Professor Kevin Anderson - Impacts Of Climate Change [Full Interview]

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Certainly every report that comes out from the scientific community suggests that the timeframe we have for dealing with climate change is reducing, is shrinking very rapidly indeed. There's no doubt from the scientific community that we have to do something imminently, starting today. We can't be waiting until 2020 or 2030. We need to make immediate changes to how it is we are consuming energy, how it's going to be consuming and how we are generating that energy. So it certainly is the case that all the scientific reports are pointing in that direction. The latest set of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which brings together the world's expertise on climate science, makes that position very clear. And scientists are generally a relatively conservative group, certainly collectively. And for such a collectively conservative group of experts to be coming out and saying things that are as stark and politically significant as is coming out from the reports now, tells us something about the seriousness of which we should be taking the scientific message. The increased number of extreme events we see, and indeed that these extreme events become the new norm, is actually even more of a concern, will have increasing impacts in a globalised world on things like agriculture. So that will mean that if you look even somewhere like the UK, which may be more insulated from some of the impacts of climate change, will actually from the direct impacts in terms of our weather here in the UK, how that will play out, actually will still be impacted by how the weather and the climate plays out elsewhere in the world. So that will significantly affect things like food prices, fuel prices, and the whole process of globalisation will be impacted by a changing climate. If we want to become more resilient here to these concerns, then we have to be planning and we have to be thinking well in advance and planning well in advance. So clearly one of the things that we could be considering doing is to have greater production of indigenous food in the UK, so that we would have more control over that food rather than being susceptible to volatile food and indeed fuel prices from around the world. So both for food and fuel, both of which of course are essential for living a reasonable quality of life, anywhere in the world. If we want to have greater insulation from the volatile prices, so particularly we can protect the more vulnerable in our community, then we need to be looking to preferably generating our energy as locally as we can so we have more control over it. And preferably energy, of course, that requires very little fuel, because the less fuel you require, that's much more resilient to fuel price volatility. But also in terms of food, if we can produce our food locally, then that gives us some resilience to the changes that will be occurring elsewhere in the world. And this is particularly important because the UK has a much more stable climate than other parts of the world where we are currently bringing a lot of the food from. So they will undoubtedly be seeing problems within other parts of the world where the food is being grown. That will impact the prices, that will impact availability, and that will play out in the UK. But in addition to that, from a sort of a wider perspective, you could argue that, you know, we can produce the food here, we can produce our own energy here, then other parts of the world that will be suffering much more from climate change than we will, that will give them greater ability to adapt for their own localised needs. So there are two ways of thinking about this. One, that is, what's good for us in the UK? And also, you know, can we marry that with something that is also good for the more vulnerable communities elsewhere in the world? The climate is changing. The climate will go on changing. And so we're going to have to make changes to our infrastructure to become more resilient to a changing climate. And, you know, what we need to do is to reduce our emissions as quickly as possible, but at the same time ensure that our infrastructure, our homes, our transport networks can deal with a climate, with a changing climate. And indeed, many people around the world at the moment, the way that they live their lives, their local infrastructure and so forth, isn't even resilient to the current climate, let alone a changing climate. So we have to spend a lot of time, effort, money, thought now on how we can make a much more resilient society. One of the issues that is often raised about this is there isn't sufficient funding. And that's something that comes up all the time. It comes up when you think about housing in the UK or infrastructure in the UK, but also elsewhere in the world. And I have repeatedly made the point that when the banks were about to go under, we managed to find, create through quantitative easing in the UK, about £375 billion. £375 billion. That's about a third of our GDP, our economic output from the UK. We generated that almost overnight. Now, we could then spend that how we wanted. We happened to give it back to the banks as a stimulus package for the economy. Now, that didn't particularly work well, or as well as it could have worked. But what we could have done, when we think about it, £375 billion, if you think of the UK, we could have retrofitted every single house that will be here in 2050. Now, there are 26 million houses roughly in the UK. About 17 million of those will probably still be here in 2050. We could have retrofitted every single one of those, and still had probably £100, £150 billion left. Now, what would have happened if we'd retrofitted them? They would have, they would have eliminated fuel poverty, would have made them, all of the houses, much, much lower energy consumption, therefore reduce their carbon emissions. We'd have made them much more resilient to a changing climate. So as the climate changes, we would have, these properties would have been resilient to that. It would have provided a huge amount of employment. A lot of that employment would have been relatively low skilled. So you could have trained people up very quickly, provided they're supervised by people who are highly trained. So that would be very good for local employment. A lot of the poor quality in houses are in areas where people actually are low, are low skill and have relatively high unemployment. So you'd have, in those areas where the houses need to be improved, you would have already had an available labour force who need jobs. Instead, we gave the money to the banks. We are not short of resources. What we are short of is the courage, the intellect, the thought that is required to use society's existing resources for the benefit of society as a whole, in dealing with climate change, but also many other issues as well. So this would have been good, good as a stimulus package. It would have been good for employment. It would have been good for eliminating fuel poverty. It would have made us a much more resilient society in terms of dealing with climate change going forward. But again, as I say, instead, we took the old route of giving the money to the banks. There's a lot of discussion within the scientific literature about a whole series of very complex, positive feedbacks that will make the situation worse. But what we know from the science is that we do not have sufficient knowledge to say whether we've actually passed the point of no return or not. There is a lot of uncertainty and there will remain a lot of uncertainty around these particular sets of feedbacks for a long time to come. We will start to understand the mechanisms better, but to quantify them sufficiently robustly to say we've actually gone beyond the point of return, is something we will not be able to say with any high degree of confidence for quite a long time to come. Now, there's some merits to that and that says, you know, we should be trying to do everything we can now because we may not have passed the point of no return. Of course, once you've passed that point, you can make the argument, well, why bother? What's the point of trying to do anything? But there is sufficient scientific uncertainty around these sets of issues at the moment that give us every reason to try to reduce our emissions, reduce our impacts on the climate as quickly as possible. What we do know, again, from the science, with a high degree of certainty, that the more carbon dioxide, the more greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere, the greater is the probability that these positive feedbacks will kick in and will make the situation much more dire and they will become irreversible. So at the moment, we have every single reason from the science to do everything we possibly can to reduce our contribution of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I think actually what's interesting is that most of the climate scientists who are working on sea level rise now would say that what we are setting in train are very large changes in sea level. Now, they will not occur, these tens of metres ones that people are talking about, will not occur during or credibly unlikely to occur during this century. But nevertheless, what we do over the next 10, 20, 30 years will have implications for sea level rise that will have big impacts for centuries, if not millennia. So we are having, we are creating a change now that is fundamentally going to be changing the shape of, of the land around the planet. And I think we have to, you know, sometimes that brings back to us some, some humility about that, about what it is that we are actually doing. And is it reasonable that over the next 10 or 20 years, that we will have put so much greenhouses, so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that we will, we'll be making these sorts of levels of change. The issue of economic growth and whether we can actually have the, the ongoing improvement in our economy as we currently measure it, at the same time of responding to the challenge of climate change, is a really thorny issue. And actually, a lot of people will shy away from it. What I have done, and what colleagues and I have done, is try to say, if we look just simply at the maths of the climate science, and then we look at what the economists tell us you can achieve with a growing economy, we can show very clearly, you cannot put those two together. Now that is a, an unpopular message, but as scientists, our concern is not about being liked, it's whether people disagree with our message. And actually people that no one has come forward, that I'm aware of, who said that actually the analysis that we're doing is wrong. Now the, there are some important parts around this. Firstly, that we have to bear in mind that the arguments we are making are about the economic growth in the wealthier parts of the world. So we are making the point that it's appropriate for the poorer parts of the world to have some opportunity to increase their emissions in the short term, because that increases their welfare, and their wellbeing, and the quality of their lives. And they definitely, we should be, we should not be asking them to cut back on carbon emissions, if it curtails the quality of their lives. So in the short term, they will burn more fuel, more hydrocarbon fuel, in improving their welfare. But that means the emissions for wealthy parts of the world, like where we live, they need to come down even faster. And when you start to play out any equity dimension in this, and this is still is not really very fair, because the poor parts of the world will certainly be suffering much, much more of the impacts of climate change that has been caused by the wealthy parts of the world. That's definitely going to be the case. So this is still not equitable. But even a small element of equity means that the wealthy parts of the world have to dramatically reduce their emissions at levels that will be incompatible with economic growth as we currently measure it. But even within our own countries, we have to think, well, how does that play out? Because that sounds like a pretty dire message for many people. But a lot of people in our own countries actually are not particularly wealthy, do not have very large carbon footprints, you know, live in relatively small houses, which may be inefficient, but then it's the role of government of society to make sure those houses are made efficient. But a lot of people do not have currently use huge quantities of energy, even within our own countries. So it's the relatively wealthy, relatively small proportion of our population, which include people like me, who need to radically reduce emissions within our own countries, to allow the poorer people in our own nations not to have to put up with the die implications of rapidly reducing their energy consumption. In the long run, once you've got low carbon energy supply in place, from a climate change perspective, it doesn't matter how much energy you consume. There may be some very good arguments from a sustainability perspective, which take account of lots more other criteria. But from a purely carbon perspective, if your energy system is zero carbon, you can use as much energy as you want. The problem is it takes a long time to put that low carbon energy supply system in place. And in the interim, given a set carbon budget, we have to rapidly reduce our emissions. And that's why I come to this conclusion, which purely comes out of the maths on this, that we cannot reconcile the targets that we set up in terms of climate change with the emissions that go alongside continued economic growth. There's a whole suite of techniques, often called geoengineering, which are about reducing, either reducing emissions by sucking them out of the atmosphere, actively going there and sucking the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, or indeed about reflecting the sun's heat, the sun's energy, back out into space, one way or another. So there are two techniques for trying to control the climate, or trying to mitigate the effects of our carbon dioxide and so forth in the atmosphere. I think it's really important that we research these. So I'll make that very clear. We should be doing research on both negative emission technologies, technology that will suck the sea or that may suck the sea to the atmosphere, and solar insulation, where we actually insulate ourselves from some of the solar energy coming in from the sun. But what we must be really careful in when we do that is that we do not use that as any excuse not to radically reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is not, we can use this to avoid us having to reduce our emissions. We should do those things because they're experiments. At the moment they're in the Doctor Strange Loves category. We do not know if they're going to work. They are very experimental, they are very conceptual, and even if we can get them to work in the laboratory, whether you can scale them up in the time frame that we will actually have is a very uncertain question. And I don't think there will be people out there say we definitely can, but there are also very eminent scientists saying we definitely can't. So there is incredible uncertainty around these sets of technologies. So for a mature society, let's assume we are a mature society, it is important that we research them because we may need them if they work. But we must not rely on them working when we think about what we need to do today. And that is absolutely paramount that we do not cut back on any of our efforts today because we think there's this insurance policy that we can use in the future. Because it's not an insurance policy that will necessarily pay out. They may not work. They may have a lot of other negative implications that mean we couldn't adopt them anyway. It may be by the time you put them in place, other feedbacks on the planet will have occurred to such a level that actually they'll be irrelevant anyway. So I'm trying to get over how serious this is. It is absolutely important that we research them, but it's absolutely essential that we do our mitigation efforts today as if they do not exist because they may not exist. It is also really important to note that we are already, when we are developing our emissions scenarios, our ways of thinking about the future, virtually every single emissions scenario that is aimed at meeting our climate change obligations that we sign up to internationally. So this idea of keeping the rising global average temperature to below two degrees C. Virtually every single emission scenario that we have so far generated on that includes geoengineering. It assumes it automatically works. Now that's fine if one or two of the scenarios have that, but almost every single scenario has it. So already what we're finding is that geoengineering, even though it is still in a very experimental conceptual stage, that we are assuming it will work and we are embedding it in our scenarios and from those are what we go on to advise policy makers from. So it is already having a really very pernicious effect in trying to, in influencing what it is policy makers, what it is civil society, what it is that companies and other people are not directly involved in the science, understand about climate change. And if you talk to most of the policy makers, they're not aware that actually already in all of the advice they're getting from scientists, there's an assumption that we'll be able to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the future. That is already occurring today. I think many of the public are already reasonably well on board that climate change is a serious issue. They may not understand all the detailed science, they may not understand all the detailed impacts and certainly having some handle on the impacts would be very helpful if the public had a better idea of what those impacts would be and the systemic implications of them so that the impact is not just about what would happen to them but what would happen to other parts of the world and how they may come back to play, you know, to play out in the UK for instance in our own lives. But we're only really going to get any public engagement and agency if the public also have some handle on what it is we can do about climate change. What can they do as individuals? What can we do as individuals? And what can we do as institutions, as companies and as governments? So there are many tiers in which we can respond respond to climate change. But if the public think it's just the role of the government, why should the public particularly be concerned? Now I would argue that the role of the individual is really important. We should all be trying these things and most ideas that we come up with will probably not be particularly successful but some will be. And if other people then can take those up as well then we can quite quickly get a rapid change across our system that could bring about a big reduction in our energy consumption, a lot more impetus for politicians to drive and to retrofit agendas, to put in lots more funding towards lower carbon energy supply. So there's a whole suite of things that politicians could be doing but at the moment the public itself is not appearing to be doing very much other than consuming more energy and emitting more carbon dioxide. What we always have to think about with the media, the media particularly in the UK but maybe some other parts, many parts of the world as well perhaps, it will try to polarise all stories, all issues. It's a black issue and a white issue, it will always do that. And it's the role of us as a civil society to actually be more discerning in how we think about the media. You know, when the media peddles something, it's trying to sell whatever it is, you know, it's a newspaper or a TV programme, it's trying to improve its ratings. And therefore we have to be a bit more cautious about what it tells us. And then we read something else that says the opposite. And it's our job to do our best to say, well, probably it's some combination of those factors that have been discussed in the media. So we can't just think of the media the thing that informs us of the truth. It never has informed us of the truth and in some respects it's even worse at doing that now, at least any one particular bit of the media. But there's a huge wealth of information that's out there. So the great thing about the media, it provides a massive amount of wealth. But it is incumbent on us as citizens in a democracy to engage with that wealth of information that's there. So if we hear people saying wind turbines are rubbish because of this, this and this, and other people saying they'll solve all the world's problems because of whatever, then our job is to go in there, have a bit of a read about these things and make our own judgment on the information that's available. Now that's not necessarily going to be easy, but there is no easy way out of this. We have to be active, engaged citizens to resolve this problem. Other people aren't going to give us the perfect information. There is an important role for us as scientists to be honest and blunt about what comes out of our work. So we shouldn't spin, particularly science and scientists, should not spin our work one way or another. We have to be as direct and honest and use the appropriate language to explain what comes out of our analysis. Now it may well be that companies will spin it one way or another and the politicians may be. And to some extent that's not unreasonable. They're trying to change a message to stimulate action. But it's not the job of the scientific community. And I think we as a scientific community have actually not done particularly well in communicating our concerns, our reservations, directly to the public. So I think there was a real role for some scientists, for scientists that are happy to do it and are good communicators, to say exactly what is coming out of the science to the public. Not just always put that directly through the media, to find more direct mechanisms to try to engage directly with the public. Well actually for me personally that touches on some very important issues. I've very seriously thought about engaging in politics and for a series of reasons, some personal, but other ones to do with the fact I tried to make a judgment as to where as a single person I could make more useful contribution. And I thought in the end probably it would be sticking with the area that I'm most familiar with as a science, but I've had interest in politics for a long time. I think we have to be very careful about scientists setting up their own party. We need far more scientists, engineers, and we need a far wider portfolio of people involved in government, both within councils, within central governments, and within the EU and so forth. So I don't think anyone would disagree with that. We just don't have the mechanisms that seem to be encouraging a wider array of expertise to be involved in government. But undoubtedly at the moment there's a real role for science and scientists for quantitative understanding of issues to have more input and more engagement, probably directly as policy makers, but also directly to policy makers in government. And I think that certainly there's a role for scientists to get involved more than they have done, and if they are politically inclined and are aware of the other wealth of issues that politicians have to engage with, then they may want to consider standing. Whether that would help in the timeframe we have, whether that would particularly help engender a change in government's attitudes towards climate change, I'm less certain about. But I can only encourage people who have a genuine political interest, who are also scientists, to think, well, yes, please do consider getting involved directly with politics. But I do not want scientists to be making the decisions about where we should be going. They will make as many foolish decisions as do economists.