Kevin Anderson: "We have to stop carbon emisions, a reduction is not enough"

25/10/2024

Why are we facing a climate emergency?

We're facing a climate emergency because we have chosen to fail to address the challenge for the previous 30 years, and that "we" is really important in my response there, because it's not everyone who has failed, but those of us in charge, or been tasked with addressing climate change. So whether that's our policy makers, I would even argue a lot of the academics, the journalists, the legal system, the people that have framed the debate on climate change, that we have run scared of saying what is necessary, because it is politically challenging. We have sweetened the pill, we have softened the message, we've done that for so long, year after year, as our emissions have continued to rise and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up year after year.

We are now in 2024 facing a much bigger challenge than we were at the time of the Paris agreement on climate change in 2015 which is [a rise of] one third of a trillion tons [of carbon] since the agreement and we have done nothing about this. Emissions just go up every single year. And so we face an emergency because of the failure of those people who should have been setting the framework for addressing climate change, we have run scared. We have tried to tweak green wash business as usual to make that fit with our climate change commitments, which we signed up to Paris. In fact, we signed up to originally back in 1992.

In a sense you could call it some sort of collective dishonesty, some collective delusion. But I don't think we should be blaming everyone for this. We blame those of us who have framed the debate, and typically, we are the high emitters. We are the people that have done very well out of the system so far, and to be serious about climate change, to respond to it as a climate emergency, now it starts to ask really quite fundamental questions about who we are, what are our values, and why have we not changed things? And so I think we are facing the emergency because of our failure to be honest to ourselves and to those people around us.

Are scientists transparent when reporting results on climate change?

Overall, I think the climate scientists who do the work on the science -you can imagine some sort of film version of what scientists are, they put their white coats on, and they go and play with their oscilloscopes, and they do their measurements- that side of science has done a good job. It's slightly conservative, but that is the nature of science. That's not necessarily a problem, as long as the rest of us realize that it's always a few years out of date, because you have to try and prove things and that takes a bit of time to do that. But that science, I think, has been well done, and it's been well done against a backdrop of huge disinformation being funded by the oil and gas and coal companies. So let's not hide this: the scientists have had to fight tooth and nail for the truth of the science against the backdrop of deliberately misleading the public and the policymakers, very well funded by the oil, gas and coal, fossil fuel executives.

So that side of the science is done well. The problem is, when we look at that science and say, what do we need to do about it based on the science to reduce our emissions? And then that, of course, suddenly becomes a very political problem. So there we have failed, and that includes quite a few of the scientists who are not honest to the public, even to themselves, about the scale of the challenge that we now face. And climate change, unlike a lot of other problems, it's a cumulative problem. Every year we fail, the next year it gets more difficult to do something, then we fail again. The next year is more difficult, the next year is more difficult. Next year is more difficult. That has gone on for three decades. So our emissions this year will be well over 60% higher than they were in 1992. And so this cumulative problem means that every year we fairly gets more difficult. That means the challenges politically are even more difficult than they were before. The speed at which you need to put the technologies out increases.

And it asks, again, quite fundamental questions about fairness and equity within our society, because most people are not responsible for the emissions. Globally, most people are very, very low emitters. And even within a wealthy country like the UK, most of the EU, including Spain, most of the emissions will come from a relatively small group of people. And that will, of course, include the scientists, the policy makers, the journalists, the people who should be bringing these issues out and saying what we need to do. But the things we need to do now ask quite fundamental, profound questions about, again, who we are, how we live our lives.

And so I think the scientific community has done well on the science and has done really, very badly, dangerously badly, and been and deluded people about how serious the challenge is for us to reduce our emissions. Profound changes to business as usual. This is not bolt on to business as usual. This is a new business as usual. The business as usual needs to focus on climate change within a broader sustainability lens as well. It's not just climate change. There are a suite of other ecological challenges that we are facing, of which climate change is one. And they work together to make the situation worse and worse. What we're seeing with the oceans and overfishing and pollution of the oceans. At the same time, those oceans are becoming more acidic because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So these problems build on each other, and we, generally the expert community, the scientific community, has continually tried to say we can just use technology to adjust business as usual, and that is a lie. Let's be clear about this. It may be a white lie, a lie that's well meant. But it is a lie, and we know that. And indeed, when I often talk to scientists and experts privately, they will say things privately they would never say in public. And my view, certainly as an academic, is: what we judge appropriate in private to say is what we should also be saying in our field in public.

Will the commitments about carbon emissions be enough to achieve the objectives of reducing warming?

No! The commitments we've made are pathetic so far! The overall goal, or commitments, that came out of the Paris Agreement, are to reduce our emissions, to hold the temperature rise to no more than 2^oC, and ideally no more than 1,5^oC. And that's because we recognize that many of the poorer parts of the world, more climate vulnerable parts of the world, will suffer very bad climate change impacts at 1,5^oC, and also that we might get a series of tipping points where, if you like, the natural processes take over from our emissions, that accelerates how bad the problem is very rapidly. And we're starting to understand those tipping points, and we know that a lot of those exist between 1,5 and 2^oC.

But nevertheless, the overall framing of Paris, I think, was helpful, particularly the 1,5 side. But then you look at our national commitments about what we're going to do about it, about how far are we going to reduce our emissions: that is nothing like the level that our big temperature commitments require. No country is doing anything significant. And lots of countries say they are doing good things. Lots of sectors say they're doing good things, universities, schools, councils... It's it's not true. None of us are making reductions anywhere near even the weakest interpretation of our Paris commitments. And next year what we will have to do to deliver on our Paris commitments would be even more challenging than they are this year, because next year we will have put into the atmosphere another 42 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide will be there for probably hundreds of years, much of it changing the climate.

Ultimately, the physics will always win out. Short term politics, short term economics, the interests of a few policy makers and economists, these are irrelevant to the climate. The physics does not care about them. We will just continue to see a warming of the atmosphere and the destruction of our ecosystems, unless we, not just reduce our emissions but stop our emissions. We have to stop them all together. A reduction is not enough. We have to stop them.

Is there anyone really performing at the level of a climate emergency? Are there any good examples, any government, any institution that is doing things the way they should be done?
At the total level, I'm not aware of any institution that's moving anywhere near in line with our Paris commitments. There are plenty of bad examples. So looking for the good examples that at least starting to move in a better direction, they're not the usual suspects. They're not Sweden or Norway. They're not UK, France, Germany or Spain. They're not the wealthy countries of the world. The few that are moving the right direction are places like Colombia, when it's looking to not produce more fossil fuels, to not give licenses to more fossil fuels. We need to see countries that have fossil fuels saying that you will not be allowed to exploit them. That's what we need.

Ultimately, the climate doesn't care about energy efficiency. It doesn't care about how many renewables you have. It only cares, really, about the greenhouse gasses we put in the atmosphere. And that's primarily, not only but primarily from burning fossil fuels. So that's what the climate sees. It sees the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse gasses from agriculture. It doesn't see the renewables. It doesn't see the efficiency. So we can have as many renewables as we want. If we're still burning the fossil fuels as well, the warming will continue. So the message is very clear, we have to eliminate the production of fossil fuels.

Now, some people will tell us that we can produce the fossil fuels and we can find ways to remove the carbon from it. From an engineering point of view, it might be possible to do that. But we will not be able to eliminate all of the carbon emissions. It would be incredibly costly, and technically a really, in my view, a really stupid way to spend our scarce resources. Already, the burning of fossil fuels to generate energy is not an efficient process anyway. It's an inefficient process, and to capture the carbon makes that inefficient process even more inefficient and much more expensive. It also locks us into lots more fossil fuels, which means we're on a much more volatile global fossil fuel market. So when, when Putin invades Ukraine, then lots of households in Spain, the UK and other parts of the world suddenly have very high energy costs that they cannot afford. So it locks us into that. So I think the problems of using fossil fuels and trying to capture the carbon are insurmountable. We cannot do that and meet our climate commitments. We can't do it in time with that either. So we have to basically eliminate the use of fossil fuels for energy. Maybe there will be some small use for hydrocarbons for some chemical processes, but even there, we've got to be careful that you might make some plastics from it, but if those plastics then get burnt in an incinerator in a year's time, than the carbon is back in the atmosphere.

The big issue is we have to address this elephant in the room, which is fairness, that most emissions come from a small group of the population. Globally, half of the emissions come from 10% of the population. And if you look at somewhere like Spain or the UK, that has a very high level of income inequality, it will be just the same here. The wealthy people here will be responsible for most of the emissions. They'll fly more, a lot more. They'll fly business class and first class. They'll have larger cars. They'll drive further. They'll have bigger houses. Often have a second house. They'll have a lot more things in the house. Everything about their lifestyles is about more carbon, more energy and more resources. But of course, who is that group? That includes the professors, the legal people, the senior journalists, the senior policy makers... So it asks, again, fundamental questions about fairness and the distribution of our society's resources. I think this is very clear from the maths alone. We cannot meet our Paris commitment without asking questions about fairness. Regardless of our political position, fairness just comes out of the maths and the science related to our commitments. And that's a very challenging conclusion for those of us who already are high emitters and have done very well out of the system.

I think there are really no countries that are good examples. There are possibly some institutions in a few places. But we know what we need to do, it's not as if we're waiting for some magical technology or some policy solution we've never come up with. We have all of the tools we need. We are simply not prepared to put those tools into place.

What do you think about putting a price to carbon?

If we started this process of the financialization of carbon, putting a price on carbon, in 1990 or 2000, it could have been a really big part of driving us to change our behaviors, our norms, and improve and change our technologies. It's now 2024. There isn't a sector out there that emits that can say “I'll do more than I need to”. Every single sector, every single country, every individual will be absolutely up against it, if they're to deliver on their fair contribution to Paris. They won't have surplus capacity to buy or sell carbon units. The carbon market only works if someone, somewhere, has an excess of carbon, and someone somewhere else can say “I can do more than I would otherwise do”. That period went a long time ago.

So it's now just a game by the wealthy who are trying to find another mechanism by which we can avoid actually making the really difficult, profound changes to our norms. And the maths tell us this: if we were to deliver on the 1,5 ^oC commitment, current global emissions will exceed that within four years. And even for the 2 ^oC commitment is only about 14 years at a global level, and emissions are still going up. So there simply is not this surplus capacity to allow us to be moving things between sectors, countries, individuals and so forth. It is just an astronomical nonsense, but wealthy emitters amongst us like it because it gives the impression that we can carry on with our business as usual and pay a poor person elsewhere to deal with it. Perhaps that would have worked to some extent in 1990 and 2000, not in 2024.

In Spain, the purchase of an electric car is being economically incentivized in exchange of scrapping a car that is more than seven years old, even if it works. Is it a good measure?

I don't think there's an easy yes or no answer to that. Overall, it is less worse to have electric vehicles than to have petrol and diesel cars. But if we think that we can just solve the problem by taking a petrol or diesel car off the road and putting an electric car, I think that misunderstands the system level challenges that we face.

Those electric cars are very heavy, and a lot of the journeys, a lot of the trips that those electric cars are making are short: three, 5, 10, kilometres. The car will weigh 1.500 2.500 or maybe 3.000 kilograms, and it will have inside me wearing 85 kilograms, just moving five kilometers to pick up my children, who collectively might weigh 60 kilograms, or some groceries from the supermarket that might weigh 10 kilograms... This is madness, utter madness, in terms of use of resources.

So it might be that we need electric vehicles. We should have some electric vehicles in the rural environment, in the countryside, but it probably means we don't have to own them. It probably much more of a rental model, because most cars are not used most of the time. They sit there for about 95% of the time not being used. But all the resources are embedded in the car. So if you have a rental model of some sort, or a car sharing model, that single car can be used a lot more of the time, which means you need far fewer vehicles. So this idea of ownership of a car, swapping from petrol to electric car, and then particularly within cities or within our urban environments, I think is a real mistake. But that's not to say there may well be important roles for electric vehicles, but not just in a one for one replacement of where we are today.

When we see a traffic jam today, a traffic jam of petrol and diesel cars is bad, but just replacing them for electric cars is still a traffic jam of cars. It's a waste of resources, and every kilowatt-hour of electricity we have to put into a car to transport that big, heavy car around, is a kilowatt of electricity we can't put into heating our schools, lighting our hospitals, to powering our industries. So we are taking a scarce resource, renewable electricity at the moment, and then we're putting it into a car to run very, very inefficiently, when there are lots of other sectors that need that green energy.

Our policymakers and indeed our academics need to step back and look at the energy system, not the little bits. There's a great belief amongst some people, if you make all the bits efficient, then the whole system must be efficient. Well, that's rubbish. The whole is always different to the sum of the parts. So you might make all the bits look very efficient. When you add them together, you get a mad system, and that's what we get if we just go down an electric vehicles route rather than thinking about transport and even maybe sometimes not needing transport as well.

Is the inclusion of nuclear energy and gas as green energies by the European Union a way to solve the problem?

Let's separate. Gas is very high carbon emissions. If you took a kilogram of gas, if you imagine a kilogram of gas, 750 grams of that kilogram is carbon. So most of gas is carbon. When you burn it, you get lots of carbon dioxide. So let's not have any pretense that gas is some way a green fuel, a clean fuel, or even a transition fuel. Gas might have been a transition fuel in 1990 or 2000. In 2024 it's too late. Gas is a major part of the problem.

Nuclear is different. Nuclear is low carbon. It has lots of other issues that I'm sure that people listen to this know about some of those other issues on waste and safety and all those things. It is low carbon, though it's probably very similar life cycle emissions to quite a lot of our renewables, but it is incredibly expensive. It produces another waste product, which we have to deal with, radioactive waste. Some people say we've got a way to solve that, but we haven't. We store it, but there's certainly a lot of uncertainty about what we should do with it. And it produces reasonable quantities, not huge quantities, but reasonable quantities of a very dangerous waste. So there are things we can do, but we're not certain about what they should be, and how reliable it will be in the long term.

It's expensive, it has a waste legacy issue, and it takes a long time to build. And that is a key issue that most of the people who are advocates of nuclear don't really think about. Building nuclear power stations typically takes much longer, for the same power output, than doing renewables. Nuclear, of all of these options, takes the longest to put in place, and we don't have very long. We don't have that many well trained engineers, we don't have that many well trained people that can license the nuclear facilities. These are really important issues that are often just ignored, particularly with nuclear. You want to make sure that your regulators are very well trained in nuclear power. If a nuclear power station goes wrong, there are lots of issues. If a wind turbine goes wrong, it's a nuisance, but there are nowhere near the same level of issues. Nuclear does need a sort of a higher level of checks and balances to ensure that it's suitable. So there are a lot of levels there: cost, the waste legacy from it, the requirements for labor and materials to build it, and how long it takes to build.

Nuclear, at the most, will have a niche role to play. And people who say nuclear can solve it, do not understand the basic science of climate change, which is about cumulative emissions, and cumulative emissions is a time frame issue. So you have to ask these people, how long will it take you to build lots of nuclear power stations? Nuclear power, I know in the UK, provides about 3% or 4% of our energy. Globally, it's nearer 2% of energy. There are about 450 nuclear power stations globally producing 2% of our energy. So if we wanted to have lots of nuclear, we would need hundreds of stations. We simply don't have the capacity to build those, or the expertise, in the time frame that we have to address climate change.

I remain agnostic about nuclear. I have colleagues who really don't like it, and some think it's really think it's really positive. But overall, I think from a climate point of view alone, it's too little, too late, but it might have a niche role in some places.

But not gas! There's a big difference. Gas is bad for the climate whatever you do to it. Don't believe the scams that are being sold by the oil industry and some academics that they have been paid for. Gas is high carbon, and you will not be able to eliminate those carbon emissions from gas.
 
What can we do as individuals?

First, we need to look at our own lifestyles and try to identify those parts of our lifestyles that have very high carbon footprints and indeed are broadly unsustainable. And change them. That might be difficult. It might be having to fly less, drive less, spend less on things in your homes. And this depends on your income, because a lot of households they don't have the income to make big changes, and they're doing everything they can because they haven't got the money to buy the energy anyway. But for those of us who do have some surplus capacity, some surplus income, then we need to identify the things that we need to change.

But let's be really clear about this. What we do as an individual in terms of our change, the numbers from that in isolation don't really matter. The point about doing it is, when I talk to you, when I talk to my friends, when I talk to my family, when they talk to your council, you can talk about what you've tried, what you've done, and how easy or hard it was. And we know from repeated social science research, that people trust someone else who's trying to do it themselves. So if they see you doing it, they will take more notice of what you are saying. So that trust relationship is really important in trying to change a bigger picture. So then we talk to our friends and our family. We discuss that in our institutions and our universities, our schools, our places of work. That means we can then start to engage with our local policy makers, our Councils, and then we can start to engage with our national policy makers.

So all of these things fit together. Making the changes ourselves helps us make better arguments and discussions with other people around us, and that helps us engage in the political process. And ultimately, this is a political challenge, but the politics isn't a separate thing that's out there. You're not waiting for the leaders to come up with good ideas. The good ideas will come out from you, or you, or me, or someone else. And we have to play out those ideas and test them and then try them out and talk about them more widely and engage with journalists. So we've got lots of ways of doing this now. We have lots of forms of social media. We can still engage directly with our policy makers in democracies, at least, and we can engage nationally, and we can engage locally in our politics. And indeed, if you're still in the EU -which, sadly, the UK is not- you can engage with your members of the European Parliament. So there are lots of ways we can engage, but rolling that right back to trying to make the changes ourselves is an important part of being trusted in that engagement.