Pat Kane: Alarming report about state out climate must motivate action

For those of us who have swallowed the red pill on climate science, it was an alarming sweep of extreme (and concatenating) warning signs.

You could spend weeks following up the papers cited, then further weeks verifying those. But for all the august academic figures involved – such as Johan Rockstrom, inventor of the planetary boundaries model – there is a notable lack of restraint in the paper’s opening lines:

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”

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We’ll come to those perils later. But what struck me most about this massively endorsed paper were the cut-to-the-chase prescriptions – particularly political and economic – at the end: “In a world with finite resources, unlimited growth is a perilous illusion.

“We need bold, transformative change: drastically reducing overconsumption and waste, especially by the affluent; stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women; reforming food production systems to support more plant-based eating; and adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice.”

At first glance, it would seem that thousands of scientists are endorsing what is essentially an eco-socialist platform, in order to save the planet (or save us from the planet’s wrath).

If the key climate crisis is still carbon emissions warming the planet – which trigger feedback loops (like methane release or Arctic melt) that worsen warming and further derange our weather – then each of these policy recommendations is aimed at preventing those emissions.

The equally key question is: can we bear to adopt them? What blend of emotion and reason can be concocted to persuade us to embark on these shifts? To make us want to do what we have to do?

Climate change will result in more extreme weather events in the future (Image: Getty) The State Of The Climate 2024 coolly reminds us how off-course we are. Fossil-fuel energy use is still 14 – that’s 14 – times that of wind and solar. The latter may often be cheaper, but their rising use isn’t replacing oil and gas – it’s only meeting rising demand. After decades of warning, oil and gas production still rose by 1.5% in 2023.

If we think for a second, we know how embedded our current lifestyles are in fossil-fuel use. Take the electric cars we don’t shift to, because the charging infrastructure is so scattered and commercially provisioned. (I’m on a UK music tour with Hue And Cry right now, and the idea of subjecting our tight travel itinerary to the vagaries of charging ports is ridiculous.)

Or remember that it took the constraints of Covid’s lockdowns, where work, transport and retail were just stopped from operating, to effect an overall reduction of fossil-fuel use. The lifestyle implications of that are a little mind-wrenching.

In a properly climate-conscious life, will we have to just hit limits on our modern behaviour? The holiday and business flights forsworn, the not-quite-essential gadget left unpurchased, the cornucopia of the supermarket drastically thinned? Do we leave that to our private sense of ecological thrift or do we need to allow our states and polities to monitor – or at least strongly incentivise – our carbon-emitting behaviour?

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“Adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice” wades right into the middle of all that. But it seems to me that the winning of hearts and minds – ones that accept the need for radical lifestyle shifts in the first place – is the prior battle to engage in. Again (and you may have heard these terms before): do we need a Project Fear or a Project Hope? Or a subtle interleaving of the two?

It’s a sign of how crucial this question is that the State Of The Climate paper – although generally pronouncing from atop a large pile of eco-scientific studies – gets into the emotional trenches here.

They note that inducing pessimism about improving matters is a strategy of fossil-fuel interests – a sense of helplessness is their friend. But they also caution that too much optimism leads to inaction, “if people think things are fine”.

Trenchantly, as scientists, they state: “The fact is that avoiding every 10th of a degree of warming is critically important. Rather than presenting a climate change prognosis pessimistically or optimistically, we just want to act truthfully and tell it like it is. We must emphasize both urgency and agency when it comes to our characterizations of the needed action on climate.”

Let scientists be scientists, for sure. But I’m long enough in this argument to have seen many major framings that seek to deeply steer public behaviour, by metaphor and narrative. Economics that take place in the “doughnut” of sustainability, or that emphasise “arrival” (at our destination of wellbeing) than “growth” towards new targets.

Nearly two decades ago, macro-eco-economist Tim Jackson tried to take us back to the core etymology of “prosperity” – the generation and pursuit of hope – breaking its usual link to economic growth.

Around that time, then Green MP Caroline Lucas even suggested we should adopt the mentality of a “wartime economy” model for climate action – large targets, collective commitment, willing to fight for the future.

In our current warring circumstances, with proxy battles conducted by superpowers all over the planet, we can grimly retire that framing. But given space, I could populate an even larger graveyard of broken climate-crisis frames, or at least quite insufficient ones.

Job not done. But what would do it? I have residual hopes that Scottish independence may become the vehicle that carries the hearts and minds of this society through the needs of transition, to a planet-friendly, though considerably different settlement.

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We have the renewable resources, we have the cultural resources, and we even have the political resources. Strip away the party-politicking, and there’s a robust consensus for eco-progressive policy in Holyrood, which would easily mesh with the powers of a full state. But I’ll confess: the experience which pointed me towards the kind of ideas-and-passions shift required, to create souls ready for the State Of The Climate’s recommendations, came from an American short story.

It was the winning entry in Grist magazine’s recent Imagine 2200 competition, easily findable on the web, the idea being you write a climate story set sometime between now and that year. All of the 2024 entries are worth your time, but the number one – To Labour For The Hive, by Jamie Liu – really got to me.

What’s affecting about this tale – where a beekeeper becomes grumpily invoked in a vast climate-modelling infrastructure – is its literary evocation of a bustling life, full of romance and chores and technology. But the basics have shifted. Work is what is needed to sustain a chosen life – not some template for success by accumulation.

I won’t reveal more details about the story, go read it. But as the facts sink in from this startling paper, those of us who narrate, visualise – even songwrite – for a living, might wonder about how best we motivate the right action. And there may be a clue in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous lines: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up workers to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”