Climate Gobbledygook: ‘Experts’ Pontificating Mitigation Failure

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

Ed. note: With the US-led demise of Net Zero and “energy transformation,” prior attempts to come to grips with climate futility and energy reality are worth revisiting. This article, “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” (Annual Review of Environment and Resources: Vol. 46, 2021), is an example of a faulty worldview, a vastly overbuilt academic climate network (23 authors), and an inability to seriously deal with critical views of climate alarm/forced energy transformation.

“The globalizing formations of industrial modernity … are, arguably, most distinctively driven by an array of fallacies, fictions, and fantasies of control.” [1]

This post presents the article’s Abstract, Summary Points, Future Issues, and Conclusion followed by my critical comment.

ABSTRACT

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve.

However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today’s carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.

SUMMARY POINTS

1. Despite three decades of political efforts and scientifically informed warnings of the likely catastrophic effects of climate change, CO₂ emissions have continued to rise globally and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990.
2. Since the first IPCC report was published in 1990, more anthropogenic fossil CO₂ has been released into the atmosphere than previously throughout all of human history.
3. The failure of leadership, particularly from within high-emitting countries, sectors, corporations, and individuals, has locked in intra- and intergenerational suffering and long-term existential threats to livelihoods and ecosystems.
4. Entrenched geopolitical, industrial, and military power and associated mindsets are fundamental barriers to effective mitigation.
5. Orthodox schools of thought and research traditions (including highly constrained forms of modeling), particularly in the fields of economics, energy, and climate mitigation, need to be challenged and replaced with, or complemented by, more heterodox approaches.
6. Three decades of choosing to fail on mitigation have shifted the climate challenge from a technocratic adjustment to business as usual to requiring a rapid, system-level change within both industrialized and industrializing societies.
7. Transformations toward more sustainable and just futures require a radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change.
8. Attention to equity, high-carbon lifestyles, and conditions for enabling new social imaginaries has the potential to disrupt dominant, high-carbon development pathways.

FUTURE ISSUES

1. How could geopolitical competition over energy resources and ideologies of control that frame dominant responses to climate change be challenged and overcome?
2. How have mainstream economics and neoliberal responses to climate change (e.g., carbon markets and a broader financialization of the environment) become so pervasive, and what opportunities are there for alternative or complementary approaches?
3. How can research approaches currently dominating advice and underpinning climate mitigation policy (such as integrated assessment modeling) be complemented with a more varied array of approaches and perspectives?
4. How could approaches that rapidly reduce energy-related emissions be realized (e.g., actively displacing and disassembling fossil fuel–based energy systems, and energy demand management practices)?
5. How can the large asymmetry in responsibility for emissions within, as well as between, nations be addressed in climate policy and governance?
6. How can fossil fuel–based, high-carbon lifestyles, practices, and visions of incremental mitigation be rapidly replaced by sustainable alternatives and profound system change, informed by a timely response to the Paris temperature and equity commitments?
7. How can knowledge systems and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change be transformed?
8. How can existing and new social movements mobilize popular power and social imaginaries in a way that effectively challenges the status quo and helps drive structural change at the scale and pace required?

CONCLUSION

This article has demonstrated that, while the reasons for 30 years of failure to bend the global emissions curve are multifaceted, a common and strong thread is woven through them all. In various guises and to differing degrees, the centralization of power and the privileges that accompany it have coalesced around a particular worldview. Through recent decades, the central tenets of this worldview have evolved into a wider global Zeitgeist whereby development and progress are reduced to economic growth and defined by increasingly narrow financial metrics and indices.

Coincident with this financial reductionism and economic characterization of nations and societies has been a growing recognition that the “system” externalities are set to undermine the very tenets of the system. Thus far, however, the power and inertia of the existing system have been sufficient to give the impression of ongoing control. The challenges are “recognized” and “internalized,” and through promised technical futures that are carefully costed in elaborate models, the existing power structures remain unchallenged.

From Bias to Gobbledygook

“The process of writing this article has been iterative and humbling,” the 23 authors admit. [1] “As the article coalesced, it became increasingly evident that any attempt to distil a single clear narrative was misguided.” It is also stated: “… we coauthors have not necessarily been neutral observers of others’ failings.”

This aside, the analysis turns against the general population that has been duped or is just plain unqualified for the task at hand, which is a “radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions.” Translated, a governmental low-carbon, Net Zero lifestyle must be mandated for one and all.

Enter the vast right-wing conspiracy. It is stated that “people can, at least temporarily, be steered to ignore physical reality.” The masses are victims of “elite political discourse,” “dogmatic political-economic hegemony,” and “narrow techno-economic mindsets.” The “psychological, social, and emotional capacity of individuals and groups to understand, explore, and create different social imaginaries has been steadily weakened.” And:

“Inadequate responses from societies can partially be attributed to psychological factors such as the limited capacity to apprehend and formulate responses to climate change….”

An ‘epistemological monoculture’ … has impoverished the collective global capacity to imagine and realize forms of living not dependent upon exploitation of people and natural “resources”….

In the educational and epistemological arena, indigenous and decolonial traditions of thought are already providing a powerful critique of education’s role in reproducing and defending the status quo.

Back to reality. Gobbledygook is defined as “language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms.” This is why the above article is so obtuse.

Will the separation of government and climate change result in these “experts” doing something more useful? Even getting a job in the private sector creating wealth rather than theorizing to redistribute it?

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[1] Authors: Isak Stoddard, Kevin Anderson, Stuart Capstick, Wim Carton, Joanna Depledge, Keri Facer, Clair Gough, Frederic Hache, Claire Hoolohan, Martin Hultman, Niclas Hällström, Sivan Kartha, Sonja Klinsky, Magdalena Kuchler, Eva Lövbrand, Naghmeh Nasiritousi, Peter Newell, Glen P. Peters, Youba Sokona, Andy Stirling, Matthew Stilwell, Clive L. Spash, and Mariama Williams.