Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice

To the next generation,

Ernesto, Mikel and Elio.

May we leave you

a better world.

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1    TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

Can technology solve climate change?

What are greenhouse gases?

What are the main sources of GHG emissions?

How can we clean up our energy grid? What exactly are clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources?

What’s the difference between zero- and net-zero emissions?

Can forests serve as a carbon sink?

What is carbon capture? Is it a viable solution?

Does LEED certification mean that our buildings are using less energy?

Conclusion

CHAPTER 2    POLICY QUESTIONS

What was the Kyoto Protocol?

What is the Paris Agreement?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of putting a price on carbon?

How does a cap-and-trade system work?

How does a carbon tax work?

What about carbon offsets?

How does the United States subsidize the fossil fuel industry?

Is natural gas a bridge fuel?

How have the fossil fuel and other industries influenced policy discussions?

What kinds of policy solutions do environmentalists propose?

What is the Green New Deal?

Conclusion

CHAPTER 3    WHAT CAN I DO AS AN INDIVIDUAL?

Should I buy a Prius?

What about giving up my car and using Uber and Lyft?

Should we all stop flying?

Should we all be vegetarians?

What are strengths and weaknesses of pipeline protests as a strategy? What about divestment from fossil fuels?

Do we need to consume less?

Conclusion: What kinds of individual actions can make the most difference?

CHAPTER 4    SOCIAL, RACIAL, AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

What’s the relationship of inequality to climate change?

What do race and racism have to do with climate change?

How will different people—and different parts of the world—be affected by climate change, now and in the future?

How are pandemics related to climate change?

How can we fairly hold different countries, people, and institutions accountable for their contributions to climate change? What methods for calculating emissions best show who is emitting the most, and where to target our efforts for change?

What do workers and the labor movement have to say about climate change? Is climate change a union issue?

What is a just transition?

What is energy democracy? How is it related to the struggle to confront climate change?

Conclusion: Should social, racial, and economic justice issues be linked to the fight to stop climate change?

CHAPTER 5    BROADENING THE LENS

Is population growth the root of the problem?

Is immigration bad for the environment?

What is economic growth? How important is it, and how does it affect the environment?

Can we have economic growth without increasing emissions?

Do we even need growth? What is degrowth? Is it a good idea?

Is degrowth compatible with the Green New Deal?

Are we making progress?

Conclusion: Reasons for optimism

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

We are facing a climate catastrophe. There are plenty of books, scientific reports, and articles out there that describe the damage we’ve already done—the droughts, the wildfires, the super-storms, the melting glaciers, the heat waves, and the displaced people fleeing lands that are becoming uninhabitable. Despite innumerable studies, proclamations, meetings, international agreements, and promises, despite scientific and technological advances in energy efficiency and alternatives, and despite huge investments in and the expansion of solar and wind energy and hybrid and electric vehicles, we denizens of planet Earth collectively continue to emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year than the one before. The discourse might be going in the right direction, but our actions are going in, decidedly, the wrong direction.

The climate crisis is the result of a social and economic system that relies on extracting and consuming the earth’s resources in ever-increasing quantities, and turning them into waste. Of course, every living creature consumes or absorbs resources and emits waste. But only humans have found ways to intensify the way we do it and developed ideologies and economies that promote unending expansion of the processes. Over the centuries, especially since the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of fossil fuels, we’ve made extraordinary leaps in production and consumption, as the world’s population has grown.

But not all of us humans play the same role in this process. Control of fossil fuels allowed some groups of people to expand their power and standard of living. Over time, some of those who were excluded, dispossessed, enslaved, and exploited by the process fought for, and achieved, a piece of the growing political and economic pie. In the process, they also increased their own fossil fuel use and their emissions. Still, today, the process of expansion, dispossession, and incorporation continues. The masters of the system consume more than previous generations could have dreamed of. The growing middle classes consume significantly less, but still far more than their grandparents or the large population that lives in extreme poverty.

No matter how much our technological wizardry advances, the resources of the planet are finite, as is its ability to absorb the waste we produce. For the first couple hundred years, industrializing areas of the world managed to outsource a large chunk of the social and environmental costs of their production and consumption. They colonized distant lands, dispossessed and enslaved workers, and devoted a significant portion of their technological advances to instruments of war to ensure their continued dominance. And they displaced the consequences of their profligacy onto future generations.

By the late twentieth century, resources were growing scarcer, waste was becoming more toxic, and the planet’s finite limits were finally being recognized. Scientists began to sound the alarm on the greenhouse effect, by which CO2 and other gases released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and by cutting down forests was trapping more of the sun’s heat and warming the earth’s temperature.

This book’s contribution

Literature on climate change has proliferated over the past decade, as have popular awareness, media attention, political mobilization, and high school and university classes. Yet there is no single, short, accessible book that breaks down the complexities, terminology, disagreements, and issues in the debates for activists, students, and the general interested public. This book proposes to be such a primer.

I am not aiming at readers who question the science of climate change. Indeed, I will not delve into the science as there is already an ample literature that does this. Virtually every book on climate change, whatever its focus, begins with a chapter outlining what we know about the physical causes of climate change, the decades of science behind our knowledge, and the current and predictable future effects of increasing, stabilizing, or slowly decreasing CO2 emissions.

Yet many questions remain largely opaque to general readers who understand we are facing a climate emergency but may be fuzzy on technical, policy, and social justice aspects. What kinds of policies could lower emissions enough to avoid impending climate chaos? What steps amount to little more than greenwashing? What issues divide the labor movement and the environmental movement, with respect to climate solutions? How does climate change relate to social and racial justice, including global and domestic economic inequality, poverty, migration, violence, and economic development? We may agree on the immediate material causes of global warming—greenhouse gas emissions. But what are the structural factors that keep us on what most agree is a path towards self-destruction? Where should we focus our attention to change the path?

Understanding climate change in order to change it

What’s the cause of climate change? While the answer might seem obvious, this book argues that how we think about the causes of climate change matters a lot, because it shapes how we think about and organize to reverse an approaching climate catastrophe.

Global warming is caused by the increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that trap the sun’s heat. The more we fill the atmosphere with these gases, the more heat is trapped. That’s the technical explanation.

GHG emissions come primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, beginning with the extraction and burning of coal as the Industrial Revolution progressed in the nineteenth century and increasing through the extraction and burning of petroleum and natural gas in the twentieth. The late twentieth century saw massive increases in extraction of resources, and production and consumption of goods (for some), thus massive increases in the use of fossil fuels, bringing us to our current climate emergency.

If the science is now crystal clear that human activity—extraction, production, and consumption—causes GHG emissions that are progressively warming our planet and leading us towards catastrophic climate change, tracing this brief history suggests that the technical answer is only part of the picture. Growing use of fossil fuels may be the proximate cause of climate change, but what explains the growing use of fossil fuels? Is it population growth, which is bringing us close to eight billion inhabitants and growing fast, putting an ever-increasing strain on our planet’s resources? Is it the inhabitants of the United States, who collectively burn about a quarter of the planet’s fossil fuels every year, despite being home to less than 5 percent of its population? Is it the global 1 percent, the elite who overwhelmingly dominate high-emissions activities like air travel and luxury consumption? Or the top 10 percent, who produce over half of the planet’s emissions, while the poorest half of the planet’s inhabitants together produce less than 10 percent?¹ Is it the fossil fuel companies, which have worked so hard to deny the science behind global warming? Is it the governments that enact policies and agreements that continue to promote high-emissions activities? Is it the corporations that dominate the global economy and exert outsized control over governments and international agencies? Is it humans? Industrialization? Capitalism? How we identify cause will play a big role in how we conceptualize what it is that we need to change.

Climate change and planetary boundaries

While the impending climate emergency has captured a lot of attention, some argue looking at GHG emissions in isolation prevents us from seeing the bigger picture of the ecological crisis we are courting. Humans are exceeding planetary limits on multiple fronts, and the impacts of human activity in different areas are interrelated and create synergistic effects.

In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) proposed the concept of planetary boundaries—the outer limits of what humans can extract from or impose on the natural world in nine areas, each of which affects the others. Crossing these boundaries, SRC argued, increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes.²

Climate change, measured by the amount of CO2 equivalent in the atmosphere, is one of the areas in which the boundary is threatened. But it can’t be separated from the others: ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical nitrogen (nitrogen released by agriculture and industrial processes), phosphorous cycle (phosphorous released into the oceans), global freshwater use, land system use (lands deforested and put into agricultural and urban use), biological diversity loss (species extinctions), chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading (air pollution, such as particles of dust and soot in the air we breathe). Exceeding any one of these boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic, triggering non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems, the SRC concluded. When the center proposed the boundary system in 2009, it concluded we had already transgressed three of these boundaries: climate change, biodiversity loss, and changes to the global nitrogen cycle.³

The concept of planetary boundaries shows that despite the urgency of reducing GHG emissions to avoid catastrophic warming, it’s not enough. If we succeed in reducing emissions but continue to pollute our waters, destroy our forests, and drive species to extinction, environmental disasters will persist. New infectious diseases like the 2019 novel coronavirus, on the heels of SARS, MERS, Zika, H1N1 (swine flu), Ebola, and others, are one example, resulting in large part from land use change as humans destroy wildlife habitats by pressing ever further into the planet’s remaining forests.⁴

Organization of the book

The book divides its questions into five basic areas. The first section, on technical issues, looks at proposed and existing technical and technological responses to climate change. While existing and emerging technologies have brought indisputable benefits to many, technological advances have also brought social and environmental problems. Technology alone can’t solve the problems we’re facing, if it’s incorporated in a social and economic system that prioritizes the profits of the few over the well-being of the many.

The second section explores the nature and implications of different policy options and proposals. Despite decades of international meetings and agreements, and despite a plethora of policy innovations, global emissions continue to rise. Why is this the case, and what kind of policies could be more effective? This section also looks at some of the economic and political interests that influence the policy discussions.

The third section asks the inevitable question in every conversation about climate change: What can I do as an individual? The specific questions here look at individual, consumer-based actions and different forms of protest and campaigns for change. While generally arguing lifestyle changes are a weak form of political activism, this section does not advocate one specific route towards bringing about change. Rather, it helps readers understand the debates surrounding specific types of activism and emphasizes the need for collaboration and complementary campaigns.

The fourth section focuses on social, racial, and economic justice, placing climate change in the context of global economic structures. Overall the world’s poorest, who have contributed the least to global emissions, are suffering the greatest effects of the changing climate. This chapter explores divisions among social justice organizations, the labor movement, and environmental groups and ways these divisions could be transcended. It follows discussions in international policy circles and local organizations about how different countries, industries, and social sectors have contributed to climate change and asks how climate policy can fairly address these differences.

The fifth and final section delves into some of the biggest questions that the climate debate frequently evades. How are population growth and immigration related to climate change? Is capitalism inherently dependent on fossil fuels? On economic growth? Can there be economic growth without environmental destruction? What do the answers mean about what we need to change? How could we reorganize our world system to liberate people from poverty and hunger—and from the deadly treadmill of constantly increasing production and consumption? And, after decades of international, national, and local activism, are we making any progress?

Confronting climate change means understanding how we got to this point, and challenging some of the basic ways our society and economy are organized. The same systems and structures that have brought us to the environmental brink have forged our unstable and unequal world. I hope this book will give the interested public tools to more confidently and effectively engage in climate change debate and activism, including finding new forms of collaboration with movements for global justice.

CHAPTER 1

TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

CAN TECHNOLOGY SOLVE CLIMATE CHANGE?

This is a big question and is at the heart of many debates about climate change today. Techno-optimists, techno-utopians, or eco-modernists believe that even though modern industrial society is the cause of climate change, it can also be the solution. New technologies can solve the very problems we’ve created. It’s just a matter of coming up with the right ones.

Most world governments, and businesses, have put a lot of faith in technological solutions to climate change. They flood us with visions of solar panels, driverless electric cars, artificial intelligence, smart grids, and carbon capture and storage technologies, and believe that the market itself can carry us to this carbon-free future. Others advocate government subsidies, incentives, regulation, or a combination of measures to encourage greater use of these new technologies. But techno-optimists believe that our basic economic model and system of production and consumption work fine, and that through technological progress, they can adapt to emit less.

Here I join critics who take a more radical, ecological, and systemic view. While technology must play a role in how we confront climate change, it’s not enough to just incorporate new technologies and new regulations into existing economic models that are based on the plunder of the planet’s resources. The global economy relies on ever-increasing consumption and economic growth, and the idea that new technologies will allow economies and consumption to continue to grow. But the model entails and is based on the exploitation of both the many and the planet, in the interests of the few.

An ecological approach

Instead of evaluating new technologies solely on their technical merit, an ecological approach focuses on systems and interrelationships. The science of ecology studies the relationship of organisms (plants and animals) and their habitats or environments. We often associate ecology with environmentalism: ecology insists on the interrelatedness of aspects of the natural world and shows how human-induced change and technology can have unwanted ripple effects that we miss by looking at one factor in isolation.

Ecological approaches also go beyond science. Political ecology considers how systems of human social organization interact with the natural environment: the co-production of the social and natural worlds, the relationship of politics and nature, and how the power structures of society and humans’ relationships with the natural world shape each other. Ecological economics seeks to expand the discipline of economics, situating the economy in our finite biosphere. It highlights the dependence of human-organized economies on the natural world that traditional economists often take for granted.¹

Ecological approaches don’t reject technology. Rather, they insist technology be understood within a web of political, social, and economic relationships that include those among humans, in the natural environment, and between humans and nonhuman nature.

Ecological approaches are radical in that they go beyond the surface to the roots. If new technologies are just imported into existing social and economic systems, the structures themselves will persist. If existing structures are based on privileging profit over people, finding more effective ways of extracting resources from nature, and endlessly increasing production and consumption, then new technologies controlled by the same powerholders will continue to uphold existing structures. This is why the slogan System change, not climate change emphasizes a much more fundamental transformation change than just adding new technologies to our toxic mix.²

Potentials and limits of technology

I’m not arguing that technology has no place in our collective attempt to reduce atmospheric CO2 and rein in climate change. If new (and existing) technologies can be incorporated into a larger project of cultural, social, and economic change that allows humanity to share our resources fairly and within planetary boundaries, then they can contribute to this new world. In other words, technical innovation and diffusion should be used to support those who have the least, rather than those who already use too much. That’s the political part.

Even though it’s not the whole story, it’s important to understand the technical aspects of how we got into this mess and what kinds of technical solutions have been proposed to get us out of it. The rest of the entries in this section look at these technical issues. First, I introduce some of the terms and concepts that we need to understand climate change. I then examine several technological innovations, from an ecological rather than a technooptimist perspective, to suggest that it’s unrealistic to believe we can rely on technical fixes alone to solve the climate catastrophe.

WHAT ARE GREENHOUSE GASES?

When we talk about greenhouse gases, we usually think first of carbon dioxide. Other greenhouse gases include methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and fluorinated gases. They’re called greenhouse gases because they trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, causing what has long been known as the greenhouse effect, now more commonly referred to as global warming or climate change. Some analysts believe that we should stop using these neutral-sounding terms and call it climate emergency, climate chaos, or climate catastrophe.

CO2 is emitted in the largest amounts, though some of the other greenhouse gases are much more potent than CO2. Some statistical analyses only measure CO2, while some use the concept of CO2 equivalence (CO2e)—that is, they translate the impact of the others into their CO2 equivalent for simplicity’s sake. If an analysis measures only CO2, it’s necessarily underestimating the actual impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that CO2 accounts for just over 80 percent of US GHG emissions, methane for 10 percent, nitrous oxide for 6 percent, and fluorinated gases for 3 percent.³ Much methane is released accidentally, and much of that is not measured, so many scientists believe methane emissions are significantly higher than the EPA figures.

CO2 is released into the atmosphere primarily through the burning of fossil