The world is apparently unaware of the importance of climate change.
According to the IMF, world GDP is about $110 trillion per annum:
Yesterday, COP 29 agreed to provide assistance of £300 billion over an annum to emerging economies to deal with a crisis almost entirely not of their making but from which they will probably suffer most.
And yes, I know the headline figure is $1.3 trillion - adding $1 trillion to the above-noted sum, but as the Observer notes this morning:
Only $300bn of that will come in the form they are most in need of – grants and low-interest loans from the developed world. The rest will have to come from private investors and a range of potential new sources of money, such as possible levies on fossil fuels and frequent flyers, which have yet to be agreed.
So, let's be honest about this: the $1 trillion is make-believe money that no one should presume will ever be paid. Just $300 billion is on offer, or 0.27% of world GDP.
Climate change is threatening to overwhelm human life on this planet, and we are willing to dedicate less than 0.3% of GDP to help eradicate it in the places where it might well be felt most and from where hundreds of millions of refugees will come as a result - who we will no doubt then declare are not our problem as they arrive at our shores.
The economic stupidity of this is off any known scale.
The strategic thinking in this deal is almost non-existent.
Empathy is absent.
The concern for humanity disappeared long ago amongst nations who all want to think this is someone else's problem.
And yet, it is our problem, which we will most definitely have to own, address and then manage. We could make it much easier to do so by acting now. But no doubt one of the actors preventing that happening was Rachel Reeves, sitting behind the scenes telling Ed Miliband to promise as little as possible.
Why, oh, why can't we face up to and address reality? That is my question. Are we really now living in an age where we can pretend all is well to permit the perpetuation of our own selfish interests at a cost to everyone else, including our own children and grandchildren, even when it is glaringly obvious that everything is far from well? It would seem so. And if that is the case, we're in very deep trouble.
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Of course completely ignoring all the ‘non climate change’ related benefits that flow from reducing our carbon emissions as well, things like energy self sufficiency, cleaner air in cities etc etc
The lack of action on climate and ecological breakdown has created a widening gap between reality and ann official narrative—a gap that has grown over the years into a lie, a big lie. The scale of this dishonesty is starkly evident in the authoritarian responses to those who protest it. Silencing dissent and repressing those who call attention to the truth reveals a fundamental fragility in the stories that Western democracies tell themselves about freedom, justice, and accountability.
By prioritizing the protection of this lie over addressing the existential threats facing humanity, democracies are eroding their own legitimacy. They are normalizing systemic dishonesty and oppression, laying the groundwork for authoritarianism to flourish. If citizens come to believe that all political choices are merely different brands of deception, it’s not surprising that many gravitate toward the bold, uncompromising narratives offered by fascist figures. After all, if the political class insists on big lies, why not choose one that’s at least presented with conviction rather than the half-hearted moralising of most neoliberal parties in elections?
Democracies must wake up to the fact that their failure to act with integrity on climate and ecological breakdown is not just a moral failure—it’s a political one that actively feeds the rise of authoritarianism. Addressing the climate crisis with honesty, urgency, and transparency is not only essential for humanity’s survival but also for preserving the democratic ideals that are being recklessly undermined.
Opinion polls suggest that climate change has at least become a background worry for many. A prerequisite for change. Currently climate change looks to have become as much a political problem as a technical problem. Political progress is stymied by the relatively short term (4-5 year) nature of democratic politic and the fractionalisation of debate with party politics becoming an expression of identity.
Politicians usually follow rather than lead public sentiment and legislation and international agreements lag further behind. I’ve sadly concluded that a political tipping point around climate change will require a significant ‘focus event’ like an (un)natural disaster(s) to change the dominant issues on the agenda in a policy domain. That may lead to a change of prioritised and interest group mobilization – including those interest groups currently fighting to extend the status quo.
That’s so depressing I need to end on something positive around the power of individual beliefs and behaviour as an alternative route to shift agendas and politicians. Research suggests that an adoption tipping point is reached at about 25% of a population. The key to getting to that 25%? I’d suggest the linking of two agendas. We can tackle climate change without tackling inequality.
Good post. Agree. The problem is short-termism, wealth and greed. Thus it is likely that only accelerating disasters will lead to societal change. It is Berlin April 1945 all over again – but global -( the better off/inner circle still partying when Russian artillery was nearly in range) in this case Western elites and the upper middles continuing their “lifestyes”..
One question worth answering with respect to the Uk and “atmopsheric rivers” is just how much rain can they hold? Extract:
“Atmospheric rivers are typically several thousand kilometers long and only a few hundred kilometers wide, and a single one can carry a greater flux of water than Earth’s largest river, the Amazon River. There are typically 3–5 of these narrow plumes present within a hemisphere at any given time. These have been increasing in intensity slightly over the past century. The paper is quite interesting.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/grl.50636
Here in our municipality, where I am a council member, we are struggling with the same conundrum, albeit on a small scale.
To meet Paris we have to, up to 2045, double electricity, electrify the municipal fleet, climate proof all municipal buildings and ramp up preparedness for worsening climate. All on an ever-shrinking budget from central gov, where rules and low returns on green energy preclude us from securing the investment needed.
I suspect that many communities are stuck up fossil creek without a paddle.
Good luck
You are going need it
Why?
I will suggest this.
The rich world accepts that global warming is going to happen.
It has therefore accepted death. But not for itself you understand – that is only for the likes of us ordinary mortals.
However, its response is to think that its wealth will help to spare it from the consequences, just like they think they are special and have saved themselves from being poor. That is why they are grabbing as much as they can.
There is no difference here between a billionaire exploring cryogenic futures for themselves and grabbing as much wealth as possible to fund that by robbing the planet and its people (cryogenics is expensive). There is a correlation.
The rich think that only they can cheat death. So we must die so that they might live. Their money will resurrect them.
This brings the rotten twisted form of Christianity we live under sharply into focus.
The meek will not inherit the earth. The rich simply will not allow it. Capital is a rule breaker not a rule taker, that is why theft has become legitimised through the market.
Misery, chaos and death has been collectivised by capital. Security, happiness, humanity and equality have been privatised, made exclusive
Wealth claims to be divine and has co-opted Jesus into wealth management.
This is what you get when you allow greed to become a moral code.
We have failed as a species already. So now like all things that fail, we must face up to and live with what is to come as bravely as possible.
”The meek will inherit nothing” (Frank Zappa)
one of your better posts old chap. Nails it. As does Trevor Dales’.
We serfs face an existential crisis – the rich & powerful think they don’t.
This is what the new normal looks like:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/24/storm-bert-batters-britain-bringing-flooding-and-power-cuts
(unprecendented flooding? I don’t think so – just the new nromal).
It seems to me that there simply isn’t any significant political penalty here in uk to inaction. Also, too many politicians believe we “don’t have the money”. Few politicians in the west look beyond the next General Election aswell. Protest groups get labelled as protestors or worse, thus losing what little public sympathy they may had.
All rather grim.
Agreed
“ emerging economies to help them address the problems that the developed world created”
The most difficult concept to grasp is globalization is the world’s biggest bubble and Ponzi scheme. De coupling from that Ponzi scheme is the most difficult but existentially necessary act of every community throughout the world.
Globalization, GDP, is simply a measure of wealth concentration. Its intrinsic metabolism depletes, pillages and dismembers economies everywhere in order to make them cog for the global financial industrial core.
The global periphery which we are largely all members of, must decouple themselves and to their invention on living as comfortably as possible on local resources. That effort is tremendously inexpensive compared to renewables, which are creatures of the global economy.
For example: nations throughout the Middle East the problem is more difficult, because Turkey stands at the headwaters for the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, their endless enthusiasm to dam that water basin is destroying the hydrology of the Middle East by destroying the biome that makes that water available in the first place. The same thing happened the western Mediterranean basin. The summer rains died because the land died to development.
Everywhere across the globe, you see the consequences of paving over clearing or sterilizing the land for plantations / cash crops, and the butchering and sacrifice of the natural world in order to engage in export / import / debt to feed that financial and industrial core. And thanks to that lovely troika of the IMF, the world bank and WTO, nations and communities have been herded into this fate with the ideological legitimization of comparative advantage.
The butcher, the brewer, the farmer, the tailor should be serving their community, embracing the very same strategy life has engaged in for billions of years. The average biological mass in a bucket of muck is capable of shaping itself to live indefinitely on the resources at hand. Modernity has no such capacity. It is unfit for survival and an evolutionary dead end.
Unfit for the world it created by peeling off the living skin of the planet, cremating it in a pyre of hydrocarbons. Something like this has happened before in Earth’s long history. Cyanobacteria caused six waves of mass extinction in a period labeled the great oxidation event. They poisoned themselves and the rest of the biomass around them by producing a lethal waste product called oxygen, which permanently altered the chemistry of the oceans, and the chemical resources had life depended on. We are not special.
I expect to get proceeds of a modest property sale next year. In case there’s enough to invest any, I looked at government bonds. I was pleased to see there are green investment bonds, which might help me avoid letting the govt use the money to fund oil or armaments. But the interest rate is significantly lower than other government bonds. Does that mean the government isn’t serious about green investments?
(I’m not asking for investment advice, just curious and sceptical.)
I was not aware that the rate was seriously lower
At one time they were very similar
They have obviously given up on them
And their uses were not very green
I have been thinking about this.
My father was born in 1916
He remembered electricity being installed in his home when he was 7 – indeed I have worked with an electrician who installed electricity in the small towns north of Bristol in the 1930’s and of course Richard, your father helped build The National Grid.
So over his lifetime the nation installed a massive electricity transmition system – the National Grid and built several generations of power stations, from Portishead A, proudly described by Bristol Corporation Electricity Department as ‘The Baseload Station for The South West’ to Drax via the Magnox & AGR installations and on to the ‘Dash for Gas’ and wind both onshore and offshore.
All cost a few bob
That of course is to say nothing of North Sea Oil & Gas etc etc
So really the conversion to renewables is simply more of the same, if we could built The National Grid in the 30’s why cant we update it and build new plant now?
Oh and dont forget it wasnt just the RAF that saved London in the Blitz, The Grid kept the lights on, the phones working and the Tube running when many London Power Stations were damaged or destroyed. It was a strategic investment that helped save the Nation then and can do so again.
You are right
A staggering transformation happened over relatively few years.
And now, apparently, we can’t do such things.
Is that because we now demand unnecessary complexity and seed (HS2, the Elizabeth line) or something more fundamental? And why with all the computing power we have is complexity so expensive and so time consuming?
Are we missing something?
I read recently of two small rail projects each involving building just 8 miles of new tracks to bridge significant gaps. Yet completion date ( if it is stuck to) is not until early 2030s. One small aspect of the mess we are in
These days it seems that nothing much will be done unless the already rich expect to profit from its being done.
‘What are we missing?’
Again Mr Warren spoke recently of change being somewhat impossible. I’m still chewing over this rather accurate synopsis in my head, trying to clearly define it.
Tim Snyder has written much about this in The Road to Unfreedom (2018) and the big idea being that there a no ideas anymore.
Much of what we suffer from is a form of habitual negativity – this thinking is almost automatic, received wisdom and brought about by:
1. The notion that a sovereign state is powerless to intervene.
2. If it does intervene it makes things worse.
3. That the individual knows best, that the individual is sovereign.
What we have lost is our history Richard.
The state in the West was involved in pushing forward improvements in the quality of human life. Most things we have got are the result of the state organising them, subjecting them to political order – even if they were private inventions or ideas. The state also HAD TO get involved and regulate that which is private because that which is private can also behave badly and society needs to be protected – this involves the conduct of debt and markets from those negating natural justice.
The reason why we cannot seem to do anything now is because basically, Neo liberal capital has gelded the State. It has defamed the state; it has defunded the state. Capital is hoping that we forget the state, that its great works will fade from memory. That we will expect nothing but the market.
As Milan Kundera, said:
“ The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. ”
And Orwell:
“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”.
What Neo-liberals like von Hayek and Friedman have done is turn the State success into failure. Writing a book criticizing state support and intervention on behalf of its citizens and calling it ‘The Road to Serfdom’ can only result in one thing over time. The effort needed to do this is in itself is a testament to the success of the state.
Not only the effort but the money. The amount of money that has been spent in the pursuit of bringing down the concept of the state is immense. Those of us who know about Mont Pelerin, the way in which economics has been twisted and how people from academics to politicians have been bought to say and do outrageous things through corruption – can get some sort of grim satisfaction that it is only money – lots of money driven by a form of anarcho-capitalism that has brought this odious credo to realisation – nothing else. It is all factless bilge – but expensive and well executed factless bilge, nonetheless.
Again, we must repair to hope whist holding onto facts.
One day books will be burnt again, but this time, they will be the right books, with the names of Fama, von Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Knight, Coase and whole bunch of twisted tossers who have tried to re-write human history.
I hope to live to see that, I can tell you.
I am not in favour of book burning, because we have to recognise our mistakes and learn from them.
And neoliberalism is one mighty big mistake.
Something I came across was that french (and some other languages) have two words, and concepts, for ‘the future’: futur, meaning essentially the continuation of the present, with things staying much the same; and avenir, meaning ‘after a change’, with things completely different. Are we spending too much time on considering le futur, just extrapolating from now, and not enough on l’avenir, which will be totally different – but that we wll have to cope with?
What is also interesting is that the same word in Spanish is ‘to reconcile’, or ‘to bring together’.
I like your thinking.
It is also my favourite font.
Prof Kevin Anderson very worth reading, looks at the (unrealistic) carbon budgets and the assumptions therein (eg that CCS would work at scale-it means alas even more is required to meet targets pushing it even further away) view on latest COP (out) – ‘Groundhog-day’ chat of small tweaks points to the next IPCC report (AR7) guiding policy makers on “actionable solutions” for 1.5°C. Yet by the time AR7 is published they’ll be no 1.5°C carbon budget left.
WGIII set again to favour economic fairytales over physical reality.‘
RE: Book burning.
All the mistakes we’ve made Richard have been explored in better books by people like Abbey Innes, Timothy Snyder, Steve Keen, Richard Douthwaite, Mirowski, Desan, Bagehot ,Mehrling, yourself etc., etc – we have everything we need for reflection and evaluation in these works that are just as worthy – if not more so – than the recognition given to these charlatans who are just backed by high finance and who drive us toward misery.
We can agree to disagree on this one.
Their books will burn well as they are mostly made of hot air anyway!
I always admire your dedication to Richard Douthwaite, who few will now have read but whose work I enjoyed a lot.
Surely accounting and accountancy is the single biggest enabler of the inertia? And one that the activists need to put more focus on.
I think you’ve written on this before Richard.
The science is clear however as long as politicians and CEOs receive the science filtered through accounts which their accountants assure them mean that companies (and countries) are still viable going concerns, then there’s no need to change, right?
If so many industries are technically bankrupt when supply chains fail and cost of climate losses appear in budgets and strat plans that one has to ask why the accounting profession is being given a pass on signing this stuff off ?
Read my sustainable cost accounting