Has the world 'surrendered' to climate change?
This year's UN climate summit, COP29, opens in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Monday. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, most climate discussions have centred on the need to keep global warming below 2 C, and ideally below 1.5 C. But Swedish academics Andreas Malm and Wim Carton think many of our leaders have resigned themselves in the last decade to reaching neither of those goals.
In their provocative new book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, they examine how politicians, business leaders and, yes, even some climate scientists have downplayed the imperative to make deep emissions cuts. Malm and Carton call it an "overshoot philosophy": a belief that it's impossible to meet our emissions targets, but that we'll be able to cool the planet at a later point, using some as-yet unproven technology.
Malm and Carton spoke to CBC's Andre Mayer via Zoom from Paris and Mӓlmo, Sweden, respectively.
Q: The subtitle of the book is 'How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.' When do you think the surrender began?
Wim Carton: We've never really tried to mitigate climate change. So in that sense, we started by surrendering. But I mean, if we take the overshoot notion as kind of the organizing principle here … this idea that, you know, we can somehow reach these [carbon reduction] targets by going past them and then returning, by lowering temperatures, by sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, then I guess the surrender began around 2007, thereabouts.
Andreas Malm: You can potentially, if you want to be chronologically specific, focus on the period between 2018 and 2022. Because it was in 2018 that the special report on 1.5 degrees was published by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. And that was a moment in time when it was almost universally recognized that we need to cap the warming at 1.5. This was also the moment in time when the climate movement began to surge in the Global North, and [the emergence of] Extinction Rebellion…. This surge continued until the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, and then it completely came to an end.
In these years, you had the International Energy Agency pronouncing very clearly that if we want to stay at or below 1.5, we cannot have any new fossil fuel installations.
Then what happened in 2021 and 2022 was a complete contradiction of this, in that you had this wave, this new cycle of profits from fossil fuels and reinvestment in them.
Q: The period you're referring to was after most of the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic had been lifted. In the early part of the pandemic, when people were being urged to stay at home, global emissions dropped precipitously. Some climate reporters thought this could be a dress rehearsal for driving emissions down permanently. This was naive, wasn't it?
Andreas Malm: This was a widely shared feeling. And I was, I think, prone to having this feeling as well, that this could be like a moment of rupture. All the flights coming to a standstill and nature returning into cities and the skies being clear … yeah, it was a moment when people could perceive a different way of life.
But all of that just, you know, ended in absolutely nothing. An obvious explanation for that is that none of these emissions cuts happened because governments wanted to act on climate. They only happened as an accidental byproduct of trying to contain the spread of the virus.
Q: In the book, you argue that "local resistance" is perhaps the most productive way to reduce oil dependency. Could you elaborate?
Wim Carton: We give this example of Colombia, of Ecuador — places where there are social movements. And obviously this is in many cases people who have been directly affected by the other effects of the fossil fuel industry, right? Not just climate change, but also its direct environmental effects, and [they] push back on the basis of that. I think you need that kind of … ground-anchored movement to be able to push back. We think that ultimately any change will have to happen through the state, but the only way we can capture the state or that you can change the direction of the state is through these mass movements of resistance, so yeah, that's the only pathway that I think seems feasible.
—Andre Mayer
I didn't listen, but there's a podcast in the link:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on ... -1.7376543
