Climate Mitigation Fail: ‘Experts’ Pontificating

Ed. note: With the US-led demotion (if not demise) of Net Zero and ‘energy transformation’, prior attempts to come to grips with climate futility and energy reality are worth revisiting. This article, “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” is an example of too many academics (17 coauthors) and too much obtuse research (think budget cuts).

Vol. 46: 653-689 (Volume publication date October 2021) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011104. First published as a Review in Advance on June 29, 2021

ABSTRACT

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve.

However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today’s carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.

SUMMARY POINTS

1. Despite three decades of political efforts and scientifically informed warnings of the likely catastrophic effects of climate change, CO₂ emissions have continued to rise globally and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990.
2. Since the first IPCC report was published in 1990, more anthropogenic fossil CO₂ has been released into the atmosphere than previously throughout all of human history.
3. The failure of leadership, particularly from within high-emitting countries, sectors, corporations, and individuals, has locked in intra- and intergenerational suffering and long-term existential threats to livelihoods and ecosystems.
4. Entrenched geopolitical, industrial, and military power and associated mindsets are fundamental barriers to effective mitigation.
5. Orthodox schools of thought and research traditions (including highly constrained forms of modeling), particularly in the fields of economics, energy, and climate mitigation, need to be challenged and replaced with, or complemented by, more heterodox approaches.
6. Three decades of choosing to fail on mitigation have shifted the climate challenge from a technocratic adjustment to business as usual to requiring a rapid, system-level change within both industrialized and industrializing societies.
7. Transformations toward more sustainable and just futures require a radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change.
8. Attention to equity, high-carbon lifestyles, and conditions for enabling new social imaginaries has the potential to disrupt dominant, high-carbon development pathways.

FUTURE ISSUES

1. How could geopolitical competition over energy resources and ideologies of control that frame dominant responses to climate change be challenged and overcome?
2. How have mainstream economics and neoliberal responses to climate change (e.g., carbon markets and a broader financialization of the environment) become so pervasive, and what opportunities are there for alternative or complementary approaches?
3. How can research approaches currently dominating advice and underpinning climate mitigation policy (such as integrated assessment modeling) be complemented with a more varied array of approaches and perspectives?
4. How could approaches that rapidly reduce energy-related emissions be realized (e.g., actively displacing and disassembling fossil fuel–based energy systems, and energy demand management practices)?
5. How can the large asymmetry in responsibility for emissions within, as well as between, nations be addressed in climate policy and governance?
6. How can fossil fuel–based, high-carbon lifestyles, practices, and visions of incremental mitigation be rapidly replaced by sustainable alternatives and profound system change, informed by a timely response to the Paris temperature and equity commitments?
7. How can knowledge systems and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change be transformed?
8. How can existing and new social movements mobilize popular power and social imaginaries in a way that effectively challenges the status quo and helps drive structural change at the scale and pace required?

CONCLUSION

This article has demonstrated that, while the reasons for 30 years of failure to bend the global emissions curve are multifaceted, a common and strong thread is woven through them all. In various guises and to differing degrees, the centralization of power and the privileges that accompany it have coalesced around a particular worldview. Through recent decades, the central tenets of this worldview have evolved into a wider global Zeitgeist whereby development and progress are reduced to economic growth and defined by increasingly narrow financial metrics and indices.

Coincident with this financial reductionism and economic characterization of nations and societies has been a growing recognition that the “system” externalities are set to undermine the very tenets of the system. Thus far, however, the power and inertia of the existing system have been sufficient to give the impression of ongoing control. The challenges are “recognized” and “internalized,” and through promised technical futures that are carefully costed in elaborate models, the existing power structures remain unchallenged.

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Isak Stoddard¹, Kevin Anderson^1,2, Stuart Capstick³, Wim Carton⁴, Joanna Depledge⁵, Keri Facer^1,6, Clair Gough², Frederic Hache⁷, Claire Hoolohan^2,3, Martin Hultman⁸, Niclas Hällström⁹, Sivan Kartha¹⁰, Sonja Klinsky¹¹, Magdalena Kuchler¹, Eva Lövbrand¹², Naghmeh Nasiritousi^13,14, Peter Newell¹⁵, Glen P. Peters¹⁶, Youba Sokona¹⁷, Andy Stirling¹⁸, Matthew Stilwell¹⁹, Clive L. Spash²⁰, and Mariama Williams¹⁷

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Source: https://www.masterresource.org/climate-cultism/failed-climate-mitigation-experts-in-denial/