Understanding Emissions

A rapid guide to the sources of climate violence

Photo Credit: Ian Britton.

When it comes to emissions there are five major discussions: where, what, who, when and how? Where are emissions coming from? What level of emission cuts do we make? Who will make the emissions cuts? By when should those emission reductions take place? How will they be made?

Where: types of emissions

Our excessive emissions originate in five primary areas: energy, food, forests, transport and industry. These five sectors can be further condensed into two key sources: where we get our energy from, and what we use our land for.

Energy: transport, electricity and cement

Responsible for two-thirds of emissions, energy is the protagonist of climate change. The global economy is around 80-per-cent dependent on power from fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). The remaining power is largely made up of nuclear, hydroelectric and traditional biomass energy. Solar and wind energy account for a mere six per cent of global electricity generation, and less than two per cent of energy.

Coal-fired power station, Westphalia, Germany. Photo Credit: glasseyes

Our fossil-reliant economy burns over 10 billion tonnes of fossil fuels every year. When fossil fuels are burnt, whether in car engines or power stations, they emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. Out of all fossil fuels, coal has the highest carbon intensity, meaning that if you burn a tonne of coal (versus a tonne of oil), you’ll get a lot more carbon dioxide coming from coal. In theory, gas has a lower carbon footprint but, due to rising demand, natural gas is today responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than coal (1).

Fossil fuels also cause emissions through leakage. As gas is transported through tubes and pipes, it seeps out into the atmosphere. Nearly a third of Russia’s emissions come from leaking pipelines that emit methane (2). Abandoned oil wells are also significant sources of methane. Methane, when compared to carbon dioxide, has what scientists call a higher global warming potential: a measurement showing the ability of a gas to trap heat (3). Over a one-hundred-year time period, methane has a warming potential 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide (4).

With such potent pollutants seeping daily into the atmosphere, we need to rapidly end our dependence on fossil fuels, transforming our transportation, industrial and electric systems.

Although it is related to energy, cement production is generally accounted for as a distinct source. Cement is the core ingredient in concrete, the building block of many of our homes, offices, hospitals and bridges. Cement manufacturing is currently responsible for around five per cent of global emissions. The most common form of cement is made of limestone and aluminosilicate clay, which are mixed and baked in kilns. When exposed to heat, limestone’s calcium carbonate converts into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, in a process called calcination.

Land use: forests and food

Greenhouse gases are not only emitted but are also held in sinks, where they are processed or stored. These are essentially the concentration spots of the world’s stored carbon. There are many types of natural sinks. Oceans are the largest stores of carbon. Next comes soil, the deposit of three times more carbon than all the flora (trees and plants) on the planet. Forests, which inhale carbon dioxide, are also vital sinks.

Deforestation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Photo Credit: Rainforest Action Network

But many sinks are destroyed or disrupted through land use changes, such as forest clearance, urbanisation, mining, or road construction. When peatlands are converted to fields, for example, dried peat emits carbon. When forests are logged and razed to make way for plantations, their previous carbon-absorbent capacities are extinguished.

Land uses also carry emissions of their own. Today, farmed fields make up two-fifths of the world’s land surface, generating emissions through biomass burning, the fertilization of soils (nitrous oxide), the flatulence of livestock (methane), the emissions of farming machinery (carbon dioxide) and rice cultivation (methane), among others.

When all the diverse impacts on the land are added up, land use emerges as the second most significant contributor to climate change, accounting for around a third of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Who: emissions and authorship

The popular mythology of climate change holds that humanity as a whole is responsible, that all human beings are to blame. But we are not all equally responsible. Climate change is inseparable from global inequality. The history of carbon is one of unequal power obtained through unequal pollution.

Who is responsible? If we assign responsibility by country, the United States carries 40 per cent of world emissions debt. There are also ‘carbon creditors’: states whose share of CO2 emissions has been smaller than their share of global population, including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan (5).

A map of the world, adjusted for emissions responsibility. Photo Credit: Oxfam International.

In 1825, Britain was responsible for 80 per cent of all emissions from fossil fuels; by 1850, it was still responsible for 62 per cent (6). The ‘richest states’, despite having less than a fifth of global population, has been responsible for four-fifths of historical carbon emissions. Until 2000, the United States had emitted 27.6 per cent of historical emissions, while Nigeria had emitted 0.2 per cent and Brazil 0.9 per cent (7). Today, El Salvador’s average emissions per capita are 45 times lower than the Qatari average, and 15 times lower than the US average (8).

If we blame the companies where the emissions originated, then the figures look somewhat different: only 90 companies are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all emissions since 1750 (9). Half of those emissions were emitted after 1988, by which time the threat of climate change was widely known (10). One study found Exxon Mobil alone responsible for 3.22 per cent of global emissions between 1751 and 2010 (11).

Long Beach oilfield, California, 1920. Photo Credit: Los Angeles Public Library.

But what if we allocated the blame to individual consumers? Oxfam reports that the richest 10 per cent of the world population is responsible for half of global emissions (12). The poorer half of the world is responsible for a mere tenth. History shows that the richest one per cent have emitted around 175 times more than the poorest 10 per cent (13). The richest one per cent of Saudi Arabians have an emissions footprint 2,000 times greater than the poorest Malians (14).

Neither is every molecule of gas emitted into the atmosphere identical; there is a difference between superfluous and subsistence emissions (15). Some scholars have argued that a sixth of the global population should exempt from responsibility, and excluded from emissions counts, given their minimal level of resource use (16).

From every angle, a common fact emerges: not everyone has emitted equally. There are clear asymmetries, which spell out a few general rules of climate inequality:

The world’s richest peoples tend to use more energy, drive larger cars, heat larger homes, take more flights and buy more things. Around 80 per cent of the planet’s resources are consumed by a fifth of its population.

Inequality can exacerbate emissions. The more economically unequal a country, the higher its carbon pollution tends to be (17).

And as we shall see later on, these rules run parallel to the laws of unequal impacts:

Those most responsible for climate change are likely to be the most unaffected, and the most able to adapt.

Those least responsible for climate change are likely to pay the highest costs and experience the strongest impacts.

Why does it matter who has despoiled the global commons of our atmosphere? One explanation is that our failure to find a way of adequately allocating responsibility is a prime reason for inaction. At every single environmental summit, the main disputes arise between the poorest and richest states, over who shall shoulder what responsibility for reducing emissions and rectifying the consequences of climate violence.

This fight is not merely a technical disagreement, but a manifestation of a much deeper historical struggle. As Asad Rehman, a veteran civil-society representative at the climate negotiations, explains: ‘If you think the international climate negotiations are about the climate, you don’t know what they’re about. They’re fundamentally about political economy’ (18).

UN negotiators meet in Bonn, Germany. Photo Credit: UNFCCC.

Since power has historically been obtained partly through carbon pollution, it serves the interests of the powerful, from states to companies, to deflect attention from the origin of their wealth. From the genesis of international climate negotiations, the richest delegations have worked assiduously to water down commitments and dilute the language of agreements. The IPCC’s first assessment report was written with the help of 11 scientists from the oil and gas industry (19). To this day, policy summaries of international climate-science reports are vulnerable to immense political pressure from polluters (20).

Powerful states with big carbon debts have used all kinds of tactics to hustle other countries, scuttle accords, insert loopholes, and sideline principles of equity. Ultimately, the United Nations is a reflection an unequal world. The size of a country’s diplomatic corps, the weight of its national economy, and the strength of its lobbying power, all define a state’s ability to shape outcomes and evade consequences.

In the shadow of such inequality, summit after summit has yielded fitful progress. On some counts, we have regressed. The current architecture of the Paris Agreement, adopted in late 2015, relies on a system of ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’. In human terms, these are voluntary pledges to cut emissions made by individual governments, with little basis in science or justice.

The agreement is not binding, without firm obligations or penalties. In other words, it is little more than a collection of well-intentioned promises on paper. In 1991, during early negotiations around the initial UN Convention, a Pledge and Review agreement was proposed by Japan. It was swiftly dismissed, given a broadly held consensus that any agreement on climate change must firmly incorporate the historical responsibility of developed countries and contain legally binding obligations. As the former Indian negotiator Chandrashekhar Dasgupta would later observe: ‘[A]n approach that was summarily rejected as inadequate at the outset of the climate change negotiations, is being hailed today as a great advance! (21)’

The 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion, in contrast, was binding, committing the world to a complete phasing out of ozone-degrading substances. The Protocol has been dramatically successful in reducing the emissions of both chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs).

The international climate regime has also effectively eroded principles of international fairness. When the United Nations first started meeting around climate change in 1992, it acknowledged an important principle: developed countries should do more to mitigate climate change, because they were historically more responsible, and were currently more technologically and economically capable. But following historic lobbying from the richest states, UN negotiations have gradually stripped away these commitments to justice.

What: temperatures and targets

What is the limit of the global warming we can handle? The honest answer is there is no such limit. Already, the implications of our current levels of warming are devastating communities. Every step further is a step too far.

But politicians have agreed over the last years on two targets: staying below 1.5°C or 2°C of warming. These represent thresholds of danger, that have been contested for years. Although these round numbers were politically agreed, they were broadly based on key scientific studies that highlighted the risks of temperatures beyond those thresholds. One IPCC assessment considered that temperatures above 1.9°C start running the risk of ‘triggering the irreversible loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could trigger sea-level rises around seven metres (22).

Ultimately, each degree of warming, each decimal point, directly translates into a different degree of destruction. The higher the warming we are willing to allow, the higher the price of life we are willing to pay. Every deadline, every demand we make, every target we forsake, involves a particular calculation of loss. The longer we wait, the less action we take and the more we are willing to sacrifice. This is the fateful arithmetic of climate change: every number is in fact a code of life.

The question is not what level of climate change is dangerous, but rather, what level of warming will we accept? The debate around temperature is one around the acceptable level of devastation, the allowable volume of human pain. When we say that there is permissible warming (until 2°C), we may be tacitly justifying all the episodes of climate change-fuelled weather we are seeing around the world.

Scientists have warned that 2°C ‘could cause major dislocations for civilization’ (23). The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C is one of life and death: major gradients of tidal flooding, heat extremes, water shortages and falling crop yields (24). The margins of these gradients are everything. For island nations, it is the difference between being submerged or surviving as a state (25). For farmers, it is the difference between the semblance of a harvest, or immiserating destitution.

The 1.5°C guardrail is for example, the sole hope for preserving coral reefs, many of which need warming lower than 1.2°C to survive. Surpassing 1.5°C would destine large percentages of the earth’s surface to desertification (26).

But already 1.5°C is largely considered unachievable without an immediate wholesale transformation of the global economy. Even 2°C, a target previously deemed catastrophic, seems out of reach. Currently we are on track for at least 3.2°C by 2100, with other studies warning of even higher likely temperatures (27).

When: too little, too late

Climate change is often framed as a ticking clock, a countdown. But we continue to push back our parameters. In 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC declared, ‘If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.’ 2012 then passed, and leaders again warned of a final moment. The reality is that there is no deadline. Every ultimatum is ultimate. There will always be warming to prevent, there will always be devastation to diminish.

Nonetheless, a common fear that surrounds climate change is that we have left it too late. At some point we will reach the point of no return, entering a stage where the changes we have triggered in the atmosphere are no longer reversible. Our immense influence over the climate system will have transformed it into a system beyond our control. This idea is legitimate, rooted in a concrete idea of what is known as feedbacks.

The Earth is an interconnected system. From our soils, to our oceans, to our winds, everything is intertwined in the web of life. Feedbacks are the mutual interactions between the elements in our climate system. Such intimate connections make every ecosystem relevant: what occurs in the Arctic, Amazon and Antarctic is closely tied to the fates of the world’s peoples.

There are broadly two types of feedbacks: positive and negative. Positive feedbacks amplify an effect, while negative feedbacks diminish it. Those concerned about climate change are most worried about positive feedbacks that accelerate vicious cycles of greenhouse-gas release and warming.

Perhaps the most famous positive feedback involves albedo. Albedo represents the earth’s reflectivity — it is a measurement of a surface’s ability to reflect light. The properties of albedo mean that dark seas absorb far more sunlight than white icecaps, which reflect it. As ice melts, the albedo of the earth is reduced, meaning less light is reflected, and more heat is absorbed.

There are many other positive feedbacks, particularly involving the ocean. When we think about climate change we usually think about how hot it is, or about surface air temperature. But only a strand of the heat retained by the greenhouse effect warms the air; 90 per cent of the additional heat ends up in the oceans. The top few metres of the world’s oceans can store as much heat as our entire atmosphere. Without the immense storage power of our seas, surface temperatures would be 36°C hotter (28).

The ocean’s uptake of heat has doubled in the past two decades (29). Water expands when it heats, in a process known as thermal expansion. By absorbing so much heat, the temperature of the oceans rises. Rising ocean temperatures increase the risk of polar melting, which increases the amount of water in the ocean, which increases sea levels, that in turn lift ice formations, inviting in warmer water, causing further melting, and further sea level rises (30).

In the atmosphere, warmer air evaporates more water, leading to the greater presence of water vapour, the most prominent greenhouse gas. Hotter temperatures mean more forest fires, which burn more trees, emitting large amounts of CO2, and reducing the number of trees absorbing CO2. In some contexts, intense heat — leads to more rain — which leads to more plant growth — which leads to more kindle — which leads to stronger wildfires — which leads to further heat.

Crucial feedbacks are found in relation to greenhouse gas sinks. From Scandinavian mires, to Congolese peatlands, to clathrate hydrates stored under ocean sediments, as temperatures warm, many ecosystems face unprecedented carbon and methane release (31). The permafrost in particular contains 1.5 trillion tonnes of frozen carbon, twice as much as the atmosphere. Yet through rising temperatures, the permafrost is being defrosted, releasing methane gas from underground, which is in turn exacerbating global warming, which accelerates permafrost melting. Current trends suggest we could be on track for losing all the top three metres of permafrost across the world by the end of the century (32).

Human communities also shape feedbacks. Countries and communities who suffer failed harvests from droughts may try make up for the loss by expanding the amount of cultivated land. But expanding that land might require cutting down trees, further exacerbating the problem. As global temperatures rise, demand for air conditioning follows, increasing electricity demand, which requires greater fossil fuel combustion. As permafrost and icecaps melt, newly accessible lands can be opened to fossil-fuel extraction.

There are also negative feedbacks that dampen dynamics of warming. These ironically include the emission of aerosols, small particles that are thrown into the atmosphere during fossil-fuel burning. Another negative feedback is vegetation growth, caused by higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The surfeit of carbon dioxide has contributed to global greening, which has slowed the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere (33). Increased emissions and warming could be accompanied by plant growth in areas such as the Sahel and the Arctic (34). But these negative feedbacks only exert a minor influence, and are vastly outweighed by all the amplifying feedbacks.

Non-linear positive feedbacks are gaining influence in the earth system, and can only be reduced by lowering the Earth’s temperature. But, despite their importance, and the dizzying unpredictability they inject into the climate conversation, we continue to act as if climate change were a linear problem. Policy-makers often assume we can over-emit for a few decades but then recover lost ground through ambitious future reductions (35). This idea, known as overshoot, has been accepted as normal. It allows for the wholesale redefinition of climate targets and provides a tacit argument for procrastination.

The serious consideration of ‘overshoot’ measures reflect our dreams of mastery, conceiving the earth system as a static machine of inputs and outputs, easily fixable (36). But the world is not a machine we can bend to our will. Nature is not a mechanical or ‘balanced’ system. It is raucously unpredictable, defined by revolutionary changes and imbalances (37) We cannot rebuild a collapsed ice sheet or reverse-engineer a feedback.

Instead, the colossal climate system is characterised by inertia: it takes time to adjust; for impacts to ripple through. Warming is gradual: first the air warms, then the land, then the surfaces of the ocean, and then, slowly, the depths of the sea (38).

Any complex system like the planetary climate is defined by ‘ubiquitous delays’, where actions can often take time to translate into observable impacts (39). The impact of pollution lags behind its emission. Climate change has its own momentum. Emissions are cumulative, taking time to translate into change. The earth system adjusts to shifts over long time scales. The real scale of sea-level rise, acidification and atmospheric temperature produced by current emissions will reveal themselves only gradually (40).

The spate of climate extremes emerging today are responses to emissions from decades ago. Our present is the effect of atmospheric memory, a visible wound of historic trauma. We are seeing the warming of the 19th and 20th centuries unfold before our eyes.

The emissions we have already pushed into the atmosphere, the scars we have carved into the earth, have already set into motion unavoidable changes. The emissions of today are legacies to be written into the future, burdens dropped on future generations. It will take centuries for the full reaction to current emissions to be expressed.

The longevity of carbon’s memory makes it particularly insidious. What is emitted can only be drawn down over long time scales. Even if we were to freeze all emissions tomorrow, the impacts of unleashed climate change would extend hundreds of years into the future. Most of the gases in our atmosphere will be there in hundreds of years.

The inertia of the carbon cycle is coupled with human inertia: our inability as societies to respond rapidly to problems, burdened by the baggage of the past. The IPCC has previously warned of ‘the tendency for past decisions and events to self-reinforce, thereby diminishing and possibly excluding the prospects for alternatives to emerge’ (41).

Every investment made is a veiled stake in the future. Every factory opened, every pipeline laid down, every technology entrenched, cements a particular reality. Existing infrastructure commits the world to significant warming (42).

Warming, and deep changes to ecosystems are locked in (43). Some western Antarctic ice-sheet glaciers have gone beyond the point of return, facing unstoppable collapse (44). Even if emissions were to cease today, there is a chance that current levels of emissions commit us to reaching 1.5°C (45).

How: the carbon budget and the roadmap

Given the inertias and feedbacks of the systems, the main imperative is to avoid a situation where thresholds (tipping points) are breached. At this point, we will have lost the ability to stabilize the climate. Feedback loops, mechanisms beyond our control, will become protagonists of the earth system (46). An era of endless warming will have been set into motion. We will have ignited the engines of extinction.

Now if we want to prevent this situation, what do we have to do?

Given that the concrete problem is excessive emissions, the intuitive solution is emissions reduction. This is half-right but the problem is that huge emissions over decades have increased the concentration of gases in the atmosphere. It is this concentration, this accumulation of gases, that needs to decrease. Even if all emissions ended tomorrow, we would need time for carbon sinks to process and absorb carbon dioxide (47).

In any case, the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere must be rapidly reduced to zero, and then, beyond that, become negative. Negative emissions occur when the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed by the earth exceeds what is emitted.

Future emissions need to be very limited. Every single tonne of carbon dioxide or methane that we emit translates into a particular amount of warming in the atmosphere. Every single tonne of gas we preclude means an avoided burst of warming.

If we want to stay below the guardrail of 1.5°C, we only have a limited amount of carbon dioxide left to emit before we transgress our boundaries. That amount is typically called a carbon budget.

Our global economy emits around 40 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year. To stay below 2°C, we have a carbon budget left amounting to somewhere between 150 and 1,050 gigatonnes (48). These budgets cannot be exceeded if we are to avoid breaking the temperature goal.

How do we keep our carbon budgets in check? We need tremendous reductions of emissions, achievable through modifying our food system, shifting our energy sources, reconfiguring our modes of transportation, and transforming our economy. We will also have to preserve, restore and expand the sinks of emissions, by increasing the carbon retention of soil, reversing deforestation, and curtailing desertification. Emissions ultimately have to go negative: carbon has to be absorbed by ecosystems at greater rates than it is emitted.

Yet we are nowhere near this level of action. Instead, we are seeing some of the highest rates of carbon-dioxide growth on record (49). Many of the world’s richest states, who bear the largest responsibilities for climate action, are postponing previous targets and policies.

Literacy and ambition

If we are interested in ambition, we need to be able to detect it. Ecological literacy requires the ability to examine any climate proposal or action plan with a critical eye. Ultimately, we should always recall that every study will be a servant to its background assumptions and starting points. Models, as mathematician Cathy O’Neil writes, ‘are opinions embedded in mathematics’.

Take a relatively simple issue, such as how we define the starting point of global warming. The Paris Agreement, and the majority of the most prominent climate studies, use temperature baselines of 1875, referred to as ‘pre-industrial conditions.’ Yet the Industrial Revolution began earlier, in the mid-18th century. Keeping the baseline at 1875, instead of 1750, excludes over one hundred years of global warming. If we adjust models to incorporate the warming of those dozen decades, we have a much smaller greenhouse gas budget, with 40 per cent less carbon, and even less time than expected to tackle the problem (50).

Another concept of particular relevance to climate models is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Climate sensitivity is a function which estimates how the Earth’s climate system responds to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ECS is used to assess the reactions of the climate and, by proxy, to determine how severe climate change will be. These readings are then used to inform temperature targets and build carbon budgets. Depending on the ECS value we use, we can get very different results. If we extrapolate from the climate commitments of the Paris Agreement, the world may face warming between 3°C and 5°C, in accordance with diverse ECS readings (51). Recent research has suggested, however, that climate sensitivity could be far greater than the medians used for most modelling, potentially driving global warming past 7°C this century (52).

Similarly, whenever we see any statistics around emissions reductions, we need to be attentive to their origin. Since 2007, China has been the country with the highest level of emissions, having overtaken the United States. But what does it mean to say that particular emissions are Chinese? China’s rise to the top of emissions rankings coincides with its emergence as the world’s workshop. As the richest countries deindustrialized, China industrialized, becoming the world’s largest consumer and producer of energy. Nearly half of China’s total emissions in the period 2002–2008 were generated in the export sphere (53). But although those goods are consumed elsewhere, emissions involved in their production are registered as Chinese. As Dale Jiajun Wen observed, ‘[in] essence, China as ‘the kitchen, while the west is the dining-room’ (54).

Smokestacks, Suzhou, China. Photo Credit: Dai Luo.

Over recent years, many governments have proclaimed they have decoupled their emissions from growth. But studies show this ‘decoupling’ is misleading, for when imported materials are accounted for, rich nations have not reduced material consumption (55). Instead of progress on emissions reductions, in many of the world’s richest countries we have seen processes of carbon offshoring, where emissions are displaced through the importation of carbon-intensive goods (56).

These may seem like unnecessary technicalities, but ultimately, the functions we use, the definitions we delineate, the timelines we stake, and the assumptions we make, do much to outline the actions we consider acceptable or effective. Across many models, lavish assumptions and devious accounting tricks are inserted to allow for states to procrastinate on real action, and pursue slower trajectories, at the expense of those most vulnerable to climate violence.

We have left things way too late to continue adjusting our ecological knowledge to the status quo, instead of our adjusting our status quo to our ecological knowledge. We have simply run out of time for further excuses and vacillations. Consider the conclusions of these recent studies:

· We have only three years left before we fully deplete the carbon budget for 1.5°C (57).

· Delivering the goals of the Paris Agreement implies ending new fossil-fuel extraction. The amount of carbon locked within existing fossil-fuel development projects exceeds the amount of burnable carbon permissible under IPCC carbon budgets (58).

· To meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, fossil-fuel emissions need to be halved every decade, reaching zero by 2050. Net emissions from land use will have to dive to zero. Carbon-dioxide removal technologies will need to scale up massively to the extent that they will have to pull 5 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere (double what soil and trees do already) (59).

· Following international principles of equity, to stay under 2°C, rich nations will have to reduce emissions by 8–10 per cent every year. Such reductions are only realistically feasible through the reduction of economic activity: reversing economic growth and downscaling the economy (60).

· Staying below 1.5°C means phasing out all fossil fuels by 2030 (61).

· To keep temperatures below 2°C, no new gas, oil or coal-fired power plants can be built beyond 2017. At the time of writing, around 1,500 coal plants are currently under construction or under planning around the world (62).

With such gargantuan tasks ahead of us, the probability of safety certainly feels extremely small (63). It is likely that staying below 2°C, let alone 1.5°C, is only possible in models (64). There is simply no patient or gradual way of reaching these targets. One scientific paper outlined the impossibility of preventing a temperature rise of 2°C ‘within orthodox political and economic constraints’ (65). We essentially need to enact deep emissions cuts, eradicating deforestation, expanding low-carbon technologies, and restoring ecosystems to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Failure to comprehensively accomplish any of the above makes any of the guardrails virtually unreachable.

With every day that passes, emissions continue to pour, and windows of opportunity continue to close. Every delay is disastrous. The only clear answer is an acceleration of action. In a world of accumulating emissions and runaway impacts, speed is synonymous with survival (66).

Radical change is therefore inevitable, either by the atmosphere or by humans who depend on it. But one thing is clear: accepting the depth of our ecological crisis involves acknowledging the inadequacy of our dominant economic model.

These few words are an edited excerpt from the Memory We Could Be: Overcoming Fear to Create Our Ecological Future, published in September 2018 by New Internationalist Books and New Society Publishers. More information can be found here.

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4. Ibid, p 81.
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