4 July 2022. Climate, again | Nature
Building on the shared story about responding to climate change. // A Speaker for the Living
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1: Building on the shared story about responding to climate change
I wrote here last week about the gap between climate rhetoric (quite loud now) and climate action (still not enough and too damn’ slow).
James Murray has a strong piece in Business green—and outside of its paywall that takes stock of what we know about what needs to done, based on the recent UK Climate Change Commission’s (CCC) “progress report”.
(Image from the UK Climate Change Commission’s 2022 Progress Report)
If I have a problem with the article, it’s in the headline—“This is the future climate hawks want to see”—because anyone who has looked at any of the climate data, and at the level of response, is a “climate hawk” now. Given what we know, and how little time we have to act, asking for effective action is not a hawkish position.
Anyway, the article starts with the bad news—the lack of action:
The lack of action on domestic energy efficiency that has now been evident for so long it has become a point of cliché for campaigners to point it out. The continued failure to deliver large scale industrial decarbonisation projects that everyone has known for over a decade will be needed. The absence of any coherent strategy for tackling emissions from land use and agriculture. The renewables-hostile planning system, grid bottlenecks, and glacially-paced nuclear pipeline. The growing fears charging infrastructure and public and active transport networks are struggling to keep pace with soaring demand. The political cowardice contained in the failure to politely ask the public if they might recognise that there's an actual war on and consider, maybe, turning the thermostat down a notch and eating a tiny bit less meat.
I don’t normally use extracts that long, but it seems to capture in less than 150 words most of the current issues on the political response to climate change in the UK.
And he goes on to point out the way that the fossil fuel industry has used the moment of the Russian war on the Ukraine to deflect politicians—“the tragedy of the current moment”, as he puts it:
The sight of a Prime Minister urging us to get over our "phobia towards hydrocarbons" even as those self-same hydrocarbons push the biosphere into unprecedented and dangerous territory. The insanity of the G7 talking up climate action even as it signals its support for new gas projects and refuses to divert land used for energy crops to help tackle a worsening global food crisis.
But, as he points out, there’s a more optimistic way to read the CCC report, because it also underlines that there’s now a clear consensus on what needs to be done, which spreads across politicians, business and the general public. Yes, there’s inaction, yes, there’s retrogressive lobbying, but we’re not actually arguing about what an effective response looks like.
A major building retrofit programme to deliver enormous energy cost savings and turbocharge the roll out of electric heating systems. A rapid build out of wind and solar power capacity, backed by smarter grids and energy storage systems, and a mix of nuclear, hydrogen, and possibly carbon capture and storage power plants. More public transport capacity, improved active travel networks, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and continued R&D investment in low carbon aviation and shipping technologies. An embrace of regenerative agricultural practices and moderately more planet-friendly diets that free up some land for natural carbon sinks. And the development of genuinely low carbon industrial hubs based on cutting edge carbon capture and hydrogen technologies.
In other words, everyone agrees on both the direction and the destination. Whatever we start to do now along these lines, we’re not going to have to unravel it later.
the net zero transition and the attempt to stabilise the climate requires much the same practical steps: a mix of public and private sector action to deliver near-zero emission energy, transport, and industrial systems, genuinely sustainable food production, and mechanisms for drawing down any remaining excess emissions.
Of course, there are some policy complexities in there, but they’re not overwhelmingly complex. A lot of what is needed represents investment, which the bond markets don’t punish governments for. (Whatever the myopic fiscal hawks in the Conservative Party and Treasury and our more stupid newspapers might try to tell you). High oil and gas prices also mean that we’d get an early economic uplift from the energy investment. There would be some early positive health impacts from the list above as well.
But: if we could conjure ‘political will’ out of the air, we’d probably have done it already rather than despairing about the uselessness of our political leaders.
All the same, Murray offers us an intriguing thought experiment of what the world might look like if we can draw on the best of different countries’ steps towards zero. Actually, this is quite a list:
An economy that boasted the UK's offshore wind industry and planned zero carbon industrial hubs, France's nuclear plants, Denmark's heat pumps, Norway's EV adoption rates, China's clean tech manufacturing and epic renewables projects, India's solar boom, Germany's passivhaus buildings, the Netherland's cycling networks, South Africa's Just Transition Partnership, Japan's levels of energy efficiency, Costa Rica's forest protection, the EU's carbon market, Australia's rooftop solar industry, Iceland's direct air capture plant, and Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem, would be well on its way to net zero already.
As Murray says, such an economy would be more productive, more competitive, and also happier and healthier. It would create worthwhile and productive work across the economy, rather than going round in extractive, rent-seeking circles. Framed correctly, it would attract strong public support, although perhaps not with our current cohort of politicians.
I said last week that this is a conversation about talking to power. But reading Murray, I think it is also about talking to citizens, to build a noisy vision of a positive future, rather than the dread associated with not doing enough in time.
Murray concludes by saying:
This is the future climate hawks want to see. It is mad they have to fight for it.
But: as I said above, we are all climate hawks now.
2: A Speaker for the Living
The narrative about how humans live with the not-human world in a way that is respectful seems to be accelerating, at least in the futures circles that I move in. There are live discussions about sentience, and of the legal status of non-human species (and not just animals) and so on.
But finding a way to act on this narrative is hard, in a world which has privileged humans at least since the Enlightenment (broad generalisation alert).
So I was interested to come across Zoöp (as in ‘co-op’), first in a link sent to me by son and then in a presentation at an online conference I attended recently.
Here’s an extract from one of the slides:
Zoöp is an organisation model for cooperation between humans and other-than-human life that safeguards the interests of all life. The Zoöp model makes the interests of other-than-human life part of organisational decision making. Zoöp is a governance model in combination with a learning process.
The model can be adopted by any organisation that wants to make ecologies and their regeneration part of their practice. As with the B-Corps movement, organisations that have signed up then share knowledge together, in this case to “foster the development of a regenerative economy or human-inclusive ecosystem.” Zoöps have a word for this: “zoonomy”.
(Henri Rousseau, ‘The Waterfall’, 1910. Art Institute of Chicago. Via JR P/flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The mechanism is interesting. An organisation that wishes to be a Zoöp appoints a ‘Speaker for the Living’—a human who represents the interest of non-humans to the organisation:
A Zoöp includes a Speaker for the Living as advisor, teacher and board observer in its organisation. The Speaker represents the voices and interests of other-than-human life in the operational sphere of the Zoöp, and helps translate them to organisational decisions. All living beings need a place to live, food, security, a chance at procreation, a chance at pleasure. The Speaker is delegated by the Zoönomic Foundation. This Foundation has only one task, as laid down in its statutes: to represent the voices and interests of other-than-human life in the operational sphere of Zoöps.
There’s an annual cycle that the Zoöp needs to sign up to as well, but you can look that up on the website.
Doing a little more research, I found that the world’s first Zoöp was announced in April—the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, which is the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture. (The researcher who developed the model was at the Instituut). There’s an interview at Disegno with the Instituut’s general and artistic director Aric Chen. Here’s a couple of extracts from that:
Disegno: So how does it differ to, say, an institution coming out and saying, “We need to be more sustainable in the way in which we go about things and think about our surrounding environment, and so we're hiring a head of sustainability.”
Aric Chan: ...The shorter, more technical answer is the way in which the framework works, which is that a Zoönomic institute appoints what's called a speaker for the living, who actually joins the board of directors on relevant matters. So it's about creating a space for non-human or more-than-human entities to be part of the decision-making process of an organisation at the very highest level. It’s not something that can easily get lost in various reporting lines.
Disegno followed this up with a question about how the Speaker for the Living differed from, say, a Chief Sustainability Officer:
Aric Chan: (T)he use of language here is important and we really need to credit our researcher Klaas Kuitenbrouwer for this. Klaas is the initiator of the zoöp, which has evolved from a research project he began three or four years ago and then worked on in collaboration with many others. So if we went with “chief sustainability officer”, that would be continuing with business as usual. The very strong, not just implicit, but explicit message here, by contrast, is that business as usual is not good enough...“Speaker for the living” really emphasises that... we’re actually giving agency to non-human entities.
There’s also a bit more on the project’s history here.
This all feels quite early in the S-curve—maybe moving from the ‘Framing’ to the ‘Advancing’ stage, in that it is offering a structure and a possible approach. One of the things I like about it is that it’s something that any organisation can do if it wants to. It doesn’t require anyone to wait on a court, say, to decide on the legal status of non-human actors. We can decide on their status ourselves.
It also resonated with an idea that was included in the protocols of a discussion group that I’m a member of, at the suggestion of Victoria Ward: ‘who speaks for wolf?’. It’s based on an indigenous America story about how we represent the voices of those who are outside of the room.
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