Introduction and Abridged Text of Lecture: “Laggards or Leaders: Academia and Its Responsibility in Delivering on the Paris Commitments”

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On 8 April 2020, the Climate Action Task Force of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) held its inaugural event—a plenary lecture by Dr. Kevin Anderson, a Professor of Energy and Climate Change from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and the former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

In our invitation to Dr. Anderson, we explained that the Task Force’s charge is to transform the Annual Meeting into a low-CO₂-emission event, so that it accords with the recommendations of climate science. In that spirit, we asked that he share his thoughts with the audience regarding the necessity of radical cuts in emissions in the immediate and near term and why high-consuming populations and institutions—those associated with Western academics, in particular—must help lead the way.

The Task Force invited Dr. Anderson not only because of his expertise as a climate scientist, but also because he is a leading authority on the impacts of aviation-related emissions and an outspoken advocate of far-reaching cuts in flying, particularly among academics. Emissions from flying typically make up the vast majority of CO₂ emissions associated with academic conferences that draw participants who travel long distances (see, e.g., Jäckle 2019). In addition, aviation constitutes a significant slice of the overall emissions of research universities, at least in relatively wealthy countries (e.g., Wynes and Donner 2018; Arsenault et al. 2019; ETH Zürich 2019). Moreover, they are significant globally: Aviation emissions made up 2.4 percent of total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions in the year 2018 (Lee et al. 2020);¹ thus, if commercial aviation were a country, its emissions would be the sixth-largest in the world, just behind those of Japan and Germany (Environmental and Energy Study Institute 2019). Flying is also “the activity that most clearly embodies the links between inequality and ecological breakdown” (Roelofs 2019, 268; see also Oswald, Owen, and Steinberger 2020). According to Gössling and Humpe (2020), in 2018, 11 percent of the world’s population traveled by air, with a maximum of 4 percent doing so internationally. At most 1 percent of the Earth’s human denizens accounted for more than half of the total emissions from passenger air travel. In other words, flying represents a particularly concentrated form of privilege practiced by a small slice of the world’s population, including aeromobile academics.

This forum includes an abridged version of the actual lecture² prepared by the two editors of this Focus Section and then edited by Dr. Anderson.³ It is followed by ten essays by a diverse set of geographers who respond to the lecture by considering its implications for the AAG, its annual meetings, or the broader world. We, the editors of this Focus Section, along with Wendy Jepson (Chair of the Task Force), conclude the forum with an essay that explores the theory of change that underlies the Task Force’s work and the importance of academics and academic institutions as agents of broad socioecological transformation.

Abridged Text of Lecture: “Laggards or Leaders: Academia and Its Responsibility in Delivering on the Paris Commitments”

Rather than asking what can academia do to reduce its emissions, we need to ask, what total reductions does the Paris Agreement require of academia? If we take seriously science and the equity components of Paris and climate negotiations more broadly, we see a far more challenging mitigation agenda than one typically finds in conventional analyses.⁴

This talk focuses on the energy system—which is from where most emissions arise. It focuses on what we must do to live up to our Paris temperature commitments in terms of a CO₂ budget.⁵ The analysis is based on Anderson, Broderick, and Stoddard (2020) and other work previously published with colleagues.

Before continuing, we must acknowledge that the Agreement is deeply unjust. Its 1.5-2 °C commitments effectively accept that many people will continue to suffer and die due to climate change, a situation that will get considerably worse. We are impacting the future for every species on this planet for decades if not millennia to come.

The basics of the Paris Agreement are that we’ll take action to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°; and that we’ll do so in accordance with the best science and on the basis of equity between and within nations. What we do in the short term is of utmost importance as long-term targets allow us to push changes to another day—by which time it will, in many respects, be too late to deliver the changes that action today can yet achieve. On this basis, we can emit approximately 660 gigatons of CO₂ between 2020 and 2100⁶—in other words about eighteen years of current emissions—to stay within a 2° rise in temperature.

The first IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports came out in 1990. In many ways, those reports captured everything we needed to know about climate change in terms of the scale of mitigation required. Yet global emissions were 62 percent higher in 2018 than in 1990.⁷ This manifests thirty years of abject, collective failure. We have not only failed to bring down emissions; we have also barely reduced the rate of increase! This applies even to the so-called climate progressive countries where the talk is now about “net zero”—a term that wasn’t even around three or four years ago.

None of the industrialized parts of the world have shown any leadership in line with the demands of Paris. Thus far, we’ve had a litany of technocratic fraud. Rather than seriously trying to cut our CO₂ emissions, we’ve seen the embrace of offsetting (paying a poor person to diet for us, to allow us to carry on with our high-carbon lifestyle); the Clean Development Mechanism (state-sanctioned offsetting); afforestation schemes (plant a tree, build an airport); as well as speculative negative emission technologies⁸ and geoengineering. Offsetting, which is particularly prevalent in academia and in international climate meetings, is worse than doing nothing (see Anderson 2012). Its existence and the problems associated with offsets manifest how we’ve failed at every level.

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In terms of what follows, I want to make four points.

1. Let's do all the things that we can do.

2. Don't wait for perfect solutions.

3. There are always cracks in the system.

4. It's through these cracks that change can emerge.

Let's Do All the Things That We Can Do

There are lots of things we can do now: fly much less; use trains or buses rather than private transport; end airport expansions; stop coal/oil/gas development; cease the building of new roads; bike and walk a lot more; build car-free cities; bring about high-quality virtual communications—and so much more. Not least among them is to talk honestly about the things we are doing, the failures and the successes.

Don't Wait for Perfect Solutions

If you look at most climate change documents from wealthy countries—such as the UK’s “Net Zero” report—they smack of colonialism. They assume that the wealthy can pretty much continue as they long have—with high-consuming lifestyles. (This is also true of the IPCC working group on mitigation.) They all assume the allocation of a disproportionate share of the world’s carbon budget to the wealthy parts of the world. These documents are not aligned with the temperature and equity commitments enshrined in the Paris agreement; they’re much more in line with 3 to 4 °C of warming.

If we reduce the issue to a pie (and assume that we want to reduce our emissions in line with 1.5 °C), we have a pie of approximately 660 billion tons of CO₂. So how do we divide it up? If we do so on the basis of equity, we find that wealthy countries (what the IPCC refers to as “developed country parties”) have between 94 and 135 billion tons to expend between 2020 and the century’s end.⁹ In other words, in less than nine years of current emissions, wealthy countries will have blown our CO₂ budget under the 2° framing. Translating that into mitigation rates, this means reducing CO₂ emissions by roughly 10 percent per year beginning now. For some of the wealthier countries, it would be even higher, 12 to 13 percent. We need to reach 10 percent per year by 2025 and 20 percent by 2030, if we’re serious about climate change. That would lead to a total reduction of around 75 percent by 2030 and a fully zero-carbon energy system by around 2035.

There Are Always Cracks in the System

This is a far more challenging scenario than we find when we look at reports calling for “net zero” by 2050. That said, when we look at our norms and day-to-day lives in recent times, we see cracks, things we had not anticipated:

• The banking crisis of 2008 showed how national governments could mobilize huge amounts of resources to bail out the banks. Imagine if we had used that money more constructively!

• Social media (with all its associated problems) has usurped the media barons’ stranglehold with huge repercussions—some of them wonderful—allowing far more people to participate in debates than would be the case otherwise.

• The rise of Trump and Brexit (among other examples) demonstrate the growing questioning of the establishment and its rejection by “new” constituencies. Similarly, in the Arab Spring (some people talk about a second Arab Spring at the moment), we see emergent people’s power.

And then there are the plummeting prices of renewables and the rapidly rising concerns about the health impacts of, and the subsidies to, the fossil fuel industry (even on the IMF’s [International Monetary Fund’s] part).

It Is Through These Cracks That Change Can Emerge

On the climate change front, it is not academics who have led the way, but youth movements, and ragtag groups from civil society, demanding things way beyond the orthodoxy. The cracks that they have opened allow the light to change the tenor of debate, just as COVID-19 has done in other realms.

What does the change we need look like? It would be something along the lines suggested by Paris and the various IPCC reports. We know that responsibility for CO₂ emissions is highly skewed—as shown by Chancel and Piketty (2015) and by Oswald, Owen, and Steinberger (2020). About 50 percent of CO₂ emissions are attributable to the top 10 percent of the world’s consumers; about 70 percent come from the top 20 percent. The inequality is such that, if we were to put into place a regulatory framework that compelled the top 10 percent to cut their CO₂ emissions to the level of the average European Union citizen—which is not draconianly difficult—it would lead to a one-third cut in global CO₂ emissions. Now, that wouldn’t be enough, but it does indicate where responsibility for emissions reside. This points to an unavoidable three-phase strategy to deliver on our Paris temperature commitments, with the specific policies tailored to national and regional circumstances:

1. Immediate and near term: Profound changes in the energy behaviors and practices of high-energy users.

2. Near to medium term: Very stringent energy efficiency standards on all major end-use equipment (e.g., cars, computers, and industrial equipment) coupled with regulations to prevent rebound effects (the Jevons paradox).

3. Medium to longer term: A Marshall-style construction of zero-CO₂ energy supply and major electrification to make zero carbon—huge changes, as only about 20 percent of the world’s energy comes from electricity.

To achieve this requires the diversion of the labor and resources enjoyed by high-energy consumers to construction of the zero-CO₂ energy infrastructure. This means no more large houses or second and holiday homes; no prestige cars, SUVs, or multiple car ownership; and no more highly mobile lives (which are completely normalized in academia), frequent flyers, business travelers, or high levels of consumption. We also need new narratives of what constitutes growth, progress, and development, and to reframe our values and how we reward success. And we need alternative relationships with time—to think better about and inter- and intragenerational equity—as well as a deeper appreciation of the more-than-human world.

To conclude, academia has done a fantastic job of applying science to climate change. As a result, we have almost all the physical scientific knowledge we need at our fingertips. But, across the disciplines—with few exceptions—we have led on mitigation denial. We have relied on future utopian technologies to avoid stringent mitigation today, paid lip-service to equity (by, for instance, embracing financialization of climate change), and supported a lightly greenwashed status quo—most insidiously through our silence and high-carbon behaviors and practices.

Academia needs to get our house in order. This requires that we:

1. Do field work in low-carbon ways (longer, less frequent trips being one);

2. Rethink how we structure academia to allow for less and slow travel;

3. Reconsider internationalization, a lot of which is driven by the desire for prestige; can’t ideas travel without so much energy consumption?

4. Emphasize quality not quantity in terms of pressures to publish;

5. Rework estate and procurement practices; and

6. Be more experimental in our universities by, for example, breaking down hierarchies and instituting wholesale sustainability—social and environmental.

Academia needs to have a 45 percent cut in emissions by 2025, 75 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035—this includes our buildings, travel, and everything else.¹⁰ This is a huge challenge. Which is why, in 2020, climate change has become system change.

As Einstein noted, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”¹¹ Thus far, we have chosen to pass on to our own children the consequences of thirty years of such insanity. And academia has sat back and either been party to the insanity or been quiet.

Isn’t the role of academia to find the cracks and let the light shine with integrity and honesty?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Anderson

KEVIN ANDERSON is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Universities of Manchester (United Kingdom), Uppsala (Sweden), and Bergen (Norway). E-mail: [email protected]. His research downscales global temperature and equity commitments on climate change, such as the Paris Agreement, to understand national, regional, and sectoral carbon budgets and the scope and scale of mitigation necessary to deliver on these.

Patricia Martin

PATRICIA MARTIN is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include feminist geography, political geography, and the geographies of Latin America.

Joseph Nevins

JOSEPH NEVINS is a Professor in the Department of Earth Science and Geography at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include socioterritorial boundaries and mobility, violence and inequality, and political ecology.

Notes

1 And if we take into consideration non-CO₂ “forcings,” write Lee et al. (2020), the impact of aviation increases “by a factor of around 3 … above that due to CO₂ alone.”

2 Kevin Anderson's original words are in italics. This also applies to the endnotes that he authored after the lecture. The entire plenary session is available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IENoxDkUjHk&t=2s

3 The reader will note a small number of words in the text of the lecture that are not italicized. We changed these words, in consultation with Dr. Anderson, because, in the original lecture, he drew on the the lyrics of a song. The publisher of The Professional Geographer informed us that we cannot use the lyrics in print without permission from the copyright holder.

4 Perhaps “orthodox” more accurately reflects the analyses I’m referring to. There are two key factors at play that differentiate the scope and scale of mitigation required of wealthier nations (i.e., between what I’m proposing and that forthcoming from more orthodox analysis). The first is the inclusion or exclusion of planetary-scale removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere several decades hence. This is typically included as one or more options from the speculative portfolio of ‘negative emission technologies’ (NETs) and/or (increasingly) “nature-based-solutions.” Of the former, the only technology detailed in the various analysis is biomass energy with carbon capture and storage. The second involves the division of a Paris-compliant carbon budget between “developing” and “developed country parties.” Most analysis fails to take any serious account of the clear equity framing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—i.e., what are referred to in the Paris Agreement as “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” CBDR-RC.

5 I am referring to carbon dioxide only (not CO₂e)—as per the IPCC carbon budgets.

6 Anderson et al. (2020, 1294). The actual value in the article is 656GtCO₂, rounded up here to 660GtCO_2.

7 I am speaking here of CO₂ only, not all greenhouse gasses.

8 Within most mitigation models, such technologies are dominated by biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS); some models/scenarios increasingly include Direct Air Capture and Storage (DACS).

9 The “equity” division between “developed” and “developing country parties” (language used in the Paris Agreement) is detailed in Anderson et al. (2020). Whilst theoretically there are various interpretations of equity that can inform the division of a global carbon budget, in practice the fact is that very little budget now remains (for 1.5–2 °C), severely constraining which equity rules continue to apply. In addition, the Paris Agreement and previous UNFCCC reports and protocols provide some guidance on what comprises equity. Again, see Anderson et al. (2020).

10 My assumption is that academia (in wealthy nations) is required to deliver mitigation levels similar to society as a whole; i.e., it is neither offered any privileges over and above other sectors, nor is it required to do more than other sectors. The values presented are based on the mitigation rates required of wealthy countries if they are to make their fair contribution to a Paris-compliant carbon budget, with the added proviso that it will take until around 2025 to reach the necessary mitigation rates.

11 Many have attributed these words to Einstein, but it is uncertain if he ever uttered them.