The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis

We are all locked in a battle between disruptive climate action and predatory delay.

(This is part three of a work in progress. The series begins with The Last Decade and You, and continues with On Climate, Speed is Everything.)

In the last two pieces, I pointed out how getting on the right emissions reduction curve for this era means taking bold action, now. We must peak global emissions by 2020. Then we must cut them in half by 2030 — and then cut them in half again by 2040, and then again, by 2050 — while restoring the natural world and spreading sustainable prosperity.



Because the planetary crisis is steepening — the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to solve the problems we face — failing to get on the right curve will mean that we end up, very quickly, on an even steeper curve. Wait too long and the curves we face become essentially impossible to meet.

We can fail catastrophically on climate. We’ll know that failure when we have delayed action so long that we find ourselves confronting an insurmountable emissions reduction challenge coupled with rising and untenable losses — a crisis where all humanity’s choices are bad ones. We will have then reached a point where a even drastic program of global carbon austerity — even when combined with our wildest gambles on trying to pull CO2 out of the air and engineer the planet’s temperature — will simply not be enough to avoid tragic, essentially permanent losses for all humanity.

To get there, all we have to do is act too slowly.



“Decades ago, time was still on our side,” as climate scientist Mike Mann puts it, but time is certainly not on our side now. Today, delay is deadly.

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The Planetary Crisis is not about the future, it’s about the present.

The planetary crisis, and the global warming driving it, are immediate problems. They can only be successfully tackled if we act without delay.



1) We’re out of time. We are already past the the “safe” level of climate change (if in truth there ever was such a thing). There are no more “extra” emissions; no more “runway” for making a transition. Every molecule of CO2 we emit is a failure, and the only sensible plan is to create a carbon-zero economy at breakneck speed.

Steepening curves (Image: Rolling Stone)

2) With delay, the emissions cuts we need will become larger and more urgent, requiring ever-more-disruptive actions — while our greenhouse pollution creates more and more climate chaos, soaking up more of our resources and causing loss and misery.



3) Therefore, early cuts matter more than later cuts; and big cuts matter more than small ones.

4) Climate goals must therefore be measured in strict budgets, with timelines. Emission cuts promised to begin sometime in the future are worthless. All that truly matters is what we’re doing now, and what we’re setting in motion for the decade ahead.

5) Wealthy nations must lead, and wealthier citizens and successful businesses must lead within those nations, because that’s where today’s emissions are concentrated; and



5) Since climate action is mostly a political fight (even with accelerating technological improvements, almost all large-scale emissions reductions demand parallel policy changes, planning approvals, regulation reform and incentive shifts), success demands winning the political fight to reshape the economy right now.



6) We are winning. You don’t have to look far to see the evidence: Hundreds of millions of people support climate action, now. Energy emissions may perhaps have peaked. Clean energy prices are plummeting. Efficiency, energy storage and electric vehicles are improving in leaps and bounds. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being shifted towards the clean economy. China, India and other nations are canceling new coal plants and shutting down some old ones. Even the Paris Agreement seems to have been strengthened by Trump’s attack on it.

The news is not all bad. Just a decade ago, researchers described a business-as-usual scenario, where little would change and accumulating pollution would cook the planet by 7+ degrees Celsius. I don’t know anyone who thinks seriously about these issues who thinks that is the default future for humanity, any more. Indeed, if nations follow through with the Paris commitments and parallel efforts, we’re currently on track to limit warming to something roughly like 3.5º C. That’s the difference between our descendents living through the effectively permanent collapse of most of the planet’s biosphere and them “merely” facing widespread catastrophe lasting for millennia. That is a real victory, though a still sour one.

7) We’re winning too slowly. If we can only achieve incremental progress when large-scale change is needed, we lose. If we set large-scale action in motion, but only after such a prolonged fight that it’s no longer possible to meet the curve ahead of us, we fail. Indeed, winning too slowly is the same thing as losing.



This last point is really critical. What the steepening curves of climate action tell us, above all else, is that when we act matters as much — arguably, even, far more — than the specific set of actions we take. Speed is everything.

Our best-paced efforts today will leave our children with a planet 3.5º C hotter; in effect, a different planet, a strange planet, a world where nothing is ever “normal” again.

That certainly means catastrophic impacts within the lifetimes of children today, and multi-generational tragedy in the future. It may not mean an apocalyptic end-of-everything crisis — that doesn’t mean the chaos, suffering and loss our kids and descendants will experience is something we should accept.



We shouldn’t accept a 3.5º C future because it would be immoral to do so; but we also shouldn’t accept it because it is completely unnecessary.

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We know what we need to do.



We know we have most of the capacities to design and build a much brighter future. We have (broadly) four tool-sets we can use to get us to zero emissions in a fast time-frame and prepare ourselves for the consequences already set in motion — and there are multiple combinations of the tools within these sets that can do it.



Those four approaches are

*Decoupling economic growth from consumption of energy and resources by reducing the amount of energy and materials we use to provide prosperity (demand reduction through threshold effects, efficient designs and waste elimination);



*Decarbonizing our energy and materials by switching to clean, low-impact and renewable sources (clean energy, circular resource flows);



*Removing carbon and stabilizing potential feedback loops through large-scale ecological restoration and land stewardship (climate-adaptive preservation, forestry, farming and food systems);



*Ruggedization of human systems to prepare for unpredictable and unprecedented conditions, using strategies that both reduce loss and increase ecological function and/or economic productivity.



I’ll have more to say about these later. The point here is that (though I personally doubt any approach can be successful without employing all four tool-sets) bold plans can be proposed that put very different emphases on different elements. The choices of specific technologies, designs, policies and processes within the tool-sets can be combined in a myriad of ways. There is no one optimal plan for rapid climate action (though all reasonable plans start soon and accelerate fast).



Here’s another thing to consider: we’re getting better at many of the tools in all four of the sets, often at an accelerating pace — but the reliability of that rate of acceleration often depends on the momentum of adoption in the immediate future. I’ll come back to this point as well.

For now, let’s just say that it’s important to start early and move fast even where — especially where — we’re counting on innovation to help see us through this crisis. The faster our start, the more powerful our tools will become within the decade ahead.

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Our thinking about what’s realistic is profoundly out-of-date.



We have the means to create workable plans for a sustainable future — but are these plans politically realistic? We hear that word a lot these days, “realism.” Most of what we hear is nonsense.



Our sense of realism has been distorted through the sustained application of disinformation and long-term efforts to control the debate, but our confusion about the political nature of the crisis we face runs to the very core of the issue.



Here’s one of the most important things I have to share with you. When people — including many experts — talk about the politics of climate change, they often make three claims, claims that have been repeated so much many treat them as received truths:



1) That climate change is a long-term problem. Specifically, we often hear that the challenge with climate is that people today must act so people in the far future will benefit. But this is not true. We’re surrounded by impacts now, and people whose lives will be shattered by catastrophic climate change are here now, they’re just young. Indeed, this claim only makes any sense if you assume that everyone of importance in the debate is old. Young people understand that climate change is a crisis of the present, a crisis that is defining their lives in the now. (Denying this, of course, makes it easier to hide some of the immorality of delaying action, and is thus a prime strategy for predatory delay.)



2) That climate change is a collective action problem. A collective action problem is one which offers a group of people a mutual winning outcome, but presents individual disincentives that prevent people from working together towards that outcome. That’s not the situation we’re in. The situation we’re in is much closer to a zero-sum game, where the losses experienced by most people are integral to the gains of the most polluting industries, and visa versa.



3) That we need everyone to act, and moving slowly in order to move together is a necessary trade-off. This belief follows directly from the first two. Moving slowly, as we’ve seen, is failing. Even more, though, there’s no evidence that those truly opposed to climate action now will ever choose to participate in climate action. By (for example) trying to craft messages that might reach climate denialists, we’ve only succeeded in wasting time: roughly the same percentage of the American population denies science now as did fifteen years ago.



Indeed, a more sensible analysis of the politics of the planetary crisis is this:



Because we have missed earlier action curves, gradual adjustments to unsustainable systems are no longer possible. Moving fast enough on climate, for instance, demands not only preventing the development of new coal, oil and gas deposits, but leaving a chunk of current deposits in the ground. It demands not only stopping the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure (from pipelines to coal ports), but shutting down existing systems before they’ve fully paid off. It means unburnable carbon, stranded assets, the end of subsidies and lost investments.



Despite the favorite silly argument of dim pundits — that we all use fossil fuels, so we’re all responsible for climate change — investments in dirty systems are not evenly spread through all parts of our global society. Most people have far more to gain from a rapid leap away from coal, oil and gas than they have to lose. A small group, though, have huge (and not easily altered) commitments to fossil fuel profits. There are identifiable sides in this fight.



The costs of pulling the global economy away from fossil fuels have been massively over-inflated in the debate. A growing number of studies have shown that once we count the “externalities” of fossil fuels — even leaving out the climate impacts — fossil fuels are already a worse deal than renewables, and some economists now go so far as to say that when we count all the costs of the dirty economy, humanity as a whole is burning money every time we burn a barrel of oil.



Nor is a clean economy impractical, even given modest rates of technological progress. While there is a real question about whether we can build a clean economy quickly enough without shifting subsidies, making fossil fuels pay their way and demanding real planning and policy changes, why would we try? Why wouldn’t we do everything we can to tilt the playing field towards sanity? The faster we tilt it, the more practically achievable an 100% clean economy becomes (I’ll be coming back to this point later in this series).



Here’s a fundamental truth: The delays we’re seen are neither inevitable nor accidental. Preventing political action, preventing faster innovation, preventing faster shifts of economic incentives, preventing realistic debates about the planetary crisis — none of this is incidental.



Why isn’t the whole world having a rollicking, progressive debate on how to decarbonize as quickly as humanly possible? The unsurprising answer, friends, is money.



The old economy has been fantastically profitable — especially the high carbon parts of it. More, it has become fantastically valuable. It makes a lot of money, but it’s worth many times what it makes. Or at least it would be, if the old economy hadn’t also set in motion a planetary crisis.



The delay in action the Carbon Lobby has so successfully worked means paradoxically that a transition away from fossil fuels is now impossible. To head off the planetary crisis, we have to stop emitting carbon. That means we have to stop burning coal, oil and gas. It also means that systems that depend on fossil fuels will have to radically change or end, too. There’s no time left for gradual-but-eventually-ambitious plans. All real climate action demands fundamentally dismantling the fossil fuel economy over the next three decades.

Put another way, for high-carbon companies, systems and places, decarbonization doesn’t mean transitioning the economy we had into the one we will have; it means being overwhelmed by a combination of democratic political power, legal and financial challenges, and aggressive, fast-scaling competitors.

This is their own fault. High-carbon industries have refused the opportunity to remake themselves into companies that could weather the coming storm of decarbonization. Instead, they’ve fortified themselves with political influence. They’ve used that influence to grab massive public subsidies and erect high barriers that shield them from change.

Those barriers protect profits. More importantly, those barriers guard companies’ valuations by protecting the perception that fossil fuels, dirty systems and unsustainable practices are durable and lasting. They need to defend that perception because the opposite is true — the dirtier the industry, the more it’s living on borrowed time. The time lost in responding to the planetary crisis has turned some big chunks of the old economy into a set of bubbles waiting to burst.



The best known — and one I’ve spent some time looking into — is the Carbon Bubble. I wrote about the Carbon Bubble in the context of the 2016 election and Russian interference here. Let me quote a short sections:



“Here’s the blunt reality: the pressure to cut emissions and respond to a changing climate are going to alter what we do and don’t see as valuable. Climate action will trigger an enormous shift in the way we value things.



“If we can’t burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can’t defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon.



“Currently, though, these assets are valued very highly. Oil is seen as hugely valuable, coastal real estate is seen as hugely valuable, industrial patents are seen as hugely valuable.When there’s a large difference between how markets think assets should be valued and what they are (or will) actually be worth, we call it a “bubble.”



“Experts now call the differences between valuations and worth in fossil fuel corporations, climate-harmful industries and vulnerable physical assets the ‘Carbon Bubble.’ It is still growing. And here’s the thing about bubbles: they always pop.”



“…There is no long game in high-carbon industries. Their owners know this. They don’t need a long game, though: their investment horizons are years (or even months), not decades. Investors don’t even need successful companies, actually — as we’ve seen time and time again with hostile takeovers, pump-and-dumps, stock buybacks and other financial looting tactics. All they need is the perception of the inevitability of future profit, today. That’s what keeps valuations high. …

“Here’s something critical it took me a long time (and the patience of a few smart friends) to understand: the Carbon Bubble will pop not when high-carbon practices become impossible, but when their profits cease to be seen as reliable. As it becomes clear that these assets will not produce profit in the future, their valuations will drop — even if the businesses that own them continue to function for years. The value of oil companies will collapse long before the last barrel of oil is burned; the value of beachfront hotels will collapse long before rising tides flood their lobbies.



“Put another way: The pop comes when people understand that growth in these industries is over and that, in fact, these industries are now going to contract. That’s when investors start pulling out and looking for safer bets. As investors begin to flee these companies, others realize more devaluation is on the way, so they want to get out before the drop: a trickle of divestment becomes a flood and the price collapses. What triggers the drop is investors ceasing to believe the company has a strong future.



“Because that risk already exists, the pop is way closer than most people understand.



“A crisis in investor confidence is the biggest threat to fossil fuel companies — not environmentalists, regulations, clean energy competitors or climate agreements.

For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.”



All the Carbon Lobby needs to do to reap gargantuan profits is to forestall serious climate action for another decade or so. All they need to do is to lose slowly.



That same decade, of course, is the last one we have to avoid catastrophic losses.

I written at great length elsewhere about delay and denialism. For now, let me just say that the Carbon Lobby’s efforts to leverage political corruption and public disinformation into inaction make up what is arguably the most successful corporate intervention in public affairs in history. Seriously, these guys have done wonders over their forty-year campaign to prevent humanity from acting on an existential threat to its own well-being. They even hacked America’s 2016 election, and set off an orgy of looting, symbolic destruction and policy attacks on the clean economy. All of us have had our expectations and our understanding of what’s possibility twisted by this set of assaults.



Now, though, their strategy is shifting, and in a way that seems to have confused many people who advocate for climate action.



Now what we’re seeing is the overt embrace of gradualism. Having long opposed any action, now dirty companies are appearing to moderate by conceding the need for “reasonable” action, paced “responsibly.” So now you have oil companies lending tentative support to pricing carbon, encouraging the use of natural gas to replace coal, acknowledging that climate science is real, and so on. They’re ready, they say, to start negotiating.



This is how they make sure they lose only slowly: engage, but ask for compromises and draw out the process. Climate gradualism — “we all want to act on climate, but we also have to be slow, incremental and realistic” — is the new climate denialism.



It’s a brilliant (if vile) move: As long as we believe that climate is a collective action problem, we will easily fall prey to gradualism. If we’re all in it together, if we need everyone moving forward to solve this problem, then we must meet our opponents in the middle and hope to nudge them forward. If oil companies are ready for a low carbon price implemented sometime in the future, well. that’s at least a start (or so the thinking goes). The idea that the planetary crisis is a negotiation of equally good-faith players all trying to solve a set of complex challenges leaves us defenseless to this sort of sociopathic manipulation.



If, on the other hand, we understand the planetary crisis for what it truly is — a zero-sum game with everything at stake; one in which a a relatively small group of investors and executives have the chance to make trillions of dollars, but can only do so at the cost of massive losses in the rest of the economy, destruction of the living fabric of much of life on Earth and the diminishment of opportunity for billions of others, for generations — then the whole debate shifts. We then see gradualism as the threat it is.



When we see clearly, we understand that the only strategy that can work to save humanity from the nightmares it has set in motion is a strategy of making the Carbon Lobby and their supporters lose, and lose as fast as possible.

Because they have delayed action so long, our strategy must be disruption. Because we need systems changes, that disruption must involve institutions (especially businesses) capable of replacing the old economy at scale. Because the Carbon Lobby’s use of wealth and political power to distort the economy feed each other, climate advocates must also evolve a hybrid strategy of civic-industrial-cultural collaboration to tilt the playing field decisively towards a radically sustainable economy. And because cultural opposition and political hostility to change have been baked into certain segments of the population (here in the U.S., the deep red parts), change strategies must not only be designed to succeed in the face of their opposition, but succeed in ways that make their opposition less and less important.

That last bit is critical. Since the current opponents of climate action simply can never agree to the the pace of climate action we need — since this is a zero-sum game — every attempt at negotiation is bound to fail in the end. The only option, then, is to intentionally reduce their power to block change as part of gaining the power to make change.



The disruption of fossil fuels and unsustainable industries are no longer unfortunate side effects of successful climate action. Now, that disruption is by necessity the defining focus of any real climate strategy.

Any climate action that is not disruptive to those industries is simply another kind of delay.