Kevin Anderson talking:
The emissions are important. Flying is 2 to 3 percent of world emissions, about the same as U.K., Germany or California, so a significant amount of emissions. But, actually, when we fly, we are locking in an industry that is very high-carbon, that there are no technical alternatives in the near to medium term to overcome that, so we remain high-carbon. And also, those of us who fly, generally, we also live very wealthy lives. We often use taxis. We live in big homes. We have quite large cars. We drive a lot. We consume a lot of goods. So, almost it’s emblematic. It captures the worst excesses in terms of our climate change impacts and also, indeed, border sustainability. And so, I think it’s important for people who work on climate change, who think it’s a really major issue, that we demonstrate that we believe in our own research by making some significant changes to how we operate our own lives.
Svante his significance was major, as were a number of people in the 1800s. So, when people talk about climate change as a new phenomenon, I mean, it’s not. It’s the laws of physics. There’s no such thing as climate science. There is science we use to understand the climate. And that science, we’ve been using for several centuries now. And during the 1800s, there was Fourier; there was John Tyndall, the namesake of the center I’m involved with; and there was Arrhenius in Sweden. And these people were putting together a fairly clear vision of what was causing climate—well, not climate change, what was—understanding global warming and the greenhouse effect and how that might play out in the future. So, we had a good understanding even in the 1800s. So it’s not a new phenomenon, as the skeptics often try to suggest.
I do, but in English in Sweden, I hasten to add. I don’t teach in Swedish.
after you had first started doing it, so it was quite some time ago now. And as soon as I heard about it, I just think it’s good that something is—well, firstly, bringing climate change to the fore, to the public debate, is important. It’s not in the public debate. This COP has been very poorly represented in the media, that I’m aware of, in other parts of Europe. So, bringing climate change to the fore is a really important issue anyway. The second thing is, to bring it to the fore with a degree of clarity and honesty is also really important. And Greta has done that in spades. You know, she’s been a real ambassador for understanding climate change, without all of the fluff and nonsense that we put on it.
a lot of people I know, people who are concerned about climate change, think of Trump, and they use Trump, to some extent, as an excuse for the inaction of the rest of us. And if you look at what Obama had planned, yeah, Obama’s climate plans, OK, were slightly more progressive, or less unprogressive, if such a thing can exist, compared with Trump, but nevertheless Obama was not moving the U.S. towards anything approaching the Paris Agreement. His plans were much more in line with a 3 to 4 degrees centigrade of warming. And people were just saying, “Oh, isn’t he doing well?”
So, Trump comes along and basically just stands up in the usual Trumpian way and justsays, “I’m not going to be involved in climate change. It’s just a—it’s a hoax by the Chinese.” And that suddenly brings climate change to the fore. People are starting to talk about it again. So, you know, Macron talks about what the French are going to do. The Chinese say they’ll step up to the plate to compensate for what America is doing. Other American mayors come to the fore. So, in some respects, Trump has reignited a stagnant debate on climate change. So, whilst I have no time for Trump’s views on climate change, or, indeed, on many other issues, I think he has been, to some extent, a catalyst.
And when you align that with Greta’s contribution and, increasingly, voices who have—who feel that they’ve been marginalized over the last 20 years on climate change, they are coming to the fore. I think there is a sense of a new dialogue emerging, not just from climate change, but from the sort of dissatisfaction with how the establishment has dealt with issues over the last 20 or 30 years.
it’s easy at the moment, when people pick on Russia, the U.S. and Qatar and so forth, saying that they’re weakening the—haven’t accepted the IPCC 1.5 degrees C report. And, I mean, it’s true that they haven’t done that. But again, that is something that the rest of us have hidden behind. The other nations are saying, “Isn’t that appalling?”
You know, the U.K. said, “Of course we should accept the 1.5 degrees C report,” whilst it’s just celebrated a new BP oil platform going offshore that’s going to produce 120,000 barrels of oil every day. That’s 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year—every day, rather, and, over the life of the platform, another quarter of a billion tons of CO2. That’s the U.K. government saying, “We must sign the 1.5 degrees C—we must welcome the 1.5 degrees C report from the IPCC,” whilst it’s celebrating new oil platforms, it’s trying to develop new gas, and it’s expanding its airports.
So, we mustn’t hide behind Trump or Obama’s inadequacy. The rest of us, the rest of the progressive world, are still fighting, as Greta points out, even in Sweden, probably which in many respects is a very progressive country—if you come from the U.K., it feels like that—but even in Sweden they’re choosing to do nothing significant on climate change.
This year, carbon dioxide emissions have gone up by 2.7 percent. That came out during the COP, the latest set of data. And when you unpick that, OK, it is easy to blame China and India, the poorer countries trying to industrialize. Their emissions are certainly rising. You look at the U.S., the U.S. emissions have also gone up. And that’s because they’ve been burning far more oil in their cars, which are even larger than they were last year. So, even in the U.S., he can talk about renewables, but really the focus by him, by the adviser, and by the Trump administration is just consuming—producing and consuming ever more fossil fuels. There is no responsibility there for the issues of climate change. It is a complete denial of climate change, which, in a sense, is a denial of physics. It’s a denial of science. So, it’s not to be surprised—we should not be surprised by what he is saying, but we must not use that as an excuse, again, just to beat him and the Trump administration for, when we are making no changes ourselves.
We have to be realistic. Is it reasonable to live with 3, 4 or 5 degrees centigrade of warming? And I think all analysis—probably even his own if he bothered to undertake any—would say that is not realistic. So, I mean, we’re between a rock and a hard place. We have to make dramatic reductions in our carbon dioxide emissions now to ensure a stable climate for our future and Greta’s futures and Greta’s children’s futures, or we have to just let things carry on with this realistic view about oil and gas today, knowing that we are leaving this legacy for future generations and for all other species which will be completely chaotic.
although Oxfam used that data, that originally came from some work by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, and Piketty is well known for his work as an economist. And that demonstrates that rather than necessarily always focusing on countries, we need to focus on the people who are actually emitting. So the idea that 10 percent of the global population are responsible for 50 percent of global emissions, or 20 percent of the global population are responsible for 70 percent of all global emissions, tells us that we need to be tailoring our policies towards that small group, rather than trying to squeeze the emissions out of the majority of the world’s population, who are hardly emitting anything at all.
So, one of the ways to explain this that I often use, which will hopefully be helpful, is that if that 10 percent of high emitters reduce their carbon footprint, their individual carbon footprint, to the level of the average European citizen, that would be equivalent of a one-third cut in global emissions, even if the other 90 percent did nothing. I mean, a one-third cut in global emissions just from the 10 percent reducing to the level of the average European citizen.
if you look at it in relation to their emissions, if you looked at, say, Rwandans, they might be consuming or might be emitting something like 0.1 to 0.5 of a ton.
people in Rwanda, yeah. If you look at the typical American, they’re going to be consuming or emitting something like 30 to 35 tons, 30 to 35 tons for the average American, compared with 0.1-ish for the average Rwandan. So you’re seeing a massive difference between those two.
very approximately, America is twice—the U.S. is twice the emissions of the average European. because they have bigger houses, bigger cars. They travel further. They still have a very high-carbon energy system for electricity generation.
They’ve been outlawed now or banned, yes, yeah. So, I mean, Europe has made some significant attempts to improve efficiency, but those attempts in efficiency have never compensated for the increase in growth, hence the European Union’s overall emissions have remained roughly static, if you take an account of the goods that we import and export.
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Kevin Anderson
professor in climate change leadership at Uppsala University’s Centre for Environment and Development Studies. He is also chair of energy and climate change at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester in Britain.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 11, 2018