications that it will be possible to prevent Climate Armageddon unless we are prepared to drastically lower our consumption of natural resources, which would reduce the size of the economy, requiring negative growth or Degrowth.
- This will also require a massive transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. If the economy is not growing, we need to share available resources in an equitable manner.
- We are rapidly running out of time.
- Global Climate Compensation offers a realistic path to a more sustainable future if it could be implemented.
The question, for which I do not yet have the answer, is how to make this happen. What I love about the “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari is that he is very frank about the power of myths or imagination:
These imagined orders are inter-subjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organisation, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. However, in order to establish such complex organisations, it’s necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 118). HarperCollins.
I am convinced that he is right. Detailed planning will be necessary at some point, but we first have to offer a lot of people an appealing vision for the future. We will never be able to mobilize people under the banners of “complex emission trading schemes”, even if they were to work. I have now given many public lectures over the years and had to learn the hard way how to talk to a mixed audience. One of the easiest ideas to convey is that economic growth is incompatible with saving the planet. Pardon the language, but you simply cannot eat more and shit less! Everyone understands this. The vast majority also agrees that climate change is real. The fundamental problem we have is with materialism and inequality. If we continue to define success in terms of material wealth, we will never solve the problem.
On the other hand, there is no political majority for an egalitarian society. Personally, I do not mind people benefitting from talent and hard work. The problem is when they profit from the exploitation of other people and natural resources. Nobody seriously believes that the salary of a hedge fund manager is in any way related to the work he puts in and the profits from an coal company depend almost entirely on its right to destroy nature. Global Climate Compensation would not be a problem for people who work for a living. It is the “non-working rich” who need to rethink.
When people criticize me for not having a finished plan for saving humanity, my usual response is that in this respect I am in very good company. But, as Richard Feynman said, “Questions that cannot be answered are preferable to answers which may not be questioned”. I am working on it, but we have a long and stony road ahead of us.