On the death of the holy cow of climate activism
Wolfgang Knorr is a climate scientist, consultant for the European Space Agency and guest researcher at the Department of Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
Cross-posted from Wolfgang’s Substack Climate Uncensored
Two days after the federal election in Germany, it’s time to reflect on the almost complete absence of a climate political debate in a supposedly climate conscious country. I also use the opportunity to re-post an article I wrote a little over a year ago, when I sensed that we had already seen ‘peak climate consciousness’, which is added below.
Back in 2019, when the topic of climate related collapse was starting to populate the narrative space, my vision was that when this happens, we will be far too busy collapsing to even notice that the events unfolding around us are in any way related to climate. This, of course, went against the fundamental truth underlying almost all climate activism: that with the climate crisis heightening, the climate issue will naturally be swept up to centre stage. Now that the reality of collapse has started to creep into our well fed modern democratic societies, it is time to revisit this thought.
Of course, nobody ever expected the climate issue to play any role in the recent US presidential elections, which ended with a climate denier in the presidency, now sending his troops to rampage through what’s left of US democratic institutions. But Germany, a rather cloudy country that has pioneered the massive state-backed rollout of solar energy much later copied by the Biden administration, should surely still be a candidate for some serious climate politics. Not so. After its Green Party – of the outgoing ruling coalition – had thrown all its weight behind building massive Liquified Natural Gas terminals to import fossil fuels from authoritarian Persian Gulf states, climate only played a role in the country’s recent elections as far as it was posited as an object of hate.
What this shows is not that people don’t care about climate any more, but that climate change is just one of many factors that makes voters worry about the future, besides immigration, war, and the energy and cost of living crises.
All this matters a lot, because the leading candidate of the main Christian democratic opposition and now likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, frequently chimed in with the angry anti-renewables rhetoric of the far right. He called wind turbines ‘ugly’ and called for a rapid build-out of gas fired power stations to boost energy security. For Merz, this is all a safe bet, because he can fully count not only on Germany’s weight as the EU’s biggest economy being able to push through a Europe-wide U-turn in environmental policy. The EU is already expected to roll back its environmental ambitions, yielding to pressure from businesses as well as France and Germany – that is, not from the future, but the outgoing government with the Green party signed up for the responsible ministry. And outside the EU, British Petroleum is just now expected to scrap its once grandiose plans to redefine itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and remain what it has always been: a fossil-fuel major. All this at a moment when global temperatures continue chasing new record highs, with more and more evidence for an accelerating planetary warming rate.
Considering that the EU parliament had once, back in 2019, declared a ‘climate emergency’, this raises the question whether we are dealing with political amnesia, a change of mind, or simply the resurgence of a sentiment that has always existed but had only gone underground when confronted with too many climate activists: to hell with climate, to hell with having to be a ‘good citizen’. With the rise of right-wing populism, there is definitely liberation and defiance in the air. After all, emergency declarations were never really meant seriously and had been seen by many as counter-productive.
This is of course a view from the privileged in the so-called ‘Global North’. What this means for the rest of humankind remains to be seen. Most experts believe that due to economics, renewables are here to stay and therefore even the election of Donald Trump is forecast to make only a slight difference in expected future warming. In fact, renewables subsidies initiated by the previous Democratic US administration have so far profited mainly Republican led states, and are therefore expected to survive. But it means that we continue to have no climate policy to speak of, or at least no climate policy anywhere that would lead to a deviation from business-as-usual. Because a rapid rollout of renewables due to falling costs, even with some subsidies involved, is just another form of continuing on the same path as before – in particular if we consider that fossil-fuel subsidies not only continue, but have recently been boosted; Germany’s by as much as 50%.
It is difficult to predict what this development means for the speed at which planetary warming will continue. One problem is the dominance of entirely unrealistic 1.5 degree scenarios by the IPCC and International Energy Agency. The ‘Climate Action Tracker’ also focuses on projections based on ‘pledges’, not on hard physical and political realities. But a relatively recent report by the consulting company McKinsey at least gives some insights into the physical reality of serious climate policy. It reports on “lack [of] established low-emissions technologies that can deliver the same performance as high-emissions ones”, the interlocking of different hard challenges, requiring essentially a change of mindset, and finally that “the sheer scale of the deployment required is tough given constraints and the lack of a track record”.
In other words, even in a political climate where there is the will to tackle those challenges, the outcome is uncertain. Now that any traces of a political will have all but evaporated in the so-called ‘developed’ world, we will see what many foresaw a long time ago: that renewables will supplement, not replace fossil fuels.
For the Global South, that leaves China as the only major economy that appears to be serious about tackling climate change, despite its continuing reliance on coal power, which is now expected to fall. But it also means likely three to four degrees of warming by the end of the century, with no end in sight, and largely unknown but extremely serious consequences for livelihoods and geopolitical stability.
Which brings us back to the voters in Europe and Germany, who are worried about the future and get caught in the logic of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the very turmoil they see coming is exacerbated by the politicians they feel urged to vote for. And that is, I believe, a good measure of the future that we are looking at: chaos, rising tensions, and more political turmoil. Within all this chaos to talk about carbon footprints, net zero pledges or 1.5 degree goals will just sound like babble from a distant past.
The Coming Sunsetting of the Climate Issue
First published in Resilience
Towards the beginning of my university student years I was enjoying the best lectures I ever came across in my career – including those years I served as a university lecturer myself. A hallmark of this teacher’s style was that, whenever we started chatting too much, he would lower his voice. Afraid that we might be cut off from crucial information, quietness quickly returned to the lecture hall.
What I sense is that the period of blossoming climate emergency declarations and well-meaning intentions for net zero by 2050 spreading like a wildfire, may now be coming to an end. That we have seen peak climate intention, while the public’s attention will soon be gripped by more immediate and equally scary threats.
I realised that writing this could be deeply shocking and discouraging for a lot of people – those in the climate movement, and more generally those suffering from a deep rooted fear that this ‘climate thing’ just cannot end well. And this reminded me of my former teacher’s pedagogical trick. If the climate voices are more and more drowned by the general noise of turmoil around the globe, the end effect may ironically be to make the climate threat more, and not less tangible.
Candidates for more immediate threats abound: The war in Ukraine nearing its final crescendo threatening to draw EU and NATO into an incalculable conflict their own cheerful propaganda has never prepared them for. The war in the Middle East spreading, creating more incentives for regional powers to acquire nuclear weapons. The continuing insistence of consecutive US governments with seeing China as an enemy, and not a regional power that has its own security and national interests independent of that of the US. An increasingly self-assertive, nuclear armed North Korea. All that before a background of declining Western hegemony. Contrary to the controlled decommissioning of the Soviet Union as a superpower through active de-escalation sought by its former leadership, the current leadership generation of the declining Western superpower shows no signs of giving in to its fate. So we are facing a turbulent time ahead.
Another, less violent, line of evidence for peak climate intention came from an interview given by Akio Toyoda, the CEO of the world’s largest car maker, Toyota, when he re-stated his company’s determination to stay out of the electric vehicle hype. He predicted notably that EVs will never reach more than 30% of world market share. At the same time Volkswagen, the world’s second biggest automaker now fully betting on going 100% electric, along with other car companies, are facing a slump in EV demand – prompting a popular German car owner’s magazine to declare “nobody wants the German e-cars”.
The level of climate action zeal we have reached collectively may soon peak, but it is still reminiscent of a typical new year’s pledge by a drug addict. Like a chain smoker switching to e-cigarettes, we engage in superficial solutions that after a while lose their shine. We approach the issue through a tunnel vision that forgets that there are literally billions of people out there for which our self-comforting rich-world solutions won’t work anyway. The issue at hand is whether we will ever be able to give up fossil fuels globally, and only a globally reached enforceable consensus agreement can do the job. If the race to this end goal is a marathon, then after 45 years, we have gotten no further than the warm-up exercise before the run. At the latest climate conference that happened last year in Dubai the term ‘fossil fuels’ appeared for the first time in the context of the UN’s climate talks. We are approaching this point in life where we realise that we have been sitting on a couch for too long. Running marathons is simply not for us.
The most important thing will be to accept that. And then we can maybe see that shifting attention away from climate towards immediate questions of war and peace may end up being more relevant for the climate than all the UN climate talks of more than 30 years combined. If the US and EU do not give up their current obsession with seeing in China an enemy and geostrategic rival, given the steady progress China is making towards renewables, it will be the West ending up as the dirty polluter clinging on to fossil fuels. After all, the current geopolitical and financial hegemonic system is intimately tied to fossil fuels.
So as the wisdom of my former professor told him to constrain himself to achieve his goals, the climate movement may not be ill advised to tone down its tactics and just focus on making the threat more tangible. So I was heartened to read that the German “Letzte Generation” radical climate movement announced that it would change tactics. The climate crisis does not need any more explaining, any more lecturing. Once the lecturing stops, people might finally listen.
At a time when Western leaders, fearful of losing control, drive us down dangerous confrontational paths – with other countries, or with the biosphere – disobedience, not attention grabbing, is the call of the moment. When other issues take centre stage, the climate issue will keep looming in the background. The knowledge that we will have all but forgotten about it will make it more, and not less scary. And the scare together with the realisation that nobody is taking care of it, will be the best way of spurring people into action.
Be the first to comment