1. Introduction (this article)
2. Mitigation Modeling
3. Demand Management
4. Technological Potential
5. Power Relationships
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture

A recent commentary notes that “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely regarded as the most important and authoritative source on climate change, its impacts and how to tackle the rising emissions that drive it.” In March 2022, the IPCC released the mitigation-focused portion of its sixth assessment report (AR6), which explores humanity’s options for addressing the threat of climate breakdown. It is the product of thousands of scientists who assemble a picture of the state of scholarly understanding on climate action every few years. As an activist, I believe that diving into the report can offer useful lessons in climate action epistemology.

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. It deals with questions about what constitutes knowledge and claims about what we know and how we know it. For those whose task is to evaluate different approaches to solving the climate crisis, there is a lot of information to sift through and either synthesize into the bigger picture or disregard. And then there are decisions about how much attention to give to each included perspective. The only way we can be sure that the recommendations emerging from the research actually match the scale of the crisis is by trying to analyze that filtering and framing process. This is epistemology applied to the domain of climate action. Activists pushing for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels must be concerned with identifying the limits we face, the opportunities we have, and the likely outcomes of different action plans given the circumstances at hand. The IPCC report should, in theory, capture the views of academics on these questions.

But despite the immense amount of research it attempts to summarize, the IPCC cannot necessarily be expected to provide a perfect analysis of possible solutions. Plenty of relevant sources in books and non-scholarly articles are not consulted in its knowledge-gathering process. A poor picture can also result from issues in the underlying literature cited by the report. Apparent shortcomings of the report may stem from these limitations rather than its authors. Even with these caveats, it remains a 2,000-page encyclopedia of the research that shapes our understanding and discussions about climate action, and therefore deserves our scrutiny.

Before exploring the report’s contents, we should consider some of the foundational ideas highlighted in its first few chapters. When evaluating our mitigation options, the authors attempt to pay attention to several dimensions of feasibility. It’s incredibly important not only for the IPCC to consider these details, but for activists to do so as well. Feasibility analyses ultimately try to answer fundamental questions: what obstacles impede the transition to a zero-carbon economy, and to what extent can technology solve them? Basically, we are asking how hard the transition is likely to be, how much lifestyle change and disruption may be involved, and what level of preparation the public might need to support the process. These are key ideas for anyone involved in envisioning and planning for a successful transition.

The authors acknowledge that previous IPCC reports have tended to ask only what technology can do to address climate change. “While previous ARs dealt with the definition of alternative mitigation pathways mostly exploring the technological potentials, latest research focused on what kind of mitigation pathways are feasible in a broader sense, underlining the multi-dimensional nature of the mitigation challenge.” The six “dimensions of feasibility assessment” considered in the report are:

• Geophysical, not only the global risks from climate change but also, for technology assessment, the global availability of critical resources.
• Environmental & ecological, including local environmental constraints and co-benefits of different technologies and pathways.
• Economic, particularly aggregate economic and financial indicators, and [Sustainable Development Goals] reflecting different stages and goals of economic development.
• Socio-cultural, including particularly ethical and justice dimensions, and social and cultural norms.
• Technological, including innovation needs and transitional dynamics associated with new and emergent technologies and associated systems.
• Institutional & political, including political acceptability, legal and administrative feasibility, and the capacity and governance requirements at different levels to deliver sustained mitigation in the wider context of sustainable development.

The trade-offs of different mitigation options are another vital concept discussed in the report. While co-benefits are often highlighted, like lower air pollution as a result of reduced fossil fuel use, new or exacerbated issues can also result from our attempts to reduce carbon emissions. Acknowledging these trade-offs is a key part of assessing feasibility and developing robust transition policies. The report highlights many possible complications of the large-scale deployment of emission-cutting technologies—“Areas with anticipated trade-offs include food and biodiversity, energy affordability/access, and mineral resource extraction.” These of course are not small areas.

Chapter two examines emissions trends and the forces driving them, suggesting places to focus our mitigation efforts. This is where we begin to see some potentially major shortcomings of the report (or perhaps its underlying literature). The IPCC is clear on the main drivers of increasing emissions over time: economic and population growth. As human numbers and our systems of production and consumption have expanded, so has fossil fuel use. Previous IPCC reports have presented literature that assumes this growth can and will continue, and have explored the feasibility of rapidly reducing emissions almost exclusively through technological solutions. That narrow approach is the one that societies have actually taken. The current report summarizes the results:

“Technological improvements (e.g., improved energy or land-use intensity of the economy) have shown a persistent pattern over the last few decades, but gains have been outpaced by increases in affluence (GDP per capita) and population growth, leading to continued emissions growth.”

Increasing energy efficiency and renewable energy have been overwhelmed by the growing scale of human societies. The ensuing sentence highlights broad areas to explore in mitigation planning:

“The key gap in knowledge therefore is how these drivers of emissions can be mitigated by demand management, alternative economic models, population control and rapid technological transition.”

Those four action areas make a lot of sense to explore. Developing zero-carbon energy systems is in large part a technological matter and it’s clearly essential, but it isn’t the only key topic. Demand management, which examines ways to reduce our resource consumption through changes to lifestyles and more efficient modes of organizing society, is also crucial. Yet 2022 was the first year that the IPCC report included a designated chapter on demand management. The other two topics would address the primary drivers of emissions directly. However, alternative economic models (that presumably prioritize well-being or other goals besides economic growth) and approaches to stabilizing and gradually reducing human population size are almost never explicitly discussed in the report. It’s hard to understand why that is, considering the consequences of leaving them unchecked. For example, the authors note that “The highest emissions scenarios in the literature result in global warming of >5°C by 2100, based on assumptions of rapid economic growth and pervasive climate policy failures.” They also identify “high levels of global population growth” as one of the “high mitigation challenges” that “may render modelled pathways that limit warming to 2°C (>67%) or lower infeasible.” Thus despite its own acknowledgement that technological solutions have never been able to cut emissions sufficiently, the report appears to remain a considerably technology-centric document.

These omissions are huge, because they lead people to neglect any role for alternative economics and population stabilization in addressing the climate crisis. The report could draw on well-established heterodox economic literature, particularly the discipline of ecological economics, which has a non-growing economic system as a focal point of its research. This would get people thinking about the sorts of institutional changes that could shift our economic goal from profit maximization to meeting basic needs within ecological limits. The report could also draw on the work of demographic experts who offer nuanced perspectives on the role of population growth in the ecological issues we face and evidence of the rapid fertility changes that are possible through non-coercive population policies. The IPCC report itself notes how different ideas about mitigation lead to very diverse approaches:

“Different sets of beliefs can shape climate-related policies, targets, and instruments. First, beliefs [may] link climate governance with social justice concerns; policies, targets and instruments may therefore reflect justice issues. Second, climate mitigation may be seen as primarily a market correction issue and mitigation compatible with economic growth, as exemplified by ecological modernisation, climate capitalism, market logics or a global commons approach. Third, climate governance may be understood relative to policies on technological innovation and progress, often conceptualised as social-technical transformations.”

The way we frame climate change has significant implications for what feasibility constraints, trade-offs, assumptions, and opportunities we pay attention to, and ultimately what targets we set and the policies we design to achieve them. IPCC reports have long been built from beliefs that center market logic, limitless growth, and technological responses to human problems.

This series begins by examining the role that climate mitigation models play in the report’s findings. It then explores the two mitigation areas mentioned above that receive significant attention in the report: technological solutions and demand management. Lastly, it reviews the report’s comments on how power struggles impact efforts to address the climate crisis. The analysis draws from many parts of the report that provide a high-level discussion of these areas (chapters 1-6, 12, 13, 16, and 17). One approach taken in this series is to compare different statements made in the report on the same topic, which at times suggest different ways of understanding the transition and how challenging it may be. Another approach taken is to add context by considering questions or consulting sources that aren’t covered much or at all by the authors. The result is an exploration of climate action epistemology.

The next article in this series takes a critical look at the perceptions created by climate mitigation modeling.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 1: An Activist’s Analysis of the IPCC Mitigation Report appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

1. Introduction
2. Mitigation Modeling (this article)
3. Demand Management
4. Technological Potential
5. Power Relationships
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture

When the IPCC mitigation report comments on the possibilities and likely effects of different emissions reduction strategies, it usually relies on quantitative integrated assessment models (IAMs) to do so. The authors review findings from over 100 models that have produced over 1,000 climate action scenarios. IAMs combine assumptions about the economy, technology, and climate policies to generate emissions projections and explore different types of futures. Models are an important planning tool, but we need to evaluate the assumptions they’re built from, because inputting an unsound picture of the world can lead us towards an inadequate response to the climate crisis. The report acknowledges that global emissions pathways “have to be assessed with the careful recognition of these assumptions.” However, on the same page the authors also state that the “IPCC is neutral with regard to the assumptions underlying the scenarios in the literature assessed in this report, which do not cover all possible futures.” This begs the question: who evaluates the feasibility of the assumptions behind these IAMs if not the IPCC?

Thankfully, some researchers do take on this task, and perhaps no one has done more to expose various implausible assumptions behind many IAMs than climate scientist Kevin Anderson. In a recent paper, he and other scholars point towards the approach taken with today’s climate action models as one of nine reasons why emissions haven’t been seriously addressed after 30 years of study and international negotiations. One limitation they note is models’ reliance on mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory, which tends to reject mitigation actions that could disrupt the current consumption-maximizing economy. Another is models’ increasing reliance on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies that envision drawing large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, though the technologies involved remain unproven and face significant barriers to scale. The major issue is how highly questionable assumptions like these tend to delay serious climate action by making marginal rates of change seem legitimate and suggesting that technological innovation will do all of the heavy lifting.

Let’s consider a few implications of some mainstream modeling practices. We know that models increasingly incorporate currently non-existent negative emissions technologies (NETs). They also tend to be global in scope and fail to incorporate international equity—the idea that wealthier nations should decarbonize earlier than those with fewer resources. The result is that the timeframe they suggest for reaching net zero emissions is much longer than what many nations must achieve to meet consensus climate goals. The IPCC report says that aiming for a 1.5°C warming limit requires the world to achieve “50% CO2 reductions in the 2030s, relative to 2019, then reduce emissions further to reach net zero CO2 emissions in the 2050s. Pathways limiting warming to 2°C (>67%) reach 50% reductions in the 2040s and net zero CO2 by 2070s.” Anderson and his colleagues show that when excluding NETs and taking equity into account, wealthy nations must actually decarbonize their energy system between 2035 and 2040—up to 30 years before the global picture suggested by mainstream models. That entails historically unprecedented rates of emissions reductions above 10% year after year, at least double the rate that supposedly “climate progressive” nations are considering.

One of the key assumptions in any model is how it represents the main emissions drivers, economic and population growth. Recall the IPCC’s acknowledgement that high levels of growth are the very conditions that could make it impossible to keep warming below 2°C and even threaten a 5°C increase, which would render large parts of the planet uninhabitable. Across the models assessed by the report, the population is expected to grow from 7.6 billion in 2019 to 8.5-9.7 billion in 2050 (growth of 10-30%) and to 7.4-10.9 billion in 2100 (a wide range from a slight decline to an increase of 40% compared to 2019). However, these figures could be a significant understatement, as the authors observe that the UN’s population projections “include considerably higher values for both the medium projection and the high end of the range.” The economy is assumed to grow 2.5-3.5% annually up to 2050 and then around 1-2% to 2100. The economy is therefore expected to “at least double” in size between 2020 and 2050 and continue expanding throughout the century. There is little discussion about whether these growth assumptions are compatible with maintaining a stable climate.

The idea that we can unlink the longstanding connection between economic growth and emissions growth, called “decoupling,” is behind the assumption that the economy will continue to expand. Relative decoupling occurs when our mitigation efforts cause emissions to increase at a slower rate relative to economic growth. What we’re banking on is absolute decoupling, which is when emissions stand still or even decrease while the economy grows. Interestingly, in different chapters of the IPCC report, statements about the possibility of decoupling become more contextualized and critical:

• Chapter 1: “Recent evidence shows countries can grow their economies while reducing emissions,” the report states assertively. Without further context, it sounds like decoupling is a viable strategy for keeping warming to tolerable levels alongside continued economic growth.
• Chapter 4: A few chapters later, the report is much more cautious about whether decoupling has actually occurred, which throws the initial assertion into question. “While some literature indicates that absolute decoupling of economic growth and [greenhouse gas] emissions has occurred in some countries, a larger systematic review found limited evidence of this.”
• Chapter 2: “Absolute decoupling is not sufficient to avoid consuming the remaining CO2 emission budget under the global warming limit of 1.5°C or 2°C and to avoid climate breakdown. Even if all countries decouple in absolute terms this might still not be sufficient and thus can only serve as one of the indicators and steps toward fully decarbonising the economy and society.” Here a more fundamental point is added. Even if absolute decoupling has been achieved, the magnitude is far from what would be needed year after year until emissions reach zero. The main question is not whether any level of absolute decoupling is possible over any period of time, but instead whether enough decoupling is possible over a long-enough period of time to allow economies to grow as expected while reducing emissions at sufficient rates to avoid extremely dangerous warming. Assumptions of continued growth in IAMs are based on the idea that the answer is “yes.”

Chapter six observes that IAMs tend to “overestimate the contributions by energy efficiency,” which has historically been the main technological counterweight to rising emissions (i.e. larger than the effect of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy technologies). Achieving deep emissions reductions alongside economic growth would rely in part on increasing energy efficiency. However, the same chapter later states that “Industry has seen major efficiency improvements in the past, but many processes are now close to their thermodynamic limits.” This raises a number of questions. We can ask whether such limits are well-represented in models. If they’re not, that could be one of the reasons why models often expect more efficiency gains than are realized. A bigger question is why thermodynamic limits aren’t recognized and discussed more broadly. That could entail looking into the limits of efficiency not just in industry but across all sectors, down to the very foundation of our economy, which is bound by these same limits and therefore cannot grow forever. If IAMs recognized thermodynamic limits in a fundamental sense—which would be the case if instead of relying on neoclassical economic theory they drew from ecological economics—then assumptions about a doubling or tripling of the economy across this century couldn’t pass without serious scrutiny.

Despite claiming neutrality about the IAMs’ input assumptions, the IPCC report does attempt to assess the feasibility of the resulting mitigation scenarios (i.e. model outputs) in chapter three. The authors write that “Mitigation pathways are associated with significant institutional and economic feasibility challenges rather than technological and geophysical feasibility challenges.” Yet when looking at their assessment in 2050 and 2100, geophysical challenges are expected to grow and become at least as significant as the near-term economic obstacles. Their assessment also anticipates very few socio-cultural feasibility constraints, which only seems possible if the transition doesn’t fundamentally conflict with cultural pillars like consumerism, the unbridled pursuit of personal wealth, and extreme economic inequality. Warnings about the feasibility picture produced by IAMs appear throughout the report:

• Chapter 4: There may be unacknowledged or unrecognized economic or social trade-offs that complicate rapid emissions reductions. “While the technology elements of accelerated mitigation pathways at [the] national level are generally well documented, studies of the economic and social implications of such pathways remain scarce.”
• Chapter 6: There could also be overlooked technological, political, or cultural barriers. While IAMs have underestimated the cost declines of key renewable energy technologies like wind turbines and batteries in recent years, which should help make the transition faster, “they tend to be too optimistic regarding the timing of action, or the availability of a given technology and its speed of diffusion. Furthermore, some technological and economic transformations may emerge as technically feasible from IAMs, but are not realistic if taking into account political economy, international politics, human behaviours, and cultural factors.”
• Chapter 16: Ecological barriers may also not receive enough scrutiny. Processes of technological change occur within societies and ecosystems, and must be modeled with special attention to their effects on these systems. “Simplifications of complex interactions between physical and social systems and incomplete knowledge of the indirect effects of technological innovation may systematically lead to underestimation of environmental impacts and overestimation of our ability to mitigate climate change.”

Constraints within essentially all feasibility dimensions are mentioned as possible complications for the validity of model outputs. This is an issue whenever journalists, policymakers, and the public believe that the message emerging from a model is conclusive. The amount of complexity involved, and the long timeframes over which solutions are explored, mean that there is so much we cannot know. We don’t sufficiently acknowledge the uncertainty involved in projecting the future, particularly when modeling rapid transitions. The IPCC authors point out that “there is often limited discussion of uncertainty and of its implication for hedging strategies in the accelerated mitigation pathway literature.” If we aren’t clear about how much uncertainty surrounds the model’s outputs, then we may not plan for potentially significant obstacles to the transition.

As we have seen, the assumptions from which IAMs are built, if not sound, have massive implications. They would suggest that all human societies can continue growing and increasing their consumption, and can reduce fossil fuel use at a slower pace than is actually necessary to avoid climate breakdown. IAMs may also lead us towards particular emissions reduction strategies without sufficiently considering the obstacles they face. Thus despite the report’s discussion of feasibility, it appears that an excessive reliance on models and an insufficiently critical approach to their recommendations may prolong today’s high emissions rates and make dangerous climate change more likely.

There are ways to reduce the likelihood of inadequate climate planning. One key is to think seriously about reducing our demand for energy and materials rather than assuming it will continue growing. The potential impacts of reducing demand and shifting towards more sustainable societies, considered for the first time in some models cited by this report, emerge as vital for increasing the ecological and technological feasibility of emissions reductions. “Many challenges, such as dependence on CDR, pressure on land and biodiversity (e.g., bioenergy) and reliance on technologies with high upfront investments (e.g., nuclear), are significantly reduced in modelled pathways that assume using resources more efficiently (e.g., IMP-LD) or that shift global development towards sustainability (e.g., IMP-SP).” These benefits are perhaps gained in exchange for greater challenges to political feasibility, but these challenges may be easier to overcome than constraints imposed by physical limits and ecosystem collapse. Given that demand management and sustainability strategies appear crucial to our mitigation plans, we should ask whether other crucial details are currently left out of mainstream IAMs.

Another key is to think about what place models should have in our planning processes. What questions can we attempt to answer with them? What are their limits? It appears that climate policy may currently rely too heavily on IAMs. It’s vital that we consider multiple sources of information to get a more holistic and accurate picture of reality, including analyses of real-world mitigation efforts, studies of relevant issues not acknowledged in the model (e.g. the likely climate impacts of growing emissions), history, theory, and forums for deliberation.

We also need to ensure that the models we use are built from sound assumptions, and that society understands how to interpret their findings. Reading through the critiques from academics and the subsequent responses from modelers is an important part of that process. But who does that? Activists must be aware of these critiques and bring this information to the public to have any chance at informed decision-making. That way we’ll all have a stronger understanding of what action at the scale of the crisis entails, and be able to evaluate policymakers’ climate plans.

Next we examine what the IPCC and the models it draws on say about demand management.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 2: Mitigation Modeling in the IPCC Mitigation Report appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

1. Introduction
2. Mitigation Modeling
3. Demand Management (this article)
4. Technological Potential
5. Power Relationships
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture

The first IPCC report was published in 1990. Three decades later, in its sixth version, it contains for the first time a chapter on demand management. The chapter discusses ways to reduce our demand for the services that meet our needs and improve those services’ efficiency, which results in lower consumption of energy and materials. Demand-side solutions to the climate crisis are the counterpart to supply-side solutions like renewable energy deployment, which typically receive most of the focus. Many of the interventions are non-technical, involving drivers of demand like culture, infrastructure (e.g. car-centric versus public transit-oriented cities), and lifestyles. The IPCC report is in large part a reflection of academics’ interest in particular topics, and attention to demand management has grown rapidly over time.

The different demand-side mitigation strategies are categorized within an “Avoid, Shift, Improve” (ASI) framework. It refers to avoiding unnecessary consumption (beyond what’s required to meet needs), shifting to more efficient means of need satisfaction, and improving the efficiency of current practices. The largest emissions reduction potential among Avoid options comes from reducing long-haul flights and providing urban infrastructure that facilitates public transit, cycling, or walking. The most impactful Shift option is to switch to plant-based diets. And the top Improve option is increased use of energy-efficient end-use technologies in our buildings (like LEDs for lighting).

How significant is the potential emissions impact of demand reduction? The report finds that demand-side strategies have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, land-based transportation, and food by 40-70% globally by 2050. In other words, it’s an impact at the scale of the climate crisis. Yet until now “less attention has been paid to deep demand-side reductions . . . primarily due to limited past representation of such service-oriented interventions in long-term integrated assessment models (IAMs) and energy systems models (ESMs),” which historically “have taken technology-centric approaches.” Low demand scenarios are also notable because they boost the technological feasibility of the transition by dramatically reducing the need for unproven carbon dioxide removal strategies and the renewable energy deployment rate.

Because increased consumption is assumed to always lead to increased well-being, demand-side solutions that aim to reduce consumption are justified by a deeper understanding of quality of life called Decent Living Standards (DLS). It provides “a universal set of service requirements essential for achieving basic human well-being. DLS includes the dimensions of nutrition, shelter, living condition, clothing, health care, education, and mobility. DLS provides a fair, direct way to understand the basic low-carbon energy needs of society and specifies the underlying material and energy requirements.” It “serves as a socio-economic benchmark as it views human welfare not in relation to consumption but rather in terms of services which together help meet human needs.”

The immense significance of the IPCC putting forward DLS as a serious concept for guiding emissions reductions is that it seems to call for an economy whose goal is meeting basic needs rather than maximizing profit, economic growth, and consumption. Consider the following statements from the demand management chapter (five):

• Working to decouple human development and emissions “implies there is a need to prioritise human well-being and the environment over economic growth.”
• The various factors that shape our demand for energy and materials “either contribute to the status quo of a global high-carbon, consumption- and GDP growth-oriented economy, or help generate the desired change to a low-carbon energy-services, well-being, and equity-oriented economy.”
• “Strong sustainability business models are characterised by identifying nature as the primary stakeholder, strong local anchorage, the creation of diversified income sources, and deliberate limitations on economic growth.”
• “GDP is a poor metric of human well-being, and climate policy evaluation requires better grounding in relation to decent living standards and/or similar benchmarks. . . The working of economic systems under a well-being-driven rather than GDP-driven paradigm requires better understanding.”

It is hard to understate how crucial these ideas are. The climate crisis is typically regarded as an issue that can be solved by transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy while leaving the basic structure of the economy intact. But the IPCC chapter on demand management doesn’t simply highlight the carbon reduction benefits of consuming less. It also suggests that creating a fundamentally different economy, predicated on needs rather than wants, is a key part of our response to the crisis.

However, the transformation we need goes beyond the economy. Changes to our culture and lifestyles are also key for turning low-demand pathways into reality. “Most global mitigation pathways that limit warming to 2°C (>67%) or lower assume substantial behavioural and societal change and low-carbon lifestyles,” the report observes. Thankfully, the authors recognize that asking individuals to make different consumption choices is not sufficient for large-scale issues, a point that activists have been highlighting for years. They specify that “behavioural change not embedded in structural change will contribute little to climate change mitigation, suggesting that behavioural change is not only a function of individual agency but also depends on other enabling factors, such as the provision of infrastructure and institutions.” We must facilitate a shift towards low-carbon lifestyles because we need many millions of people in high-emission countries to adopt them.

Ultimately, the report identifies five areas that shape our demand and therefore must be part of the transition: our economy, culture, lifestyles, governing institutions, and technology. When one reflects on just how much could change by pursuing DLS for all, it becomes clear that we’re talking about creating a new society. However, the report doesn’t clearly convey the deep transformation involved in creating a low-demand world. Some of the magnitude needs to be pieced together by the reader. For instance, the authors do not directly and frequently assert the need for an economy focused on meeting basic needs, but rather suggest its necessity through statements sprinkled in the text like those quoted above.

The authors also don’t sufficiently convey the challenges of a DLS transition. A few observations hint at the struggle involved. Many Avoid and Shift options “are difficult because they encounter psychological barriers of breaking routines, habits and imagining new lifestyles and the social costs of not conforming to society.” “‘Avoid’ options that reduce service levels (e.g. sufficiency or downshifting) imply very substantial behavioural and cultural changes that may not resonate with mainstream consumers.” But the report gives no indication of the significant cultural battles that may need to be waged and won to create a sustainable society.

The studies mainly point to one level of cultural change: developing lower-consumption norms. Examples of behavior change explored by models include “heating and cooling set-point adjustments, shorter showers, reduced appliance use, shifts to public transit, less meat-intensive diets, and improved recycling.” But while changes like these would invite their own battles, there is a deeper level of cultural change necessitated by the limits we would need to place on consumption to achieve DLS for all. Many wealthy countries consume at levels far beyond what is required for a decent life, so reducing consumption in these countries could maintain DLS there while reducing emissions and also creating space for countries below DLS to consume more. “A mitigation strategy that protects minimum levels of essential-goods service delivery for DLS, but critically views consumption beyond the point of diminishing returns of needs satisfaction, is able to sustain well-being while generating emissions reductions,” the authors write.

In other words, we’re talking about “the establishment of minimum and maximum standards of consumption, or sustainable consumption corridors.” We would need to enshrine these limits in law, rely on our governing institutions to uphold them, and accept the resulting scale of redistribution. This transition faces cultural barriers that aren’t explored in the report. These include consumerist habits and identities, a belief that there cannot be limits to personal wealth, anti-government sentiment, and lack of community solidarity. We need to redefine what it means to be free on a finite planet.

Perhaps the magnitude of the struggle ahead isn’t highlighted because the low-demand studies themselves essentially anticipate only positive results from carefully implemented reductions in demand. “There is medium evidence and high agreement that well-designed demand for services scenarios are consistent with adequate levels of well-being for everyone, with high and/or improved quality of life and improved levels of happiness and sustainable human development.” It sounds like this transition would simply improve everyone’s life. But as discussed in the previous section, models can’t offer definitive answers to our questions, including whether DLS for all is possible within the planetary boundaries we’ve been eroding. The report cites just three studies when mentioning that “some current literature estimates that it is possible to meet decent living standards for all within the 2°C warming window.” If it turns out that it isn’t possible, then we would either need to accept lifestyles somewhat below DLS at least in the medium term (i.e. during an energy- and resource-intensive transition) or accept some amount of warming beyond 2°C. Part of making the transition feasible is preparing for such challenges in advance.

How do we move towards a DLS-for-all world? One necessity is having a sense of where we’re going. That would require the IPCC report to take a clearer position on the feasibility of economic growth alongside rapid emissions reductions and discuss the workings of a non-growing economy. The authors could address the latter by reviewing the ecological economics literature, which offers decades of thinking on steady-state economic institutions. While overlooking that discipline, they do highlight some literature on degrowth, which examines the deliberate and equitable downscaling of economic production in countries with excessive consumption. Though the report refers to degrowth at one point as “the option of economic decline,” its coverage overall is pretty balanced, acknowledging how crucial degrowth approaches to reducing emissions may be. “Several studies find that only a GDP non-growth/degrowth or post-growth approach enable reaching climate stabilisation below 2°C, or to minimize the risks of reliance on high energy-GDP decoupling, large-scale [carbon dioxide removal technologies] and large-scale renewable energy deployment,” the authors note in chapter three. Chapter six even identifies “the objectives of modern economies and the potentially contradictory dynamics embedded in the concept of ‘green growth’” as an example of the “embedded institutions, norms, beliefs, and ideas that would need to change to support net zero energy systems.” However, in many areas the report suggests that continued economic growth is both possible and a worthy goal for businesses and nations to pursue.

We also need to create space for a DLS society to emerge from the present one. As mentioned in the previous section, what we gain in technological feasibility when following the low-demand scenarios comes at the cost of lower political and cultural feasibility. To realize those scenarios, we’ll need to lay the cultural groundwork for a society organized around meeting basic needs. Part of this groundwork involves public education about how lifestyles may need to change and why it’s so critical for emissions reductions. We’ll need to highlight the ways in which well-being can simultaneously improve and acknowledge the difficulties involved in this transition. Fostering informed public deliberation is vital. The report observes that “the acceptability of collective social change over a longer term towards less resource-intensive lifestyles depends on social mandate building through public participation, discussion and debate over information provided by experts, to produce recommendations that inform policymaking.” This effort also requires us to challenge the core cultural norms cited above that impede DLS implementation (e.g. consumerism). We need to stimulate discussion across society about the misalignment between contemporary worldviews and humanity’s ability to survive and flourish on a finite planet.

Mass movements are the only force capable of driving this societal transformation. The IPCC’s authors frequently mention the need for cultural change, but activists aren’t sufficiently focused on it. We’ll need that to change first.

Despite the inclusion of demand management in the latest IPCC report, technological means of reducing emissions remain the primary focus. Technological potential is the topic we turn to next.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 3: Demand Management in the IPCC Mitigation Report appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

1. Introduction
2. Mitigation Modeling
3. Demand Management
4. Technological Potential (this article)
5. Power Relationships
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture

Despite the IPCC report broadening its focus by including a chapter on demand management, the rest of its chapters primarily explore technological means of addressing the climate crisis. When climate mitigation literature maintains such an emphasis, it’s not surprising that many see decarbonization as purely an engineering issue. By examining the IPCC report’s discussion of mitigation technologies, we can learn what messages the academic community is sending to the public about the difficulty of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Chapter six summarizes research on the topic of “energy systems,” and it may be easiest to begin our examination at the end of that chapter. That’s where the authors highlight a couple of frequently asked questions that should directly address what they want lay readers to take away about technological potential. “Will energy systems that emit little or no CO2 be different than those of today?” asks the first question. The authors respond that “Low-carbon energy systems will be similar to those of today in that they will provide many of the same services . . . But future energy systems may be different in that people may also demand new services that aren’t foreseen today.” We’ll start using electricity for services like light-duty transport, heating, and cooking, and incorporate other types of energy carriers for sectors that are harder to electrify. Thus “Electricity, hydrogen, and bioenergy will be used in many situations where fossil fuels are used today,” and “almost all electricity will be produced from sources that emit little or no CO2.” Fossil fuel consumption will be reduced substantially. “All of these changes may require new policies, institutions, and even new ways for people to live their lives.”

The second frequently asked question is “Can renewable sources provide all the energy needed for energy systems that emit little or no CO2?” The authors answer that the energy available from natural sources like the sun and the wind “exceeds the world’s current and future energy needs many times.” However, “that does not mean that renewable sources will provide all energy in future low-carbon energy systems,” for several reasons. They explain that some countries with fewer renewable energy resources may use more nuclear power and fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage; or the variability of certain sources like wind and solar may be supplemented by more controllable options; or limits on certain renewable resources might be established to manage undesirable trade-offs like increased mining and biodiversity loss.

The answers provided for these two questions give only the faintest hint of any difficulty involved in transitioning to an all-renewable energy system. There is no indication that any services might be curtailed. In the future, the main difference is that we may enjoy additional services. The authors suggest that electricity, hydrogen, and bioenergy will successfully replace fossil fuels. And when discussing why some countries may not go 100% renewable, they don’t mention any serious obstacles to the transition. All the energy that we expect will be there, from one source or another. After all, there is far more than enough renewable energy available to meet humanity’s growing energy demands.

The idea of renewables’ overabundance appears repeatedly throughout chapter six. The amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface continuously is “almost 10,000 times average world energy consumption.” Recent estimates of “potentially exploitable” wind energy amount to “20-30 times the 2017 global electricity demand.” The theoretical amount of hydropower potential globally exceeds total electricity production in 2018. “The geophysical potential of geothermal resources is 1.3 to 13 times the global electricity demand in 2019.” And “wave energy alone could meet all global energy demand.” The general picture is a world awash in harnessable energy—far more than we need today or in the future.

But for those who continue reading past the astounding theoretical potential of these energy sources, another pattern arises. As various limits are factored in, the potentials shrink significantly. Accounting for “competition for land-use” drops solar energy’s availability from 10,000 times the world’s energy consumption down to “roughly double” that amount. That may appear inconsequential to the reader, since any amount larger than today’s energy consumption, from just one source of renewable energy, seems to suggest plenty of availability. But it’s vital to recognize how much solar energy potential was subtracted from its theoretical maximum after accounting for one limit. In reality, we live within layers of limits. A paper by Floyd et al. observes that “the proportion of [renewable energy’s] theoretical potential that can be realised in practice, once the broad spectrum of geographical, technical, engineering, environmental, economic and socio-political factors is taken into account, is far less certain – though certainly orders of magnitude less than theoretical potential in absolute scale.”

Indeed, the picture of unlimited energy painted above and the relatively straightforward vision of the energy transition expressed in the FAQ contrasts with much of the commentary throughout chapter six, which is more critical:

• The report states that “it will be challenging to supply the entire energy system with renewable energy . . . Economic, regulatory, social, and operational challenges increase with higher shares of renewable electricity and energy. The ability to overcome these challenges in practice is not fully understood.”
• As a result of these potential barriers, fossil fuels are projected to maintain a significant ongoing presence in our primary energy mix. “In scenarios limiting warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with limited or no overshoot, fossil energy provides 59-69% (interquartile range) primary energy in 2030 and 25-40% primary energy in 2050 (AR6 Scenarios Database). In scenarios limiting warming to 2°C (>67%) with action starting in 2020, fossil energy provides 71-75% (interquartile range) primary energy in 2030 and 41-57% primary energy in 2050 (AR6 Scenarios Database).” Those scenarios imply a huge reliance on carbon capture and storage (CCS) to prevent fossil fuel emissions from reaching the atmosphere, but our ability to implement large-scale CCS is unproven. By 2100, non-biomass renewables account for just 52% of primary energy in these scenarios, “even with stringent emissions reductions targets and optimistic assumptions about future cost reductions.”
• And then there are several major sectors of the economy that may be difficult to maintain in an all-renewable world, at least at today’s scale. “CO2 emissions from some energy services are expected to be particularly difficult to cost-effectively avoid, among them: aviation; long-distance freight by ships; process emissions from cement and steel production; high-temperature heat (e.g., >1000°C); and electricity reliability in systems with high penetration of variable renewable energy sources. The literature focused on these services and sectors is growing, but remains limited, and provides minimal guidance on the most promising or attractive technological options and systems for avoiding these sectors’ emissions. Technological solutions do exist, but those mentioned in the literature are prohibitively expensive, exist only at an early stage, and/or are subject to much broader concerns about sustainability (e.g., biofuels).”
• In a world powered in large part by intermittent renewables like wind and solar, our ability to store energy for when it’s needed will become extremely important. However, of the 10 storage technologies considered in the report, only three are said to be potentially appropriate for seasonal storage, all of which are designated as “low” maturity. This raises questions about how we’ll deal with periods of weeks or months when sunlight and wind happen to be harder to come by.

As we can see, the takeaways around technological potential could be very different based on the parts of the report one focuses on. But the serious challenges highlighted in the points above are not well-represented in the FAQs that summarize the content in chapter six. Though the chapter begins with a restatement of the feasibility dimensions used in the report to assess each type of energy technology, the discussion often gives the impression that any issues are overall pretty minor and won’t prevent the creation of an all-renewable energy system that operates like the current one.

One interesting point in the chapter is a brief discussion of the “energy return on investment” of fossil fuels. It’s a ratio of how much energy society gets back for each unit of energy invested in setting up the generating system, an important concept we can use to compare different sources of energy. Sources with an energy return ratio of 1:1 don’t produce any energy surplus, and modern industrial societies have been built around fossil fuels with a return currently around 30:1. “The energy return [on] investment (EROI) is a useful indicator of full fossil lifecycle costs,” the authors write. “Fossil fuels create significantly more energy per unit [of] energy invested – or in other words have much larger EROI –than most cleaner fuels such as biomass or electrolysis-derived hydrogen, where intensive processing reduces EROI.” Recall that the authors assert in the FAQ that biomass and hydrogen will play a major role in replacing fossil fuels for various services, like long-distance transport. But the EROI of some biomass, for example, may hover close to 1:1, meaning that it wouldn’t offer much usable energy and may never be used on a large scale for that reason alone. As the EROI of society’s main sources of energy drop, so does the prospect of energy abundance.

Strangely, the IPCC’s authors don’t discuss the EROI of the main sources of renewable energy like solar and wind. Some studies have suggested lower EROI values for these resources than what fossil fuels have historically provided, though others contest that idea. Calculating EROI isn’t a perfectly straightforward process, as different boundaries are used in the literature and debate is ongoing. But if we take EROI figures as a rough estimate, it is possible that an all-renewable energy system would offer less usable energy than a fossil-fueled one.

Another complication arises from the fact that the energy transition will rely on fossil fuels at least in its early stages. As we’ve moved in recent years from more abundant to harder-to-obtain sources, these fuels’ EROI is decreasing, and that will feed through to our transition efforts. Even if renewables ultimately provide as much or more energy than fossil fuels, energy could become scarcer during the transition. A cap on fossil fuel-derived energy would also likely cap economic growth, and would require us to adapt to energy limits we haven’t ever had to face. None of these possibilities are mentioned in the discussion.

The more we improve existing technologies, reduce their costs, and bring nearly mature options to scale, the faster we’ll be able to transition to an all-renewable world. The IPCC report examines the forces involved in this innovation process in chapter 16. However, significant contradictions arise in the analysis. The authors repeatedly observe that countries’ interest in gaining competitive advantages is a driver of technological development, but also note that cooperation is a necessary component. Solar panels are spotlighted as a product of collaboration. “No single country persisted in developing solar photovoltaic (PV): five countries each made a distinct contribution, with each leader relinquishing its lead. The free flow of ideas, people, machines, finance, and products across countries explains the success of solar PVs. Barriers to knowledge flow delay innovation.” Today, the transition to a new energy system based on increasingly complex technologies “requires cooperation.”

Another contradiction arises from countries’ desire to develop new technologies in order to stimulate economic growth, which is a primary driver of emissions and environmental degradation. “Technological change and innovation are considered key drivers of economic growth and social progress. Increased production and consumption of goods and services creates economic benefits through higher demands for improved technologies. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, and notwithstanding the benefits, this production and consumption trend and the technological changes associated with it have also come at the cost of long-term damage to the life support systems of our planet.”

The authors do not deeply examine the implications of these contradictions during their review. But it seems clear that past dynamics around technological innovation cannot continue into the future if we’re to address the climate crisis. We’ll only reduce emissions globally if countries reject possible competitive advantages and cooperate towards a rapid energy transition. They must also not pursue innovation only on the condition that it boosts economic activity and consumption. We’ll need to establish limits to economic growth to ensure that new technologies that generate energy and make our resource use more efficient actually reduce our impact on the environment rather than increasing it.

The IPCC report could go deeper into the feasibility analysis for different sources of energy and broaden the metrics used to compare them. The authors don’t really level with the reader about just how challenging some options may be to implement, and consequently how we should plan for the energy transition. They do assert, however, that “Policy approaches facing deep uncertainty must protect against and/or prepare for unforeseeable developments,” including by “planning for the worst possible case or future situation.” Despite suggestions of energy abundance and a seemingly straightforward transition, “This uncertainty extends to the impacts of low carbon innovations on energy demand and other variables, where unanticipated and unintended outcomes are the norm.”

There is good reason to expect that the transition process will be more difficult than we tend to hear about, and that technological solutions, while essential, aren’t enough to address the climate crisis. Chapter 16 reminds us that “Underlying driving forces of the problem, such as more resource-intensive lifestyles and larger populations, remain largely unchallenged.” The authors of that chapter offer one takeaway in clear terms, stating that “innovation and even fast technological change will not be enough to achieve Paris Agreement mitigation objectives. Other changes are necessary across the production and consumption system and the society in general, including behavioural changes.” We need more nuanced discussions of technological potential and greater focus on changes to our culture and lifestyles as a means of reducing emissions.

Of course, even with an understanding of the various approaches we must take to preserve a livable climate, there is no guarantee that they’ll be implemented. A major reason is the role of powerful interests that block efforts towards change. The IPCC’s exploration of social power is the topic we turn to next.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 4: Technological Potential in the IPCC Mitigation Report appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

1. Introduction
2. Mitigation Modeling
3. Demand Management
4. Technological Potential
5. Power Relationships (this article)
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture

When the IPCC mitigation report was published in late March 2022, a press conference was held to allow members of the media to ask questions about the report to the IPCC’s co-chairs. With the session’s final question, reporters asked “which political players have been the main obstacles to climate action and how must politics now change to enable the energy transition to occur?” An IPCC co-chair responded by saying “we’re trained to deflect questions like that,” and that the report’s coverage of politics and policy formation downplays obstruction and greenwashing. However, its authors do highlight some of the entities that have fought against climate policies and the methods they’ve used.

The report repeatedly observes that politics and power are actually vital considerations when analyzing the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy:

• Technical Summary: “The interaction between politics, economics and power relationships is central to explaining why broad commitments do not always translate to urgent action.”
• Chapter 1: “Crucially, climate governance takes place in the context of embedded power relations, operating in global, national and local context. Effective rules and institutions to govern climate change are more likely to emerge where and when power structures and interests favour action. However widespread and enduring cooperation can only be expected when the benefits outweigh the cost of cooperation and when the interests of key actors are sufficiently aligned. Investigating the distribution and role of hard and soft power resources, capacities and power relations within and across different jurisdictional levels is therefore important to uncover hindrances to effective climate governance.”
• Chapter 17: “Though the above work tends to downplay politics and business, others suggest that political economy should feature prominently in transitions. Some branches of political-economy research underline how resource-intensive and fossil-fuel industries leverage their resources and positions to undermine transitions. These vested interests can lock in status quo policies in countries where political systems offer interest groups more opportunities to veto or overturn climate- or eco-friendly proposals. Companies with a strong interest in earning profits and building competitiveness from conventional fossil fuel-based energy systems have particularly strong incentives to capture politicians and agencies.”
• Chapter 17: “To date, the debate has had some obvious blind spots, not least considerations of power, politics and political economy. Certainly, the transition will create winners and losers, as well as stakeholders that can frame their economic interests so as to determine the orientation, pace, timing and scope of the transition.”

In addition to establishing power dynamics as a key determinant of climate action, the IPCC report examines those who have used their power to undermine the transition. There are no real surprises. “Fossil fuel industries have been important agenda-setters in many countries, including the USA, the EU, Australia, China, India, and Mexico, with differing positions and impacts across countries.” The authors note that “opposition to climate action by carbon-connected industries is broad-based, highly organized, and matched with extensive lobbying.” “Conservative foundations, sometimes financed by business revenues, have funded a diversity of types of groups, including think-tanks, philanthropic foundations, or activist networks to oppose climate policy.”

A few different methods have been used by economic elites to undermine the energy transition:

• Chapter 5: “A good number of corporate agents have attempted to derail climate change mitigation by targeted lobbying and doubt-inducing media strategies,” the authors write. The absence of any serious climate policy by the US federal government is a testament to the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the country’s political system.
• Chapter 13: Control over information systems and the public’s understanding of the climate crisis is another mechanism of power. “Who dominates the debate on media, and how open the debate can be varies significantly across countries based on participants’ material and technological power. Fossil fuel industries have unique access to mainstream media via advertisements, shaping narratives of media reports, and exerting political influence in countries like Australia and the USA. . . Accurate transference of the climate science has been undermined significantly by climate change counter-movements, particularly in the USA in both legacy and new/social media environments through misinformation, including about the causes and consequences of climate change.” “In the US, the oil industry has underpinned emergence of climate scepticism, and its spread abroad.”
• Chapter 5: A different approach has been to distract citizens from working together to elect a climate-conscious government by overemphasizing personal consumption choices as a climate solution. “Corporate advertisement and brand-building strategies also attempt to deflect corporate responsibility to individuals, and/or to appropriate climate care sentiments in their own brand building; climate change mitigation is uniquely framed through choice of products and consumption, avoiding the notion of the political collective action sphere.”

If we’re not thinking about how to undo corporations’ control over governments, no action will be taken at the scale of the climate crisis. “Overcoming the carbon lock-in is not simply a matter of the right policies or switching to low-carbon technologies. Indeed, it would mean a radical change in the existing power relations between fossil fuel industries and their governments and social structural behavior,” the report reads.

In order to develop enough power to overcome the obstacles presented by economic elites, everyday people need to build social movements. “Civil society social movements are a primary driver of social and institutional change.” They “frame grievances that resonate with society, mobilise resources to coordinate and sustain mass collective action, and operate within – and seek to influence – external conditions that enable or constrain political change. When successful, social movements open up windows of opportunity (so called ‘Overton Windows’) to unlock structural change.” Different chapters in the report highlight the importance of movement-building. “Collective action by individuals as part of social movements or lifestyle changes underpins system change,” the authors write. They point out that recent years have seen an “upsurge in climate activism.”

Several movements are mentioned:

• Chapter 4: The authors note “the growing movement for a ‘Green New Deal’—a roadmap for a broad spectrum of policies, programs, and legislation that aims to rapidly decarbonise the economy while significantly reducing economic inequality.”
• Chapter 5: “Indigenous resurgence (activism fuelled by ongoing colonial social and environmental injustices, land claims, and deep spiritual and cultural commitment to environmental protection) not only strengthens climate leadership in many countries, but also changes broad social norms by raising knowledge of Indigenous governance systems which supported sustainable lifeways over thousands of years.” Such knowledge may be crucial for establishing societies that respect ecological limits.
• Chapter 13: “Fridays for Future – the name of the group coordinating this tactic of skipping school on Fridays to protest inaction on climate change – has spread around the world. In March 2019, the first global climate strike took place, turning out more than one million people around the world. Six months later in September 2019, young people and adults responded to a call to participate in climate strikes as part of the ‘Global Week for Future’ surrounding the UN Climate Action Summit, and the number of participants globally jumped to an estimated six million people.”
• Chapters 1 & 17: The concept of degrowth “questions the sustainability and imperative of more growth especially in already industrialised countries and argues that prosperity and the ‘Good Life’ are not immutably tied to economic growth.” Not just a topic of academic research, “the degrowth movement, with its focus on sustainability over profitability, has the potential to speed up transformations using alternative practices such as fostering the exchange of non-monetary goods and services if large numbers of stakeholders want to invest in these areas.”
• Chapter 17: Fossil fuel divestment activists, who work to persuade investors to pull their funds out of fossil fuel companies and thereby undermine the industry’s social license to operate, are also recognized. “The divestment movement has the potential to disrupt current practices in the fossil-fuel industry, shape a ‘disruptive innovation’ and contribute to a strategy for decarbonising economies globally. Divestment is contributing to the political situation that is ‘weakening the political and economic stronghold of the fossil fuel industry.’”

What are the effects of these efforts so far? “Activist climate movements are changing policies as well as normative values. . . Environmental justice and climate justice activists worldwide have called attention to the links between economic and environmental inequities, collected and publicised data about them, and demanded stronger mitigation. Youth climate activists, and Indigenous leaders, are also exerting growing political influence towards mitigation.”

On one hand, the IPCC’s authors state that more research is needed to understand the climate impacts of today’s social movements. Yet they also observe that “Activism, including litigation, as well as the tactics of protest and strikes, have played a substantial role in pressuring governments to create environmental laws and environmental agencies.”

Despite the central role of the fossil fuel industry in undermining efforts to reduce emissions to date, it’s not just the financial interests of one industry on the line. The low energy demand scenarios that envision us keeping warming to 1.5°C without relying on unproven technologies while also achieving decent living standards for all find that these conditions are only possible “at near full equality” of energy use. In other words, it means capping the energy use of the wealthy at much lower levels than today. And the establishment of a non-growing economy could necessitate the same substantial level of redistribution of wealth as these studies suggest for energy use. All businesses would need to be reoriented around meeting basic needs rather than pursuing limitless profits. Creating a sustainable society appears to be a fundamentally anti-elite project, and when this becomes clear, elite opposition will very likely extend far beyond the fossil fuel industry.

Though the IPCC’s co-chair suggested that it’s not the report’s job to comment on politics, the reality is that addressing climate change is inescapably political. Some interests will be served at the expense of others. To not explore the efforts by fossil fuel executives and other elites to block climate policy would amount to taking a political side in their interest. It would also leave a critical barrier to action out of the analysis. Thankfully, the IPCC’s authors do acknowledge this repressive influence, note some of its methods, and recognize social movements as the vehicle for everyday citizens to overcome it. We’ll need a much deeper analysis of both elite opposition and the strategies and tactics employed by social movements, however, to effectively plan to overcome political barriers to the transition.

The final article in this series reflects on the need to cultivate a deep understanding of climate mitigation among the public.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 5: Power Relationships in the IPCC Mitigation Report appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

1. Introduction
2. Mitigation Modeling
3. Demand Management
4. Technological Potential
5. Power Relationships
6. Conclusion: Developing an intellectually and politically active culture (this article)

The earlier parts of this essay examined how the IPCC report discusses climate mitigation models, demand reduction, technological potential, and social power. The consequences of what we believe about these topics are immense. If we’re not aware when our modeling assumptions and expectations around technology are unrealistic, we may design a societal transition around technological solutions that have unacceptable trade-offs or aren’t viable at scale. The same consequences could result if not enough attention is paid to demand reductions, and the changes to our economy, culture, and lifestyles they entail. If we’re not analyzing power relationships, we won’t be focused on building a transition movement strong enough to overcome elite opposition. This is why climate action epistemology—an examination of what we know about transitioning away from fossil fuels and how we know it—is so essential.

The influential IPCC report should tell us a lot about how academic researchers understand the task of rapidly reducing emissions, views that then shape policy discussions and public perception. It is therefore an important document to analyze. However, the only section of the report that anyone is likely to read is the short Summary for Policymakers (SfP). Unlike the rest of the report, which only reflects the assessments made by its scientist-authors, the SfP needs to be approved by the IPCC’s member governments before it can be published. As a result, it’s conceivable that major technological or political issues would be downplayed in this section. Indeed, in the SfP there is little discussion of the potentially major energy challenges we may face during a rapid transition towards 100% renewable energy systems, the questionable likelihood of implementing large-scale carbon dioxide removal strategies, concerns about resource availability for batteries, significant obstacles to shipping and aviation in an all-renewable world, and other vital questions.

This essay considered not just the SfP but the text of the actual report, which isn’t subject to political vetoes. But while the sorts of issues mentioned above receive some discussion in the report, it’s not connected together into a clear, contextualized picture often enough. The report does offer lots of vital information needed to understand the climate problem. But several feasibility challenges noted by the authors aren’t explored in enough depth or accompanied by a full explanation of their implications for society.

The following are examples of questions around mitigation modeling, demand reduction, technological potential, and social power that can help to build a high-level understanding of climate mitigation:

• Can we maintain a stable climate without addressing the primary drivers of emissions, economic and population growth?
• To what extent must we simultaneously address other urgent ecological issues like biodiversity loss?
• What do current mitigation models tell us and how much credibility should they have?
• How sure are we that energy will be just as abundant in an all-renewable world as it has been in a fossil-fueled world?
• Even if a post-transition, 100% renewable economy can largely recreate the types and scale of energy services we’re accustomed to, might we face serious challenges during the transition?
• Is there enough discussion of uncertainty and contingency plans for all foreseeable obstacles?
• How much must society change (economically, culturally, and in terms of lifestyles) to realize the low-demand scenarios?
• What ethical challenges are we likely to face during a rapid societal transition and how might we handle them?
• What forms of repression can we expect from vested interests likely to oppose the transition?
• What sort of political groundwork must be laid to achieve low-demand scenarios?
• How do we scale social movements to create these conditions?
• What lessons can we draw from past and present movements?

Answering these questions often requires us to ask and explore several sub-questions. The answers we find cultivate a holistic understanding of the challenges we face and better prepare us to craft a strategic transition plan. Is it reasonable to expect the IPCC report to deeply explore and clearly answer these questions? Should it go further in interpreting and contextualizing the information in contains? If the IPCC doesn’t provide that perspective, then who will?

We’ll certainly rely on individual academic researchers to contextualize their findings for policymakers and the general public. But with so much knowledge across different disciplines required to be fully informed, we need some sort of synthesis report that both incorporates and goes beyond perspectives from the IPCC or perhaps one or more institutions dedicated to generating a comprehensive, nuanced, accessible, and actionable picture of the transition.

However, it’s clear that before we can organize an army of analysts working together to provide society with a deep understanding of the nuances of the transition, we must first achieve a critical mass of people who recognize such an effort to be necessary. There are many observations in the report that point to just how essential holistic knowledge is. “Analysing a challenge on the scale of fully decarbonising our economies entails integration of multiple analytic frameworks,” the authors write. These include:

• “Aggregate frameworks” such as cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses, the dynamics of emitting systems and climate impacts, and welfare economic theory
• Ethical frameworks that “consider the fairness of processes and outcomes which can help ameliorate distributional impacts across income groups, countries and generations”
• Transition and transformation frameworks that “explain and evaluate the dynamics of transitions to low-carbon systems”
• Psychological, behavioral, and political frameworks that “outline the constraints (and opportunities) arising from human psychology and the power of incumbent interests”

“A comprehensive understanding of climate mitigation must combine these multiple frameworks.” Perhaps most salient for activists who are driven by their concerns about justice is the authors’ assertion that these frameworks collectively “underpin ‘just transition’ strategies in diverse contexts.”

If only minor changes to society were necessary, then prevailing views about the climate crisis and the details of its solutions might not matter much. But this issue is much farther-reaching. Several areas in the report discuss the need to shift society’s “development pathway” to fully address it. This paragraph from chapter four helps to convey the enormity of the task ahead:

“Shifting development pathways aims to influence the ultimate drivers of emissions (and development generally), such as the systemic and cultural determinants of consumption patterns, the political systems and power structures that govern decision-making, the institutions and incentives that guide and constrain socio-technical innovation, and the norms and information platforms that shape knowledge and discourse, and culture, values and needs. These ultimate drivers determine the mitigative capacity of a society.”

The faster we must reduce emissions, the more we require changes to all of the institutions and norms that define our day-to-day lives. In other words, acting at the scale of the climate crisis means creating a new society.

Holistic knowledge is crucial if we’re to achieve that level of change. “One of the more direct channels through which transitions spread are climate change education and action-oriented research . . . the acquisition of transformational knowledge and transformative learning contributes to thinking and acting that open climate-friendly development pathways.” Education efforts must reach not only our political representatives but the general public, whose support for the transition will depend on advance preparation and realistic expectations. Recall the report’s assertion that “the acceptability of collective social change over a longer term towards less resource-intensive lifestyles depends on social mandate building through public participation, discussion and debate over information provided by experts, to produce recommendations that inform policymaking.” A major part is creating information platforms up to the task of laying that groundwork.

I believe that a curriculum aiming to cultivate holistic knowledge about the issues we face would explore ecological systems, technology and energy sources, economic institutions, power structures, and socio-cultural change. These areas are essentially identical to the feasibility dimensions that the IPCC suggests for evaluating mitigation scenarios.

Armed with a clear and comprehensive framework for analyzing the transition, we’ll need to build education and discussion networks to instill habits of learning about, deliberating on, and actively supporting it. The report points to two foundational pieces of our information system that we should try to influence: media and schools. “The media shapes the public discourse about climate mitigation. This can usefully build public support to accelerate mitigation action, but may also be used to impede decarbonisation,” the authors write, referring to elites’ well-documented misinformation campaigns. They add that “the updating of educational systems from a commercialised, individualised, entrepreneurial training model to an education cognizant of planetary health and human well-being can accelerate climate change awareness and action.” It’s worth seeing how far this analysis can be spread through existing media outlets and school curriculums, which already reach millions of people.

It may also be important to establish information networks both online and in person in as many communities as possible. Reforming existing systems would allow robust transition discussions to reach people on a much larger scale in the near term, but there will surely be significant resistance and various limitations. Having a means of communication controlled entirely by supporters of the transition may eventually turn out to be the best way to create an informed and active citizenry.

Who will lead this mass education and discussion project?  Social movements seem poised to be the driving force, perhaps in collaboration with academic experts across the many relevant disciplines. Chapter 17 explicitly links “Social movements and education” together as one of the main engines of societal transitions. The authors note that “social movements serve to develop collective identities, foster collective learning and accelerate collective action.” Activists can and must act as educators and facilitators until deliberation about and action on the transition becomes a norm across society.

It’s essential to understand that knowledge is power, to have a solid analytical framework with the right guiding questions, and to work with others to share the significant costs involved in becoming deeply informed. Developing a balanced analysis of climate mitigation and the transition without undue optimism or pessimism is very hard, but it’s a key ingredient for creating a sustainable society. We will only go as far as our own ability to decode reality will take us.

The post Climate Action Epistemology Part 6: Conclusion – Developing an Intellectually and Politically Active Culture appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

Citation: Karp, A. (2022). Educating for Climate Activism, Autonomy, and System Change. In: Peters, M.A., Heraud, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2262-4_268-1

This article ties together the literacy domains explored in the Climate Activism Curriculum series:

1. Ecological and Energy Literacy
2. Economic Literacy
3. Power Literacy
4. Social Change Literacy

Introduction

Humanity faces an ecological emergency. Wealthy countries have pushed rates of resource use and pollution to levels that threaten to make much of the planet uninhabitable. To significantly reduce the demands placed on the natural world, each nation must transition to a society of sustainable consumption. The changes to economies, political systems, cultures, and lifestyles are likely to be substantial. A lot is known about these problems and possible solutions, but many details have yet to be determined. The transition will rely on dedicated participants who can successfully navigate the many uncertainties, emotional challenges, and power struggles involved. It is the task of education systems to develop a generation of effective navigators.

Though the climate crisis receives the most attention of today’s many ecological issues, climate curriculums remain a work in progress. Those who follow research on climate education often acknowledge that there is no firmly established set of guidelines for the field, and that content can vary widely. With increasing recognition of the systemic nature of the problem, however, there are growing calls for shifting away from models that emphasize individual action as the solution and towards those that center an exploration of system change. It has become clear that if climate breakdown is to be addressed, a core goal of climate education must be to create committed activists who can think strategically about the interconnected systems at its root. How best can educators meet this need, and what sort of framework can help prepare students to drive a transformation of society?

A comprehensive climate curriculum would spend most of the time covering topics besides climate science. The model described below highlights various disciplines and a few key texts that can contribute to a well-rounded understanding of the complexities of the climate crisis and encourage efforts to change systems.

Holistic Climate Curriculum Content

This curriculum model contains five content areas that aim to analyze the major forces that give rise to today’s existential problems and their solutions: ecological systems, energy sources and technology, economic institutions, power structures and politics, and social movement-driven societal change. It envisions the development of literacy in each area and an understanding of the connections between them. This model could be used to guide curriculum development for current educators as well as courses in teacher education.

Ecological literacy: The natural world provides the resources and waste absorption capacity that communities use to meet their needs. The stability of ecosystems is essential for the survival of humanity and all other species, so it’s where the curriculum begins. Because each content area involves systems, and students will need to work towards systemic change, it is important to explore systems thinking early in this section. Introducing students to the tools used in the field of foresight, which incorporates systems thinking, can also encourage critical reflection and a recognition of the uncertainties involved in the transition to a sustainable society. Climate science is of course a component of this section, but it should be studied in the context of Earth System Science and planetary boundaries. The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972 yet still the best-selling environmental book in history, describes the basic components of today’s ecological issues: the ecological limits inherent in a finite planet, exponential growth of the economy and human population, ecological overshoot (when growth exceeds limits, triggering crises of resource depletion and pollution), technological solutions and their constraints, non-technological solutions (such as changes to economies and lifestyles), delays in returning below the limits, and the ensuing threat of societal collapse. Students should recognize that climate change is a symptom of the overarching process of ecological overshoot alongside other issues like freshwater depletion, topsoil erosion, and biodiversity loss. This broader view highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that sees humanity reduce its demands to what ecosystems can sustainably provide. To fully assess these problems, learners must also examine the profoundly inequitable levels of resource consumption between higher-income and lower-income countries, which establish different responsibilities for making deeper changes. A primary message in this section is that ecological limits are inescapable—technology allows us to exceed them for a while, but we must ultimately learn to live within them.

Technological/Energy literacy: Technology can be used in ways that either increase resource consumption and ecosystem damage or reduce them. Technological innovations thus heavily influence humanity’s interactions with the natural world, particularly those that allow us to capture and utilize energy. Energy is the capacity to do work; the types of economic activity we can undertake and their overall scale are constrained by the quality and quantity of energy available. Technological solutions are often regarded as sufficiently capable of addressing every ecological issue, making fundamental economic and lifestyle changes unnecessary. Students must be able to critically evaluate the validity of this perspective. Perhaps the most obvious aspect of the response to the climate crisis is the need for society to transition its primary source of energy from fossil fuels to renewable resources like solar and wind power, which don’t emit carbon. Two crucial questions that students should consider are what the transition process may look like and how an all-renewable society might operate. Many researchers modeling energy futures suggest that a world powered mainly by wind and sunlight will be reasonably similar to today’s, and anticipate a fairly straightforward (though massive) energy transition. However, other researchers highlight obstacles that could result in lower energy availability in the medium term (i.e. during the transition) or the long term (i.e. an all-renewable society may turn out to be less energy abundant). If energy limits do arise, they would necessitate various changes to lifestyles. Richard Heinberg and David Fridley’s book Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy provides a look at some of these possible challenges. Thorough vetting of researchers’ models and our expectations around technological solutions is vital for anticipating how society may need to change economically, politically, and culturally in order to respect both ecological and energy limits.

Economic literacy: Like technology, the structure of the economy shapes humanity’s impact on the environment. Economic institutions that promote high-consumption lifestyles tend to destabilize natural systems over time. As it becomes clear that models of a sustainable future rely overwhelmingly on technologies that may or may not live up to expectations, the next step is to investigate ideas for creating an economy that facilitates lower-consumption lifestyles. There is significant risk that explorations of economic issues connected to climate change will take the mainstream or “neoclassical” perspective that often claims to be value-free while tacitly endorsing unimpeded economic growth, anti-redistributive political views, and a conception of human nature as inherently greedy. This can quietly reinforce many ideas used to justify the current economy that students must be encouraged to question. The climate crisis should instead be explored from the perspective of ecological economics, which unlike other economic disciplines takes the reality of ecological and energy limits as a defining condition to which economies must adapt. Policy prescriptions arising from ecological economists offer potential answers to the question of how to reconcile human needs with the limits of a finite planet. Many point out, for example, that achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth could allow society to better meet basic human needs while reducing resource use. Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill’s book Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources highlights several of these ideas. Exposure to other heterodox economic thinkers is also essential for deepening students’ critique of the existing economy and instilling a sense of its malleability. Beyond the policy solutions arising from diverse schools of economic thought, the main messages this section would convey are that the economy is a human construct that we can collectively reorganize, and that many “economic laws” are simply a reflection of the current structure of economic institutions and the power systems that protect them.

Power literacy: There can be no discussion about how to create a sustainable economy without examining the power disparities in society. Social power can be defined as the ability to influence the actions or beliefs of others. The economy can only change if those who want to change it build more power than those who prefer to keep it the same. In a self-reinforcing loop, the current economy delivers extreme wealth to a small fraction of the population. This wealth then provides disproportionate political and cultural power that the superrich can use to block attempts to transform the economic institutions that benefit them. Change requires struggle. Students must critically evaluate notions of politics that equate democracy with elections while ignoring the political system’s reliance on money; such ideas obscure the reality of plutocracy. Groundbreaking political science research has shown that elections, while a necessary part of democracy, do not on their own allow citizens to exert meaningful control over policy decisions (Gilens & Page, 2014). Those with concentrated wealth are afforded various means of influencing political decision-makers and public opinion, and as a result legislation tends to align with the preferences of the superrich. The answer to such power disparities is for everyday people to engage in collective political action to combine their power and create a government responsive to public interests. In other words, in order to create a sustainable society, students must strive to create a more democratic society. The primary disciplines covered in this section are political economy and history, and the content should explore sources of power, how power is used, and past examples of elite opposition to social change. Because power in freer countries is exerted mainly through ideas and cultural values rather than through force, learners should thoroughly examine how propaganda has been used to sow hatred, doubt, and confusion over political issues and to shape culture in a way that legitimizes the status quo.

Social change literacy: With ideas about how a sustainable economy would operate and greater clarity about the political struggle that may be involved in creating it, students should then investigate ways to generate people power and democratize society. This entails learning about the theory and practice of democracy. What are the pillars of a democratic society, and how can we build them or strengthen existing ones? It also entails learning about activist movements, which have historically acted as a vehicle for everyday people to achieve economic, political, and cultural change. This section would explore the history of mass movements, providing inspiration and distilling lessons for students. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, a book by Lawrence Goodwyn on perhaps the largest democratic uprising in US history, illuminates the movement-building process through which millions of people organized themselves into a widespread political force. This section would also examine the cultural norms of thought and behavior that define the current society, trace their historical origins, and envision alternatives. Examples include notions of freedom, progress, consumerism, individualism, the role of government, and patterns of mass political (dis)engagement. Both economies and power structures shape culture and are shaped by it, thus the struggle to achieve fundamental change is cultural. Students should reflect on the sorts of cultural characteristics that might define a sustainable and democratic society, and those that help build the resilience needed for a challenging energy transition, and examine ways to shift culture in that direction.

The concept of justice is essential and relevant to each of these areas and should be discussed throughout the analysis. A few topics include the uneven responsibility for and impacts of ecological issues, the implications of proposed technological solutions for different groups of people, the extremely inequitable wealth distribution within the current economy, the repressive effects of concentrated economic and political power, and how cultural values affect our perception of what justice entails. The potential tradeoffs that accompany different perspectives on justice—within nations, between nations, between humans and other animals, and between present and future generations—should also be discussed to develop more nuanced views of ethical issues.

Cultivating Students’ Autonomy

Helping students to develop holistic knowledge about the climate crisis is an essential part of preparing them to lead an unprecedented transition to a sustainable society. Informed decision-making is impossible without it. However, it is also vital to cultivate the sorts of abilities and traits that will be utilized throughout the transition process, including self-confidence, critical and nuanced thinking skills, an orientation towards collective action, and the resilience needed to sustain engagement for the long term. Combining deep understanding with these skills can position students to become dedicated and strategic activists.

Qualities that enable an active and effective approach to today’s problems can be thought of as building blocks of autonomy. Instilling a sense of intellectual self-confidence, interest, and commitment will motivate students to continue refining their own analysis of the problem landscape over time. Sharpening the critical thinking skills needed to thoroughly evaluate evidence will enable them to arrive at more solid conclusions. Inspiring an orientation towards collective action encourages students to combine their efforts and develop the power needed for large-scale social change. Cultivating their willingness and ability to explore the challenging emotions arising from this curriculum builds the resilience needed for ongoing engagement with society’s toughest problems. Deconstructing the cultural values and assumptions that influence the decisions we make can help students to consciously choose their own path rather than remaining bound to the norms of the present.

Educators can support the development of those sorts of qualities by, for example, making it routine for students to identify implicit assumptions and collectively evaluate all evidence presented when encountering divergent views in the research, asking questions that reveal the cultural values shaping public discourse, and by providing a supportive environment for emotions to be worked through rather than ignored.

Educators are likelier to advance the transition if they’re fully aware of the dual nature of education: it can be a force for the transformation of society or simply reproduce the way things currently are. For too long, education has primarily operated to preserve the present order. Educators have a significant responsibility to try to make their work liberating and avoid reinforcing limits to social change. For example, it is difficult to see how a sustainable society will be realized if students learn

• They should take individual actions rather than work collectively to change systems.
• The crises we face are so severe as to seem impossible to address (i.e. there is insufficient discussion of solutions and the potential power of social movements).
• Technology alone can sufficiently reduce humanity’s impact on the environment, making it unnecessary to discuss and prepare for any significant changes to lifestyles.
• Economic growth is an unquestionable social good.
• Markets self-regulate and naturally solve any problems that originate from their operation.
• Our society is thoroughly democratic, thus average citizens already exert meaningful control over government policy.
• “Great men” at the forefront of movements are the main reason why social change occurs, rather than the rank-and-file participants themselves.

Each example expresses a way of seeing the world that can lead students to focus on marginal changes to society, feel powerless to make a difference, or wait for someone else to solve today’s crises. However, there are plenty of information sources (including some that are authoritative) that convey those perspectives. It is very possible for educators to discuss ecological systems, energy sources, economic institutions, power structures, and social change in ways that create or reinforce limits to societal transformation. The outcome depends on the quality of the analysis that educators explore with students.

And yet there are many obstacles to forming a high-quality analysis. Educators must sift through lots of information to find the most accurate perspectives across the many disciplines relevant to the climate crisis, which is a huge challenge. Certain details of the problem landscape will also change over time, requiring a reevaluation of possible solutions. As social movements grow stronger, propaganda aimed at sowing confusion and doubt from those who seek to block the sustainability transition will also increase, further muddying the waters.

Given all of these challenges, educators cannot be expected to arrange a perfect discussion of the causes of and solutions to the climate crisis. Even as they aim for liberation, in all likelihood certain barriers to change will be reproduced in the course of education. This need not be as significant of an issue if the curriculum focuses primarily on cultivating learners’ autonomy over any particular interpretation of the evidence. If students come to see that knowledge is power and they have the tools to decode reality for themselves (particularly if they are inclined to work with others to share the time investment required), they will be more likely to explore the topics beyond the classroom. Any shortcomings of the curriculum may therefore matter less.

In the quest to realize a sustainable society, students will only go as far as their collective efforts take them. Along the way, many questions will arise. Various courses of action will be called possible or impossible, and students must have the ability to form their own conclusions. It is vital that they possess the skills needed to handle the demands and uncertainty involved in this unprecedented transition process with a mix of assertiveness and flexibility.

A Few Pedagogical Considerations

Presenting incisive curriculum content is only part of the task of creating activists. Pedagogical approaches also play a significant role in shaping learning outcomes.

Beyond teaching social movement history and elements of strategy, there are other creative ways of building students’ interest in joining or starting a movement. Modern political and economic systems encourage atomization, and collective action feels unfamiliar and difficult to many people. Activities that get students frequently working in groups to build their comfort level and collaboration skills should be part of a curriculum aimed at system change. Bringing in local activists to share their stories and facilitate connections with existing movements could also help students to take the first step towards their own activist journey.

The personal approach taken by each educator also acts as an important model for learners. In response to the challenges of formulating a liberating climate curriculum, educators may be inclined to overstate their confidence with the material in order to maintain their authority in the eyes of students. If educators instead explain that they are co-learning many things with their students, that transparency can establish a more empowering learning environment. Students could more easily recognize that their views matter and will influence everyone’s takeaways, that learning never stops, and that they are capable participants in the analytical process. The result could be a stronger sense of intellectual initiative and self-confidence in each student.

Given that there is currently no singularly agreed upon climate curriculum, all educators are experimenting to find the best way to inform and empower new generations of activists. This means that it could be useful for educators to attempt to measure learners’ sense of empowerment and intent to join social movements, and adjust as needed. Sharing these insights with other educators could also accelerate the development of effective climate curriculums and help them become more widely implemented.

Activists as Educators, Social Movements as Education Systems

The idea that only formally trained educators have the ability and responsibility to help others develop an action-oriented understanding of the climate crisis is a major barrier to social change. Intellectual rigor, dedication, empathy, and humility are needed, but these qualities aren’t possessed exclusively by those with an advanced degree from a university. Most people who care deeply about addressing today’s ecological issues could take on the role of educator.

Furthermore, the task of scaling up this holistic climate curriculum is the very sort of campaign that movements can and should lead. Activists could work to create the pressure needed for schools to adopt this type of curriculum. Movement-organized education and discussion groups that meet frequently in communities and in online spaces could also be a cornerstone of societal transformation. Those employed as teachers should consciously aim to create activists who recognize that they are completely capable of becoming educators themselves.

Conclusion

To meet growing calls for system change, climate curriculums need to synthesize several disciplines. The broad literacies described above provide a foundation that can help students grasp the multiple dimensions of the climate crisis. By remaining focused on the goal of cultivating autonomy, educators can prepare students to become activists who are capable of reshaping the interconnected systems at the root of the problem.

References

Dietz, R., & O’Neill, D. W. (2013). Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources (First Edition). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Gilens, M., & Page, B. I. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564–581. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

Goodwyn, L. (1978). The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Abridged edition). Oxford University Press.

Heinberg, R., & Fridley, D. (2016). Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy. Island Press.

Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Meadows, D. L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

The post Educating for Climate Activism, Autonomy, and System Change appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

This is a response to an article by Ian Lowe on the role of population growth in our ecological crises. For context, check out the original article. Or check out Lowe’s response to the discussion, which ends with a quote from this essay.

The need to directly address population growth

I am among those who believe that population growth is a serious issue that doesn’t receive the attention it deserves, and that this is largely the result of a taboo around discussing it. If we’re to lift that taboo, which is a prerequisite for taking action at scale, we should first listen to the counterarguments and then address them as completely as possible. One in particular that has been expressed in this discussion is that efforts to reduce further population expansion are not a priority and distract us from real issues, like lowering consumption per person in wealthy countries. Making a clear case for the significant role of population growth in our existential problems should speak to this argument. Ian Lowe’s nuanced essay contributes to that case, and I thought I’d offer additional perspectives and data I find compelling.

Some basic ideas shape my view. One is that regardless of the form of ecological overshoot we focus on—climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil erosion, freshwater depletion, etc.—the unifying cause is the scale of human consumption, which currently stretches beyond the limits of our finite planet. Total consumption is the product of consumption per person and the number of people, and unless the contribution of the latter is truly negligible, our crises are too dire to ignore it. The population has been growing by one billion people about every 12 years for the last five decades, even as the growth rate has dropped. I have a difficult time thinking of that trend as insignificant or that it’s reasonable to expect it to stabilize on its own with no large ecological consequences as expansion continues. It’s also clear that we need to establish a non-growing economy to have any hope of respecting ecological limits, but we can’t maintain it with a growing population.

Scientific perspectives are also compelling. In November 2019, over 11,000 scientists from around the world declared that Earth faces a climate emergency and asserted the need to stabilize the human population as one of six “critical” steps to address the crisis. As Ian Lowe noted, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is clear on the main drivers of increasing emissions over time: economic and population growth. The latest mitigation report observes that “Technological improvements (e.g. improved energy or land use intensity of the economy) have shown [a] persistent pattern over the last few decades but gains have been outpaced by increases in affluence (GDP per capita) and population growth, leading to continued emissions growth.” While economic growth was responsible for 2.3 percent annual emissions growth from fossil fuel combustion over the past decade, population growth increased emissions by 1.2 percent annually; a factor with half the impact of affluence is not insignificant. Emissions before the year 2000 were driven in more equal measure by both factors and at times even led by population growth.

When breaking down our mitigation options, the report says “The key gap in knowledge therefore is how these drivers of emissions can be mitigated by demand management, alternative economic models, population control and rapid technological transition.” But though the IPCC acknowledges the large role of population growth in the increase of emissions over time, efforts to curb it are almost never explicitly discussed in the report’s nearly 3,000 pages. Many in the climate science community therefore contribute to the taboo around addressing the issue. That’s a serious problem when the report’s authors identify “high levels of global population growth” as one of the “high mitigation challenges” that “may render modelled pathways that limit warming to 2°C (> 67%) or lower infeasible.”

For those who understandably focus on the need for immediate emissions reductions, let’s recognize that while addressing population growth cannot solve climate change, leaving it unchecked could push the required mitigation rate much higher and perhaps out of reach. We’re not going to reduce emissions by achieving a gradual decrease in population over the next few years. But by working to stabilize the population we can greatly diminish the eventual expansion, and in so doing give other necessary solutions like renewable energy supply increases and consumption reductions a chance to reduce emissions as quickly as we need.

Learning to have difficult conversations about justice on a finite planet

Despite efforts to establish population growth as a priority for ecological activism, many thoughtful people remain wary of the idea of addressing it. The overriding concern is that any attempt to stabilize the population is almost certain to lead to injustice. That view may be less open to change solely in response to evidence about population’s role in our crises, and calls for a deeper discussion of ethics. Only a few thoughts can be provided in this short essay.

Some see the potential for injustice only on one side. However, moral issues arise not only when we consider limiting population growth, but also when we don’t. The well-being of future generations and non-human life is tied to how much finite ecological space we appropriate today, and population size is a key determinant. Is it more moral to let populations grow?

Others fear that discussing the ecological impacts of population growth inevitably emboldens eco-fascist ideologues. But if we believe there can be no responsible conversation about population size and therefore remain silent, we create that reality by completely ceding the topic to malicious actors.

Moral issues abound when considering a transition from seemingly limitless societies to ones that respect ecological limits. Population is just one (crucial) issue. We must learn how to have productive discussions about what justice looks like on a planet in overshoot, and nuance is a critical component.

We have yet to fully reckon with the fact that human rights have costs. This idea may be overlooked in societies with the highest fossil fuel use, because these fuels empower us to completely reshape our surroundings, quickly travel any distance, and allow an individual to easily perform the equivalent of thousands of hours of human labor. The rights we are accustomed to in a society with cheap and abundant energy cannot necessarily be expected in one without these advantages. Many people believe in the power of technology to solve overshoot while improving well-being for all. But what if that view is too optimistic? What if, for example, renewables are unable to provide the same scale of energy use as fossil fuels?

I believe we often underestimate the extent to which society must change in order to become sustainable and the significant limits that we’ll need to place on our consumption at least during the transition, if not on a permanent basis. This, too, will be called unjust. All efforts to create rapid and deep change carry risks of causing hardship and stoking authoritarianism. The longer that the transition is delayed, the less avoidable these risks become. Many aspects of the transition will inevitably bring about accusations of injustice, but we’ll need to discuss them and take action anyway. We must be willing to explore new notions of justice and rights compatible with a limited world.

The overconsumption that drives today’s ecological crises arises from multiple sources, and reining it in requires us to address many of those sources. Several approaches are therefore necessary and insufficient, including implementing more efficient technologies, redesigning our societies to deliver services with less underlying energy and resource use, organizing campaigns to shift our culture away from consumerism and towards an embrace of sufficiency, transforming our extremely unequal and consumption-maximizing economy into one focused on equity and meeting needs is one of them, and stabilizing the size of the human population. Some people will of course focus on one of these factors more than the rest. That shouldn’t be the basis of unnecessary division among the too few working on these issues. The stakes are too high to not fairly consider the role of each potential source of the existential issues facing us.

We chip away at the taboos that impede the path to a sustainable society as we commit to analyzing and discussing our problems with an open mind and assuming positive intent by others who also want to construct that path. This conversation is a step in that direction.

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Climate change as an issue of economic and cultural transformation

Climate change is mainly understood by the public and by activists as an energy problem that can be solved through a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewables. What is less appreciated is that climate change is also an economic problem requiring a simultaneous transformation of the present economy. If we assume that currently non-existent negative emissions technologies do not come into being (Fuss et al., 2014), then in order to hold warming below 2°C—the limit most consistently identified in international climate discussions—rich nations must reduce emissions at rates above 10% per year, a feat that has never been achieved (Anderson, 2015). For context, emissions reductions greater than 1% per year have historically occurred in situations of economic upheaval or recession (Stern, 2007).

To overcome the apparent link between economic turmoil and serious climate action we can look to the discipline of ecological economics, which outlines the policies and institutional changes that could transform the current profit-driven economy into a non-growing, steady state economy (SSE) that has as its goal the meeting of basic human needs within ecological limits. Presently, if fossil-fueled consumption levels do not remain high enough, then economic growth reverses into recession. This outcome would likely make rapid emissions reductions socially and politically untenable. Establishing a SSE would eliminate the unstable grow-or-contract nature of the current economy and could allow for a swift transition to renewables while avoiding economic breakdown.

Because climate change is an economic problem requiring an economic transformation, it is also a cultural problem requiring a cultural transformation. The current economy allows individuals to consume as much as they can afford, and consumption plays an outsized role in our understanding of freedom. A SSE preserves vital natural systems by establishing limits to consumption, a fact that elites who own and manage the economy will seek to exploit. Why? Growth is treated as the best (and only) way to improve the economic situation of working-class citizens—a substitute for equality—and every step towards a SSE would spotlight the need to redistribute wealth. A non-growing economy requires clearly defined limits to economic inequality and calls into question the very existence of profit-maximizing institutions and the exorbitant private fortunes that exist today. To combat this threat to their financial interests and dominant social position, elites will vigorously oppose this transition. A key strategy will be attempts to generate public opposition by arguing that to limit consumption is to undermine an essential freedom. Establishing a SSE will thus only be possible if a new cultural understanding of freedom gains legitimacy over the consumerist definition, and climate activists must lead that campaign.

“The contest for legitimacy is a public battle for the supremacy of particular frames that underpin the legitimacy of specific norms and of the organizations and institutions that promulgate them,” writes Julie Ayling (2017, p. 362-363). Activists fight this battle by shifting discourse and the public’s understanding of core cultural ideas. Though industry possesses significant economic and political advantages, activist groups “typically do enjoy considerable ‘discursive’ and ‘symbolic’ power, meaning battles over ideas and legitimacy tend to be less one-sided,” observes Fergus Green (2018, p. 109). By generating a society-wide discussion aimed at redefining the concept of freedom, climate activists can protect their movement. A SSE embodies certain principles: the importance of limits, the equality of human beings, the ethic of sufficiency, and others. By asserting a new understanding of freedom that features these ideas, activists will undercut elites’ attempts to delegitimize the movement through appeals to the consumerist definition of freedom. This redefinition process can also drive the movement towards a SSE. The promise of freedom has historically been a central motivation of social movements, and by asserting a new, inspiring vision of eco-democratic freedom—and the climate movement as a vehicle for that vision—activists gain a potentially significant source of engagement.

The next section reviews the early history of corporate elites’ crusade to define freedom as consumption. Educating the public about this history is an essential part of redefining freedom, as it delegitimizes the corporate definition and shows that consumerist lifestyles had to be forced upon the public. The following section outlines an ecological and democratic understanding of freedom by sampling the views of prominent classical liberals and ecological thinkers. The final sections examine the reasons why activists must launch a mass-communication campaign to assert the eco-democratic definition over the consumerist definition.

Consumption as freedom: Business shapes culture in its preferred image

When one considers the world-leading consumption levels of US citizens, it is easy to imagine that daily life in the US was always defined by consumption. But prior to the start of the 20^th century, thrift had been a classic feature of American culture (Ewen, 1976). This trait became a major problem for business with the development of mass production, which for the first time led to a significant surplus of consumer goods beyond what citizens required to meet their basic needs. Business leaders feared a permanent crisis of overproduction, with social historian Stuart Ewen noting that consumerism “emerged in the 1920s not as a smooth progression from earlier and less ‘developed’ patterns of consumption, but rather as an aggressive device of corporate survival” (1976, p. 54). Business thus became preoccupied with the challenge of turning the American cultural ethic of sufficiency into one of constant consumption.

However, “underconsumption” was not the only crisis facing corporate elites. Around 1900, mass media that could bring news and other information to communities across the US were just getting established (Ewen, 2003).  This far-reaching press was informing the public about the increasing control of social conditions by large corporations and the violence unleashed against workers attempting to organize and improve their conditions (Ewen, 2003). An increasingly politically powerful public was forming solidly anticorporate sentiments. Business had tried to impose industrial discipline on American workers through horrific violence for decades, but began to shift towards organized propaganda, harnessing the new channels of communication to reestablish its social legitimacy. The creation of a consumer culture, it was thought, could address both problems.

The power of propaganda was demonstrated by President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information during World War I, which successfully transformed a pacifist population into one clamoring for war (Ewen, 2003). Edward Bernays, a member of the Committee and later the recognized “father of the public relations industry,” brought the tested techniques of manipulation to the private sector. He observed that “mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained—that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity . . . today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand . . . [and] cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda . . . to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable” (Bernays & Miller, 2005, p. 84). Both public relations and advertising would develop into their own sectors of business in the 1920s.

Control would be gained by associating individual liberty with the purchase of goods (and the corporations producing them) in the public mind. In 1924, retail magnate Edward Filene observed that “modern workmen have learned their habits of consumption and their habits of spending (thrift) in the school of fatigue, in a time when high prices and relatively low wages have made it necessary to spend all the energies of the body and mind in providing food, clothing and shelter. We have no right to be overcritical of the way they spend a new freedom or a new prosperity until they have had as long a training in the school of freedom” (as cited in Ewen, 1976, p. 29-30).

An expanding corporate propaganda machine would provide that training. “During the 1920s,” Ewen observes, “advertising grew to the dimensions of a major industry” (1976, p. 32). Between 1900 and 1930, national advertising revenues grew from $200 million to $2.6 billion, a thirteen-fold increase (p. 62). Growing investment produced great successes, with business increasingly associating itself with liberty. Historian Kerryn Higgs (2016) notes how marketing publication “Advertising Age credited the National Chamber of Commerce with divorcing the word ‘big’ from the word ‘business’ in the public mind” (p. 177). “Private enterprise” was replaced by “free enterprise,” and Henry Link of the polling firm Psychological Corporation later promoted “a transfer in emphasis from free enterprise to the freedom of all individuals under free enterprise; from capitalism to a much broader concept: Americanism.” Link recognized that unlike “free enterprise,” “Americanism” possessed a “terrific emotional impact” (p. 179).

The reach of this propaganda machine was exemplified by the massive campaign launched by the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1930s to define the “American Way of Life.” It replicated the WWI model, establishing local Committees on Public Information composed of influential community leaders throughout the country. These agents “funneled articles, features, and films to newspapers, radio stations, and movie theaters,” sent speakers to “every local group of any sort,” and “distributed pamphlets and weekly bulletins to schools, clubs, and libraries” (Higgs, 2016, p. 175). Particular care was taken to target the young:

“Aware that the adult population was cynical about the corporate claim to ‘service,’ they aimed specifically at schools, where Young America, their weekly children’s magazine that portrayed capitalism as dedicated to looking after them and their communities, was sent to thousands of teachers, who used them in classroom assignments. You and Industry, a series of booklets written in simple language, linked individual prosperity to unregulated industry, and was distributed to public libraries everywhere. One million booklets were distributed every two weeks by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, along with the giant industrial corporations, was also involved in the campaign” (Higgs, 2016, p. 175).

The corporate elites driving the expansion of a consumer culture were joined by economists calling for a “new economic gospel of consumption” (Higgs, 2016, p. 71) and political leaders offering enthusiastic support. Higgs (2016) notes that “President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes welcomed the demonstration ‘on a grand scale [of] the expansibility of human wants and desires,’ hailed an ‘almost insatiable appetite for goods and services,’ and envisaged ‘a boundless field before us … new wants that make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied’” (p. 72). This collective effort would eventually culminate in the society that the American people (and those of other wealthy countries) know today, in which individuals see themselves as consumers rather than citizens.

An ecological and democratic understanding of freedom

A brief sampling of the history of corporate culture gives us a sense of the effort that business has put into shaping the public’s understanding of freedom in its preferred image. Before we explore why activists need to stimulate a societal rethink of freedom, we must reflect upon the concept that will replace the corporate definition.

When we recognize that addressing climate change requires us to create a fundamentally different economy, we must reckon with the fact that ordinary people have little say over the structure of the economy and thus over their own fate. Elites will not willingly make these changes. In order to transform the economic system, the public must gain control of it—in this way, economic democracy is vital to achieving a sustainable society. An understanding of liberty in the age of climate crisis must therefore foreground the freedom of the public to shape the economy.

A new definition of freedom must also highlight the importance of limits. One can find strong support for limits within classical liberal thought, which today is often claimed by wealthy industrialists as a moral foundation for unimpeded, self-interested action. However, two of freedom’s greatest theorists, Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill, recognized that limits could rightly be placed on individual liberty. Even in asserting freedom’s importance for human development, Humboldt always recognized that it exists within justifiable limits. Not only must our sphere of action preserve the equal rights of others, but restrictions on our action are warranted when “freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable” (Humboldt & Burrow, 1993, p. 144-145). In Mill’s view, a SSE represented an important step in human advancement: “It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on” (1909, p. 751). These perspectives remind us that limits are not only necessary to preserve freedom and even existence, but can also act as a catalyst towards forms of progress more aligned with human flourishing.

Contemporary perspectives further inform our understanding of ecological freedom. Though some academics seem to take the market-centered, acquisitive definition of freedom shaped by corporations as the definition (Dibley, 2012), others remind us that such ideas can be defined differently and in ways that are more descriptive of reality. Consider Peter Brown, who recognizes that “we are required to re-examine, and ultimately to redefine the emancipation project. The narratives from which we currently take our bearings are simply not true to our circumstances” (2012 p. 7). Brown calls for the recognition of human equality to temper our understanding of freedom. “We must see that how we live is often unavoidably harmful to others. There are no actions that affect us alone. . . In a world of limits, liberty may be legitimately exercised only if one is using only his/her fair share of low entropy sources and sinks. . . All persons in all cultures and all generations have equal moral claims to flourishing, constrained and enhanced by the claims of other species for their place in the sun. We are not the chosen species, or the chosen people. This, if you like, is the new emancipation” (2012, p. 14).

The corporate messages flowing through society have conjured a myth of individualism at the heart of conceptions of liberty, which ignores the fact that society is only possible through the care we provide and work we do for one another. Bruce Jennings (2015) argues that our understanding of freedom must be informed by the relationships we have with others and with the natural world. Freedom should be recognized as a social practice arising from the bonds of interdependence that we share. This view elevates each person to the status of subject rather than object, and does not privilege the individual over the community—rather, balance is sought between the flourishing of each. It entails a recognition that we are only free to the extent that others are, too. Power relationships should be examined and the ability to make decisions should be distributed to all affected by them. These guiding principles suggest that “the message of planetary boundaries and the end of the liberal era of cheap fossil carbon is not the bad news of lost liberty but the promise of a newfound freedom—a more humanly fulfilling kind of liberty” (p. 307).

Jason Lambacher (2009) believes that activists have avoided discussions of freedom because many citizens in wealthy nations have been free to “live in ways that appear to ignore ecological limits as if they were not there. In fact, this is a vital issue – our dominant political concepts, such as freedom, have not yet become ecological” (p. 32). Our ways of life, and every layer of society, must be transformed around the reality of limits. Figuring out how to live sustainably will of course be an ongoing process, part of learning how to be free on a finite planet. “What is important is not the validity of a single approach to environmental sustainability,” he writes, “but rather that people feel inspired by the challenge of freely creating an ecologically responsible culture” (p. 41).

An ecologically compatible freedom will foreground democracy, both political and economic. It will acknowledge that liberty—and life—cannot exist without limits. It will be shaped by our recognition of interdependence and human equality. It will balance the interests of both individual and community. It will be broader than the simple consumption of goods, a vision encompassing the many parts of human nature left behind by the current society. Activists must assert and continue to develop this eco-democratic definition of freedom, both to protect and to drive the movement towards a SSE.

Redefine freedom to protect the movement

It is clear that as activists recognize the need to establish a SSE and begin to vocalize their demands, business will leverage the vast communications system it has built and the cultural cues it has implanted to make this transformation appear catastrophic. To protect the climate movement, citizens must learn how the consumerist definition of freedom has been carefully constructed as a pillar of a culture that serves corporate interests—the result of a century of corporate PR and advertising campaigns rather than a signifier of the inherent acquisitiveness of human nature. By educating the public about this history and exposing the narrowness of the consumerist definition as compared to the eco-democratic definition, which better supports human flourishing, activists delegitimize “consumerist freedom” and undercut corporate messages that utilize it. The following subsections illustrate why redefining freedom is an essential defensive strategy by exploring the nature of the counterattack activists will have to withstand.

The Corporate Culture Machine

Stuart Ewen (1976) notes that it would take a few decades, but the post-World War II period finally realized elites’ vision of the mass-consumption society. Advertising and public relations deserve a lot of credit for these developments. “The new society was one which distributed culture on a mass scale,” Ewen writes. “This triumph over the locality of people’s lives as a source of nurturement and information is, perhaps, the monumental achievement of twentieth-century capitalism: centralization of the social order” (p. 206-207).

Activists must recognize the extent to which corporate elites control society’s information systems and thus have the means to dominate social narratives. A primary consideration is that major media institutions are themselves corporations whose advertising clients are also corporate entities, and all share an interest in burying or delegitimizing challenges to the profit-driven economy. Sociologists highlight additional contours of the modern propaganda machine by exploring climate science denial networks. Wealthy family foundations now funnel untraceable “dark money” to various cultural and political causes, obscuring the support provided by specific individuals and organizations (Brulle, 2014). Corporate think tanks have also proliferated, set up to constantly generate ideas and literature that can be passed off as independent research or science (Dunlap & McCright, 2011). Front groups and astroturf campaigns further obscure reality, suggesting independent or even grassroots movement support for corporate positions. An online rightwing echo-chamber regularly amplifies baseless or conspiratorial stories through social media networks until they reach mass media channels (Dunlap & McCright, 2015). These are some of the narrative-shaping realities with which activists must contend.

The Public’s Vulnerability

Another component of the threat facing the climate movement is the public’s vulnerability to manipulation through claims of “curtailed consumerist freedom.” Developing an ecological consciousness within a consumer society presents significant challenges (Hamilton, 2010; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004). Clive Hamilton (2010) warns that “Consumption behaviour and the sense of personal identity are now so closely related that a challenge to someone’s consumption behaviour may be a challenge to their sense of self” (p. 574). This identity-linked dependence on consumption can be exploited by corporate elites and mobilized against the transition to a sustainable society. In Hamilton’s view, consumer identity can only change with a massive environmental calamity or a widespread loss of confidence in consumer life, thus the task of achieving sustainability is primarily cultural, not scientific or technological.

In a review of climate change communications research, Susanne Moser (2016) highlights specific psychological defenses identified by researchers that can be triggered through different frames. Most relevant here is the defense that arises against identity change, a resistance to changing how we see ourselves through “avoidance, denial, helplessness, reinforcement of existing identity, or attack on others” (p. 355). The triggering frames are those that have already been used by business in shaping a corporate culture, including proclamations that “The American way of life is not up for debate” or “The threat to mobilize around is what ‘they’ propose as solutions to climate change; Fostering anti-science and anti-government sentiments; Emphasis on freedom from government, individual freedom, [and] free market economics” (p. 355).

Appeals to Freedom, Then and Now

These threats are not hypothetical, as business has repeatedly exploited issue frames appealing to freedom. Grace Nosek (2018) highlights how the tobacco industry used this framing decades ago to protect against regulation. An industry messaging memo recommended the mantra “Freedom of choice is an American birthright. Infringement on this right is an injustice” (p. 758-759). This argument successfully defended these businesses in the first waves of legal challenge, until the anti-tobacco movement finally reframed smoking as a systemic public health issue.

We can see explicit freedom frames already used by business in climate change litigation. When a coalition of state attorneys general recently sued fossil fuel companies for documents about whether they lied to the public and shareholders about the risks of climate change, Exxon countersued and used a freedom frame, asserting that “The allegations repeated today are an attempt to limit free speech” (Nosek, 2018, p. 767). Noteworthy also was the amplification of the corporate message through the vast communications system discussed earlier. Exxon was painted as the freedom-defending victim through two opinion pieces in the Washington Post and dozens of stories from the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the Heritage Foundation. The counterattack also included denunciations from other state attorneys general and threats of a counter-investigation by corporate politicians.

This is War

Because the SSE has not yet become an explicit goal of mainstream climate activism, we have not yet seen the most vicious expressions of corporate self-defense. Ron Arnold, longtime vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE), makes the nature of his work very clear. “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement…. We’re dead serious—we’re going to destroy them. . . People in industry, I’m going to do my best for you. Environmentalists, I’m coming to get you…. We’re out to kill the fuckers. . . We [CDFE] created a sector of public opinion that didn’t used to exist. No one was aware that environmentalism was a problem until we came along” (as cited in Higgs, 2016, p. 234). Some who defend corporate power openly treat any attempts to regulate industry as war. Activists must prepare for the unprecedented cultural onslaught that will be waged when corporations are faced with an existential threat.

Summary

Groomed to be consumers, US citizens place disproportionate emphasis on the things they buy to attempt to shape their identity. Left unquestioned, this fact can be turned against the movement towards a SSE. But, Clive Hamilton (2010) reminds us, “identities that can be forged from the products provided by the market are not to any great degree the creations of those who adopt them, but are manufactured by marketers or popular culture” (p. 573). Aside from constraining authentic human development, this process causes a host of social ills. “The inability of consumerism to allow true realisation of human potential manifests itself, to an ever-increasing degree, in restless dissatisfaction, chronic stress and private despair, feelings that give rise to a rash of psychological disorders—including anxiety, depression and substance abuse—and a range of compensatory behaviours including many forms of self-medication” (Hamilton, 2010, p. 572). Activists must illuminate these outcomes of a society defined by consumerism.

As freedom is invoked in discussions of social issues, the effect is to legitimize or delegitimize a particular point of view or policy. As activists expose the narrowness of unlimited consumption as freedom, and the way it obscures the public’s inability to participate in shaping the economy itself, the credibility of both the current hierarchical economic system and its defenders is undermined. It becomes harder to attack the movement to establish a SSE as this shift takes place. When citizens hear the defenders of corporate power speak about freedom and still take them seriously rather than thinking immediately of the domination they actually represent, activists have not yet done enough to clarify reality.

Redefine freedom to drive the movement

The eco-democratic definition of freedom is not only part of the cultural foundation for a SSE, which is crucial to humanity’s survival, but also points towards a more humanly fulfilling society. This definition gains legitimacy as activists highlight these merits and vocally assert the concept in public discussions. By helping the public to see the climate movement as a vehicle for this kind of freedom—including, in particular, the fundamental freedom of ordinary citizens to reshape the economy to avoid ecological collapse—activists can fuel the movement.

Discourse researchers follow the ways that climate change is discussed and observe the impacts on citizen engagement with the issue. Of particular interest are depoliticizing discourses that encourage apathy. “Depoliticization refers to the deletion of alternatives and of democratic debate about alternatives regarding climate change from public spheres,” notes Anabela Carvalho (2018, p. 6). “In spite of climate change’s massive impacts on citizens around the world, it has been transformed into a seemingly consensual techno-managerial matter where citizens have no say. Those depoliticization processes have crucial implications for public engagement” (p. 6). How we talk about climate change determines how we understand it, and whether and how we take action. These discourses tend to be unexamined and exert an unseen marginalizing influence.

Carvalho, van Wessel, and Maeseele (2017) describe several types of marginalizing discourses. Scientization suggests that climate change is a problem of technology whose solution must be led by technical experts. Economization envisions climate change as a problem of economic calculation that can be solved entirely through market-based mechanisms, with economists at the helm. Moralization frames the issue as humanity versus CO2 and treats the solution as a matter of individual responsibility, as if personal consumption choices can solve systemic problems.

By vocally championing the eco-democratic definition of freedom and establishing the climate movement as a fight for collective self-determination within ecological limits, activists can politicize climate change and maximize mobilization through various mechanisms: issue tangibility, engaging values, movement legitimacy, and participant identity-formation.

Issue Tangibility

Dale Jamieson (2017) writes about the connection between the British anti-slavery movement and current attempts to address climate change. He highlights how the distance between the colonies where slavery was practiced and Britain’s mainland made the issue just as distant and abstract in the minds of the public. Abolitionists realized that in order to generate a movement against slavery, they would have to make the issue visible. After parliament rejected abolition, activists started the “blood sugar” campaign—using pamphlets, speeches, and formal organizations to inform citizens about the amount of flesh they were consuming as they ate slave-produced sugar. As a result, 300,000 people boycotted Britain’s largest import; Abolition followed.

Jamieson (2017) observes that “For people to support moral change in a world in which there is a rupture in space, time, or scale between a cause and a harm, they must somehow be reconnected in people’s consciousness” (p. 181). However, “carbon’s assault on what it is to be a person seems less deep, direct, visceral and even true than slavery’s assault on our shared notions of humanity” (p. 181). Highlighting climate change as a freedom issue may make it more tangible, exposing the link between this global problem and citizens’ everyday experience of lacking control over their economic conditions. As the public associates the climate crisis with inadequate wages, crushing debt, and overwork—economic oppression stemming from an economy that serves elites rather than the people—the connection may be visceral enough to drive action. Achieving economic democracy would not only allow citizens to create a SSE but also address these social ills, a connection activists must emphasize.

Engaging Values

Literature on climate change engagement often focuses on the connection to human values, and advocating for eco-democratic freedom may attract new movement participants for whom freedom is a highly cherished value. Corner, Markowitz, and Pidgeon (2014) note that divides on climate change are more a representation of the values at stake than disputes about science, and that if the self-transcending values typically associated with activist engagement can be joined with more traditionally self-interested values, the combination could hold promise for generating action: “The challenge for climate change communicators seeking to make the most effective use of research on human values is to identify ways of bridging between the diverse values that any given group of individuals holds and the values that are congruent with a more sustainable society,” including “Coupling, for example, values around security or freedom with self-transcending values like concern for the welfare of others” (p. 417).

A sustainable economy will only be brought about through public control. By highlighting the freedom dimension of climate activism, activists add the promise of liberty to the range of values that inspire people to join the movement. In terms of audience, the point here is not to try to convince skeptics and “conservatives” that they should support climate action, though that could result, but to attract those already inclined to act by vocally championing a new vision of freedom.

Movement Legitimacy

As the climate movement’s goal of advancing a new vision of freedom becomes well-known, it stands to gain broader cultural legitimacy that can also encourage participation. Julie Ayling (2017) writes that “legitimacy is an intangible but crucial resource that assists an organization to exercise authority in numerous ways” (p. 351), and the battle for legitimacy “plays a significant role in progress on climate change mitigation” (p. 366).

This is evident in the effects of the fossil fuel divestment movement, which aims to delegitimize investments in coal, oil, and gas by pointing out the need to halt carbon emissions and the industry’s political efforts to block that outcome. Ultimately, activists’ goal is to remove the fossil fuel industry’s social license to exist. “For the divestment movement,” Ayling (2017) observes, “legitimacy strengthens its case for fundamental economic change and enables it to mobilize its supporters, garner public support, and fund its activities” (p. 355). Since it began in 2012, the movement has spread to over one thousand institutions and divestment activists have transformed discussions around climate change: asserting it as a present emergency, spotlighting the culpability of the fossil fuel industry, and undermining the legitimacy of both the industry and investing in it. Ayling finds that “there are signs that the movement is making progress in building its own legitimacy and in damaging the industry’s” (p. 350). Noam Bergman (2018) notes how divestment activists have generated politicized understandings of the climate issue, which have led to increased engagement: “The most prominent impact has been the discourse shift, a clear cultural impact, which in turn has precipitated mobilisation, political and financial impacts” (p. 12).

The same can be true for climate activists aiming to redefine freedom. By asserting the legitimacy of eco-democratic freedom and establishing the movement as a vehicle for this vision of freedom, activists can legitimize their movement—encouraging participation—while also exposing the illegitimacy of an economy that is run by elites, driving towards ecological collapse, premised on limitless consumption, and forced to manufacture consent for consumerist lifestyles. As the movement gains greater social acceptance, the effect will be greater mobilization.

Participant Identity-Formation

Carvalho et al. (2017) cite an extensive US survey (Roser-Renouf, Maibach, Leiserowitz, & Zhao, 2014) which “showed that ‘identity’ was the largest barrier to engagement with climate change politics, with a third of respondents saying they were not ‘activists.’ The survey also showed that most people have low expectations for the efficacy of their political actions: they do not believe that they can alter the course of climate policies and hence do not even try” (p. 127).

Here we see a clear indication of the connection between identity and participation in political action, suggesting that cultivating an activist identity among the public could boost engagement. Also present is a sense of fatalism. By framing the climate movement as a fight for freedom—requiring no special qualifications to participate—and informing the public that freedoms have historically been won by social movements composed of ordinary people, such self-defeating beliefs can be combatted. And by helping prospective participants see themselves as freedom fighters, activists can encourage the development of activist identities that drive engagement and commitment. These strategies also align with observations by Moser (2016) that identity-based resistance to change can be overcome through “inspiration,” “appeal to deeply held values,” the illustration of “new social/cultural norms,” and “stories of positive transformation” (p. 355-356).

As activists more fully develop their identity through their efforts against climate change, the movement becomes more resilient and autonomous and more compelling to those searching for an authentic self. Climate activists must be aware of the fact that, at its best, their work creates a new identity within people, and they ought to be as conscious and encouraging of that process as possible.

Summary

This section can be summed up by an activist from Toronto’s climate movement, who observed that “success will be based on how much we can inspire people to engage, and how much it will feel like… feel for people as though we were creating a space to be free” (Del Rio, 2017, p. 59). The fight for freedom has often been a central motivation of social movements. The energy behind the cause of self-determination has often led individuals to risk their lives. It lends itself to something larger than oneself, something so valuable that it can lead to the most selfless commitment, even as it allows for perhaps the most authentic expression of the self. Within mainstream climate change activism, discussions about the meaning of freedom and about the movement as a vehicle for expanding liberty have been uncommon thus far. Activists have yet to harness the force that is unlocked when establishing climate change as an issue of freedom.

Conclusion: Illuminating our choices

How can activists stimulate a society-wide reconsideration of freedom? First, activists’ analysis must incorporate the necessity of a SSE in addressing climate change, which reveals the need for a cultural transformation that replaces consumerist freedom with an ecological and democratic definition. Then, campaigns dedicated to this transformation should be launched. Developing activist-controlled education and communication networks to be in constant touch with the public also seems essential to drive this cultural change and counteract the corporate culture machine. Academics writing about ecological freedom could make their work accessible to movements by hosting public discussions. All of this should be a part of larger efforts to create a participatory, democratic culture in which being intellectually and politically active is the norm, thus laying the groundwork for public control of the economy.

The nature of choice is often limiting (consider Hensher, 2019, in this collection). Defining the course of one’s life, for example, means foreclosing multiple possible paths in order to follow the ones we choose. Right now we are exchanging many paths and cherished things, many freedoms, in order to pursue limitless consumption. But this is no conscious choice. In fact, it is a choice made for us by those in power, who have put immense effort into preventing us from seeing what options we have. Only when we become conscious of the tradeoffs we are making will freedom of choice be anything more than an illusion. The task of activists is to make our choices clear—to help the public see that it need not walk the path to ruin. When the people recognize that they have alternatives, that the choices available are ultimately constrained only by our ongoing acceptance of elites’ hierarchical and consumerist worldview and the boundaries they’ve established, then a transformation may be possible. We must choose to create an economy that does not force us to remain on the consumption treadmill, one that allows for the rapid emissions reductions needed to maintain a livable climate. It is this conscious choice that will see humanity define itself, a choice that many did not know they had, now perhaps the most important one we’ll ever make.

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The post Defending and Driving the Climate Movement by Redefining Freedom appeared first on Freedom and Survival.

Ecological Literacy

The better one understands a problem, the greater the chance of solving it. So it is with climate change, a crisis demanding far-reaching social transformation. But just how far-reaching? A broad curriculum that develops activists’ clarity and unity of vision could be an essential pillar to advance the climate movement’s preparation, ambition, and cohesiveness.

The mainstream understanding within the movement is that climate change is the issue—there is no bigger picture—and the solution is a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewables. An all-renewable society will be more equitable by attending to economic and racial injustice in the transition process, but will largely resemble the present one.

A more comprehensive view recognizes climate change as perhaps the most urgent of several interconnected ecological issues that require us to not only transition from fossil fuels to renewables but also to reshape our economic, political, and cultural systems around the reality of ecological limits.

I believe that which analysis the movement holds will determine how it develops and whether it is able to meet the scale of our issues. A holistic, unified understanding of our ecological predicament is thus sorely needed.

The Limits to Growth framework helps us to see the bigger picture. It shows that as exponential growth of the economy and population pushes global consumption beyond ecological limits, we encounter crises driven by pollution, like climate change, or by resource depletion, such as peak oil. The more recent incarnation of the Limits framework is “planetary boundaries” analysis, which confirms that overwhelming human intervention into global ecosystems is generating multiple crises beyond climate change. Climate activists can draw several lessons here.

The first is that continued economic and population growth is infeasible. A holistic movement for survival would seek to address the overarching threat of ecological overshoot and recognize that whatever special remedy a particular issue requires, such as rebuilding healthy soils to address topsoil erosion, all ecological issues have overconsumption at their root and require wealthy nations to consume less.

A second and related lesson is that creating a sustainable society involves tradeoffs. The lifestyles we know today are based on treating ecological limits as if they don’t exist—a consumer culture made to serve economies that maximize consumption—and this must change fundamentally to restore the natural systems we’ve undermined. Solutions are thus not as straightforward as unplugging fossil fuel plants and plugging in renewable infrastructure. We must embed the reality of ecological limits into our economic and political systems and our culture, and learn to live within them.

The third concerns our priorities. We must maintain enough social and economic stability to carry the massive sustainability transition to its conclusion. Though depletion issues seem to be overshadowed by pollution crises, resource availability challenges must be factored into activists’ plan for transforming society. The depletion of oil, which is currently essential to both large-scale food supply systems and producing wind turbines and solar panels, could threaten the transition if not planned for in advance.

Climate activists must come to see themselves as a “new society” movement—nothing less will meet the demands of the problem. This perspective informs us as we dig into the details of the climate crisis: its severity (what level of threat does it pose to humanity), its urgency (the timeline we must adhere to), and the forces driving the problem.

In terms of severity, we should recognize that current warming of one degree Celsius (1C) since industrialization puts us at the edge of the stable Holocene conditions in which our societies and agriculture developed, and that business as usual would result in 4C+ warming within this century. The previous ice age was about 4C cooler than pre-industrial times, with mile-thick ice sheets covering North America and Europe. Though discussions of “adaptation to climate change” abound, there is no meaningful sense in which humanity can “adapt” to 4C+ warming. Avoiding that outcome justifies large changes in how we live.

The carbon budget concept helps us understand the urgency of the crisis. While any greenhouse gasses emitted by burning fossil fuel and land use change warm the planet, carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years and thus determines long-term temperature rise. A long-term warming limit corresponds to a finite “budget” of carbon dioxide emissions. Activists tend to focus on ramping up the supply of renewables, but the carbon budget concept emphasizes changes in energy demand rather than energy supply—we need to lower emissions in line with our budget even if that means reducing energy use by phasing out fossil fuels faster than we can replace them with renewables.

Our carbon budget helps establish the timeline we must follow in getting to zero emissions, which is shaped by our approach to the different emissions drivers. The Kaya identity breaks down total emissions into its constitutive parts:

Emissions = Economic output (GDP/person) x Population (number of people) x Energy intensity (Energy/GDP) x Carbon intensity (Carbon/Energy)

If growth is sacred, then the only way to decrease emissions is by reducing energy intensity (through increased efficiency) or carbon intensity (by installing non-carbon sources of energy). The models projecting a 66% or greater chance of limiting warming to 2C envision emissions reaching “net zero” around 2070 (by matching any remaining emissions with deliberate reabsorption strategies). They assume continued economic and population growth, and that the last two factors alone can save us. But can these technological interventions overcome the effects of growth?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points out that energy efficiency increases over the past 40 years were overwhelmed by economic and population growth. Models assume continued increases in efficiency, but physical laws ultimately limit how much more efficient we can become. And bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, a supposedly carbon-negative energy source crucial to the IPCC’s 2C scenarios, doesn’t exist at scale and isn’t likely to. Through dangerous assumptions, the primacy of growth is built into climate models. With these assumptions stripped away wealthy nations’ emissions would need to reach real zero around 2035, and the need to degrow would be clear.

A holistic understanding of our predicament would clarify activists’ sense of the timeline, solutions, priorities, and complexity of their task. It would make the notion of continued growth obviously untenable. It would highlight a global decarbonization date for 2C (without significant negative emissions) around 2040. Maintaining enough social stability to make the transition possible would emerge as a priority—in particular, focusing on relocalizing agriculture in anticipation of slowing oil production. A more complex and realistic understanding of the transition that illuminates the reality of tradeoffs, like reduced consumption, would reveal the need to prepare for the challenges of creating a new society. With a shared understanding of this analysis, activists could develop a plan to meet the scale of the crisis.

Energy Literacy

To those pushing for a rapid transition to an all-renewable economy, energy literacy is just as important as ecological literacy. Physicists define energy as the capacity to do work—without energy, nothing happens. That goes for both biological systems like ourselves, which need energy to survive, and for economic systems, which constantly require energy to accomplish any activity. Though climate change is mainly understood as an energy problem, activists’ transition plans haven’t yet incorporated the work of energy analysts who explore the societal implications of large-scale conversions from one energy source to another.

The Industrial Revolution came about because human beings unlocked the concentrated energy available in the form of coal, followed eventually by oil and gas. The ensuing changes to society cannot be understated: mass-production of goods, previously unthinkable mobility, time-saving appliances—millions of people shifted from agrarian lifestyles into cities where jobs now served the mass production process. This process and the lives we know today were born from energy sources that developed over millions of years—finite conditions we’ve come to see as normal.

The most prominent transition studies, undertaken by researchers Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, give no indication that these conditions will change in a society powered completely by renewable energy. But energy analysts like Richard Heinberg and David Fridley highlight issues that suggest an all-renewable society will be different than the one we live in today.

Because wind and solar are intermittent, we need to develop strategies to have energy when weather conditions are calm and overcast. But infrastructure solutions like batteries and long-distance transmission lines require energy to build, and the energy costs of making renewables controllable may cut too far into the energy we want for transportation, construction, educating students, and many other things. To some extent we may need to learn to use energy when it is available.

Replacing oil, which powers 95% of transportation, is also a challenge. We’ll need to use batteries to power our vehicles in an all-renewable world, but their energy density is much lower than oil, and heavy vehicles would require prohibitively large batteries. It’s therefore unlikely that we’ll have battery-powered heavy trucks or planes, and we may need to adjust to a less mobile society.

Finally, it always takes energy to get energy, a ratio energy analysts call “energy-returned-on-energy-invested” (EROEI or EROI). Some studies looking at the net energy generated by an all-renewable system suggest that the EROEI may be significantly lower than a fossil-fueled system. If that turns out to be the case, it means that we would have less energy available in a society powered only by renewables, and thus a smaller economy.

Activists must incorporate these analyses into our transition plans and educate the public about the likelihood that an all-renewable society will be different than the one we know today. This is vital to making the transition possible. Whether looking at our problems through the lens of ecology or energy, it appears likely that establishing a sustainable society will come with tradeoffs. I believe that if we do not foresee these tradeoffs, plan for them, and educate the public about the challenges ahead, then the unprecedented, massive, and sustained coordination we need to transition in an orderly way may not be possible.

Ecological and energy literacy are necessary if we’re to understand what is happening to us and why, and to develop productive ways to respond. However, additional analyses are also essential. We must have knowledge of how the economy currently works and how it could be restructured to work in the context of shrinking consumption and energy use. Beyond that, we’ll need to understand the power systems that oppose the transition and how to build a movement that can overcome them. Nothing less than a new Enlightenment will do.

Read the next article in the Climate Activism Curriculum series: economic literacy. Or check out this curriculum model that ties each literacy domain in the series together: Educating for Climate Activism, Autonomy, and System Change.

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