The other night, I headed across town to the London School of Economics where I listened to one of the world’s most experienced climate diplomats say something unexpected about how business and political leaders are tackling global warming.
Todd Stern was Barack Obama’s climate envoy and the chief US negotiator at the 2015 COP climate conference that delivered the Paris Agreement.
He was giving the first annual memorial lecture in honour of another architect of the Paris accord, his friend Pete Betts , a former lead negotiator for the EU and UK who passed away in October.
Stern had no qualms about naming the biggest obstacles to climate progress. “The main one is the fossil fuel industry,” he said, explaining that the “huge clout” of both state-owned and private companies could influence political leaders.
But then he named another, less obvious culprit: “We are also slowed down by those who think of themselves as ‘grown-ups’.”
By this he meant the politicians and business leaders who say that yes, global warming is real and yes, it must be addressed, but no, it is unrealistic to cut carbon emissions at the pace climate experts say is needed.
His words struck home because it was the latest complaint I have heard this year about the “adults in the room” or “very serious people” who bog down climate action.
In some ways this criticism is curious. Not that long ago, western capitals were banking on seasoned military and civilian officials in the Trump administration to temper the unpredictable president’s term in office. The prospect of a second Trump term at a time of deepening geopolitical turbulence makes the orthodox views of respected centrists look more valuable than ever.
But an unwavering faith in orthodoxy, no matter the evidence, is what makes such experts a menace, says Paul Krugman, the US economist who has popularised the concept of the very serious person.
He has railed against the economic variant of the species, the policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic who pushed for austerity measures after the 2008 financial crisis despite warnings of the risks these posed to long-term growth.
The grown-ups holding back efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are not necessarily the same people, but they share the same aversion to radically unorthodox ideas.
“They’re the avatars of the establishment,” a US climate policy veteran told me the other week. He was describing the voices of centrist reason he heard from Wall Street to Whitehall who said calls for net zero emissions by 2050 were financially impractical, politically impossible and naive.
This is a seductive argument. It is obviously true that the bulk of emissions come from fossil fuels — the oil, gas and coal that still make up around 80 per cent of the global energy mix. It is also true that these fuels support tens of thousands of jobs and account for as much as 60 per cent of export revenues in dozens of countries.
So decarbonising the global economy at speed is hard to imagine, let alone accomplish.
Yet so is the prospect of business as usual prevailing — not least in a week when record rains caused chaos at the world’s busiest international airport in Dubai, while an unusually granular study showed climate damages could reach $38tn a year by 2050.
We live in a world that is already at least 1.1°C warmer than it was in the late 1800s, where unnerving levels of heat, drought, flooding and ice loss are ever more evident.
Scientists have shown for years that it would be wise to hold global warming to 1.5°C, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. But this would require a breathtaking rate of decarbonisation: emissions would have to nearly halve by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. So far, global emissions are not even falling, let alone halving, and 2030 is just six years away.
Is it fair to lay all the blame on serious grown-ups in successive governments and boardrooms who have spent years failing to do enough to fix the problem? Probably not. But it is fair to ask them a question that Stern posed the other night about how dangerous it would be to take more radical, unorthodox climate action: “compared to what?”
We know that unthinkable action, like sudden mass lockdowns, can be launched in the face of a problem with the frightening immediacy of a global pandemic. Climate change is a different, slower-moving type of disaster. But it is a disaster nonetheless, and one that no truly serious person can continue to ignore.
pilita.clark@ft.com
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