This one is about Privilege and Tipping Points

We never quite know what will happen when people come together for a discussion. To be true to the intention of gathering, there can be no preconceived idea of where the discussion will go. The magic is in the process. Our speaker, Niko Charalambides, the director of Greenpeace, facilitated this process beautifully.

The invitation said “Making Sense of the Climate Crisis. Get informed about the latest science, the politics of climate change, where we have gone wrong and where our strengths lie.”

The talk began with calling it;  not nearly enough is being done to effectively rise to the challenge of climate change and all that it implies socially and ecologically. We know this, and if we sit with it, it is terrifying. It is not the science that is terrifying, it is the politics. 

We know the Paris Agreement target is to limit global warming to 1.5C. We know that each incremental rise in temperature carries an exponential increased risk. So why 1.5C?Crossing this line is likely to trigger a cascade of tipping points which would irreversibly undermine the planet's ability to sequester carbon. It is the point at which it is believed the Earth’s climate/living systems will hit a tipping point, unravel, collapse and flip from carbon sinks to sources that then propell and reinforce global warming.  So, with each notch in rise in temperature we increase the risk of runaway global warming and of passing points of no return. Such as the following:

1. The Greenland ice sheet. Ice has a high albedo effect, meaning its white surface reflects far more solar energy back to space than darker land or open water. The shrinkage of the ice sheet is increasingly exposing the lower albedo dark sea water underneath that absorbs more heat that accelerates melting… until the melt and shrinkage becomes irreversible … This threshold could be 1.5C. 

2. This melt water poses risk for the weakening and potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a crucial conveyor belt-like system responsible for distributing heat and nutrients worldwide. Disruption of the AMOC could destabilise established weather patterns globally, posing risks to the global food supply and accelerating the passing of other tipping points… such as… 

3. The disruption of AMOC could push the Amazon rainforest, already facing increasingly severe droughts, towards a tipping point where irreversible dieback becomes self-propelling and unavoidable. This will not only be the loss of the greatest harbour for terrestrial biodiversity, the home of some 1.6 million indigenous peoples, it will also be a loss of a massive carbon sink that will flip to become a source… further driving global warming.

4. As AMOC weakens, the Southern Ocean stores more heat. This accelerates melting of the Antarctic ice sheets pushing it towards the tipping point of self-propelling melt and shrinkage.

… and then there is sea level rise to think about. 

“At sustained warming levels of 2-3C, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will be irreversibly gone. The collapse of major Antarctic ice shelves at the end of the century, followed by increased discharge of ice, could lead to catastrophic sea level rise by 2300 of 9-15 metres, under strong warming. And if global heating advances to 5C, the planet could expect 19-22 metres of sea level rise, wiping out entire cities and countries by the year 2300.” (The Guardian)

5. The permafrost, a massive store of carbon and methane (a potent GHG), is also melting at an accelerated rate… again adding to the overall risk of triggering other tipping points. 

6. And so on it goes until…. 

If the world stays on its current warming trajectory, IPCC projections point to 1.5C being breached by 2030 BUT, and here it gets familiarly frustrating, it will only be confirmed once the observed temperature rise has reached 1.5C on average over a twenty year period… in other words a decade too late.

Scientists from the UK Met Office writing in Nature stress the need to formally agree on a way of defining the current level of global warming and called for a new approach that would combine the last ten years of observations with a forecast of the coming decade so as to determine the current level of warming. ‘If adopted, this could mean a universally agreed measure of global warming that could trigger immediate action to avoid further rise but also create the necessary pressure to work towards reversing climate change, not just stopping it.’ 

James Hansen (a former top NASA scientist and one of the first to alert the world to the danger of climate change in the 1980s) and others believe we have already reached the 1.5C threshold and here language is important. “Passing through the 1.5C world is a significant milestone because it shows that the story being told by the United Nations, with the acquiescence of its scientific advisory body, the IPCC, is a load of bull****. We are not moving into a 1.5C world, we are briefly passing through it in 2024. We will pass through the 2C (3.6F) world in the 2030s unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet’s energy balance.”

So, “clarity on breaching the Paris Agreement guard rails is crucial. Without an agreement on what actually will count as exceeding 1.5 °C, we risk distraction and confusion at precisely the time when action to avoid the worst effects of climate change becomes even more urgent.”( Richard Betts, lead author in the Nature article

There seems to be a great deal of distraction and confusion.

Back to our discussion with Niko; it moved into the entrenched vested interests that have since the 1950s knowingly obscured, undermined, and outmanoeuvred those who were trying to warn of the impact of doing too little to mitigate and reduce the causes of climate breakdown. We know this, but perhaps not just how brazenly it is still going on. Imagine that the number of lobbyists working on behalf of the fossil fuel industry with access to COP28 rose to a record of at least 2,456, from 636 at COP27. 

For those on the frontline, intricately involved in this fight (and it really is a fight… for survival for all that we hold dear),  I imagine there is no time to waste with outrage.  For the rest of us, information like this can suspend us in outrage and thicken the sinews of cynicism and a sense of powerlessness. 

But here I wonder, what is outrage and is it a symptom of privilege? Outrage can certainly be a legitimate response; it can be useful to stir, move, motivate, put fire in the belly and connect with others. But there are pitfalls too. If we do not go beyond outrage… does it not then become a rather flawed attempt at exonerating ourselves from the problem that we are very much a part of. Is sitting in outrage a privilege assumed by those with greater ease and comforts, those who can dabble but not necessarily commit, who are used to a lifestyle that can take its time and waste it… when we have no time to waste.  

In hindsight it seems inevitable that the conversation would reach into what privilege means, its complicity in tearing at the web of life and the comforts, convenience, delusion, denial, rabbit holes it affords, the list can go on. The richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity. It is absurd… it could also be easily argued that it should be criminal. 

At this point the language of addiction emerged to describe… us, the privileged, as addicts; our drug… carbon. This is language we have perhaps heard before, we may have become complacent with it, but if we explore it a little, our consumptive choices are very much driving our own demise, we know this and yet… This begs the question: how do we recover?  

Niko repeatedly acknowledged the sense of powerlessness, outrage, addiction (call it what you will) but very pragmatically put it in its place. We can rant, rage in wanting solutions and wanting them now but ultimately what counts is the work, and the work that counts is often community-based and self-organised. Action is the antidote to despair... as Joan Baez said, but also so much more; We cannot know the way to ‘recovery’ but we can find it through action. 

What is the alternative? 

We do not have one.

Testifying to this, Niko told us that within the last few years, 1000 energy communities in Greece have been created, or more accurately have created themselves. There are also more than 4000 applications for new energy communities that are on the waiting list to be approved. Why does this matter? Not only does this enormously reduce the carbon footprint of these communities, it is quite literally the decentralisation and democratisation of power. What's more! In the spirit of solidarity, communities can allocate surplus energy to low-income households. How wonderful; the emergent human potential of self-organisation.

Will this stem the tide of destruction? Most likely not, but perhaps a better question to ask; is it work in progress? There are many similar efforts and initiatives emerging, connecting, and fortifying the resistance needed to stem this tide of mindless destruction. It is no small thing. There is no such thing as a small thing in systems thinking; what might appear as a trivial action has the potential to nudge us past that social tipping point that we need.

So, back to the responsibility of the privileged. What must we do? Systematically work to undermine the very system that affords us our consumerist privilege, to work so that

we no longer have so much choice. 

Can you imagine, what a relief it would be. 

Class inequality must be at the centre of the climate response. It is going to take a sort of collective leap of faith, that by recognising the consequences of privilege and undoing systemic inequality we will find… peace.

We must also recognise the urgency and the need to not only safeguard but restore the Earth’s wildness; to not only stop climate change but reverse it. 

I will finish up with the following; a particularly good story because it is a wonderful example of a positive tipping point… that utterly unpredictable, unquantifiable moment. If there is any hope to be found it is in this quality of connection that triggers an irreversible resolve.

“It was a lunch break during the summer of 2013. At the top of a tower in downtown Athens, Morris Pearl approached the dessert tray. He was one of the managing directors at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and his team had been commissioned to assess the health of Greek banks. "I glanced out the window and saw a huge crowd on the street," he recounted during a recent video call from his New York office. "When I realised they were Greeks made desperate by austerity, I looked at the well-fed bankers around me: What exactly are we doing for the good of this country?"

A few months later, he resigned and joined the Patriotic Millionaires, an organisation of 250 Americans whose annual income exceeds $1 million (around €950,000), or whose assets are worth more than $5 million. "The rich aren't all greedy: We want the world to be a better place, and that will only be possible if people like me pay more taxes."

 Read the rest here.

There is a similar initiative in Europe. Tax Me Now

Thank you Niko… and Lara for hosting… and all of you who joined us.