Next big steps on climate
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“It is time for a new era of solutions that can rid the world of the greenhouse gas emissions ruining the planet.”
My 2004 book, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, was very critical of the approach being taken to address climate change at the international level. I warned it was not working then and would not work in the future, and I called for a very different approach.
Twenty years have passed, and Yale University Press asked me to reflect on the book, its continuing relevance, and our current predicament. That started me thinking.
Despite Red Sky at Morning’s good reception in The New York Times, The Economist, and elsewhere, its warnings in 2004 that we were on the wrong track in addressing the climate threat have gone largely unheeded. Of course, I cannot say my proposals would have done the trick, but I do believe they offered alternatives that would have greatly helped, and could still. That said, it is time for a new era of solutions that can rid the world of the greenhouse gas emissions ruining the planet.
A bit of background here will provide context. In 1980, I was chair of President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. That was the year that climate change moved from science into the public policy arena, with Carter calling it a “preeminent environmental challenge of the next decade” in an important address that year. Please note the ancient date!
This foresight was confirmed twelve years later when an international climate treaty was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Over the next decade, my concern grew that the international community had in fact adopted a flawed, weak approach to climate change and several other major global environmental threats like biodiversity loss. That concern was the origin of Red Sky at Morning two years later.
In the preface to the book, I wrote that “the current system of international efforts to help the environment simply isn’t working. The design makes sure it won’t work, and the statistics keep getting worse.”
The overarching conclusion of Red Sky was that “the response that the international community has mounted has been flawed: the root causes have not been addressed seriously, weak multilateral institutions have been created, consensus-based negotiating procedures have ensured mostly toothless treaties, and the economic and political context in which treaties must be prepared and implemented, has been largely ignored.” It was quite an indictment.
A particular focus of my critique was the climate treaty process, in which the international community had invested so much. Fast-forward 20 years to today, the conference of the parties to the climate treaty (COP) has now met 28 times, the most recent annual meeting in Dubai attracting over 80,000 participants, including 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists! Unfortunately, the size of its crowds bears no resemblance to the COPs’ actual accomplishments. The climate treaty COPs have not been a waste of time, but they have surely wasted a lot of time, decades of it.
At COP 21 in Paris in 2015, the treaty process gave birth to its main achievement, the Paris Accords, which Trump infamously abandoned but Biden promptly rejoined. The accords have done some important things: setting the well-known goal of preventing warming from exceeding 2° C while trying to stay below 1.5° C, mobilizing countries to come forward with pledges for greenhouse gas reductions, and launching programs for monitoring progress.
Last year was a moment for taking stock in the accords and global climate action. A number of sophisticated assessments found that country pledges were woefully inadequate to meet the accords’ goals. Worse, perhaps, as the senior UN official in charge of the treaty noted, “governments combined are taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis.” In one of the most comprehensive studies, the researchers found that “Only 1 of 42 indicators assessed—the share of electric vehicles in passenger car sales—is on track to reach its 2030 target.”
The World Resources Institute, where I was president for its first decade, had this to say: “The United Nations’ polite prose glosses over what is a truly damning report card for global climate efforts. Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”
For many reasons, the international community has failed to rise to the climate challenge. Those reasons include, especially, pushback from the powerful fossil fuel industry. Consider that more than three decades after the famous climate treaty was signed at Rio, the world is still deeply dependent on fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas, the main villains in global warming. For both the United States and the world, our energy still comes 80 percent from fossil fuels. In 2023 both global greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were the highest ever. The week of July 21, 2024 saw several of the hottest days ever recorded.
Societies everywhere now face increasingly dire situations. Climate change is often called an existential threat, but few appreciate how true that is. A new and frightening world is unfolding around us.
New solutions
I suppose Red Sky could have stopped with the critique, but I felt obligated to write a second half of the book on what I thought should be done. I pointed out that there were available models of successful international regulation and issue management to draw from, and an attractive proposal for a World Environment Organization was making the rounds in world capitals. A revamping of the treaty process to make it truly regulatory and functional was only one of the “8-Fold Way” that Red Sky recommended.
The last of the eight initiatives I urged—“the most fundamental transition of all”—was the compelling need for a transition in values and consciousness. I quoted the remarkable Earth Charter: “Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living.” We know now from much experience that value change is something we can bring about, not something we must just await.
My critique still stands, I think, and there are good pointers for today in Red Sky. But we need a new era of innovative international collaboration in the fight against climate devastation. It is time to design new and implement existing solutions that can rid the world of the greenhouse gas emissions ruining the planet.
Americans naturally focus on US greenhouse gas emissions, which remain huge and demand curtailment, but today almost 90 percent of global emissions come from outside the United States. This reality underscores how critical it is for the US government and our citizen groups to focus internationally.
Here are some ripe targets for innovative international action. During the past eight years the world's big banks have pumped more than $7 trillion into the global fossil fuel business, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank among the worst of them. It is insane for this to continue. Several states, including New York and California, are pursuing legislation to force fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damages. Vermont now has such legislation. Everywhere, we should make the polluters pay!
“The past 20 years have seen a flourishing of creative efforts to explore futures that involve transformation in our interlinked economic and political systems—our political economy. I love the frequent climate protest banner, ‘system change, not climate change.’”
Across the pond, Europe has adopted a new system of carbon border tariffs to protect its companies from unfair competition from imports from countries without carbon controls. That will put real pressure on the laggards. To address the financing needed in the developing world, the Bridgetown Initiative proposes a new global financial architecture to make a lot more money available and to create financial guarantors for larger private sector funding. As has happened with the treaty to protect the ozone layer, other treaties can be mobilized to help with climate. The Convention on Biological Diversity should be next.
The international community needs urgently to pursue new ways of tackling greenhouse gas emissions, like going after the big banks. New avenues have been proposed and more should be developed. The treaty process with its endless conferences needs to be revamped. This comprehensive effort should be a major, priority project of all those institutions and individuals now in the fight against climate change.
On the homefront, reasons for hope
After Red Sky at Morning, I wrote two other books at Yale Press, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008) and America the Possible (2012). They both dealt with the American scene, not the international one, and they both began by describing national challenges that have deepened and worsened in the ensuing years. I tried in both books to understand America’s mounting problems—environmental, social, and political—and to explore how they might be addressed. Most of the problems we see all around us today were clearly visible then, including, of course, climate change.
I came to a difficult conclusion in writing these two books. In America the Possible I noted that “when big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be for small reasons.” My conclusion was that the unfortunate conditions we faced then and still do—the decay in American society, politics, and the environment—stem from basic flaws in our economic and political systems.
The priorities of our economic system, and the political system supporting it, include ramping up gross national product, growing corporate profits, focusing investments on high financial returns (rather than social and environmental returns), keeping labor markets slack, promoting boundless consumerism, sustaining great bastions of corporate political and economic power, ignoring issues of income distribution, and projecting overwhelming military strength abroad. This complex is reinforced by a flawed, plutocratic democracy and by dominant cultural values that remain severely materialistic, individualistic, and anthropocentric.
In other words, while there are many things we should do of a reformist nature, sustained progress on America’s great challenges requires deep, transformative change. That is a very sobering thought.
I do join those of us who sometimes get discouraged. From such desperate moments I try to rescue the ground for hope—not “hopium” but plausible hope. Let me relate some of the things that now give me hope.
The past 20 years have seen a flourishing of creative efforts to explore futures that involve transformation in our interlinked economic and political systems—our political economy. Doubts about the current order are increasing, and calls for transformative change are growing louder. I love the frequent climate protest banner, “system change, not climate change.”
Recognizing that such deep change will take time, efforts there have been complemented by the pursuit of near-term avenues for progress. First off, there is a rebirth of protest in America. Activism is increasing, including labor and climate activism and activism among the young, the marginalized, and the victims. Aversion to “socialist” ideas is fading, at least for young people. Economic democracy is in the air. Bernie almost won the Democratic nomination in 2016. Recent affirmations of government action, like the successful Inflation Reduction Act, challenge the hold of market fundamentalism. The conventional wisdom that markets are good and government bad may be on the way out.
Meanwhile, the public, the media, and progressive politicians are finally alert to the rising menace of climate change. The Biden Administration has recently issued a flurry of impressive climate regulations. Here and abroad, the growth of renewable energy is extraordinary, especially its phenomenal takeoff in China. China is building renewable energy equivalent to five nuclear power plants every week! Ongoing stalemates in Washington are countered at least partially by impressive initiatives by some states and localities. Interest in new indicators of well-being is growing, including development of alternatives to GDP as a measure of progress.
The threat to democracy is recognized, and the fight for a democratic future is joined. The climate challenge is underscoring the imperative of a strong, effective government of, by, and for the people. And more and more people are seeing the root of many problems in misguided dominant values. They are searching for new values and new lives to go with them. We often find our faith communities at the forefront of these efforts.
So, I say all is not lost. It is not over yet. I believe the positive currents driving toward meaningful change can strengthen in the future. But there is a major problem on that front. These positive currents would be greatly weakened and slowed in a second Trump presidency, much as climate and other progress was derailed in the first. Our democracy and our climate are both at stake in this election.
My big hope is for progressives to leave behind their issue silos, come together, and forge a mighty political force, both for immediate action and for deep, transformative change. We need a fusion of forces, a movement of movements. That would be new and could make a world of difference.
Gus Speth is a Distinguished Next System Fellow at The Democracy Collaborative and the editor of The New Systems Reader. He has worked as a key environmental movement leader and has authored several books.