Roger Bate and Julian Morris of the British free-market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), decided to catch ExxonMobil’s gravy train across the Atlantic as they began working for US think tanks.

Bate became a Fellow in International Policy at the oil giant’s think tank du jour, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which by 2001 had become ExxonMobil’s biggest beneficiary.

From here, he pitched the ‘Africa Fighting Malaria’ project to Philip Morris Commercial Services, which paid him $800 a day for his work. 

The project would further the tobacco company’s interests since it would enable Bate to build a reputation amongst African politicians, enabling him to influence the World Health Organisation (WHO) on their tobacco protocol.

Koch ties

Bate added that if Philip Morris agreed to fund the project, he would be happy to continue working with the company under the guise of a “new operation, initially based in UK, but soon to have offices in South Africa.” In 2001, he published a paper with the CEI called “When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story”.

Meanwhile, Julian Morris had also been keeping tabs on the well funded US think tanks.

Morris maintained close ties to Koch’s Heartland Institute, writing environmental ‘myth busting’ articles advocating a ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude towards combatting climate change.

Morris and Bate co-authored “Risk, Health and the Environment,” a selection of essays debunking pervasive myths about, for example, the health risks of pesticide use.

The collection included an array of Heartland, Cato Institute and IEA insiders, including Dr Indur Goklany, who was, at the time of publication, in receipt of Heartland funding of $1,000 a month, and who would later sit on Lord Lawson’s advisory board at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF): a climate denial charity in the UK.

International Tools

Morris and Bate met with their American counterparts, including Fred Smith of the CEI, in May 1999 to talk about how to attack the green agenda.

Having thus developed their contacts, the two Englishmen in America decided to take advantage of the Libertarian spending boom.

They were looking for an international tool, according to a strategy document released as part of the tobacco settlement, and were especially interested in “how to present our arguments to developing countries”.

The International Policy Network (IPN), based in the UK and the US, would provide this link. And so, the IPN officially came into being on 1st April 2001.

In reality, the IPN was none other than the UK branch of Antony Fisher’s Atlas Economic Research Foundation. The name change was supposed to be a new lease of life for the organisation, in line with the original conception of Atlas: to scatter the seeds of the free market across the globe.

The idea was that branches of the IPN would be set up across the world. Morris and Bate set up offices in India, Chile and the US.

American Donors

Their first year was strong, with more than £607,000 in foundation and corporate donations. Their accounts for 2001 state that the organisation was principally involved in archiving “historically important papers” for the forthcoming biography of their founder, Antony Fisher.

The biography, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty, was later written by Gerald Frost, when he was director of CPS. But the men’s experiences in America had taught them the benefits of corporate donations stateside.

During 2002, the trustees decided that it would be advantageous for donors based in America to be able to take advantage of the US tax regime in giving support to the IPN’s mission.

Accordingly, a ‘sister’ US-based charity was formed, International Policy Network US, Inc., with the trustees of the IPN forming the majority of the Board of Directors of International Policy Network US, Inc.

Following this initiative, donations to the IPN declined in 2002, as expected, compared with the 18-month period ending in December 2001.

In 2001, the IPN reported £607,272 in donations (including £450,269 from corporations and £152,186 from foundations), but in 2002, only £79,745: this difference hints at the size of the donations coming from the other side of the Atlantic.

ExxonMobil Funding

Of the £79,745 that was received, £79,495 was donated directly from corporations, with just £150 given by individuals. The IPN’s setup in the United States helped them in securing extensive funding from Exxon, totalling $390,000 between 2003 and 2005.

ExxonMobil’s largest grant to the organisation, $115,000 in 2004, was specifically designated for “climate change activities”. This grant represented 16 percent of their total expenses for that year.

Thus, well oiled, in August 2002 the IPN moved its headquarters from the IEA’s offices on North Street to Bassetts Manor in Sussex, England, purchased for $900,000.

One month later, Morris was made a visiting professor of the Department of International Studies, University of Buckingham – known for aligning with the interests of dirty energy and climate denial – in the same month that Lord Martin Jacomb, now a GWPF Trustee, was appointed as the university’s third chancellor.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

A programme of ‘Compassionate Communities’ in Frome combined with changing the way the general practice provides care for patients and families has dramatically reduced emergency admissions to hospital, according to a new peer reviewed paper.

The report, Reducing emergency hospital admissions:  A population health complex intervention of an enhanced model of primary care and compassionate communities was published in the British Journal of General Practice on 9 October and “opened the door to a new field in medicine”. The Resurgence & Ecologist magazine was the first with the story. 
Friendship and kindness

Dr Julian Abel, lead author and Director of Compassionate Communities UK, who has been working with the Frome Team since 2016 said: “The number of emergency admissions in England increased by 42 percent between 2006/7 and 2017/8. The project in Frome started in 2014 and since then, emergency admissions have fallen by 14 percent across the whole population.

“This is the first time over the last 25 years that we have found a way of reducing the total emergency admissions to hospital. This is the biggest single challenge to the NHS and until now, there has not been a solution to the ever increasing influx.”

The enormous resources of friendship and kindness in the community make a big difference to quality in people’s lives. Working with communities helps to lessen feelings of loneliness and isolation that many of us, from young to old, experience.

Dr Abel said that if people are going to be given the best and most effective care, compassionate communities must be a part of the routine clinical consultation.

This has two major components, working to enhance people’s individual supportive network and making best use of the resources that exist in communities. 

Broader implementation 

Dr Abel said: “This is about how we treat each other as human beings. Kindness and compassion have an enormous impact on our health and well being.

“Being kind and compassionate is now more than a good idea. It is something we must do if we are to help solve the increasing healthcare crisis of the last 25 years.”

The results suggest that 30 percent of people in hospital are there not because they need more or better medication, but because they have become disconnected from the social world around them.

Through the broader implementation of this model in England, potential savings to the NHS could be over seven billion pounds.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Compassionate Communities UK. 

Ecologists need to discover the terrestrial – to both literally and metaphorically come down to earth – if we are going to persuade humanity to fundamentally change its relationship to Nature and save the planet. This is the only counter to the apparent insanity of continuing to burn vast amounts of fossil fuel while denying the devastating consequences.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Bruno Latour’s latest book, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, is a fascinating and provocative manifesto for a new way of addressing the compound crises we face. Latour is billed on the cover as “one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists”. But is his prop­osition useful?

The starkest claim in this book comes on the first page: the “ruling class” has given up on any vision of a shared future for all humanity. The response to climate change is to deny the science, to ramp up social inequality and deregulation in a bid to acquire vast material wealth and escape an earthly demise. 

‘Modernization front’

Latour is among those who will be left behind, but he claims to have uncovered a way out. The stated aim of his text is to provide a mode of analysis that can help us overcome neoliberal capitalism. This is necessary to prevent the increasingly absurd pursuit of short-term profit made by devastating the natural environment on which human civilisation depends.

This mode of analysis is drawn from systems thinking and networks, and in particular the concept of the ‘attractor’. The key premise of Latour’s book is that humans have been mesmerised by the conflict between two diametrically opposed attractors – the local and the global. Movement towards the global was agreed to be progressive, and resistance regressive. 

Society has until recently been enthusiastically carried along a ‘modernization front’, Latour argues, separating those who are ‘ahead’ and those who are ‘behind’. This fascination wastrue for both the political left and the right. But climate change and the breakdown of other natural processes have fatally undermined this optimism.

The two attractors are losing their attraction. The response from the extremely wealthy is to abandon ship. This might take the form of ever more segregated communities, rural bolt-holes for the wealthy, even flights to Mars. This is the third, new attractor: out of this world.

In order to counter this third attractor a fourth is needed. Ecologists – and anyone with any concern for their fellow humans – need to embrace the terrestrial. This involves abandoning the old dichotomy of left and right – and previous attempts by greens to sit carefully between the two.

World as body

What Latour’s analysis appears to be lacking is the terrestrial itself: the down-to-earth problems of fossil-fuel dependency, the political power of corporations, and the violent oppression imposed by nation-states.

Latour is successful in evoking a sense of urgency, and in presenting a sophisticated model of human responses to ecological crises. However, his solution is too ill-defined and abstract to convince many to abandon the attractors of their existing approach. 

Where Latour is weakest, Graham Jones, in his debut book, The Shock Doctrine of the Left, is most successful. Both books are published by Polity Press in what is becoming a fascinating series. Jones draws explicitly on systems thinking to provide an elegant, robust and precise proposal for the left. 

This work could inform how environmentalists organise, work collectively and respond positively to the environmental, economic and social crises that too often feel completely overwhelming.

William Harvey described as a system the flow of nutrients in the blood in the human body. Thomas Hobbes transposed this to the economy to produce the first systems analysis of social phenomena. The metaphor of world as body has been enduring, and is consciously adopted here by Jones. 

Building systems

The aim of the text – again – is to provide a schema that can be used by humanity to move beyond the crisis of capitalism. Jones is pragmatic and concise. He sets out four modes of organising: smashing, building, healing and taming.

Smashing is already a behaviour (or at least vocabulary) associated with the traditional (hard) left. Jones does not deny that for him this remains a necessary if insufficient mode of organisation. Rather than physical violence, however, industrial action and online hacking are, Jones argues, both forms of smashing. 

Just as important as smashing is building. “For the institutions of our shock doctrine to beat the neoliberal model, our organisational resilience must improve,” Jones explains. This involves intense and intensive community building and networking.

We then move to healing. It is here that Jones would move the old left into new territory. We see the influence of family therapy based on systems theory. 

Jones argues that the systems of oppression that make neoliberal capitalism possible require and create trauma – both of individuals and of society. Healing means feeling, sharing and processing this trauma. This necessity of feeling – including feeling empathy for every individual – denies oppressive politics access to Jones’s shock doctrine.

Practical and profound

Finally, we have taming. Here Jones sets out a new response to the institution of the state. We cannot smash the state, he argues, as this creates trauma and chaos. Nor can we reform or ignore it. He proposes a different response. Change comes “through coordinating smaller but escalating shocks, each time increasing the power of people to organise beyond the state”.

Magic happens in the final chapter, ‘The Meta-Strategy’. Here, in true ‘systems’ style, Jones provides a simple flow diagram. For smashing, we see a ‘growing movement’ leading to ‘chaos’, then to ‘absorption’ and finally closing the loop to ‘growing movement’. For taming, we again see ‘growing movement’, which now leads to ‘gaining legitimacy’ and thence to ‘reforms’ and back to ‘growing movement’.

Then all four of the charts are drawn together around the central phenomenon of ‘growing movement’. The strategies of smashing, building, healing and taming are autonomous but also mutually reinforcing. The micro-systems nest perfectly into one meta-system.

The Shock Doctrine of the Leftis practical and profound, short and essential. Much should be gained by reading, rereading, sharing and adopting these ideas. Taken together, Latour and Jones offer a fresh diagnosis of the ecological crisis, and a potential and novel solution.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague.

This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is out now!

Much ink, and blood, has been spilt on the ethics of a good life, but relatively little on the ethics of good money. The passing of ‘Good Money Week’ and the most recent IPCC report in to climate change seems like a good time to consider what it means to be good with your money. 

Money is all about value, but financiers play the game that money is morally neutral. Look after the profits and the outcomes take care of themselves.

In other words, when it comes to ethics, how you spend money matters more than how you earn and invest it. 

Ethical divestment 

It is certainly the case that we have become highly exercised in how we spend our money ethically. Buying a running shoe is now a political act.  

Everything from tipping to how we grow coffee is increasingly scrutinised through an ethical lens. The message is clear: how you spend your money should reflect your own ethics and tells a story about the morality of society. 

By contrast, how you save and invest is still very much a private matter reflecting personal values of thrift and prudence – or capitalist virtues of risk taking and adventure.

The public ethics of how your money is used by the financial system when you are not spending it have remained taboo. The industry sees itself purely as a guardian of our wealth with less regard for the social usefulness or wellbeing it generates.

This came to a head at my own alma mater, Cambridge University, where half of the investment management team who handle the university’s £6bn + endowment fund recently resigned.

The Financial Times and others reported comments that “the debate around divestment has left staff unable to get on with their jobs of trying to maximise the value of their endowment” – while the University commented on the team “transforming the performance” of the fund allowing the institution to further its social and charitable mission. 

Cognitive dissonance

Both views reflect the cognitive dissonance – the ability of the human brain to hold two conflicting positions simultaneously without losing our marbles – that is endemic across much of the financial system.

In these private pools of capital that are large enough to have real public consequences, how you make money is as important as how you spend it. A fund that is designed to maintain itself ‘in eternity’ should think about the world it is creating for future students through its significant investments in companies that contribute to man-made climate change.

It is not just institutions that have this split morality when it comes to money. Modern tech-based capitalism produces individuals with levels of wealth not seen since the Tsarist empire.

With her usual rapier eloquence Marina Hyde in the Guardian described Jeff Bezos’s attempts to join the human race with his ‘One Day’ inititative as ‘fauxlanthropy’, asking whether a better use of his wealth would be paying his workers a fair wage.

It’s not that finance itself is intrinsically ‘bad’. That’s as faulty as the argument for the neutrality of profit seeking, ‘we make the markets and the money we deserve’.

Collective wealth

It may still end in a Marxist meltdown but until then we can re-make capitalism to reflect the morality of the society it serves. We need a system of ethics conscious of the impacts of investment beyond the boundaries of the firm set by traditional accountants. 

The Finance Innovation Lab campaigns for a fairer financial system for people and planet. Its recent report criticised the ‘value neutral’ stance of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as a fallacy, when actually it has ‘values blind spots’.

This prompted the regulator to consider how it should respond to the very real moral challenges presented by man-made climate change, for example.  

Money is created by and helps shape our society. The way it is regulated fundamentally affects the behavior of financial firms in that process. As the recent welcome memorandum from the Department of Work and Pensions demonstrated, it is the legal duty of the guardians of our collective wealth to consider the wider impacts of how it is invested on our behalf. 

Abundance is not alone in thinking that it is not enough to blame the regulators for our ethical shortcomings. We try to make it easier for people to consider the ethical impact of how their money is invested and provide investments that fit with the values of our customers.

I believe that private money is capable of producing public good, and that will be accelerated if it takes place in a financial system whose idea of profit, benefit and value looks beyond short term self interest. 

This Author 

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, hates to see the public misinformed on science. 

As an A-level student at Southend School for Boys in the mid-eighties, he read an article in the Guardian which had confused the hole in the ozone layer with global warming, attributing global warming to aerosols.

The outraged teenager wrote to science editor Tim Radford to notify him of the mistake. Later, as a geology PhD student, he became staunchly anti-Greenpeace after he saw one of their posters wrongly claiming that an area proposed for storing nuclear waste was an earthquake zone.

In 1999, after spending 10 years trying to finish his PhD in experimental rock deformation and a brief stint working as a science reporter for The Daily Telegraph, he found himself working in the Policy Department of the Royal Society. 

Exxon’s Lecture

A few months into his job, Ward was invited to a seminar at Exxon’s London HQ. Brian Flannery, ExxonMobil’s veteran climate advisor, would be speaking.

Earlier in his career as an astrophysicist, Flannery had started to produce peer-reviewed work for the IPCC. At Exxon he would commission work from MIT climate modellers, who he would instruct to “embrace the uncertainty of all this”.

He was now being called in to talk to UK policy bodies and politicians about how the IPCC’s conclusions were far from certain and did not support such extreme measures as Kyoto.  

“Why does Exxon have such a problem with the IPCC?” Ward recalls having thought at the time.

The Wider Campaign

The young geologist was bemused by the whole charade: his work at the Royal Society had included a project on the contribution of nuclear energy to tackling climate change, which was “framed in terms of nuclear being an important way for the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions which seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing.” 

Ward would later recognise the context of Flannery’s talk: “I did not realise it at the time, but this meeting was part of a wider campaign by the oil company to resist restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, including those applied to the burning of fossil fuels.”

In the United States, Exxon was engaged in intensive lobbying efforts against the Kyoto protocol, including advertisements that questioned the scientific basis for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This was all changed by President George W. Bush and the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2001, Ward was heading the Royal Society’s Press Office. When Bush announced that the US wasn’t going to ratify Kyoto – and what’s more, that he wasn’t sure of the science – the Royal Society joined with 15 other national science academies to combat Bush’s scepticism by endorsing the IPCC’s main conclusions.

To be continued…

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Claire Perry MP, the Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth, has been told to drop controversial planning proposals related to the shale gas industry in England by activists in the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC) – which aims to provide the youth voice on climate change in the UK.

The government announced plans to fast-track planning applications to support the development of the shale gas industry in May of this year. It is hoped that the proposals will reduce dependence on imports of natural gas.

However, research undertaken by Cardiff Business School, commissioned by Friends of the Earth, casts serious doubt on the UK’s fracking potential.

Youth voices

The research showed that to replace just 50 percent of gas imports, the industry would require a new well to be drilled and fracked every day for 15 days, amounting to just over 6000 in total. Conservative estimates that accounted for wells performing below expectations put the total at over 16,500.

Sebastian Kelly of the Let Communities Decide campaign said: “These proposals to fast-track fracking threaten democracy, climate and countryside. We call on the government to respect all three and withdraw their proposal, and not offer fracking companies the green light to drill at will.”

In a letter sent to Claire Perry MP, the UKYCC not only called for the controversial proposals to be dropped, but highlighted the incompatibility of fracking with the UK’s climate commitments.

Jake Woodier, part of the UKYCC campaign said: “Youth voices are too often left out of the discussion when it comes to climate change.

“Fast-tracking fracking proposals not only subverts local democracy and the ability of local communities to have a say on what is permitted where they live, but is also completely incompatible with a clean, safe environment for ourselves and future generations.

Diverse opposition

“We are the ones that will bear the brunt of climate inaction, and, put simply, we need to invest in clean energy and end our fossil fuel addiction before it’s too late.”

Rose Dickinson of Friends of the Earth recently told the Independent: “It’s clear that affected communities’ wishes are being sacrificed so that fracking companies can more easily drill. Significantly, the fact also remains that fracking is fundamentally incompatible with avoiding climate chaos.”

The government is facing revolt by grassroots. Almost two in three (65 percent) Tory councillors in areas where licenses have been granted said the final decision should be made by local councils rather than central government. This would give local communities the power to block shale gas exploration in their area.

With such a high level of opposition coming across the board, from the Conservative grassroots to a coalition of campaigning organisations, it is clear the Government must ditch its controversial planning proposals.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the UKYCC. 

Major companies – Energa and Grupa Azoty (Poland), ČEZ (Czech Republic), Elektroprivreda Srbije (Serbia), and Bulgarian Energy Holding (Bulgaria) – rely heavily on fossil fuels, primarily coal, for energy generation.

Despite governments’ pledges to address the climate crisis, these major energy companies have shown no commitment to reduce their reliance on oil, gas and coal. Some of them are even developing additional coal capacity.

And yet, over the past years, they have been receiving hefty financial support from both the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Perpetuating dependence 

A new Bankwatch report reveals that, while virtually halting their direct investments in coal in the last five years, the EIB and EBRD have provided corporate level financing and extended loans for distribution and renewable energy projects to the same fossil-fuel dependent companies.

Therefore, by allowing these investments without a long term decarbonisation plan, the two European public banks have effectively turned a blind eye to the companies’ fossil fuels dependence, and ultimately helped perpetuate it.

Since 2012, the Polish state-owned energy company Energa has received generous financial support from the EBRD, the EIB and the Nordic Investment Bank. Most recently, in 2017, Energa and the EIB issued EUR 250 million in hybrid bonds with the aim of financing the upgrade and expansion of distribution system during the following two years.

Nevertheless, earlier this month, Energa approved the construction of the controversial 1GW Ostrołęka C coal-fired power plant, a joint project with Enea, another state-owned energy utility.

Over the past decade, Serbia’s national power utility Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) has received a series of loans from the EBRD. A loan of 200 million euros approved in 2015 and meant for restructuring not only legitimises EPS’s continued reliance on lignite, but effectively frees up resources that helped perpetuate it.

In 2011, EPS received a loan of 80 million euros from the EBRD for what had been termed “environmental improvements”. In practice, the coal energy company has increased its emissions, and it continues to expand its coal mines.

Urgent decarbonisation 

The report’s authors stress that, in addition, fossil fuels are fast becoming a financial liability, thus creating a tangible investment risk.

The EBRD’s ongoing review of its energy strategy is a prime opportunity to ensure the bank’s investments help bring about the urgently needed transition towards sustainable energy, rather than hamper it.

The draft of the new EBRD Energy Sector Strategy acknowledges the urgent need for decarbonisation through increased support for renewables and energy efficiency, but at the same time it keeps the door wide open for fossil fuels investments.

The bank also commits to encourage greenhouse gas emissions reporting and decarbonisation plans by clients with significant carbon assets, however, it lacks explicit commitment to divestment from companies that are building new coal capacities

Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath, EBRD Policy Officer with Bankwatch, said: “The EBRD needs to send a strong signal to the market that the low-carbon transition for fossil fuel dependent companies and carbon intensive economies needs to start now.

“It is a joke to ‘encourage’ a state owned energy utility to develop a decarbonisation plan when it is building a new coal power plant that will be in operation for decades in the future. You cannot eat your cake and have it all.”

Energy sources

The report underlines the need for EBRD investments in fossil fuel dependent companies to facilitate absolute emissions reductions in both the short and the long term.

Europe’s development banks must also condition any further financing for companies whose electricity or heating capacity relies on fossil fuels on emissions reductions measurable within the lifetime of projects they support.

And lastly, companies planning new coal power capacity should not benefit from any financial support.

Anna Roggenbuck, EIB Policy Officer with CEE Bankwatch Network, said: “The review of the EIB’s energy strategy expected later this year is a great opportunity for the bank to reconsider its business model for the sector.

“As a financial institution, the EIB should be avoid getting involved with companies facing losses due to a major carbon exposure, and as an EU institution it ought to support energy transformation. Supporting companies’ decarbonisation plans based on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources is the only way forward.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Bankwatch. The full report can be read here.

Only the remaking of the human world in a generation can now prevent serious, far reaching and once-avoidable climate change impacts, according to the global scientific community.

In a major report released on Monday, the UN’s climate science body found limiting warming to 1.5C, compared to 2C, would spare a vast sweep of people and life on earth from devastating impacts.

To hold warming to this limit, the scientists said unequivocally that carbon pollution must fall to ‘net zero’ in around three decades: a huge and immediate transformation, for which governments have shown little inclination so far.

Small island states

“The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) research into the impacts of warming.

The report from the IPCC is a compilation of existing scientific knowledge, distilled into a 33-page summary presented to governments. If and how policymakers respond to it will decide the future of vulnerable communities around the world.

“I have no doubt that historians will look back at these findings as one of the defining moments in the course of human affairs,” the lead climate negotiator for small island states Amjad Abdulla said. “I urge all civilised nations to take responsibility for it by dramatically increasing our efforts to cut the emissions responsible for the crisis.”

What happens in the next few months will impact the future of the Paris Agreement and the global climate

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Abdulla is from the Maldives. It is estimated that half a billion people in countries like his rely on coral ecosystems for food and tourism. The difference between 1.5C and 2C is the difference between losing 70-90% of coral by 2100 and reefs disappearing completely, the report found.

Small island states were part of a coalition that forced the Paris Agreement to consider both a 1.5C and 2C target. Monday’s report is a response to that dual goal. Science had not clearly defined what would happen at each mark, nor what measures would be necessary to stay at 1.5C.

Absolute alarm

As the report was finalised, the UN secretary general’s special representative on sustainable energy Rachel Kyte praised those governments. “They had the sense of urgency and moral clarity,” she said, adding that they knew “the lives that would hang in the balance between 2[C] and 1.5[C]”.

At 2C, stresses on water supplies and agricultural land, as well as increased exposure to extreme heat and floods, will increase, risking poverty for hundreds of millions, the authors said.

Thousands of plant and animal species would see their liveable habitat cut by more than half. Tropical storms will dump more rain from the Philippines to the Caribbean.

“Everybody heard of what happened to Dominica last year,” Ruenna Hayes, a delegate to the IPCC from St Kitts and Nevis, told Climate Home News. “I cannot describe the level of absolute alarm that this caused not only me personally, but everybody I know.”

Around 65 people died when Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean island in September 2017, destroying much of it.

Food production

In laying out what needs to be done, the report described a transformed world that will have to be built before babies born today are middle aged. In that world 70-85% of electricity will be produced by renewables.

There will be more nuclear power than today. Gas, burned with carbon capture technology, will still decline steeply to supply just supply 8% of power. Coal plants will be no more. Electric cars will dominate and 35-65% of all transport will be low- or no-emissions.

To pay for this transformation, the world will have invested almost a trillion dollars a year, every year to 2050.

Our relationship to land will be transformed. To stabilise the climate, governments will have deployed vast programmes for sucking carbon from the air.

That will include protecting forests and planting new ones. It may also include growing fuel to be burned, captured and buried beneath the earth. Farms will be the new oil fields. Food production will be squeezed. Profoundly difficult choices will be made between feeding the world and fuelling it.

Net-zero

The report is clear that this world avoids risks compared to one that warms to 2C, but swerves judgement on the likelihood of bringing it into being. That will be for governments, citizens and businesses, not scientists, to decide.

During the next 12 months, two meetings will be held at which governments will be asked to confront the challenge in this report: this year’s UN climate talks in Poland and at a special summit held by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in September 2019.

The report’s authors were non-committal about the prospects. Jim Skea, a co-chair at the IPCC, said: “Limiting warming to 1.5C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes.”

Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and a former lead author of the IPCC, said: “If this report doesn’t convince each and every nation that their prosperity and security requires making transformational scientific, technological, political, social and economic changes to reach this monumental goal of staving off some of the worst climate change impacts, then I don’t know what will.”

The scientist have offered a clear prescription: the only way to avoid breaching the 1.5C limit is for humanity to cut its CO2 emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach ‘net-zero’ by around 2050. But global emissions are currently increasing, not falling.

Social change

The EU, one of the most climate progressive of all major economies, aims for a cut of around 30% by 2030 compared to its own 2010 pollution and 77-94% by 2050. It is currently reviewing both targets and says this report will inform the decisions.

If the EU sets a carbon neutral goal for 2050 it will join a growing group of governments seemingly in line with a mid-century end to carbon – including California (2045), Sweden (2045), UK (2050 target under consideration) and New Zealand (2050).

But a fundamental tenet of climate politics is that expectations on nations are defined by their development. If the richest, most progressive economies on earth set the bar at 2045-2050, where will China, India and Latin America end up? If the EU aims for 2050, the report concludes that Africa will need to have the same goal.

Some of the tools needed are available, they just need scaling up. Renewable deployment would need to be six times faster than it is today, said Adnan Z Amin, the director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency. That was “technically feasible and economically attractive”, he added.

Other aspects of the challenge require innovation and social change.

Made public

But just when the world needs to go faster, the political headwinds in some nations are growing. Brazil, home to the world’s largest rainforest, looks increasingly likely to elect the climate sceptic Jair Bolsonaro as president.

The world’s second-largest emitter – the US – immediately distanced itself from the report, issuing a statement that said its approval of the summary “should not be understood as US endorsement of all of the findings and key messages”. It said it still it intended to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

The summary was adopted by all governments at a closed-door meeting between officials and scientists in Incheon, South Korea that finished on Saturday. The US sought and was granted various changes to the text. Sources said the interventions mostly helped to refine the report. But they also tracked key US interests – for example, a mention of nuclear energy was included.

Sources told CHN that Saudi Arabia fought hard to amend a passage that said investment in fossil fuel extraction would need to fall by 60% between 2015 and 2050. The clause does not appear in the final summary.

But still, according to three sources, the country has lodged a disclaimer with the report, which will not be made public for months. One delegate said it rejected “a very long list of paragraphs in the underlying report and the [summary]”.

This Article

This article was first published at Climate Home News.

Just a week after the announcement came from George W. Bush that the US would renege on Kyoto, the then media-shy NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen (pictured) was invited to speak to Vice President Dick Cheney’s ‘Climate Task Force’.

Hansen took strength from the fact that the task force was manned by a high profile bunch: it was chaired by Cheney himself and included secretaries of state under orders to attend in person rather than send their delegates.

The NASA scientist did not expect to have any friends in the room; Bush’s chief of staff had previously attempted to fire Hanson in 1989 following the scientist alerting media to the fact that the White House had altered his conclusions on global warming – submitted to a hearing convened by the then US senator Al Gore – to make them seem less certain.

Complex science

Nonetheless, it was too good of an opportunity to forfeit for the sake of pride or pessimism. The first meeting fell on Hansen’s 60th birthday. Despite his lifetime of experience, the world’s foremost climate scientist was deeply anxious.

He and the other two scientists presenting were deeply apprehensive about the complexity of the work they had to present to this non-expert audience and spent the minutes before the meeting critiquing the more complicated aspects of their work.

Afterwards, Hansen was pleased. He thought he had gained their attention and had been invited to come to the Task Force again.

But his optimism quickly died when he was escorted from the building. He was told that at the next meeting he would be joined by none other than tobacco lobbyist and dean of climate sceptics Richard Lindzen.

Lindzen, an MIT professor whose career had been made from talking to businessmen and politicians, maintained a cool and authoritative air in the White House. His presentations more closely resembled a lawyer fighting for his client and are anathema to the scientist, whose main aim is to fairly and accurately represent the facts.

But when it comes to communicating with beginners, the former method has the upper hand.

The ‘right’ perspective

Lindzen argued that the climate hegemony kept critical voices “out in the cold” and that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) projections were no better than the Republican/sunspot analyses.

This was what they wanted to hear and, according to Hansen, the Bush–Cheney administration’s policies regarding CO2 appeared to be “based on or, at a minimum, congruent with, Lindzen’s perspective.”

It was three years before Hansen decided to give another public talk. He spent six months preparing to speak to the National Press Club in Washington. Here, he would explain why he planned to vote for Kerry rather than Bush.

But sponsors pulled the funding and, in the end, he delivered the speech to a college audience in Iowa City.

On 26 October 2004, Hansen told the audience: “In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.