If renewable technology is already so good, why aren’t we beating climate change?

For this episode I spoke to Hiro Ito, a climate advisor working in the Japanese Embassy. He told me about the last few large scale climate change conferences he has been to (the latest being COP23). Recent news on the advances of green technology had given me a lot to be excited about — now that renewables are more cost-effective than their competitors, surely we’re going to start beating climate change very soon… Right?

It turns out things are harder than that.

The real bottleneck to progress isn’t the engineering challenges that need to be overcome. The real problem, in a word, is politics.

Getting hundreds of actors to coöperate on any issue is difficult enough. On an issue like climate change it is nigh on impossible.

First of all, powerful industry actors have very different incentives to normal citizens. Any corporation is bound by law to serve its shareholders, and when transnational corporations’ entire business models are built around the production of fossil fuels, getting them to change their ways is tricky. But it is conceivable. The smart ones can see which way the wind is blowing and want to transition to renewable energy, but they want it to happen on their terms and at a pace that maximizes the bottom line. Too many still are actively obstructive and underhand.

Second, governments are distracted. Environmental issues are rarely at the top of the news or most voters’ agendas. While few other issues are more important, as the weeks go by so many are more imminent. Our government remains ideologically averse to the market interventions even a small-state liberal might agree is necessary here. Without a constant reminder, resources aren’t directed towards the R&D and planning we need to drive real green transformation. Hell — we’re struggling to even maintain our current performance on some environmental issues.

Third, governments are conflicted. They have to weigh up the long-term interests of their citizens — to limit the risks of extreme weather, refugee crises, and rising food prices, for instance — with the immediate political urges for economic continuity, fiscal austerity, keeping pro-fossil funders satisfied, and kicking complex problems into the long grass. People don’t naturally embrace change, at least at first, and we need concerted leadership to drag society in the right direction. Waiting for citizen’s and markets to come round isn’t enough.

What can we do to address this?

People don’t naturally embrace change, at least at first, and we need real leadership to pull society in the right direction. Waiting for citizen’s and markets to come round isn’t enough. So what can we do?

We can challenge executives and shareholders, through the media and pressure groups, to grasp the inevitability of a green economy and embrace the opportunities. We need to call out and denial. We need to boycott and sue polluters, so that inaction becomes a threat to their bottom line. And we need to champion and reward those who are making an effort.

We need to keep climate change and environmental issues at the top of our own agendas — democracy is, fundamentally, our views made large. We can take steps to reduce our carbon footprint: reducing meat, switching to renewables, making green consumer choices, investing in green funds; and encouraging our friends, family and workplaces to follow this lead. This doesn’t just reduce our individual carbon footprint — collectively, it shapes the market and forces business to adapt.

We can support worthy environmental interest groups with our attention, time, and donations — so they can compete in the political arena against well-established fossil fuel and interests.

We need to vote and lobby our politicians to divest from fossil fuels; invest, incentivise, subsidise and purchase green technology at both national and local level; and set out a credible plan for carbon neutrality this side of 2040.

There are already a lot of people out there interested, following what is going on and keen to learn how they can help. This isn’t a niche concern anymore. When we posted this episode online, it generated some healthy discussions over on Reddit. (You can read the best threads in full here and here).

It’s worth pointing out progress when it has been made. For all the disaster and poverty and war and terror we see in the headlines, things on earth are about as good as they’ve ever been. That’s easy to forget.

Having said that, the counter point is: time is not a luxury we can afford. In an excellent and sobering essay by Bill McKibben, he pointed out the usual way political and economic problems get solved is slow. Attitudes change slowly. Alliances are formed, aligning incentives across sectors and parties. Eventually, the negotiations and deal-making that representative politics is built for win out. But in this case, there is a hard and unavoidable deadline:

“By 2075 the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills – free energy is a hard business proposition to beat. But on current trajectories, they’ll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.”

There are still technical challenges holding back widespread adoption — making the political process slower.

Many commenters pointed out that, while renewable energy production is at the tipping point, storage and transportation remain problematic. Engineers aren’t done yet. And for every moment that technical hiccups can be used to hold up political actors, they probably will.

Encouragingly, when I asked Hiro about climate change deniers causing problems, he said he’d never come across any. The plague of false equivalence has often caught public attention, at the nitty gritty level — where people spend long hours hammering out the specifics through negotiation — climate change deniers are not being granted the same attention. That’s one delay that seems to have been sidestepped, at long last.

Now, let’s see what we can do about the others.

You know the drill:

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