Waste land: large-scale irrigation strips nutrients
from the soil, scars the landscape and could alter climatic conditions
beyond repair. Image: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier
Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London, Pivot Irrigation #11 High Plains,
Texas Panhandle, USA (2011)
In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named
Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space
scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held
annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name
participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new
milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James
Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.
But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz.
It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked?
Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities
for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).
Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from
the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the
advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked
about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors,
bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible
to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom
line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of
resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human
systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a
journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner
set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope.
Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of
people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within
the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation,
this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from
outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by
indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.
Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass
political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then
again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely
observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the
abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street –
represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic
machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social
movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant
culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re
thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling
to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that
dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but
“really a geophysics problem”.
Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to
take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and
biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear
weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And
in November 2012,
Nature published a commentary by the
financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging
scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”,
because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is
also the crisis of our species’ existence”.
Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate
science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested
some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and
tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to
have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested
outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a
glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s
melting ice sheet.
“I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at
the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this
case. I need to be a citizen also.”
This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is
different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to
stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our
entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And
indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement
counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.
That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but
increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the
destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system –
is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary,
conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of
overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less
likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes,
this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the
ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps,
with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological
preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.
Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of
Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of
the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly
established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research
institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International
Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a
decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate
science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and
understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions
reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature
rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined
would stave off catastrophe.
But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become
more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond
Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the
chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are
diminishing fast.
With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the
Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to
political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global
consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so
drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP
growth above all else.
Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation
target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has
been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no
scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from
what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that
build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on
targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what
we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious
risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to
come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and
putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.
Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of
developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon
international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if
reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that
the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two
centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion
people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a
lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.
To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and
many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging
climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting
their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year –
and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further,
pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest
carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green
groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are
simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is
virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with
coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been
associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist
Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration
and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced
average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten
years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy
countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but
their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China
and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of
the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see
emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent
annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide
Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of
modern times.
If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our
science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed
carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and
immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”.
Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that
fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or
ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has
utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the
market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still
time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of
capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best
argument we have ever had for changing those rules.
In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal
Nature Climate Change,
Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of
their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of
changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth
quoting the pair at length:
. . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and
severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to
avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but
doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to
appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example,
to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by
economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together
with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of
low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets
dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the
diktat of economists remains unquestioned.
In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal
economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the
implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to
be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change.
“Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of
the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved
through significant
evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony.
But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in
high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect.
Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any
opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and
larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies,
the remaining 2°C budget demands
revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a
little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research.
Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores,
running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to
discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton
puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and
social order”.
But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary
nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided
to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon
have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their
nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt,
with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists
should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and
should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as
myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the
public arena”.
If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in
Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has
done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down
critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand
scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in
Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No
Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.
But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the
business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on
earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific
journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing
numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity
in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian
waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to
court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of
resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the
“friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great
climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to
fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.
It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us
enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is
distinctly less f**ked.
Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo”, is
working on a book and a film about the revolutionary power of climate
change. You call follow her on twitter @naomiaklein
