Almost half a century ago, in 1972 to be precise, the Club of Rome issued its 'Limits to Growth' report. The 'limits' mentioned in this report referred to the ability of Earth's interlocking ecosystems to absorb waste and replenish raw materials in order to sustain the global economic framework. Five factors were studied that regulate and, in their mutuality, ultimately limit economic growth on this planet. They are population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution.
In 1988 James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Institute for Space Studies, in his testimony on global warming to the US Congress, pointed to explicit anthropogenic impacts on the climate and an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That same year an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] was established to provide policy makers with regular scientific assessments on the current state of knowledge about the changing climate.
In 1995 the United Nations was sufficiently concerned about successive IPCC reports to take the hazards of global warming seriously enough to convene a 'conference of the parties' to discuss targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. A Convention was adopted in 1992 during the aptly-named Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The treaty entered into force in 1994 with 196 countries ratifying it.
The first of a series of successive COP meetings was convened in Berlin the following year, attracting 3,969 participants. This included official negotiators, observers, and the Press. In 2009 a total of 27,294 people turned up for COP 15 in Copenhagen, while more than 28,000 people registered for the COP 21 cabaret in Paris in 2015. These ridiculous numbers, along with a suite of tools totally inadequate for the task, should give you a clue as to the likelihood of success in negotiating any kind of substantial agreement sufficient to address the problem.
Today, following the release of the latest IPCC report on the state of the climate, and in the lead up to the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow this year, governments around the world are scrambling to prepare their case. There appear to be four generic strategies in play:
Sitting on the fence while waiting for others to act
Taking additional, more robust steps, to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases
Doubling down on the rhetoric of distraction in the hope of convincing ordinary citizens that getting back to 'normal' can be achieved without doing anything different
Numerous appeals to other, generally larger and wealthier nations, to act before it is too late.
The main reason for nations waiting for others to act, dawdling in terms of appropriate policies, or trying to pretend that business-as-usual is a valid option, even in the current circumstances, come down to two factors: a fear of loss, together with a lack of imaginative foresight.
In terms of fear, governments heavily invested in carbon-intensive industries, including Russia, Indonesia, Australia and India, for example, fear the loss of direct revenues, the loss of a sufficient return on foreign investments, the devaluing of assets such as coal power plants, and the loss of jobs. As much as these fears are justified, they are overblown and wide open to ideological manipulation.
In terms of imaginative foresight, most governments are stuck in a 'manufactured normalcy' of their own invention from which they cannot escape. This trap has arisen through a tendency to constantly patch up the present as a substitute for long-term vision, and has now become a habit. There is also an element of fear attached to this. The future is an imaginative 'space' of immense complexity and uncertainty. Those ill-equipped to understand opportunities within this uncertainty are destined to ignore it - or to pretend that the future can look after itself. And without consciously 'shaping the conditions' for a viable socio-economic transition that is exactly what happens of course. This is why history repeats itself.
Unable to escape this trap, I fear the outcome from COP 26 can only be more pontificating, prolonged shouting into the abyss of neoliberalism, more hand-wringing and blaming others for their inaction.
Putting the sheer numbers of people attending the Glasgow meeting to one side for a moment, the composite nature of this problem can be traced back to a toolkit (including mindsets and beliefs) that is no longer fit for purpose. The trap can only be leveraged open with tools able to design and deploy practical solutions that will enable the fossil fuel sector in particular to transition to a renewable energy world, by addressing their fears as well as the multiple problems they face. Namely, having to continue competing, while their key assets and legacy systems become stranded, but without the support needed to clean up their balance sheets and compete on an innovation platform rather than continuing to out-perform each other by squeezing every drop of oil and gas out of their current asset portfolios.
In essence, current conditions must be transformed if we expect to see emissions reduced to net-zero any time soon. Business-as-usual cannot possibly get us there. Setting targets, however ambitious, will not work - particularly if their achievement is not mandatory. Cooperative structural change across all sectors is needed.
For many years the world's large energy companies have been spending a fortune on telling us there is no problem and that fossil fuels will be around for decades. They funded pseudo research aimed at discrediting the science, their aim being to delay and discredit. We know they perpetuated a lie. And so do they. Once again fear is part of the equation. We cannot expect the likes of Saudi Aramco, Shell or Petrochina to use their capital to transition to a clean, green economy if their competitors are allowed to continue with business-as-usual or while they are still required to deliver dividends to their shareholders. Companies are not set up to pursue altruism.
The task of governments to (i) agree on a temporary international moratorium on competition, (ii) buy the stranded assets from conventional energy companies, using them as startups for sequestering carbon and other drawdown initiatives, and (iii) legislate to ensure that the energy industry returns to competition in renewables, is critical. That is potentially fertile ground for the negotiators in Glasgow, if only they can find the courage and imaginative foresight to propose whole-of-system solutions for 2nd-order change.
I am not optimistic this will happen. Instead of planning effective transformative strategies I suspect the communique will once again take the path of least resistance. Instead of conveying the unadulterated truth, that we need to radically transform the way we live and organize society, we will be told that we can still carry on much as before, except perhaps with our fossil fuels and one-use goods replaced with green energy and recyclables. We can expect to hear more about the circular economy in mainstream media. Maybe a diet comprised more of plants and less meat. Reduced air travel, perhaps. But still back to 'normal' with a light green touch simply because of our innate caution in dealing with uncertainty.
We are relatively comfortable trading in risk as there are usually odds we can count on. But dynamically complex systems like the climate, with unpredictable events and a propensity to speed up exponentially when reaching tipping points, freak us out. Nor are we well disposed to dealing with wicked problems at scale. Our modern skulls accommodate stone age minds quite happy to concoct coping tactics to deal with any existential uncertainties. We ignore climate reality in order to focus on local weather. This offers us a comforting illusion of control and stability at the price of increasingly misunderstanding the reality in which we live.
Thus, the story we continue to tell each other is one of being able to live 'happily ever after' - even as industrial growth and production accelerates, pushing society across planetary boundaries that are quite possibly irreversible. The truth is there are now no plausible 'normal' to which we can return. The reality is a mess of asynchronous events and unfamiliar, ever-deepening uncertainties.
Oh, and those hordes of people about to descend on Glasgow in December? The crowd is nothing more than a distraction - an impediment to any kind of truly radical outcome. At this stage of the journey we do not need more somber sermons from celebrity politicians, no VIPs of the Thunberg or DiCaprio variety who are present to lighten proceedings for the media circus, nobody from the Press, nor bureaucrats of any shape or form. What we actually need is a workshop retreat, conducted away from the glare of the media, and comprising:
a small team of no more than two or three intelligent representatives from each nation - perhaps a scientist from the IPCC, an economist whose expertise is in climate science, and a constitutional lawyer with finely tuned negotiation skills
an immersive digital platform for helping to visualize the complexity of negotiations and avoiding any unnecessary breakdown in communications
a cadre of curators well-versed in posing strategic questions, guiding systemic inquiries with a large group, and moderating transformative conversations to a satisfactory closure.
I can imagine many of my readers smiling ironically at these proposals. But without these components, even if they were off to the side in a working group, I am doubtful Glasgow will produce anything substantially different than before. The most likely scenario is that COP 26 follows its predecessors as yet another lost opportunity for regenerative change. Possibly the last chance to find a way of living within the resources of the planet and in ways that allow future generations of humans to survive and thrive, will have been wasted.
Decisions are needed. But we cannot allow further procrastination, corporate lies, and government hand-wringing to become an acceptable substitute for effective, actionable policies.