11 April 2022. Climate | Racism
Climate change is getting worse. We might actually need to change our behaviour. The long pause that said more than a thousand words
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1: Climate change is getting worse. We might actually need to change our behaviour.
I haven’t had time to even start on the 570 pages of the latest IPCC report, but fortunately Carbon Brief has. (Thanks to Ian Christie for the link). It is every bit as gloomy as the initial news reports said it was. It is the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), and the headline is this:
it will be “impossible” to stay below 1.5C with “no or limited overshoot” without stronger climate action this decade.
So we used to think we had a decade to fix this. But now maybe not even that. However, the report does outline how these emissions might be achieved,
including “substantial” reductions in fossil fuel use, energy efficiency, electrification, the rapid uptake of low-emission energy sources – particularly renewables – and the use of alternative energy carriers, such as hydrogen.
And:
rapid cost reductions in key technologies – such as wind, solar and batteries – mean that continuing to use high-carbon energy may be “more expensive” than the alternatives, the report says. Overall, the economy would benefit from limiting global warming, it adds.
Carbon dioxide removal is “unavoidable” to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. And the report recommends demand side measures to reduce emissions, for the first time. This includes changes to diets and to consumption patterns.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterriez, called the report “a file of shame”, a catalogue “of empty pledges”:
“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels…The report sets out viable, financially sound options for cutting emissions in every sector that can keep the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5C alive.”
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(Credit: IPCC/WGII Report)
The Carbon Briefing piece is structured around 17 questions, with links to help the reader navigate to the sections they’re most interested in.
For me, it was useful to get a snapsoht of current share of emissions:
For the year 2019, about 20GtCO2e – or one-third of annual emissions – were attributable to the energy sector, while the direct emissions from industry contributed about one-quarter of the total, 14GtCO2e. The other major contributing sectors were agriculture, forestry and land use, known as AFOLU (13GtCO2e, or 22%), transport (8.7GtCO2e, or 15%) and buildings (3.3GtCO2e, or 6%)...
When emissions from electricity and heat are added to direct emissions from various sectors, industry’s share climbs to 34% and that of buildings leaps to 16%.
And, hand in hand with that, also a snapshot of what was driving the increases in emissions:
The strongest drivers of increased emissions from fossil fuel combustion were increases in per-capita GDP and population growth, the report says, responsible for emissions gains of 2.3% and 1.2% per year, respectively.
The evidence here suggests that ‘decoupling’ of production and emissions (‘decarbonisation gains’) are small (and also insufficient),
the energy needed to generate each unit of GDP falling by 2% per year.
And they conclude that, in short, absolute emissions levels rose everywhere:
There is high confidence that emissions rose “across all sectors and subsectors”, with transportation and industry showing the most rapid growth. Average annual growth in the transport sector was about 1.8% over the past decade, with direct emissions from industry growing annually by 1.4% and those from the energy sector by 1%.
And here’s the regional snapshot. Yes, rich countries contribute far more emissions per head:
So-called “developed countries” have “sustained high levels” of per-capita emissions – more than double the per-capita emissions of Asia and the Pacific, Africa or Latin America. The group of least-developed countries has the lowest emissions per capita and has “contributed only a negligible proportion of historic GHG emissions growth”.
Developed countries, on the whole, “have not managed to reduce GHG emissions substantially” over the past several decades, the report states, while the bloc of “Asia and the Pacific” has “rapidly increased its share of global GHG emissions” since 1990, and “particularly since the 2000s”.
They quantify the emissions levels within countries by income deciles, and find the same distribution pretty much everywhere:
emissions also vary widely with income level within a country. There is robust evidence and high agreement that the wealthiest 10% of people are responsible for 34-45% of consumption-based household emissions. The report notes that this 10% is found on all continents.
Hence the interest in changes to patterns of demand and carbon capture. I think we know the kinds of changes in demand that would make a difference (I wrote about some of these a few weeks ago). But it is worth capturing the IPCC assessment of the effect of these:
(there is) high confidence that such efforts to reduce demand would “significantly reduce” the challenge of mitigation overall, dependence on CO2 removal... , pressure on land... and carbon prices needed to meet climate goals. The report states that low-demand pathways “eliminate the need for technologies with high uncertainty, such as BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage)”.
And the report goes into a lot of detail about which demand-side strategies have the most effect, having reviewed almost 7,000 papers on the subject:
Overall, the report notes that choosing low-carbon options could reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by up to 9tCO2. Effective “avoid” options include not using a car and cutting back on flights, effective “shifting” includes switching to plant-based diets and using public transport, and effective “improving” includes purchasing an electric car or a heat pump.
This piece is long enough already, but it’s also worth noting that they say that “choice architecture” strategies—to effect behaviour change—and they also look at the potential for reducing emissions through transformational change, supported by digital infrastructure, captured in a helpful diagram.
(The growing nexus between digitalisation, the sharing economy, and the circular economy in service delivery systems. Source: IPCC (2022), Figure 5.11. Via Carbon Brief)
A couple of final thoughts from me: I think this is the final time we’ll see those absurd claims that it is possible to reduce emissions only through ‘silver bullet’ technology fixes. I also hope it’s the last time I’ll see techno-head claims about ‘decoupling’, since this may be marginally true, but is broadly speaking completely ineffective.
There are also no longer any excuses for governments tolerating sectors that emit carbon but don’t pay emission related taxes (aviation, I’m looking at you). Or justifying low carbon taxes on the basis that they’re good for economy. And we knew already, but this underlines it, that financial institutions that invest in fossil fuels are doing it because they don’t care about the impact on the planet, whatever PR-washing they dream up to justify it. There’s a long list of those, like HSBC, for example. And all the governments who give tax breaks to help all those fossil energy companies along. Just stop.
2: The long pause that said more than a thousand words
Well, Ketanji Brown Jackson has now been confirmed as the first Black American woman to serve on the US Supreme Court, after confirmation hearings that revealed much about the current state of the Republican Party.
One of the most revealing pieces about the state of those hearings—the subtext of racism bobbling along constantly just below, or sometimes just above, the surface—was by Elie Mystal, the legal commentator at The Nation.
(A hat-tip to Martin Belam’s newsletter for this).
(Photo of Ketanji Brown Jackson by Rose Lincoln, Harvard University)
Mystal focussed not on the exchanges, but on a pause, “one really long pause”, in response to a question from the Republican Senator Ted Cruz:
Jackson is a Black woman, and Cruz’s teeth were out. He was trying to scare white voters by implying that Jackson was a black radical who believes in “critical race theory” and would use her position on the court to put dangerous thoughts in the minds of white children...
Cruz came prepared with posters, like an office manager who never learned how to use PowerPoint. The posters were blown-up pages from a children’s book, Antiracist Baby, written by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, so the images were of a blobbishly drawn, racially indistinct baby in a diaper playing with blocks... Cruz pointed to his poster and, in his most wolfishly serious voice, asked, “Do you agree…that babies are racist?”
As Mystal says, Jackson started to answer, and then she stopped. His entire article, pretty much, is an exploration of what happens in that pause, which is, after all, quite unusual in its own right.
As the silence filled the room, I felt like I could see Jackson make the same calculation nearly every Black person and ancestor has made at some point while living in the New World. It’s the calculation enslaved people made before trying to escape to freedom, or activists made before sitting down at the white lunch counter. But it’s also the calculation a woman makes before responding to the e-mail of the failson who was just promoted ahead of her... It’s the calculation when black people try to decide: “Am I gonna risk it all for this?”
Of course, Jackson has known Cruz for moe than 25 years, and maybe in private she would have told him what she thought of him and this performance. But this was a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and of course she decided against:
She eventually spoke: “I do not believe that any child should be made to feel as though they’re racist…” She then resumed her normal posture and didn’t repeat the sigh, or the pause, for the rest of the hearing.
It’s quite a long piece, and carefully woven, and I can scarcely do it justice here. But what struck me about it when I read it was the way Elie Mystal had managed to extract from that moment of silence of whole explanation of how racism works.
There’s more on the hearings as well, and the inevitable contrast with the behaviour of the Republicans at the confirmation hearing of the white frat boy Brett Kavanaugh, so clearly one of them in every way that mattered.
I think it’s a grave insult to Jackson to put her in the same sentence as Kavanaugh, but my mind couldn’t avoid juxtaposing the two over the course of the hearing. Surprisingly, Senator Thom Tillis put my frustrations into words near the end of the second day of questioning. Tillis... reflected on how hard it must be for her during the hearings. He noted that there are 11 (Republican) senators against one. And he acknowledged that these senators have way more power in the hearing room—because “it’s not like you can really come at us.”
Well, you can’t if you are a woman or a person of colour. Because white men can, and did, ‘come at’ members of the Senate committee:
Nothing at all bad will happen to white men who scream at senators. In fact, it helps them. People, white people, who are part of the institution that has just been screamed at, will say that the yelling and the threats were justified and applaud the white man for “standing up for himself.”
And I think that for me, as a white man with lots of privilege, was why Mystal’s article was so powerful, as it interrogated the meaning of the “one really long pause”:
In that pregnant moment, everybody in the whole country who was watching got to see whiteness at work. Everybody knew that Ted Cruz got to stand up there and call Ketanji Brown Jackson whatever he wanted to, and nobody would stop him. Everybody knew that Jackson could not respond in kind if she wanted the job... That pause, that moment, that clear difference in the range of human possibilities afforded to Jackson and Kavanaugh—that’s racism, folks. That’s sexism. That silence was a clearer definition of the thing than I could give in a thousand words. I can’t prove it, but I saw it.
A quick reminder that there won’t be a Just Two Things tomorrow. Back on Wednesday.
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