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The other evening I visited the London School of Economics where I heard one of the world’s most experienced climate diplomats say something unexpected about how economic and political leaders are tackling climate change. global warming.
Todd Stern was Barack Obama’s climate envoy and the chief US negotiator at the 2015 COP climate conference that resulted in the Paris Agreement.
He was giving the first annual memorial lecture in honor of another architect of the Paris agreement, his friend Pete Betts, a former lead negotiator for the EU and the UK, who died in October.
Stern had no qualms about naming the biggest obstacles to climate progress. “The main one is the fossil fuel industry,” he said, explaining that the “enormous influence” of public and private companies could influence political leaders.
But then he pointed to another, less obvious culprit: “We are also slowed down by those who consider themselves ‘adults’.”
By this he meant the politicians and business leaders who say that yes, global warming is real and yes, it needs to be addressed, but no, it is unrealistic to reduce carbon emissions at the rate experts say is necessary. climatic.
His words struck me because it was the last complaint I heard this year about “adults in the room” or “very serious people” bogging down climate action.
In some ways this criticism is curious. Not long ago, Western capitals relied on veteran military and civilian officials in the Trump administration to temper the president’s unpredictable tenure. The prospect of a second Trump term at a time of increasing geopolitical turbulence makes the orthodox views of respected centrists more valuable than ever.
But an unwavering faith in orthodoxy, regardless of the evidence, is what makes these experts a threat, says Paul Krugman, the American economist who popularized the concept of the very serious person.
He railed against the economic variant of the species, political elites on both sides of the Atlantic who pushed for austerity measures after the 2008 financial crisis despite warnings about the risks they posed. weigh on long-term growth.
The adults holding back efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren’t necessarily the same people, but they share the same aversion to radically unorthodox ideas.
“They are the avatars of the establishment,” a veteran of American climate policy told me the other week. He was describing the centrist voices of reason he heard from Wall Street to Whitehall that calls for net zero emissions by 2050 were financially unfeasible, politically impossible and naive.
It’s an attractive argument. It is obviously true that the bulk of emissions come from fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal, which still make up around 80 percent of the global energy mix. It’s also true that these fuels support tens of thousands of jobs and account for up to 60 percent of export revenues in dozens of countries.
It is therefore difficult to imagine, let alone achieve, a rapid decarbonization of the global economy.
Yet the prospect of a status quo prevails – particularly in a week when record rains caused chaos at the world’s busiest international airport in Dubai, while an unusually granular study showed that Climate damages could reach $38 trillion per year by 2050.
We live in a world where the temperature is already at least 1.1°C warmer than in the late 1800s, where worrying levels of heat, drought, flooding and melting ice are more and more obvious.
Scientists have demonstrated for years that it would be wise to keep global warming at 1.5°C, as provided for in the Paris Agreement. But that would require a staggering pace of decarbonization: Emissions would need to almost halve by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050. So far, global emissions are not even falling, much less by half, and 2030 is only six years away.
Is it fair to place all the blame on the serious adults in successive governments and boardrooms who have spent years not doing enough to solve the problem? Probably not. But it’s fair to ask them a question that Stern asked the other night about the danger of taking more radical and unorthodox climate action: “compared to what?”
We know that unthinkable measures, such as sudden mass lockdowns, can be launched in the face of a problem posed by the frightening immediacy of a global pandemic. Climate change is a different type of disaster, one that evolves more slowly. But it is nevertheless a disaster that no serious person can continue to ignore.