Avoiding a Ghastly Future

An open letter to the authors of “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future” by Corey J. A. Bradshaw et al.

Dear authors:

I would like to thank you for writing this concise and yet comprehensive summary of the challenges we face. The article is mandatory reading for anyone interested humanity having a future, such as everyone having or planning to have children. Given that we only have one planet and human survival depends on it, elementary risk management dictates that we should only consider the worst-case scenarios. Viewed this way, our future does indeed look bleak.

Unfortunately, the conclusions of your paper seem strangely disconnected from the rest of it. We are not going to solve the sustainability crisis by being concerned, analyzing, or talking about it. George Monbiot recently wrote an article about the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic titled “Clueless”. It starts with the following sentence: “Here’s the chilling, remarkable thing that should be inscribed on everyone’s minds: there is no plan.” Unfortunately, the same is true for sustainability in general.

As the German author and journalist Philip Blom recently pointed out, the collective intelligence of humanity corresponds to that of a yeast cell. We gobble up all available resources, thereby destroying our environment, and then we die. The reason is not that humans are stupid and unable to understand what is going on. The problem is that we are trapped in a self-destructive economic system which forces us to act against our own interests.

None of the problems described in your paper can be solved within a global economic system built on competition. The reason is simple: no country is prepared to voluntarily sacrifice its competitiveness to save the environment. Everyone understands this. Some people therefore cling to the absurd idea that sustainable technology will make us more competitive and powerful, thereby eliminating the need for tough political decisions. This is complete malarkey as evidenced by the increase in global military spending. The world seems to be gearing up for the climate and resource wars of the future. And wars are not are not sustainable.

Saving humanity will require a global system which increases the cost of fossil fuel while providing climate justice through redistribution. In such a system, it would be in the national interest of every country to limit its greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the system would also reduce the value of fossil fuel reserves, thereby relieving global tensions.

Fixing the problems you so expertly describe in your paper will be very expensive and is probably not compatible with a growing economy. We need a global system for sharing the costs. A surprisingly simple solution to this problem can be found here: www.global-climate-compensation.org. The idea would work, but it is politically difficult to implement. However, I prefer a politically difficult challenge to a physically impossible one.

We will never accomplish anything by simply pointing out problems. The time has come to use whatever influence we have a scientists and citizens to promote workable solutions. Or as poet laureate Amanda Gorman put it at the inauguration of President Biden:

The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb

Truth is Incontrovertible

United wishes and good will cannot overcome brute facts. Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.
Winston Churchill

Here is an interesting graph from September 2020 to start the new year.

https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-emissions-gaps

Obviously, the world is not even close to having an idea about a plan for preventing catastrophic climate change. It is a bit worrying when the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases are either “highly” or “critically” insufficient in meeting their climate protection goals.

There are two reasons for this sad state of affairs:

By sticking to the idea of economic growth, governments have essentially been trying to square the circle by accomplishing something which is physically impossible.
There is no incentive for politicians to admit their own inadequacy. When was the last time you heard about a politician who resigned because he realized that he was not up to the job?

This leaves us in a precarious situation, where the people entrusted with climate policy are either unable or unwilling to do what is required to prevent catastrophic climate change. Instead, they put on a charade of pretending to be concerned to appease the masses. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is that “telling the people the lies they want to hear” can be a successful and dangerous strategy.

The incontrovertible fact is that our current approach to tackling the climate crisis has failed and that the people in charge have no idea what to do next. It is therefore not enough to demand that our politicians do something. We need to tell them what to do!

Global Climate Compensation (GCC) offers a simple solution based on the idea that the people responsible for destroying the climate should pay for the damage done. It will not solve all our problems, but it would be a huge step in the direction. It is also completely risk-free and could be implemented immediately. It is a lot better than doing nothing

I am actively trying to promote GCC. Please let me know if you like the idea and believe that you can help.

The Power of Imagination

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.

Global Climate Compensation – Now or Never!

Since the world still does not have a realistic plan for preventing catastrophic climate change, I have decided to develop one myself:

Global-Climate-Compensation-publication Download

It is a first draft, but it does merit further consideration. Please let me know if you are interested in contributing. You can reach me under info@global-climate-compensation.org.

Can we get serious now?

One thing you learn when leaving the protected world of academia for a position in industry is to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information. An older colleague at ABB used to interrupt my detailed explanations with a simple question: “Do I need to know that?”. I was rather annoyed at first, but I soon realized that he was right most of the time. Scientists always try to dig deeper to learn as much as possible about a particular problem. Engineers, on the other hand, have deadlines. To move ahead with a project, one needs to filter out the facts relevant to decision making. Our understanding must be “good enough”, but not much better than that. Scientists often have a problem with this, making them poor decision makers.

For almost over 30 years, politicians have successfully avoided any meaningful action to limit global warming. To accomplish this, they employed every trick in the book. One of the more successful ones was to shift the responsibility to scientists. This was a brilliant trap, which made scientists feel important and almost ensured inaction, as politicians could pretend to be waiting for the next scientific report when accused of inaction. The reports, written by large committees of scientists and keenly monitored by politicians with their fingers on the funding button, were carefully purged of any controversial content and presented in a language intended to make people fall asleep rather than to wake up.

May I propose a title for the next IPCC report: “Do We Really Need to Know That?”. The short answer is no. Our understanding of global warming has been good enough for at least 30 years and the main conclusions of the first IPCC report are the same as in the last one. Basically, IPCC has confirmed the results of the climate models developed by the oil industry in the 70s. This is paralysis by analysis.

The real harm, however, was done by economists, such as William Nordhaus, who tried to balance the cost of climate protection against the deleterious effects of climate change. Such a calculation is clearly meaningless, as it is not possible to predict any of these quantities with sufficiently high accuracy. We do not know how technology is going to develop and therefore cannot predict the costs of climate protection far into the future. Just look at the rapid fall in the price of photovoltaics during the last decade, which few people expected.

Predicting the economic costs of global warming is even more difficult because it requires detailed knowledge of local weather changes rather than global averages. A farmer does not only care about average temperatures and precipitation, but also wants to know about the distribution over the year. Funnily enough, the same people who like to criticize climate models for being inaccurate, seem convinced that they are good enough to prove the harmlessness of climate change.

The economic argument for a measured response to climate change is therefore based on calculating the difference between two extremely uncertain quantities, rendering the result sufficiently inaccurate to be irrelevant. Furthermore, it is deeply immoral, as it forces future generations to accept decisions made for them by us. To make matters worse, economists apply the trick of discounting, thereby assuming future generations to be much richer than we are and therefore more able to cope with environmental disasters. Assuming an economic growth of 5.5%, they conclude that it is better for your children to lose $10’000 in 30 years than for you to spend $2’000 today. I am not sure your children would agree.

Leadership can best be defined as the ability to make decisions based on incomplete information. The simple truth is that we need to keep as much fossil fuel as possible in the ground, without wrecking the economy. We also know that the best way to accomplish this is through a global carbon tax. It is left as an exercise for the interested reader to explain why neither emissions trading, geoengineering, nor carbon capture change the validity of this statement.

There are only two important decisions to be made:

How high should the carbon tax be?
How do we distribute the revenue from the tax?

Fortunately, we do not have to answer the first question if we use a feedback loop. Rather than trying to predict the price in advance, we can use the carbon tax as a control parameter, just like a thermostat uses the actual room temperature to determine whether it should heat or not. If carbon emissions sink too slowly, the price needs to increase. If the damage to the economy is too large, we need to reduce the price.

Thus, we are left with the one question upon which the fate of humanity hinges: global inequality. We cannot introduce a single global carbon tax today, as it would be too high for poor countries and too low for rich countries. However, different taxes in different countries will not work, because it leads to leakage effects. Companies would simply outsource activities to countries with low carbon prices.

There seems to be only one reasonable solution to this problem. The revenue from a global carbon tax must be distributed in an equitable manner, with every human being receiving the same amount. This is the central idea behind Global Climate Compensation. The rising tide lifts all boats, but we first need to make sure that everyone has a boat.

In less than 8 years, we will have used up the remaining carbon budget for a 66% probability of staying below 1.5°C. At least three years of emissions will be required to transform our energy infrastructure (building solar panels, wind power and energy storage). No government in the world has a climate policy which comes even close to accomplish what is needed, and elections are typically held every four years. I encourage you to draw your own conclusions from these simple facts.

We are well past the point where new research and global political conferences can have an impact. The only thing that can save us now is the immediate introduction of a global carbon tax. Arguing about the distribution of the costs makes about as much sense as negotiating the price of water when your house is on fire.

A society depending on fossil fuel has no future, because it destroys the atmosphere and will eventually run out of energy. The entire scientific debate on climate change has focused on whether this will happen 20 years earlier or later, which is not even very relevant. The real question is whether we want to write off our children as collateral damage related to our fossil fuel addiction. If not, we had better start working.

A group of people have come together to launch an initiative for Global Climate Compensation. We need everyone to make it happen. Please contact me if you want to join.

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.

Sincerely,
Henrik Nordborg