How to solve a problem so unsolvable?
It is first important to understand why we disagree about climate change. Different political interests create different aims to gain the support of different people. Private industry wants to decrease awareness of climate change in order to maintain profits where lobby groups hope to increase awareness.
For example, it’s ironic that Trump calls out fake news, however this is actually in order to turn away the attention of his own ‘fake news’ on climate change. He doesn’t want people to believe in climate change as this would limit economic prosperity for the US. Trump even denies findings of his own government warning against climate change. A report found that climate change will cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars annually and damage health, but the Trump administration has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda. We need to deconstruct what we believe. Being aware means we can question narratives.
Personal experiences and personal knowledges also influence attitudes to climate change. Our ideas are always situated, and this then impacts the solutions. Spatial differences in narratives also impact people, for example in London we see limited impacts of climate change vs. in the Maldives where they face the risk of sea level rise. Apocalyptic narratives make it seem like there will be one big failure, where it is actually always happening in our everyday lives. It’s a problem that’s entangled in cultural, political and economic structures. You can have no one solution to it as it would have to be able to intersect all interest groups. We need to create a more holistic view of solutions taking into account different knowledges.
There is no way we can ‘solve’ the issue of climate change as it has become so clear that it is now ‘unsolvable’, however, perhaps we can solve the issue of adaptation and mitigation.
The work of the IPCC is arguably complete, it has proven that climate change is happening and that it has anthropogenic drivers. Now the issue is what that will mean for life on earth.
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. These changes in the climate systems will impact on our ecosystems and natural resources which in turn affects the humans that rely on these systems. And with this, climate change increases inequalities, as some are able to mitigate impacts more successfully than others due to their adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is socially differentiated, the privileged are more able to adapt which means that climate change makers the poorer, poorer.
The problem is, we live in a globalised system that doesn’t want to change. For many, reducing emissions means sacrificing the economy. Carbon is so closely tied with economies that by mitigating climate change, many big actors will be ‘losing’. It is time to decouple carbon from the economy, since there is actually no need for continued economic growth through carbon- on a finite planet, you can’t keep growing infinitely.
Who should have to reduce their emissions?
It is a fair question to ask why some countries that haven’t done any of the emitting should be responsible for the emissions reductions. There are millions of people having to live without electricity but are being limited by carbon targets that developed countries never had the hindrance of, and instead prospered from. Institutions should find a policy which balances the level of action dependent on the amount that they have already emitted.
It is hard to cut emissions because people have cultural ties to practices. Changing behaviour needs to be led from the top down. It is impossible for people to change the impact of climate change by carrying out individual acts such as recycling. In this sense, we are led to overestimate and underestimate the effects of different mitigation strategies. We need institutions to chose to make large scale changes, instead of holding behaviour as responsible.
It is ironic that everyone puts the blame on China for climate change. Who is China actually making stuff for? Without an active market in the global north, they wouldn’t have the need to be so polluting. In essence we are outsourcing our emissions, so it looks better for us. It is not about scapegoating individual areas, climate change is a networked impact that needs a networked polycentric approach.
Although it is clear that it is near impossible to find solutions that will cater for everyone, there are key ideas and concepts that will aid the speed at which climate change can be managed. We need to look at the equities of climate change, who has the ‘right’ to pollute, the way we can manage it, and the actors that influence our understandings as this is key to the way we will be able to support solutions.