I was sat in yet another meeting/conference/workshop on climate change where in exasperation I wrote the words in the title above on my notepad; describing the elephant that was looking down upon us all and whose existence could not be acknowledged in “acceptable” discourse. For over three decades now politicians, policy makers, academics, and the media have danced around this core issue, while acting at being perplexed about the continuing climate policy failure; greenhouse gas emissions being more than 50% higher now than when the Rio Earth Summit was held in 1992 and global average surface temperatures soon to exceed pre-industrial levels by 1.5oC on an annual basis. The 2023 UN Emissions Gap Report found that in 2022 anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached a new high, and that in September 2023 the global average surface temperature was 1.80oC above pre-industrial levels. That report also states that those GHG emissions need to drop to 37 GtCO2e (Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent) from 2022’s 57.4 GtCO2e by 2030 to be sure of limiting the temperature change to 2oC above pre-industrial levels, even when using the UN IPCC’s extremely optimistic assumptions. That’s a 35.6% reduction in 8 years, about 4.4% per year; with current trends quite possibly leading to a continuance of small increases in emissions.
The studied ignorance of this reality has been greatly facilitated by the conscious removal of historical materialist analysis from “critical” social theory, to produce a safe for the capitalist elite critique of modern society, as Gabriel Rockhill and others have well documented.
Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony captures this process well, as the dominant societal elite manipulate societal beliefs so that they both obscure the nature and actuality of their own power and legitimize their elevated societal positions. Critical political economy, and specifically historical materialism, that treats the material bases of power imbalances as the predominant (but not the only) ones is the best tool to understand the elephant and that is why it has been consciously shoved beyond the limits of “acceptable” discussion. Even the critical theorists who conceptualize more and more intertwined social identities will not accept the most important of identities, class. Those attempting to point out the centrality of class conflict are labelled with derogatory slurs such as “classist”.
The utter ridiculousness of this viewpoint comes in an intersectionality which is blind to economic realities and can be called upon by some of the most well-off people in society to claim victimhood. We may have a lesbian claim that they are “subjugated” because of their sex and sexual orientation while leaving out their material circumstances. Can Ellen DeGeneres really be seen as being in the same subjugated position as a lesbian who is a nurse? Is the everyday experience of that nurse closer to that of Ellen or to that of the middle-aged straight male porter working in the same hospital? Is Ellen’s closer to that of G.W. Bush who she was so happy to hang out with? Is Oprah’s (black female) life really anything like that of an economically struggling black female? Or the charmed elite life of Barrack Obama? Before homosexuality was generally accepted in the US, the gay lawyer and power-broker Roy Cohn seemed to be able to live as a gay man in a way that less rich and powerful gay men were unable to do. The academy has been rendered as a distraction to real knowledge and understanding through the non-materialism that sees no capitalist dominance, hears no capitalist dominance and speaks of no capitalist dominance.
If it did, those that control the grants and academic careers (the capitalist elite and their courtiers), and those that control access to the media and the messages that it launches into the minds of the populace, would quickly act. The same goes for media personalities, journalists, producers and authors. And those people who control academia, the media and many other institutions of society are the very ones that will lose the most in any real effort to reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions. Energy equals wealth and power, which is why the wealthy and powerful are the greatest emitters. To protect themselves against actions that would force them to use less energy and therefore have less wealth and power, even worse to reduce their energy usage more than the rest and thus lose relative wealth and power, they have constructed ideological and institutional impediments in addition to their tight restrictions on the discussion of anything related to class.
· Reducing emissions is treated as simply the technocratic process of replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy, part of ecomodernism. This belief has remained unproven since it was utilized in the 1970s to protect the rich from “silly” notions of ecological limits. As I have detailed, ecomodernism is without evidence at the global level.
· The “empty” climate change UN institutions, so well described by Radoslav Dimitrov, designed to give the appearance of action while no substantive actions are taken. Purely performative institutions, such as the regular Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC). Such meetings produce far more hot air and dead trees than real actions.
· The narrative that “we are all in this together” rather than accepting the deep responsibility of certain actors (e.g. fossil fuel companies, the rich and their energy-lavish lifestyles and energy-dependent wealth). Leonardo DiCaprio is a wonderful example of this self-enabling belief among the rich, with personal emissions equal to that of a small town while he travels the world in his personal jet bloviating about climate change.
· Treating climate change policies and impacts as a series of unconnected events. During the Iran Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s, the media ran an ever-present count of the number of days the hostages had been held. Why no such count for the emissions cuts that were required but were not implemented? Somewhat like the US government debt displays so beloved of the Peterson Institute? Our emission cuts deficit updated on a daily basis.
· That climate change is a linear process and therefore climate action can be delayed. The celebrated fraud Ted Nordhaus, the recipient of the utterly fraudulent “Nobel” prize in economics (awarded by the Swedish Central bank, not the Nobel Committee) has been a wonderful elite courtier with his utterly fatuous and science-denying calculations of climate change damages related to given rises in global surface temperatures and assumptions of controllable linear climate dynamics. While actual scientists find that modern industrial society will not withstand a 3 or 4 degrees rise in global temperatures, Nordhaus and his ilk cheerily assume losses of just 9% and 16% of GDP respectively in the future, with respect to an economy that has grown so much more in the interim due to energy-dependent economic growth! One could call him and his ilk, “idiot savants”, but the savant part is not applicable; more “useful well looked after intentional idiots”. Oh, and of course there are no feedbacks that mean that 3 degrees pretty much automatically means that 4 degrees is a reality, then 5 degrees ….
· That the mythical “market” that is independent of politics (which only exists in the minds of those with brains damaged by mainstream economics) is the best avenue through which to implement climate policies. Funny how during two world wars the “market” was rapidly consigned to the waste heap in favour of central planning and compulsion; as Seth Klein has noted.
The above is the work of the dominant section of the capitalist elite, the socially-liberal neoliberals that cannot be seen to be openly rejecting science (unless of course it’s the science of human sexual dimorphism), so the hegemonic culture has to be constructed in such a way that the science can be “accepted” while no substantive action is taken. There are of course the socially conservative neoliberals, personified by Trump in the US, who have no problem rejecting science (unless of course it’s the science of human sexual dimorphism). There are really only two avenues to substantive climate action (i) the capitalist elite will be bought off at the expense of the rest, somewhat like a much bigger version of the response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (ii) the capitalist elite are overthrown. This is one reason why China, where the capitalist elite were overthrown and remain subjugated to the bureaucratic state and Party, has such a lead in green technologies and policies; it may even peak GHG emissions this year while growing its economy by 5%.
In capitalist societies, where the capitalist elite dominates (why China is not a capitalist society as so many misguided leftists believe), climate change policies will always be the subject of class war. At the international level, geopolitical competition is not compatible with climate action as energy use equals military (and other) power. In this arena, for real climate policy to happen the US (and Western) capitalist elites would have to accept a reduction in the relative power that is so central to their ability to extract value from the populations of other nations. “Over their dead bodies” may be a correct assessment of their attitude to that.
As I have detailed previously, the only probable outcome is the band-aid solution of Solar Radiation Management and other geo-engineering solutions that not only do not threaten the capitalist elite and relative national power positions but provide new mouth-watering profit opportunities. As Simon Dalby has detailed in his most recent book, human society needs to power down not utilize even more energy to build out chimeric “solutions”. But such a power down will mean the powering down of much of the wealth and power of the capitalist elite; back to the core problem of climate change action!
I have decided to not attend any further climate change related conferences, meetings or workshops that do not accept the centrality of the political economic elephant; too much time wasted and too much annoyance experienced. They are generally an exercise in the creation of a misdirecting discourse, “look over there” (anything that doesn’t include political economy) and not “over here” (capitalist elite dominance and energy dependence), even if the participants are not fully cognizant of their disabling biases. Then again, when not understanding is crucial to career advancement and elite and academic social acceptance, that lack of understanding may not be so unconscious.
From https://www.carbonbrief.org:
"The newly published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on 1.5C (SR15) significantly expands the budget for a 66% chance of avoiding 1.5C to the equivalent of 10 years of current emissions. This compares to the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5), which put it at around three years."
Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
Multi-polar traps, loss aversion, shifting baselines, and belief in progress will mean we as a culture will burn it all, then burn up. If we instigated a worldwide green police force and subjugated the elites (which includes me, not being a small farmer, nomad herder, or hunter-gatherer), excess energy released would be used elsewhere in increased resource and energy use, unless the police forced everyone into equally simple lives, which would mean global surveillance, which would mean the police would be the new elites.
Honestly, just enjoy each day given while we still have that privilege. Poor spelling is a pivilige.
Global average EROI's (Energy Returned Over [energy] Invested) are rapidly declining to under ~ 10:1 a self limiting geophysical ceiling where it's not profitable for oil companies to continue. Coal follows a similar if slightly delayed path path.
The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication). In 2013 world oil and gas had a mean EROI of about 20:1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856#s0020
EROI's are a hard geophysical ceiling - a self limiting factor - to all the geopolitical 'hot air' about what to do about AGW (Anthropic Global Warming due to CO2 emissions).
An additional limiting factor is that engineering, technical and physical reality dictates that humans – with electricity alone – simply can't mine, refine and transport the raw minerals needed for the much touted "Green energy transition". It's only thanks to diesel's ~40 times higher energy density than batteries that we can build and maintain extremely low density solar energy flow harvesting infrastructure in the first place.
Access to dwindling global fossil energy resources has been the main driver of geopolitical turmoil for many decades and explains the 'Western' lust for global chaos and wars to dominate those resources for as long as possible. For example in 2019 'Western' Big Oil firms Shell and BP told us their supply will decrease by 1 - 2% per year, which means that in about 70 years it will 25% of what it was in 2019. In March this year they are now revising their targeting to a reduction of 25% by the end of the decade. A 25% decline over 7 years is a 5% decline per year, which means in 28 years time – by about 2050 – oil production by Shell and BP will be 25% of what it was in 2023.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/shell-reviewing-oil-gas-output-reduction-targets-ceo-tells-times-2023-03-03/
Clearly Russia and Kazakhstan and others have greater reserves, which they may consume more equitably and efficiently than 'Western' Big Oil, but the trajectory is the same just delayed a hand full of decades or so. But since all the above listed industrial activity today currently uses diesel, how does the global "green energy” lobby propose to make electric machines to replace diesel machines needed to achieve “zero greenhouse gas emissions by [insert favourite date]”?