The Great Disruption (18 page)

They will, however, be wrong in that simply applying technology and the power of markets and capital to this problem, while essential, will only buy us time, it will not solve the problem. Even if we stabilize the climate by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, endless economic growth is still not possible on a finite planet when that economic growth involves material consumption. Decoupling economic growth from material growth is only a “slow it down” strategy. It simply reduces our speed as we head for the cliff. The numbers just don't stack up, as we covered in chapter 4.

The old economy thinkers referred to above are wrong in another respect as well: Not only are humans
capable
of fundamental change and overcoming our genetic urges, but such capacity
defines
our development and growth as a species. It is true that we were only recently apes, but we have come a long way and we still have a ways to go.

To argue we are naturally greedy and competitive and can't change is like arguing that we engage naturally in murder and infanticide as our forebears the chimps do and therefore as we did. We have certain tendencies in our genes, but unlike other creatures we have the proven capacity to make conscious decisions to overcome them and also the proven ability to build a society with laws and values to enshrine and, critically, to enforce such changes when these tendencies come to the surface.

So don't underestimate how profoundly we can change. We are still capable of evolution, including conscious evolution. This coming crisis is perhaps the greatest opportunity in millennia for a step change in human society.

While both approaches just described will inevitably be pursued, there will be great debate on which one is right, using the arguments covered above. I believe putting energy into these arguments will not be of great benefit and shouldn't get much attention. It is inevitable that those in power now, who run the “old economy,” will do their utmost to preserve the existing system and will argue strongly that it can be saved with a new model of economic growth. Many will rail against this, but to little effect. An existing system is powerful and doesn't give up its power lightly.

Besides, we need them to run the war, something they're very good at! Indeed, if they don't run a successful war, we will be building a new economy from the village up with just a few hundred million people and a whole lot less technology and knowledge, making that job far harder and slower. Not to mention the suffering of billions of people on the way to that new starting point.

The efforts of those who seek to build a new economy should instead be focused on doing just that: working on building new economic models and ownership structures, developing successful purpose-driven businesses, and driving the transformation in culture and values we will need. The laws of physics dictate that the old economy approach will fail because continued material economic growth is impossible. So we need to be well advanced on the solutions when that is accepted.

What all this means is that to get past the Great Disruption and to the better world on the other side, we need
both
approaches to be unleashed with full fury. This will be messy and confusing, but that is just the way many things are going to be over the coming decades.

We will now address the first of these approaches, the inevitable, exciting, emergency response to climate change. This is where the fun really begins.

CHAPTER 10

The One-Degree War

Like most advocates for action on sustainability, I've had days when I find it hard to imagine the world waking up as comprehensively as it must to address these issues effectively. Indeed, while I've been writing this book, some argue the tide is going firmly the other way. The Copenhagen Conference failed to deliver tangible progress, the science has been under attack again, opinion polls are going the wrong way, and there is little evidence that governments will translate widespread and genuine concern and understanding into real action. The boiling frog is indeed getting hot!

So why am I so confident the world will respond and that when it does, it won't be too late? I answered the first question in the last chapter, but the second question needs a more detailed response—will it then be too late? This question has been the focus of a great deal of my research over recent years. However, not only do I describe here a technical answer to the question “Will it be too late?” but I have become convinced in the process of investigation that this is more or less how the future will unfold. It is how we will both survive the impending sustainability and climate crisis and begin the process of building a new economy and society. This is where we come into our own.

This research led me to a new understanding of what's possible. Up until this point, like most advocates for action in this area, I shared the assumption that society was capable of letting the situation reach a point where it would be “too late,” a point where we would not be capable of stopping a runaway process of ecological collapse. This risk of a runaway breakdown is perhaps the most important issue in this whole area. It is of great concern to scientific experts seeking to understand whether there are tipping points where the global ecosystem takes over and acts on such a scale that nothing we do can have any influence.

I am pretty confident such points exist, but I am also now firmly convinced we will act before we reach them. I wasn't always so sure. It was only when I understood what a true crisis response could achieve that I realized just how dramatically we can, and I believe will, respond when we do. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a realistic one.

In doing this research, I was joined by my friend and colleague Professor Jorgen Randers, professor of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian School of Management. I mentioned Jorgen in chapter 2 as one of the original authors of the Club of Rome report
The Limits to Growth
. He has been a tireless advocate for action on sustainability since that book was published in 1972 and became the bestselling environmental book of all time. He is deeply experienced in these issues and from many points of view. Along with his MIT PhD and his current professorial role, he has been a company director, a business school president, deputy head of the World Wildlife Fund (a global NGO), and an investment manager.

Jorgen and I are on the core faculty of the Prince of Wales's Business and Sustainability Program, an in-depth seminar for corporate executives run by the Cambridge University Programme for Sustainability Leadership. After one of these seminars in 2007, Jorgen and I, joined by my wife, Michelle, took some time out and went mountain bike riding in the Barrington Tops National Park in Hunter Valley north of Sydney. Over dinner one evening, the three of us were discussing how we saw the global response unfolding as the economy moved beyond the limits to growth. We had first discussed this issue a year earlier with the team at my advisory business, Ecos Corporation, brainstorming what a global crisis response might look like.

With thirty-five years of focus on that very topic, Jorgen had a great deal of wisdom to share. Indeed, in 2004 he had published, with his colleagues from 1972, the thirty-year update to
The Limits to Growth
titled
Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update
, where they explored this very question.

Around the time of our discussion, there had been greatly renewed public attention on climate change and sustainability. Governments and the corporate sector were engaged deeply on these issues, and the public, driven by major climatic events and high-profile campaigners like Al Gore and Tim Flannery, had put the issue at the forefront of public and political debate. So many experts argued we'd turned the corner and would now start to see serious political action.

Jorgen was skeptical of that view. He had seen the issue ebb and flow over many decades, from the 1970s oil shock through various peaks of attention in the 1980s and 1990s to the then emerging global financial crisis. He was convinced the world still wasn't ready for the type of transformational action required to shift the global economy. He mounted a convincing argument, so our conversation moved to when we thought real action was likely to occur and what the science told us about the implications of acting at that stage. Would it be too late? If not, what type of response would then be necessary to prevent societal collapse?

Our first conclusion was that the world was probably still a decade or so away from really engaging with a comprehensive response. We knew what this meant, given the lags in the global ecosystem and what the latest scientific research was saying about accelerating impacts. Any response that hoped, at that late stage, to stabilize the global ecosystem would have to be breathtaking in scale, certainly compared with any proposal on the table in 2007. Otherwise it would indeed be “too late” because the lagging impacts would overcome anything less. So we knew immediately we were talking about an economic and social mobilization comparable to that in a world war.

Two things occurred to us as we explored this idea further over the coming days, while cycling and walking through the mountains. First, there would have to be a major global crisis before such a response would be implemented, because nothing else would drive the dramatic shift in the political context that would be necessary. Second, we knew of no mainstream global research under way to define the response that would then be needed to be effective. All the work being done was based on what Churchill called “doing our best” rather than “what was necessary.” The science was clear on what was necessary, and we knew even the most dramatic proposals on the table in 2007 didn't come close.

These conclusions gave us some important insights into how the future would unfold and also set us a clear task to take on.

The fact that a crisis would be needed before society responded actually meant such a crisis was inevitable. As we covered in the last chapter, the momentum of change in the physical system will inevitably cause the Great Awakening, which will in turn trigger a societywide crisis response. This meant the scale of response we foresaw, impossible to imagine in 2007, was not just possible but actually highly likely. History suggested as well that when it emerged, it would do so apparently suddenly, with most people caught by surprise.

That in turn meant the world at this time would urgently need a well-considered crisis response plan but wouldn't have one. So we decided to start the process by writing our version of such a plan and putting it into the public domain. Over the following two years, we did so.

Our prime objective was to encourage other experts to engage on the approach, ideally motivating government policy makers to dedicate adequate resources to a comprehensive version of such a plan, even if just as a contingency. Our other objectives were to alert climate advocates, businesspeople, and the community in general that such a warlike mobilization was at least likely, and therefore we all needed to prepare for it.

We concluded our work and after peer review put it into circulation in 2010 via the academic publication
The Journal of Global Responsibility
.
1
This paper provides the foundation for what I present here.

As we covered in the last chapter, there will be two types of responses when the Great Disruption gets into full swing. First the old economy, recognizing the scale of the threat, will try to right itself. This will be a fight for the survival of that system and its associated power structures. Systems fight hard to protect themselves. What I describe here is the centerpiece of how I believe the response of that system will unfold.

Remember that at this time, the world will have woken up to the fact that we are at risk of collapse. There will be acceptance that action can no longer be delayed, because if it is, key tipping points could be passed that would put survival at risk. There will be sufficient present impacts to eliminate any serious political debate about the causes or the risks—in fact, at this point there will be powerful political forces, in business, the military, and the community more broadly, demanding urgent and dramatic action. This demand will be sufficient to overcome the vested interests' fight for protection of their economic wealth.

There are parallels in this to the context in which World War II was declared both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Therefore, World War II contains many lessons for us here, above and beyond great Churchill quotes.

When this situation emerges, the first question to be answered will be Churchill's “what is necessary.” While it is obvious that the challenge we face is much broader than climate change and goes to the essence of our socioeconomic model, climate change will be the prime focus. There are two reasons for this. First, the system will correctly judge that climate change is the most immediate, clear, and present danger and that if it is not effectively addressed, economic and social collapse will prevent anything else from being dealt with. Second, the system will incorrectly believe that we can continue with our present economic model if we decouple growth from CO
2
emissions and make our economy greatly more efficient in material consumption. As we've discussed the data indicates this is not true, but the system will not be able to cope with that reality, because it will threaten power structures and philosophies too completely; so denial of this will continue for a while longer.

Given that the first point is true, however, there will be great benefit in having society focus sharply on greenhouse gases and climate change. It will, after all, as we will see, require an extraordinary level of focus and effort to be effective.

So with this in mind, what will be
necessary
?

To the objective observer, the climate science is clear on what is necessary. The framework for this science generally translates into how many degrees centigrade we can allow the average global annual temperature to rise above the level it was before the Industrial Revolution. This then translates into a maximum allowable level of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to keep below that given temperature target. This concentration level is generally measured as CO
2
e (all the main greenhouse gases converted into their equivalents in impact to CO
2
, the key greenhouse gas of concern). While this science is imprecise because of uncertain feedbacks, it is currently assumed that to have a reasonable chance of achieving two degrees of warming, the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere must be kept to less than 450 ppm CO
2
e.

Using these measures, allowing even two degrees centigrade of warming is too dangerous. Although broadly accepted as an important goal by policy makers, including the 2009 Copenhagen Conference and hundreds of global corporations, few mainstream science groups actually argue that this is a “safe” level. Rather, it is assumed to be “the best we can do” based on the analysis of what is politically “realistic.” Two degrees will in fact lead to widespread environmental, social, and economic disruption, including widespread threats to food supplies, dramatic increases in extreme weather, and a significant rise in sea level. Most important, we would still face the risk of runaway warming threatening the stability of civilization. So two degrees of warming is an inadequate goal and a plan for failure.

The logical, science-based response is to set a target that gives society a “safe” outcome. Based on currently available science, bringing global warming back to below one degree centigrade above preindustrial levels can be considered reasonably “safe” for humanity on a crowded planet. Returning below one degree of warming, in other words, is the
solution to the problem
. It is “what is necessary.”

Therefore, Jorgen and I concluded that when the crisis hits and the scale of the threat is understood, society will demand a plan to achieve no more than one degree of long-term warming. It was interesting that in our research we concluded that the CO
2
e concentration required to achieve this was around 350 ppm. This is the same level being called for by scientists such as James Hansen of NASA and also endorsed as the likely end target by many others. It is also the focus of many in the global climate movement, particularly around Bill McKibben's 350.org. Many scientists in the heavily politicized arena of climate understandably prefer not to enter the public debate on what is a safe target, given that even two degrees creates such resistance. However, I've now had enough private conversations with world-class scientists to be confident that the scientific community will before long settle on this as the upper end of the right target range.

It is interesting to consider the context of risk here. The nature of emissions reduction curves (how an end target translates into annual reductions to get there) means it's very hard to strengthen targets later. So the logical approach to uncertainty, given what's at stake, is to have a tighter target and then lift it later if the science firms up. So from every rational view, one degree is the right place to start at this stage.

Some respond to such a target as unachievable, believing we are inevitably on our way to two degrees or more. In considering this view, it is critical to differentiate between what people believe is politically “realistic,” which is a subjective judgement, from what would be technically possible if we decided to address the issue with our full capacity.