Ten thoughts on climate change

Our focus on climate change has been temporarily displaced by other work, but from mid November, in partnership with COIN we'll be intensifying preparation for five RSA public events from January-May 2015 as part of our project The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change.

As things stand, the planned events look wonderfully risky (not just talking heads...) so watch this space in about a month. To keep those climate embers bright (rather than burning...) in the meantime, here are ten things (with some of the seven dimensions captured more than once) that have caught my attention during the last few months:

1. Democracy: The global climate marches were an inspiring sight. I recently argued, slightly too strongly I suspect, that it would have been even better if the generic call for 'action' was clarified, but that was a quibble really - demonstrations of that scale can be hugely galvanising. A friend in New York said the best part of the march was the moment of shared silence beforehand as the assembled masses contemplated what they were about to do and why. The marches also gave rise to an evocative expression that may be the key to climate solutions: "If you want to change EVERYTHING, you need EVERYONE." Nobody quite knows its provenance though you can find Bill McKibben (a huge climate star in the US, barely known in the UK) reflect on it here at 32.40 (HTs @Mariegasha, Adam Corner and Jonathan Rose).

2. Law: While major Oil companies are now on record as saying they don't believe Governments will act in a manner that is consistent with the totemic 2 degrees target, Mark Carney, The Governor of the Bank of England just made an announcement that acknowledged the reality of the carbon bubble at the heart of the global economy. Simply stated, the world's projected economic health is based on a false premise i.e. that we can access valuable fossil fuel reserves for the foreseeable future. This is no small matter, and potentially much worse for the global economy than the housing bubble that caused devastation in 2008.

3. Democracy: The Naomi Klein show has recently graced the UK. I am slowly reading her book 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism against the Climate" and enjoyed her Guardian event chaired by Owen Jones. Her emphasis on the 'bad timing' of climate change; arriving in public consciousness just as the public realm is in retreat is a crucial point - and axiomatic for her claim that solutions to climate change involve mass social mobilisation and fundamentally rethinking capitalism. I need to reserve judgement until I have finished the book, but I suspect I will end up agreeing with Adam Corner. Adam wrote an excellent summary and critique on COIN's website here. The depth, scale and complexity of the problem suggests to me that any meaningful climate victory will not be a victory for the left, but more like a growth in human consciousness and cooperation that transcends left and right.

4. Economy: I am not sure how directly Klein engages with the question of economic growth, but it's a fundamental fault line on climate questions, as I wrote here. I was delighted to see a more advanced version of this argument by David Roberts (a climate writer recently back from a year's sabbatical!) in an outstanding piece responding to some lazy articles by people who should know better- Paul Krugman (and Chris Huhne) among them - who suggest that technology means we can decouple growth from emissions in absolute terms in a timely enough way (maybe we can, but David Roberts explains what they need to explain to make sense of how).

5. Technology: On the other hand, a few months ago I was really impressed by a piece that had somehow escaped me about the failures of environmentalism. It's from 2004, but there have been updated versions since in book form, and the authors now run 'The Breakthrough Institute'. In essence these ex NGO activists who used to think very differently now argue that the only hope for climate change is a commitment to certain kinds of growth that aim to transform the material basis of the economy. For instance, two of the main proponents of this world, Nordhaus and Shellenbenger argue: "Environmentalists like to emphasize the ways in which the economy depends on ecology, but they often miss the ways in which thinking ecologically depends on prospering economically." (p6 Breakthrough, 2007)

6. Culture: I don't know what I think about that yet, but I suspect David Roberts is right that timing is the key question, and that is not particularly intuitive for human thinking or for our cultural discourse more generally. We are prone to deciding between what are effectively ideological visions on the basis of coherence, facts, and values, but with climate change the question becomes even more complex because it's not so much a matter of what should we do in principle, but rather what should we do given that we have so little time to do it. As Bill McKibben puts it in the video mentioned above: "The physics of global warming are such that if we don't get it right quickly, we don't get it right."

7. Technology: My inclination is to view climate change more as an adaptive challenge (about people, cultures, feelings, psychologies) than a technical problem (clear policy levers, technological change, simple interventions) but that's a personal bias based on background, and clearly it is both. In this respect this report on 'Deep Decarbonisation' led by Jeffrey Sachs is noteworthy - he believes global negotiations on emissions are much less likely to succeed than government commitments to the technological infrastructure. Put that way, he might be right, but he seems to overlook or underestimate potential solutions at the level of behaviour or culture that impact indirectly on such international talks - as the global marches said loud and clear: the political mandate ultimately comes from us.

8. Economy: And political pressure and economic change happen in tandem. Lots of really influential bodies have begun divesting in fossil fuels and in some cases reinvesting in renewable energy. For instance, recognising the threat to public health, The British Medical Association did it, recognising the moral case, lots of Churches and Quakers have done it, and following the intellectual and moral lead of many US Universities, Glasgow University became the first European University to divest - good on them! That's quite a bit of momentum on divestment now; slowly but surely fossil fuels are becoming socially stigmatised - the key point of this process, as argued by this influential Oxford University report.

9. Science: All of this is of course premised on Science, and there was an exceptional report released earlier this year by UCL about how Climate Scientists need to form a new social contract with society, both improving their communication based on the kinds of understanding that underpin our work in Social Brain; and, just as important, getting more directly engaged with the policy implications of their work - an excellent and very important read.

10. Behaviour: Finally (for now), it has never occurred to me to write an open letter to Nigel Farage! (The very idea...) But I came upon one well worth reading. Farage's love of alleged common sense, pints and, crucially - being seen to be drinking pints is well known, but his sceptical if not downright dismissive thoughts on climate change are less salient. I was therefore impressed by Geographer Joe Smith's charming pitch to help him see sense on climate change which can be summarised thus: 'let's have a pint and talk about the weather.'

Jonathan Rowson is author of "A New Agenda on Climate Change: Facing up to Stealth Denial and Winding Down on Fossil Fuels."

You can follow him @Jonathan_Rowson