This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

The post From “Green Growth” to Post-Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A quick glance at the headlines appears to confirm this gloomy assessment. From the rapid succession of tropical storms ravaging the Caribbean and the spate of unprecedented forest fires raging across southern Europe and the western US, to the deadly mudslides in West Africa and the worst monsoon flooding to hit South Asia in years, the past twelve months have seen an unusually high frequency and intensity of climate-related natural disasters. By late October, the year 2017 was on track not only to join 2015 and 2016 in the top-three hottest years on record, but  —  for the United States at least  —  also to become the most expensive ever in terms of extreme weather damage.

As the empirical evidence continues to mount, then, it is rapidly becoming clear that the threat of catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be considered a distant prospect. It is already here. In a highly symbolic development earlier this year, the so-called Doomsday Vault, built deep inside the Arctic to protect the seeds of billions of food crops from regional crises or environmental disasters, flooded after the permafrost in which it is embedded suddenly began to melt. As a Norwegian official explained, “it was not in our plans [when the Norwegian government built the vault 10 years ago] to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that.” This is how fast things can change in the space of a decade.

Now that the atmospheric and planetary implications of two hundred years of capitalist development and the associated systemic dependence on fossil-fuel combustion are beginning to manifest themselves in the form of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, it is slowly starting to dawn on large parts of the world population that climate change has now become a material force to be reckoned with in the present. A recent report by The Lancet finds that hundreds of millions of people around the globe are already being affected by the health consequences of rising temperatures, ranging from crop failures and undernourishment to heatstrokes and the spread of infectious diseases.

With the notable exception of Donald Trump, most world leaders are still formally committed — through the Paris Agreement of 2016 — to reducing carbon emissions fast enough to avoid anything more than an already very dangerous two-degree increase in global temperatures by 2100. In reality, however, they are doing nothing to avoid the worst-case scenario. The World Bank now warns that the planet is on course for a four-degree increase by 2100 — a scenario that, according to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, “is incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.”

Yet even the World Bank’s estimates are widely considered to be on the conservative side; many experts believe that a business-as-usual scenario would lead to something far worse. The International Energy Agency, for one, estimates that a continuation of current trends would set the world on course for a six-degree increase by 2100, rendering the vast majority of the planet entirely uninhabitable for humans — and, indeed, for most existing species. When global temperatures reached a comparable level at the end of the Permian, some 251 million years ago, 90 percent of species were wiped out.

And as if this were not enough reason to be deeply concerned, scientists are increasingly starting to raise the alarm about a number of other looming ecological crises as well. In November, a group of over 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed an open “letter to humanity” warning of the potentially disastrous consequences of widespread deforestation and the sixth mass extinction. To this, we should add the threats posed by the combination of water loss, soil and fish stock depletion, plastic waste and pollution. Even more acute, it seems, is the bee colony collapse that has been unfolding over the past decade, and the related “insectageddon” that — according to one recent study — has reduced Germany’s flying insect population by 75 percent over the past 27 years. The complex knock-on effects of these dramatic changes on wider ecosystems and agricultural production are not yet fully understood, but are likely to be highly disruptive, if not outright catastrophic.

As public awareness of these developments grows, many people find themselves riven by an increasingly acute sense of anxiety — about the state of the world we live in, about the self-reinforcing disorder that appears to have grabbed a hold of late-capitalist society, about the relentless death drive of global capital that has sent humanity careening towards the abyss of ecological self-destruction. The resultant social malaise, fruit of a generalized sense of helplessness wrought by neoliberalism’s decades-long assault on all expressions of popular power and collective agency, has penetrated deep into the body politic. “No one is in control,” the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once noted. “That is the major source of contemporary fear.”

The truth is that a dystopian end-times imaginary has been stirring in the collective subconscious for some time already. The radical theorist Mark Fisher, who passed away earlier this year after a protracted battle with depression, called this condition capitalist realism  —  or the widespread conviction that, even if the systemic imperative of infinite growth on a finite planet is pushing our species headlong into extinction, there is simply no alternative to the present order of things. This has left us in a situation in which, as Frederic Jameson famously put it 15 years ago, it has become “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

The reign of capitalist realism appears to be further entrenched by the fact that, in some respects, we are already living through this epochal denouement. The “end of the world” is now unfolding before our eyes as a grim spectacle, widely represented in popular culture and screaming at us daily from increasingly alarmist newspaper headlines. “The catastrophe,” Fisher wrote of Children of Men, that masterwork of contemporary dystopian cinema, “is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.”

In the wake of the disturbing political developments of the past year, with the rise of Trump and Brexit throwing the liberal postwar order into profound disarray, the emergent realization that we are already living through the catastrophe now seems to loom increasingly large. Last October, for instance, when hurricane Ophelia unleashed its fury upon Ireland (the farthest north that such a major tropical tempest has ever been recorded), and a thick layer of sand swept up by the storm over the Sahara combined with smoke and debris from the Spanish forest fires to shroud the financial district of London in an eerie yellowish hue, social media feeds across the UK lit up with references to the impending apocalypse. Much of this was sardonic, to be sure, but the millenarian irony clearly resonated with the apocalyptic zeitgeist that has come to define the popular mood of the early twenty-first century.

Those in power are not impervious to this cultural climate of socio-ecological catastrophism. In fact, the rich seem to be keenly aware of what is coming their way, and are already preparing for the worst. One particularly telling indication of growing elite anxiety is the spread of survivalism — or “doomsday prep” — among America’s ultra-wealthy elite. Earlier this year, an investigation in The New Yorker revealed how libertarian Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires like Peter Thiel of Paypal are rapidly losing faith in the ability of political leaders and the democratic system to keep the situation under control. In response, they have been buying up luxury condos inside converted nuclear missile silos in remote rural areas and self-sufficient boltholes in New Zealand to ride out the institutional breakdown and civil disorder that are likely to accompany a possible nuclear holocaust or climate apocalypse, in what the Financial Times has called “the latest craze for a global super-rich hedging against the collapse of the capitalist system.”

With this, we arrive at the crux of the problem: the fact that not everyone will be equally vulnerable to the unfolding catastrophe. Like every other crisis under capitalism, the climate crisis — and the ecological crisis more generally — will have profound social and political implications. As in finance, the costs of the crisis will be borne overwhelmingly by those who are least responsible for causing it, while those most to blame will likely find creative ways to escape the worst consequences — at least for a while. Long before rising sea levels, scorching temperatures and civilizational collapse leave vast stretches of the planet uninhabitable, the super-rich will seek to establish a regime of global eco-apartheid to manage the resultant disorder and shield themselves from the inevitable mass migrations and debilitating social unrest, hiding behind a rapidly expanding authoritarian complex of militarized police, mass surveillance, drone warfare, concentration camps and border walls.

Climate change, then, cannot be understood in isolation from its social, political and economic context, including the structural violence of the neoliberal shock doctrine, the systemic logic of extractivism, the asymmetric integration of the Global South into the world economy, the concentrated power of the fossil fuel industry, the investment decisions of the big banks and financial institutions, or the deep-seated inequalities of class, race and gender that lie at the heart of capitalist society. As the environmental historian and critical geographer Jason Moore has forcefully argued, there is “a profound interconnection between biophysical transformations and biophysical problems and crises, on the one hand, and the central institutions of the capitalist world economy, on the other  —  of financial markets, of large transnational firms, of capital intensive agriculture.” The ecological crisis, in short, is inextricably bound up with the general crisis of late capitalism.

It follows that the central focus of action should not just be on reducing global carbon emissions, but on confronting the underlying asymmetries in the balance of power and making sure that those who benefited most from the extraction, sale and combustion of fossil fuels end up paying for the burden of adaptation and the worldwide transition to a renewable energy future. Crucially, this fight cannot be waged on the basis of failed multilateral negotiations, elusive technological fixes or flaunted emission reduction targets; it inevitably necessitates a broad-based popular struggle for climate justice —  involving not only radical action to mitigate the worst effects of global warming, but also extensive technology transfer and the payment of sizeable and sustained reparations for the enormous climate debt that the wealthy citizens of the Global North owe the poor of the North and the South alike, especially the Indigenous peoples who have been at the front-lines of the struggle against extractivism since the days of European colonialism.

It has long since become clear that piecemeal reform and corporate techno-utopianism will do little to resolve the structural drivers behind the present ecological calamity. As one recent study has shown, 71 percent of global emissions can be traced back to the activities of just 100 mega-corporations. If anything, this indicates that we are confronted not by a Malthusian crisis of over-population, as many liberal environmentalists in the Global North continue to argue, but by a clear-cut Marxian crisis of unbridled over-accumulation, which has brought about an “irreparable rift” in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature. What we are living through, in short, is the Capitalocene — a distinct geological epoch in which the capitalist formula of “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the planet’s biophysical environment, to the point where the survival of the capitalist system has come to constitute an existential threat to the survival of humanity as a whole.

The only sustainable solution now lies in a profound transformation of the global political economy and the market-based social relations that underpin it — especially in the way we produce, distribute and consume things to meet human needs, wants and desires. While we can no longer reverse climate change or completely undo ecological destruction, we can still mitigate the worst consequences, adapt to the inevitable changes and avoid wholesale eco-civilizational collapse. But doing so will require a veritable revolution in the underlying production, energy and transport systems, which will inevitably involve an epic showdown with the concentrated power of capital, including not only the fossil fuel industry but also global finance, industrial agriculture and the aviation and automotive industries, which will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privilege to poison the soil, oceans and atmosphere and make life impossible for the rest of us. Clearly, if we leave it up to them, the response will amount to nothing but empty talk and endless tinkering at the margins.

This seventh issue of ROAR Magazine does not pretend to offer any concrete policy proposals, nor a detailed roadmap for the coming clean energy transition — even if such interventions will certainly be very necessary. Rather, the aim is to shed further light on the profoundly social and political nature of the climate crisis, and to emphasize the importance of rebuilding popular power from below. Taken together, the contributions collected on these pages set out to problematize some of the ideological assumptions of the mainstream narrative, which completely overlooks the systemic nature of the problem, continuing to prescribe highly individualized solutions, market-based technological fixes and the further commodification of nature in place of the transformative social change the world so desperately needs.

Against these neoliberal delusions, we must stand firm and insist: the real catastrophe is capitalism, and the only acceptable outcome system change, not climate change. As unrealistic as this may seem from the dominant perspective of capitalist realism, the future of our species — and that of countless others — now depends on it.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by Zoran Svilar

The post Climate change: Living Through the Catastrophe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In pre-industrial times, cities were still the cores of political power and the economy, but less so. More people lived and worked in the surrounding countryside. That trend has been steadily reversing since industrialization, with more and more of the global population flowing into the urban centres of the world. There’s no question that cities are important.  Today, cities have a new stage on which to flaunt their power: the fight against climate change. This post is all about why climate action in cities will be where the global fight against climate change is won or lost. Cities will determine our collective future.

Just a quick side note: while underlining the importance and power of cities, I don’t want to make it seem like rural areas are not important. Just under half the world’s population still lives in rural areas, the countryside still provides almost all the food and natural resources that make life possible, and of course geographically, rural areas account for the majority of the planet. The rural is where most of the world’s animals live and is made up of all the beautiful and vital habitats that we rely on for so called ‘ecosystem services’ – things natural habitats do that we need, such as powering the water cycle, cleaning the air and making soil. If you happen to live in the country, no one is saying your part of the world isn’t important any more. Okay?

Now, with that out the way…

1. Most people live and work in cities – and that’s increasing

A steady trend of urbanisation has been going on for all of human history, which is now accelerating. In 2009 we passed an important milestone, when over half the world’s people lived in cities and towns for the first time. Now it’s 54%, and the urbanisation is happening quickest in Asia and Africa (while richer countries already went through this phase and are now pretty steady). The UN expects almost 70% of the population to be urban by 2050. That’s a major infrastructure challenge in itself. People tend to move to the city searching for work and a better standard of living. Yet fast urbanisation without proper planning leads to slums and all kind of issues like overcrowding, pollution, increased sickness and crime.

As most businesses are based in cities, they are of course the commercial hubs of the world, accounting for the vast majority of the world’s economic activity. Just the 600 wealthiest cities accounts for 60% of GDP today. That’s likely to remain, but the composition of the 600 will shift, with many Chinese cities joining the club over the next few years.

By 2050, 70% of people will live in cities. How can we stop #cities from becoming #inequality traps? Read https://t.co/6bZKEou3Jg pic.twitter.com/lVmljfCTIT

— OECD (@OECD) November 2, 2016

2. Cities use the most energy and resources, and produce the most waste

As they have the most people and economic activity, it stands to reason cities would also have the biggest environmental impact. Their ‘ecological footprints’ – the area of productive land needed to produce their resources and absorb their waste – are huge. Like a mega-organism, they ‘consume’ vast quantities of food, water, resources, energy and products, and expel huge quantities of rubbish, dirty water and pollution. It’s a linear, unsustainable model.

How carbon-heavy cities are varies massively around the world. What’s not so obvious is how much cities can diverge from their home countries. For example, emissions are higher per person in London than in New York City, even though the UK emissions per person are way smaller than the USA. This blog post has a clear representation of the carbon emissions in several major cities. Just use it as a rough guide though – it’s based on population x emissions, but the emissions are from self-reported data between 2005 and 2010 which probably doesn’t include embedded emissions (more on that in another post).

The importance of #climatechange management in #cities. different carbon footprints #UNHABITAT world cities report pic.twitter.com/7Pg3lQkDw2

— Alis Daniela Torres (@alisdaniela) July 11, 2016

3. Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change

So where does climate change come in? It’s already in the picture, since climate change is affecting people and the economy, both of which are cantered in cities, and climate change is affected by carbon emissions, which are also cantered in cities.

But there’s an even more direct link. Cities are very vulnerable to climate change because so many of them are on the coast or a big river. This means rising sea levels threaten to flood them. Major cities such as New York, Mumbai and Shanghai are particularly at risk. In most cases the water can be kept out with barriers, but they are hugely expensive and that is public money that could be spent on education, health or other infrastructure. London’s Thames Barrier will need to be upgraded to keep out storm surges from the river as climate change leads to sea level rise and more extreme weather.

Coastal Cities and climate change, how ready are American cities? @IWAHQ #waterwisecities https://t.co/S2RddhkwpQ

— Lisa Andrews (@LisaMAndrews_) February 20, 2017

4. The city is the perfect scale for catalysing change

We need action at every scale to successfully address climate change: from the global to the personal, and everything in between. But smaller or bigger scales are more difficult. Working at the level of the household can sometimes feel insignificant, like a tiny drop in the ocean. Some people find it hard to get motivated about change at such a small scale. On the other hand, action at the national level is certainly significant but it’s intimidating. States are big and slow and full of bureaucracy. It’s hard for one person to have an impact, or to feel like they can. And yet cities sit in the middle as the Goldilocks scale. They are big enough to matter and small enough to change. Also, city mayors are often more respondent to local needs, including climate adaptation, than national politicians, because they’re closer to the grassroots.

It may be simple, but I actually think this is the most important point of the 7.

Hanover Action launch a community-based One Planet Living action plan Sat 4th March, 1.45pm Please RT https://t.co/fdFLJmckvO #OneHanover pic.twitter.com/ZFVBBMMGdS

— Hanover Action (@HanoverAction) February 25, 2017

5. National contributions to the Paris Agreement aren’t enough

The historic Paris Agreement which passed into force in 2016 and requires all countries to work together to keep global warming under 2 degrees, will only be successful if cities step up to the plate.

All the national action plans submitted so far add up to limiting climate change to around 2.7 degrees – and that’s if they’re followed to the letter with no backsliding. The 0.7 gap is expected to be filled by “non-state actors” which is weird policy speak for cities and big business. To this end, cities have taken an unprecedented central place in the big global sustainability agreements of the last two years, being specifically highlighted in the Paris Agreement and also the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. (If you have no clue what those are, you’re not alone. They’re not very well communicated to the public. I’ll be discussing them both in later posts).

.@CloverMoore of Sydney and Vancouver's @MayorGregor speak on how cities can collaborate to fulfill the Paris Agreement #Cities4Climate pic.twitter.com/aF3tbTSP1N

— C40 Cities (@c40cities) December 1, 2016

6. National government leadership is unreliable

It also makes sense for activists and climate campaigners to focus on creating change at the city scale because national governments are so unreliable on this issue.

We do need their support, but sadly we can’t rely on getting it. In America, Trump is desperate to undo years of climate progress, and is already starting to dismantle Obama’s climate policies. In the UK, it’s not politically correct to admit climate denial, but the Tories just pay it lip service while ignoring the issue and favouring fracking over renewables.

National governments are very partisan, with each new administration making dramatic policy U-turns, which is not good for environmental policies, which are longer term by their very nature. Certainly longer than a government term of 4 or 5 years. To clarify: we definitely do need national policy, but it’s unstable. Cities on the other hand, are less dramatically partisan and so more stable partners in the climate battle.

“Energy experts give Trump the hard truth: You can’t bring coal back” by @climateprogress https://t.co/ecCJf3wNVv
turn our backs on future?

— Elaine Vincent (@bndforcollege) February 14, 2017

7. Climate action in cities is already leading the way

And the other good news is that cities are already leading the way. American, European and Asian cities are all speeding ahead of their respective countries. Copenhagen is totally bossing the transition, with an action plan to go fully carbon neutral as early as 2025. American cities and states, including New York, California, San Diego and LA, have proclaimed their plans to continue with bold climate action in open defiance of Trump’s Big Coal agenda. China is planning to start building ‘forest cities’ where skyscrapers are blanketed with trees, shrubs and plants in order to clean up air pollution and absorb carbon. Paris has passed legislation, backed by the mayor, to encourage anyone to plant urban gardens throughout the city.

Thanks to the action of city leaders @MarkWatts40 is "sticking with the optimists" on climate change https://t.co/ec7b0hfpwb #cities4climate pic.twitter.com/Z3CVEAbpSU

— C40 Cities (@c40cities) March 1, 2017

And in our digitally connected age, cities have an unprecedented opportunity to connect and collaborate. Networks are springing up, such as the C40 cities initiative, a network of 90 cities accounting for 25% of global GDP and 1 in 12 people, which are committed to going zero-carbon in line with the Paris Agreement. Similarly, the Compact of Mayors, supported by the UN, is for climate leader mayors of an ever growing list of cities to convene and help each other respond to climate change.

Conclusion

In conclusion I’d like to draw your attention to the final episode of Planet Earth 2, the Attenborough nature documentary series so exquisitely produced that some refer to it as “Earth porn”.

The final was my favourite episode, because it made me think and gave me hope.

Each episode had featured a major habitat or biome, like deserts, rainforests, mountains. The final one was on the “newest habitat on Earth” – cities. I thought it was a beautiful and thought-provoking idea to describe cities as habitats. The episode showed how full of natural life our cities already are, and ended on an even more exciting note: how biodiverse they could be if we redesigned them to be eco cities. Imagine what they’d be like if every building had roofs and walls alive with plants and wildlife.

Just finished Planet Earth 2, 'Cities'. Just amazing. And a profound message for all: https://t.co/lFRPL8R6WT

— Kate Pain (@katepain) December 27, 2016

China is planning its first Forest City for early 2018. Perhaps we should all be taking a leaf from their book, and adding more leaves to our concrete jungles.

What do you think is the most important thing about cities from a climate perspective? Have you been involved in any community climate action, or would you like to? Let me know in the comments.

The post 7 Reasons Climate Action In Cities Is Our Ultimate Lifeline appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Yay for the Paris Agreement!… Wait. What actually is that?

If you’ve read anything much about climate issues, you’ve probably come across the term ‘Paris Agreement’ – aka ‘Paris Accord’, ‘Paris Climate Treaty’, ‘Paris Climate Deal’ or simply the ‘2015 climate deal’. Like a lot of climate lingo, it isn’t immediately obvious. This post will explain the Paris Agreement in simple terms. As a global diplomatic agreement which was 40 years in the making, there’s a lot of intricacies that we won’t be able to cover here. But this is the gist of it.

So, enough chit chat. What actually is it?

The Paris Agreement is a binding international agreement, led by the UN, that the global community will work together to limit climate change to less than 2 degrees of warming, compared to pre-industrial levels.

2 degrees has long been seen as the safety limit, above which climate change would be likely to spin out of control. The Agreement states that we will also “pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees” – a much tougher goal, but a much safer and fairer one (more on that later). Over 100 nations have ratified the Agreement, covering over 75% of global carbon emissions. The Agreement was hashed out at an UN conference in December 2015 and came into force on 4th November 2016.

It’s seen as such a big deal because the UN has been calling conferences on how to deal with the threat of climate change for the best part of four decades, and they’ve always failed, until this one. There’s so many vested interests and conflicting views and different national priorities that it’s next to impossible to get everyone to agree. While there are many weak spots, the Agreement is a big achievement because it’s the world’s first global and binding climate deal.

The key highlights

Apart from the headline goal of staying below 2 degrees, here’s some of the key highlights.

(If you want to check out the official text, be my guest. To be honest it makes The Silmarillion look as readable as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so good luck).

• We’ll be effectively net zero carbon by 2100

  There’s a statement that carbon emissions must be no higher than absorption by the environment by 2100, but no clear deadline for when fossil fuels must be phased out. This could mean carbon pollution continues far in to the future, as long as there are enough forests and other natural ecosystems to absorb it (known as ‘carbon sinks’). Only problem is, by the end of the century is waaay too far away. To limit warming to 2C we must keep around 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground – and of course even more for the tighter 1.5C target. Still, this is the first time we’ve had a global target to get to a post-carbon society.

• We’ll ramp up ambition every five years

  There is going to be a review mechanism, where every five years the world’s nations will ”take stock” of their collective progress, and ramp up climate commitments, with the first official one in 2023. This is crucial because so far the national climate action plans are only sufficient to limit global warming to 2.7C – a dangerous level. This was a major sticking point, with large developing nations – notably India and China – opposed to ramping up their contributions so soon. It’s good news this is included in the text. Also, nations are “encouraged” to revisit their climate plans in 2018, before they take effect in 2020.

• Irreversible climate damage gets lip service

  The thorny issue of loss and damage is included – kind of. The most climate-vulnerable states have been adamant that they will suffer some irreversible impacts that cannot be mitigated nor adapted to. For example, losing part of their country to sea level rise, mass deaths and forced migrations, the inability to continue growing a staple crop. The have passionately, and rightly, demanded they must have some form of compensation from the rich nations for these losses – in addition to the finance mobilised for mitigation and adaptation (which is for things like renewable energy and flood defences).

  The rich nations, especially the USA, have opposed these calls. The American government have been terrified of any language denoting legal liability, because if the deal leaves American companies or the American government open to being sued on climate grounds, the climate-denying corporate-loving Republicans will block the deal and we’ll all be screwed. The final draft includes the principle of loss and damage and says something must be done about it, but clarifies this action cannot be through legal liability. This isn’t fair. But it is pragmatic.

• Target confirmed for $100 billion in yearly climate finance

  As previously agreed, the rich countries will provide at least $100 billion a year of climate finance to the developing world, in a ”transparent” manner. How exactly this will be done is still being worked out. It’s very important that the word ”transparent” was used, but it should have gone further. This was a sticking point in the negotiation, as many of the richer nations claimed that nearly $60 billion had already been mobilised, but many developing nations claimed this was not true. They said the calculations were not clear, and that the figure includes loans and the double-counting of finance already provided for other reasons. This is a valid objection.

  I know for sure that my own county, the UK, was doing this. Cameron’s government pledged to redirect our whole aid budget to climate finance. As many of the countries that would be receiving standard development aid are the same ones that will be getting climate finance, our pledge amounts to almost nothing. It’s highly likely other countries are doing the same and it’s totally out of order.

  The rich countries have the historical responsibility for causing this mess – the least we can do is help poorer countries transition and adapt. Anyway, this point is right to be included but it should be stronger.

• Only voluntary action until 2020

  The Agreement “encourages” voluntary climate action in the years running up to 2020– when this deal will take effect. It is not good enough to wait until then before doing anything, so I sincerely hope countries start early. The good news is momentum is still running high from getting the Agreement into force within a year, which is earlier than expected. The text “decides” (sounds better than the other funky verbs flying around the document) that the period 2016-2020 will see a “technical examination process” around clean technology transfer. That sounds promising, if vague.

• We need cities and businesses to step up to the plate

  The Agreement “urges” nations to work with “non-state actors” (anything that isn’t a whole country, e.g. a city, county, business, university, community group, NGO etc))to ramp up action prior to 2020, and beyond.  It also looks like non-state actors are going to be relied on to bridge the gap between what the national climate plans can achieve, and what we need to stay under 2 degrees. The good news is 450 cities made climate pledges at the 2015 climate summit. 165 local governments have pledged to get to net zero carbon by 2050, and 90 major cities (covering 25% of world GDP) have joined the C40 climate action program.  I’ll write more about that in other posts as it deserves more attention. Spoiler: Copenhagen wins most ambitious prize, pledging to completely decarbonise by 2025!

https://twitter.com/c40cities/status/818842356665450496/photo/1

• It’s legally binding. Sort of…

  Although the Agreement is described as legally binding, it’s actually only true to a certain extent. Basically, it is now international law that every country which has ratified the Agreement has to submit a climate action plan every five years, and each plan has to be more ambitious than the last. Great. But here’s the thing: actually implementing the plans is not a legal requirement. As the plans will be submitted to international scrutiny at the regular UN climate summits, the idea is that the motivation to be seen as a climate leader rather than being shamed on the world stage will be enough to get everyone to comply. I’m not convinced. But unfortunately several countries – including China and the USA, the two largest emitters – promised to reject the deal if specific emissions cuts were legally binding. So what we got was an imperfect compromise.

How is it different to other attempted climate deals?

It’s novel in two main ways.

One, it covers all countries in more or less the same way, while previous agreements (such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997) had two distinct categories for developed and developing nations, with only the developed ones being required to make emissions cuts. That approach became unfeasible when the larger developing countries started supercharging their pollution. It also gave sceptics in the rich countries a great excuse to drag their heels. (“Not fair! Why should we do anything when China doesn’t have to?”).

Two, the process started with each country being asked to produce  national climate action plans, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs – what a mouthful!) which together forms the bones of a global action plan to actually implement the Agreement. The idea got a lot of buy-in from countries that may have resisted the process otherwise, and it allows plans to be nationally relevant (e.g. many poorer countries said they’d plant forests, rather than cutting down on their small and vital energy use). However the problem with the ‘what can you do’ as opposed to the ‘this is what you need to do’ model, is that when all the plans were in, they didn’t add up to enough to stay below 2 degrees. Scientists who analysed the plans said if they’re all implemented to the letter (in itself a big if) then we’re on track for 2.7 degrees of warming. Ouch.

So, will it be effective or not?

It’s hard to say. The good news is, this is the closest we’ve ever got to a workable global action plan. All the major polluters are on board, climate action is getting more mainstream every day, and the renewable energy revolution is snowballing so fast it’s probably got a critical mass of its own now.

The bad news? We’ve already hit 1C of global warming, and even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, there’s a good chance that could climb to 1.5C – or even more. The reason is because carbon doesn’t just do its business and then piss off, it hangs out in the atmosphere for ages – up to a century. There’s a delay between carbon pollution and the climate change it causes. Essentially, we’re always dealing with the impacts of what we did about 50 years ago.

Staying below 2C is a HUGE challenge. But it is physically possible. Although the climate is already changing, but we still have time to avoid that worst bits.

The other good news is that many of the actions needed to reach net zero carbon are also good for society in other ways. There’s plenty of win-wins and win-win-wins to be had. The rest of the posts on this blog explore those opportunities!

Here’s some quotes from the experts

I’m a climate blogger, not a scientist or NGO leader. Let’s hear from some people who should know.

“This marks the end of the era of fossil fuels. There is no way to meet the targets laid out in this agreement without keeping coal, oil and gas in the ground,”
– May Boeve, Executive Director of 350.org

 

“We have witnessed something incredible today. Finally, we can feel hopeful that we are on a path to tackling climate change,”
– Tim Flannery, scientist and conservationist, The Climate Council

“It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
– James Hansen, climate scientist and author

Quick note on that one: sadly, he’s probably right. So it’s lucky that fossil fuels won’t be the cheapest energy source for much longer.

“The fact that we got an agreement with a temperature target, with a commitment to a direction of travel, with a commitment to improving and enhancing the financing that’s going to be necessary to meet that direction, I’m pretty optimistic about it,”
– Nigel Arnell, climate scientist at University of Reading

What’s next for the Paris Agreement?

The Paris Agreement is actually ahead of schedule. It passed into force less than a year after the original agreement, which was faster than anyone expected. A promising start! But what next?

There was a climate summit in November 2016, in Marrakech, Morocco, and there will be one each year (next up is May 2017 in Bonn, Germany). But the next big one won’t be until 2018. Until then, the aim of the game will be to iron out all the vague language in the Paris Agreement and decide on rules for transparency and reporting. This administrative stuff will be known as the ‘Paris Rulebook’. It’s not very sexy (unless you find legislative small-print sexy!?) but it’s bound to have important repercussions for its overall effectiveness.

As the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions elegantly puts it:

“In the long evolutionary arc of the U.N. climate effort, Marrakech was an important transitional moment, pivoting from the years of negotiation that produced the Paris Agreement to a new phase focused on implementation.”

Bring on the implementation!

Featured image: Celebrating the signing of the Paris Agreement. Credit: UNclimatechange / Flickr, Creative Commons. 

The post What Actually is the Paris Agreement on Climate Change? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s mainly about the atmosphere and polar bears and carbon, right? Well, not really. I mean yes – it is about those things, but mainly it’s about human rights and politics. If that doesn’t make immediate sense to you, then this post is for you. Here’s why climate change is about human rights:

• Responsibility for climate change, its impacts and the capacity to adapt to it are unequal
• Climate change deepens every existing social inequality
• Climate action has huge potential to enhance equality and human rights

Not convinced yet? Let’s explore each of those points…

Responsibility, impacts and capacity are uneven

Responsibility for climate change

The roots of climate change go back to the drawn of the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off in the UK in the late 1700s and quickly spread around North Western Europe and then the world.
The discovery of coal, and later oil and gas, changed everything.

These three fossil fuels are fossilised organic matter from millions of years ago, hugely energy-dense, which release their pent up energy when burned. Being made from ancient dead plants and animals, they are full of carbon, and when burnt, that carbon goes into the atmosphere. The extra carbon acts like an insulating blanket, blocking heat from radiating out to space, making the Earth warmer. This is known as the “greenhouse effect” and is vital to life. Without it we’d be absolutely freezing, like a planet sized fridge-freezer. But when it comes to blankets, it’s not just ‘the more the better’ is it? You get too hot. And that’s what’s happening now.

Related: Understand Basic Climate Science With These 5 Beautifully Simple Videos

Europe and later the other rich nations were blazing it up for decades before poorer countries came on the fossil-burning scene, and by the time industrialization took off in the rest of the world (which is still ongoing) we had already chucked enough carbon into the sky to start changing the Earth’s entire climate. Until the 1960s the top emitters were all rich industrialized nations (with the UK at the top of that list for roughly a century after kicking off the Industrial Revolution). In the mid 20^th century China and Russia joined the big boys of carbon pollution. Today China is the biggest emitter, but it’s important to remember that:

• They have well over a billion people, roughly one seventh of the world’s population
• They manufacture a large proportion of the world’s goods

If you put it in per person terms instead, the biggest emitters are all rich countries, with Australia and the USA topping the list.

See this 49 second visualisation of historical emissions around the world to get a sense of it. (and check out this epic interactive version on Carbon Brief).

The point is, over the last 200-odd years, the vast bulk of the carbon emissions have come from the rich countries – Europe, North America, Australia, Japan. Apart from Japan they happen to be Western and white.

Impacts of climate change

The impacts of climate change are also uneven across the globe, and across each country. The most severe climate impacts are expected across tropical regions – which happen to be in Africa, Asia and South America – as they are already hot and stormy. The more arid parts of Australia and USA will also be seriously affected by heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires. Low-lying and coastal areas will be worst hit by rising sea levels – there are small low-lying island states which are literally already disappearing under the sea. Most of the countries hit first and worst by climate change are poor, and all the poorest regions of the world are expected to have very severe impacts.

Map of the Day | Impact of global warming on crop yields | UN Climate Change report released http://t.co/Lxq42nrrsI pic.twitter.com/R8EPZ3taPw

— Dr Steve Millington (@DrSDMillington) March 31, 2014

It’s worth noting that even at the catastrophic 4 degrees of warming that sees most of the world turn into a desert or a floodplain, the UK remains “habitable”. That doesn’t mean we’d get off scott-free, it would still see floods, droughts, sea level rise, water shortages and food prices rocketing. (And those impacts would be mostly borne by the British poor – who else?) But it would be an oasis of liveability compared to the rest of the world.

Global map of climate change impacts – physical, biological & human http://t.co/RyicjZ4h4D #IPCC #AR5 pic.twitter.com/ZBsWNBfZw0

— EGU (@EuroGeosciences) March 31, 2014

It’s also worth noting that even 2 degrees of warming, which politicians have agreed as the line in the sand, would still be an absolute disaster for Africa. Yeah, looks like the West is screwing over Africa yet again. Shameful.

The point is, the countries that have done the absolute least to cause climate change, and benefited the least from industrialization, are expected to be some of the hardest hit. If that isn’t injustice, I don’t know what is. But wait, there’s more…

Capacity to adapt to the impacts

The final in the trio of shit which is climate injustice, is the capacity to adapt.

This is where the stark differences in the most affected countries comes into play. Australia and the USA will both be badly hit, and are actually already seeing impacts, but the difference between them and the others is that they are rich countries. Their governments have budgets for public spending, they have emergency services, they have a welfare state (kind of – I’m looking at you America), they have strong institutions and infrastructure. These tools of survival mean that while impacts may be dire, the government has some capacity to respond and invest in adaptation.

Compare this to, for a random example, Chad. In land-locked northern Africa with a sizeable desert region and a non-desert arid region that runs the risk of becoming desert, they’re one of the many countries that will be seriously impacted, like USA and Australia. The difference in that Chad is one of the poorest and most corrupt in the world. Most people are subsistence herders and farmers, earning their livelihood directly from the land – meaning they’re incredibly sensitive to environmental change. And they don’t have stored wealth or a welfare state to fall back on. Also, they’re biggest export is crude oil, so when that’s no longer a viable industry they’ll likely be even poorer.

The problem for countries like Chad, is that they’re struggling as it is, so literally cannot afford to invest in adaptations for climate change. They simply don’t have the cash, can’t borrow on favourable terms, often don’t even have the policy freedom, they lack the institutions and infrastructure they need, in some cases officials are corrupt and there’s all too often political/religious/ethnic violence to contend with. What a shit-storm. And that’s before you add in the increased risk of actual storms.

So, many of the countries most effected by climate change are not only the ones who’ve done the least to cause it and reap the benefits of carbon-heavy industry, they’re also the least capable of adapting to it.

Climate change deepens existing inequality

The second key reason why climate change is about human rights, is because due to the uneven nature of its cause, impacts and adaptability, it tends to deepen existing inequalities.

I have already alluded to the raced nature of climate change. Zoomed out, it looks awfully like a case of white people screwing over everyone else. Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s true. As discussed above, the (mostly) white rich nations have by far the most historical responsibility for causing climate change, have benefited the most from carbon-heavy industrialization, and yet it is the mostly black, Asian and Latino countries that will see the most catastrophic climate impacts, despite being poorer and less able to cope with them. Pretty damn racist, when you put it like that.

But there’s more: obviously many countries are now very multicultural, so race is relevant within countries, too. Case in point of course is the USA: due to the history of racism, black and Latino people are more likely to live in polluted areas and less likely to be protected by the state. Remember Hurricane Katrina. A much higher proportion of the people who were stranded, lost their home or lost their lives happened to be black. Also, sometimes crisis can push people into crime. It’s well known that American police and courts are massively harsher to black criminals than white.

Of course, you could say it’s not really a case of race, but class. That’s kind of true, although you can’t ignore the reality that people of colour tend to be poorer on average. (I wonder why that is? Hmm… *Cough* history of massive racism *cough*). The two are entwined. Anyway, arguably the clearest reason climate change is political is because it’s all about class and power. Like usual, the poor are most at risk simply because they are poor so don’t have the required capacity to adapt. They also have less political power so governments are prone to policymaking that serves the richer classes instead. Whenever a crisis hits, it’s usually the poor who bear the brunt of it.

Climate change can also deepen gender inequality. This isn’t too relevant in the West, but many poor and rural societies have a very gendered division of labour that sees women doing work that is hit by climate change first and worst. For example, women may be gathering water, growing vegetables and gathering firewood, while men of the community are travelling to do paid work in the city or working on an industrial cash-crop farm. In these cases women will have their work more badly hit. Depending on how much understanding of climate change there is in the community, they could potentially be blamed for their lower yields and be seen as less capable, leading to a loss of power and worse prejudice against them. Also existing issues like women having less access to land, less legal rights and social inequality could see single and widowed women finding it harder to cope with climate impacts.

Basically, without a huge concerted effort to ‘level the playing field’, climate impacts are likely to deepen existing inequalities.

Climate action has huge potential to enhance equality and human rights

Lastly, climate change is political because it doesn’t necessarily need to deepen inequalities; it has the potential to do the opposite. The movements for climate justice and environmental justice are about healing deep wounds of injustice and oppression via environmental action. Climate action can, if done right, be a powerful force for making a society more equal and advancing human rights. It can be a catalyst for positive social change.

Take my native UK as an example. A climate strategy could include bringing high-tech green industries to the North of England that has never recovered from the deindustrialization of the 1980s; it could see parks, urban farms and green spaces bought to inner city areas; it could see run-down coastal towns becoming hubs for off-shore wind and marine energy; it could see struggling farms reinvigorated with an increased demand for local food and extra income streams from ecotourism and renewable energy; it could see public transport improve and also become more affordable. Such schemes wouldn’t only lower carbon emissions, they’d also create millions of good jobs, spread wealth more equally across the country, improve public health, regenerate poor neighbourhoods and improve quality of life for everyone – especially those on lower incomes.

Detroit 'Agrihood' Turns Vacant Lots Into Edible #Farms via @seeker https://t.co/DQR3Xs2teE #urban #agriculture #sharingcities #ecocity

— Julian Zelazny (@BorealJulian) December 16, 2016

Paris Mayor @Anne_Hidalgo plans to restrict traffic, create more spaces for cyclists, pedestrians & clean transport: https://t.co/3UO2BRTDBV pic.twitter.com/DzdPeuyzPX

— C40 Cities (@c40cities) January 15, 2017

Also look at the global scale. Climate action has the potential to reduce the sickeningly-enormous gap in living standards, wealth and power between the rich and poor nations via transfers of money and tech. Such actions would not be charity. They would be a good start to paying off the huge debt of injustice discussed earlier. We’re already seeing a glimpse of this: there is an agreement for rich countries to send $100 billion a year in climate funding to poorer countries. Unfortunately this hasn’t been done yet, but it has been signed into the Paris Agreement as a key target. Concerted climate action has the potential to make the world a much fairer place. This is what the climate justice movement is all about.

Sooner or later, we will be moving to a post-carbon world. It could be one in which the rich huddle in their guarded air-conditioned mansions while starving environmental refugees clamour at the gates. Or it could be a brighter more beautiful world, one where we deal with the impacts of climate change with solidarity, cooperation and compassion. What that would look like is uncertain, there are so many possibilities. Personally I see a world of egalitarian high-density high-tech globally-connected eco-cities surrounded by newly planted forests.

So, climate change is about way more than carbon. It’s about who lives and dies, who survives and thrives, who has power and who is powerless. Change is coming whether we like it or not, but that change can be harnessed in dramatically different ways. And what determines what path we take, is politics.

Featured image: People being rescued after being stranded by Hurricane Katrina. (US Navy / Public Domain).

Cross-posted from The Climate Lemon

The post Why Climate Change Is About Human Rights, Politics & Justice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First, whatever you think of government policies on such matters, the national and local governments of a major part of the world’s population — and state and local governments of a major share of the U.S. population — are already committed to large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and in many cases have already achieved them. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the state functions as the “executive committee of the capitalist ruling class,” as Marx put it. And sometimes it pursues long term collective interests of capital, like preventing total collapse of the biosphere, despite the short term interests of some or even most capitalists. This is not to say its motives are good, that there aren’t much better ways of doing things, or even that it’s especially competent in carrying this stuff out. But Rube Goldberg machine though it may be, at least the state sometimes acts to limit the damage resulting from its own previous actions to subsidize wasteful energy and transportation inputs and encourage fossil fuel consumption.

At the global level, countries participating in the Paris Agreement seem likely, for the most part, to continue pursuing their individual commitments even if the U.S. drops out. China, until recently driving most of the world’s new fossil fuel consumption, may position itself politically as the new global climate leader simply because it has stabilized fossil fuel consumption and is leading the world in adding renewable energy capacity for economic reasons.

In the U.S., 24 states have already beaten their 2022 carbon emissions goals, and California — 12% of the U.S. market — is pushing higher reduction standards than even Obama had committed to.

Second, far more than government policies, laws of nature and economics that are beyond Trump’s control are driving reduced fossil fuel consumption, and will continue to do so — even if Trump greenlights Keystone, the Dakota Access pipeline and every other proposed pipeline project in the country. The basic laws of physics and geology behind Peak Oil and Peak Fossil Fuels — most importantly the tendency of remaining sources of fuel to have lower and lower energy return on energy input (EROEI) — have not been repealed.

Current low oil prices result mainly, not from new unconventional fuel recovery techniques — which are generally much lower in EROEI than older extraction methods — but from Saudi Arabia pumping oil from its old reserves at unsustainable levels for political reasons and hastening their exhaustion.

Recurring energy price spikes have created a strong incentive to decouple economic productivity from energy consumption, so that American CO2 emissions have fallen by 10% over the past decade for mostly economic reasons. Power plant carbon emissions are already three quarters of the way to Obama’s Clean Power Plan reduction goals of 32 percent. And this trend will likely continue despite Trump simply because we seem to be near peak demand for fossil fuels, regardless of the supply side.

Even as carbon-powered plants are being retired, renewables account for about two thirds of new American generating capacity.

China, currently the source of 30% of CO2 emissions, is levelling off — and may even have peaked — fossil fuel consumption for reasons largely unrelated to the Paris agreement.

And on a global level, CO2 emissions have been levelling off for about three years and are now virtually flat — a projected growth of 0.2% for this year — compared to their previous growth trajectory.

Third, and most importantly, human creativity and cooperation are making renewables more and more attractive — and economical — relative to fossil fuels. A decade ago Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken, in Natural Capitalism, argued that existing low-hanging fruit technologies, if applied to all new buildings, appliances, cars, etc., could achieve a factor five reduction in energy consumption — in most cases at an actual cost savings up front. All that was needed was to speed up the adoption curve. We may now have arrived at that point.

Solar generating technology has been falling in cost exponentially — solar panels cost about a quarter as much per watt as they did ten years ago. We see announcements of new breakthroughs in the most costly bottleneck — storage capacity — on an almost weekly basis. And some of the most promising innovations are open-source, created by commons-based peer production, foreshadowing the society that will emerge from its cocoon when our current world of states (including Trump) and global corporations finishes dying off.

For that matter, we’re not exactly rolling over and playing dead even when it comes to the stuff Trump can do. Climate activists all over the Midwest are blocking trains transporting supplies to the DAPL construction site.

When it comes to the survival of humanity, don’t put your faith in princes — but don’t let them scare you too much, either.

Photo by Rubí Flórez

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