{"id":44845,"date":"2019-04-20T09:39:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-20T08:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=44845"},"modified":"2019-04-20T09:39:15","modified_gmt":"2019-04-20T08:39:15","slug":"why-myles-allen-is-wrong-there-is-no-deferred-way-of-dealing-with-the-climate-crisis-by-financialising-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2019\/04\/20\/why-myles-allen-is-wrong-there-is-no-deferred-way-of-dealing-with-the-climate-crisis-by-financialising-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Myles Allen is wrong: there is no deferred way of dealing with the climate crisis by financialising it"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am sharing this piece by\u00a0Myles Allen<\/span><\/a>who is Professor of Geosystem Science and Leader of ECI Climate Research Programme at the University of Oxford. It was published on The Conversation. I share it for a reason. I think it deeply misleading and unhelpful, for reasons I note later in the post:<\/p>\n

I was invited to speak to a group of teenagers on climate strike<\/a> in Oxford recently. Like many scientists, I support the strikes, but also find them disturbing. Which I\u2019m sure is the idea.<\/i><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s teenagers are absolutely right to be up in arms about climate change, and right that they need powerful images to grab people\u2019s attention. Yet some of the slogans being bandied around are genuinely frightening: a colleague recently told me of her 11-year-old coming home in tears after being told that, because of climate change, human civilisation might not survive for her to have children.<\/i><\/p>\n

The problem is, as soon as scientists speak out against environmental slogans, our words are seized upon by a dwindling band of the usual suspects to dismiss the entire issue<\/a>. So if I were addressing teenagers on strike, or young people involved in Extinction Rebellion and other groups, or indeed anyone who genuinely wants to understand what is going on, here\u2019s what I\u2019d say.<\/i><\/p>\n

My biggest concern is with the much-touted line that \u201cthe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we have 12 years<\/a>\u201d before triggering an irreversible slide into climate chaos. Slogan writers are vague on whether they mean climate chaos will happen after 12 years, or if we have 12 years to avert it. But both are misleading.<\/i><\/p>\n

As the relevant lead author of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5\u00b0C<\/a>, I spent several days last October, literally under a spotlight, explaining to delegates of the world\u2019s governments what we could, and could not, say about how close we are to that level of warming.<\/i><\/p>\n

Using the World Meteorological Organisation\u2019s definition of global average surface temperature, and the late 19th century to represent its pre-industrial level (yes, all these definitions matter), we just passed 1\u00b0C and are warming at more than 0.2\u00b0C per decade, which would take us to 1.5\u00b0C around 2040.<\/i><\/p>\n

That said, these are only best estimates. We might already be at 1.2\u00b0C, and warming at 0.25\u00b0C per decade \u2014 well within the range of uncertainty. That would indeed get us to 1.5\u00b0C by 2030: 12 years from 2018. But an additional quarter of a degree of warming<\/a>, more-or-less what has happened since the 1990s, is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today\u2019s striking teenagers (the striving taxpayers of 2030). And what will they think then?<\/i><\/p>\n

I say the majority, because there will be unfortunate exceptions. One of the most insidious myths about climate change is the pretence that we are all in it together. People ask me whether I\u2019m kept awake at night by the prospect of five degrees of warming. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll make it to five degrees. I\u2019m far more worried about geopolitical breakdown as the injustices of climate change emerge as we steam from two to three degrees.<\/i><\/p>\n

So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a \u201cplanetary boundary\u201d at 1.5\u00b0C beyond which lie climate dragons.<\/i><\/p>\n

Get angry, but for the right reasons<\/i><\/h3>\n

What about the other interpretation of the IPCC\u2019s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a one-in-two to two-in-three chance of keeping global warming below 1.5\u00b0C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn\u2019t mean we have 12 years to act: it means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.<\/i><\/p>\n

And if we don\u2019t halve emissions by 2030, will we have lost the battle and just have to hunker down and survive? Of course not. The IPCC is clear that, even reducing emissions as fast as possible, we can barely keep temperatures below 1.5\u00b0C. So every year that goes by in which we aren\u2019t reducing emissions is another 40 billion tonnes of CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a that we are expecting today\u2019s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere<\/a> in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.<\/i><\/p>\n

Assuming people will still want to feed themselves and not turn the world over to biofuels, then scrubbing CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a out of the atmosphere currently costs \u00a3150-\u00a3500 per tonne<\/a>, plus the cost of permanent disposal. So those 40 billion tonnes of CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a represent a clean-up liability accumulating at a cool \u00a38 trillion per year, which is more or less what the world currently spends on energy.<\/i><\/p>\n

So here is a conversation young activists could have with their parents: first work out what the parents\u2019 CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a emissions were last year (there are various carbon calculators<\/a> online \u2014 and the average is about seven tonnes of fossil CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a per person in Europe). Then multiply by \u00a3200 per tonne of CO\u00e2\u201a\u201a, and suggest the parents pop that amount into a trust fund in case their kids have to clean up after them in the 2040s.<\/i><\/p>\n

If the parents reply, \u201cdon\u2019t worry, dear, that\u2019s what we pay taxes for\u201d, youngsters should ask them who they voted for in the last election and whether spending their taxes on solving climate change featured prominently in that party\u2019s manifesto.<\/i><\/p>\n

Get angry by all means, but get angry for the right reasons. Action is long overdue, but to a British public sunbathing in February<\/a>, weird though that was, it doesn\u2019t feel like an emergency. Middle-aged critics would much rather quibble over the scale of climate impacts (as if they have any right<\/a> to say what climate young people should have to put up with) than talk about the clean-up bill.<\/i><\/p>\n

Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice. Your ancestors did not end slavery by declaring an emergency and dreaming up artificial boundaries on \u201ctolerable\u201d slave numbers. They called it out for what it was: a spectacularly profitable industry, the basis of much prosperity at the time, founded on a fundamental injustice. It\u2019s time to do the same on climate change.<\/i><\/p>\n

As noted, there are aspects to this that I find surprising, and even disturbing.<\/p>\n

The first is that there appears to be no consideration of tipping points in what Myles Allen says. I find that bizarre when it appears that there is a very high chance that they might exist. Putting money in a trust fund will not put methane back in the frozen tundra if the permafrost melts. That process would be irreversible in any relevant timescales if it were to start. The implied claim that we are on a continuum does, then, seem to be wrong. This, then, is deeply misleading.<\/p>\n

In that case the option to delay implicit in the article also seems to be wrong. If the risk is real the option of delay does not exist.<\/p>\n

Third, I am worried that crass economics is implicitly endorsed: the idea implied is that financialisation of this issue can defer solving it. This is on display when it is suggested that money might be put in a trust fund to deal with this issue later on. First, we cannot delay. Second, this claim for financialisation is not true. Financialisation cannot solve the climate crisis. It undoubtedly helped create it: we did discount the future for too long. But it cannot solve it. This problem is real, physical and requires action now.<\/p>\n

I am afraid that however good an environmentalist Myles Allen might be, he has a very poor grasp of the interaction of the real and economic worlds. He does the real world an injustice as a result buy even hinting at possibilities that do not exist. And right now that\u2019s far from helpful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am sharing this piece by\u00a0Myles Allenwho is Professor of Geosystem Science and Leader of ECI Climate Research Programme at the University of Oxford. It
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