Climate and development: A tale of two crises
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Speaker: Peter Newell, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex The project of development is very much implicated in the production of climate change, as well as how it has been managed to date. But can the development sector also help to bring about the sorts of transformations now required to prevent climate chaos? This lecture looks at the intertwined histories of development and climate change and argues that only a very different approach to development can help to address the climate crisis we currently face. This lecture is part of the Sussex Development Lecture series: Achieving the SDGs: Synergies and Tensions.
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Climate and development: A tale of two crises
- 1. Climate change and development: a tale of two crises Sussex Development Lecture February 2019 Peter Newell P.J.Newell@sussex.ac.uk
- 2. Climate change and development: a tale of two crises Sussex Development Lecture February 2019 Peter Newell P.J.Newell@sussex.ac.uk
- 4. The emissions gap • Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2020 and the gap must be closed by 2030. • If the emissions gap is not closed by 2030, all hope of 1.5 degrees is lost & it is very plausible that the goal of a well-below 2°C temperature increase is also out of reach • Pathways reflecting current NDCs imply global warming of about 3°C by 2100, with warming continuing afterwards. • 80- 90% of coal reserves worldwide will need to remain in the ground, if climate targets are to be reached & approximately 35% for oil reserves and 50% for gas reserves • Even assuming all countries fulfill their pledges, it would account for only about a third of the needed emission reductions to get to 2°C.
- 5. IPCC SR15
- 8. The Production of Climate Change
- 9. The industrial revolution & fossil capital
- 12. Changing Geography of Global Emissions
- 13. Global GHG emissions: % v per capita
- 14. Overshooting other planetary boundaries
- 15. Managing Climate Change: Trasformismo or transformation?
- 16. Business as usual • Multilateral development banks provided over $9 billion in public finance for fossil fuel projects in 2016 – with the vast majority of transactions approved after the Paris Agreement was reached. • Clean energy still made up less than a third of multilateral development bank energy finance in 2016. • Total MDB finance for oil and gas exploration more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, from $1.05 billion to $2.15 billion. • The World Bank Group, European Investment Bank, and Asian Development Bank were the largest financiers of fossil fuels in 2016. Source: Oil Change International Cross Purposes: After Paris, Multilateral Development Banks Still Funding Billions in Fossil Fuels 2017.
- 17. New wine in old bottles: The case of climate-smart agriculture Agribusiness corporations that promote synthetic fertilisers, industrial meat production and large-scale industrial agriculture – all of which are widely recognised as contributing to climate change and undermining the resilience of farming systems – can and do call themselves ‘Climate Smart’. (Climate Smart Agriculture Concerns 2015)
- 18. Managing contradictions: Green growth
- 19. Moving beyond crisis Development as (un)usual
- 20. Capillaries of fossil fuel power
- 22. From reducing emissions & trading- to leaving it in the ground
- 24. Final word “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”. Albert Einstein
- 25. Stories of positive change https://www.rapidtransition.org/ Peter Newell P.J.Newell@sussex.ac.uk
Editor's Notes
- Despite growing acknowledgement of the climate crisis, we need to unpack the nature of that crisis: For whom is it a crisis? (judging by the lack of action compared with what is required, clearly not everyone sees it is a crisis) What is it a crisis of? What does it represent? (legitimacy crisis for key tenets of development thinking?) For me, CC does suggest the ‘limits of (conventional) development’ as ideology and practice. But it is not just CC that does that. Whole range of issues around inequality and unsustainability of systems of food and agriculture, water and energy to name a few. The dominant economic system is performing poorly on a range of grounds, though its inability to address CC is certainly one of them.
- According to the latest UNEP Emissions Gap report
- Just reflecting for a moment on what this would mean- especially for least developed countries- should we fail to get the world on a 2 degree, let alone a 1.5 pathway. Clearly – this degree of CC amounts to development in reverse
- Given the scale of the challenge, understandably therefore triggered a debate about whether the dominant economic system is fit for purpose in terms of tackling climate change. Naomi Klein suggested in her book ‘This changes everything’. But does it?
- It is helpful at this point to return to the origins of the CC problem to understand the links to development and the intertwined histories of these two crises. Understanding where we have come from, why things are the way they are, helps us to assess the prospects of reform or transformation
- The origins of the climate crisis- understood as industrial lock- are found in the rapid expansion in the use of fossil fuels at the time of the industrial revolution. But, as Andreas Malm has shown, this was not as conventionally assumed, about coal-fired steam offering a cheaper or more abundant source of energy, but the superior control of labour that it afforded. Allowing capital to concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours. Not only is this story interesting and important in terms of how lock-in was created, but also in relation to the narrative that has been constructed about how to undo it and create a new (low carbon) industrial revolution by: -creating new sites of accumulation for capital particularly by engaging finance capital -stimulating and accelerating waves of creative destruction -allowing the market to determine which energy sources and technologies should prevail
- On one level this is obviously a generic problem of human impact on the climate system. But on another, we can be much more specific. Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions including Chevron, Exxon, Shell and BP according to a study by Richard Heede published in the journal Climatic Change. More worrying still, half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years – well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change
- In so far as the contemporary notion of development was invented (as Escobar and others claim) with President Truman’s declaration in his inaugural address in 1949 that ‘greater production is the key to prosperity and peace’ and to relieving the suffering of those in poverty- coincided with great acceleration. At very moment of its inception, development in reverse was set in train As we can see here…. Fordism, mass consumerism and then globalisation intensified and globalised these modes of extraction and exchange.
- Not of course a static picture. With globalisation….seen new geopolitical landscape of emissions
- What these national figures disguise are the global inequalities that always bedevil development progress
- Again, the problem is not just CC… However contestable the planetary boundaries concept might be, the trends it describes provide warning signs about the unsustainable trajectory of the global economy which You might have thought this would create a crisis of legitimacy and perhaps should trigger reflection and revision to prevailing development orthodoxies. But has it?
- CC just latest legitimacy crisis for BW institutions- managed to ride out anti-globalisation movement But proscriptions and orthodoxies increasingly under threat
- So where do we go from here?
- Not fetishing one agreement or arena Mis-match between this terrain of conflict Climate change Un-burnable carbon Commodification- forests, oceans
- After all…..