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but now without further ado i'm very happy to welcome kevin anderson as our keynote for today kevin is a professor of climate and energy with joint chairs at the universities of
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manchester uppsala and bergen kevin has made several key contributions to the development of paris compliant carbon budgets at local to national levels in the uk in sweden and beyond we miss
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having kevin here with us in sweden but are very grateful that he can join us today from across the pond so to talk about net zero and real zero and how we are using carbon budgets to frame
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car um paris compliant mitigation policies welcome kevin thank you very much can you hear me okay isabel loud and clear excellent and let me share screen let's see if this
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technology works so let's have a look let's minimize that and let's start that tell me if that is okay can you see can you see that clearly
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we see you you can see the oh you see me can you see this the slide as well said precedence for the possible is that is that there do you see it yes
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yeah yes yeah excellent right okay fine um well actually i've very much been missed being back in sweden i've had many conversations with um ezac and we we send whatsapp pictures backwards
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and forwards um but it's not the same as actually being there so so hopefully sometime in the not too distant future i can i can return back on the long journey back up north um anyway for today i've called this talk here precedence
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for the possible and that become obvious in a moment why i refer to it as as precedence um and then the sub the subtitle if you like it's banking covid net zero and paris and this builds on some work that
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um the ezac and another manchester colleague john project and i have been doing along with lots of other people within cms and within the tyndall center over here as well so it's a it's a combination of quite a lot of other other work um for those interested in social media
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i have quite an active twitter account which you can see there at kevin climate so i'm going to start off with a slightly unusual first slide and just take us back to 2006 which
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um doesn't seem very long ago when you're my age um and i think it was quite common that when we talked about climate change but indeed about any other sort of major social issue that there's a view that rapid social change is impossible because the public of
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course will never accept it now we hear this we've heard this repeatedly it's the is the whole sort of um yes that's the mantra that very often comes out when you're suggesting something significant then in 2007 we had the subprime mortgage scandal
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and that triggered a banking crisis that by 2008 we had really huge levels of austerity the policy has been put in austerity policies putting in which have been there for a decade in some parts of the world uh the us the uk being good examples um
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particularly hitting the poorest communities as is very common in the case huge cuts in public services massive job insecurity and deep social upheaval for many people we're going through huge and still are actually there's a repercussion of it
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um you know over a decade later for some people anyway huge social upheaval there was also a really interesting issue in that the whole language of quantitative easing which is the to put it based simply was a huge
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transfer of public money via the banks into the private sector in theory to stimulate spending it didn't do that and in fact a few people made lots of money out of it but but nevertheless if you looked at somewhere like the uk indeed this
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happened around the globe we put in about about a third to a half of our of our annual gdp was actually mobilized this money was almost almost materialized out of thin air to try to change how we do things so we
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went from the impossible to the deliverable in two years of the banking crisis but roll on a decade or so 2019 people are saying again and i still see this regularly in my engagement on
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twitter and elsewhere well we can't have rapid social change the public will never accept it and then 2019 we had in wuhan this virus appears covered rears its ugly head we've we've
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had this huge global response massive lockdowns rapid mobilization of science and technology both in terms of the treatments and the vaccines again not surprisingly
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it demonstrates the deep inequity in our society with poorer key workers very commonly in certain countries like the uk i can't comment on sweden people of color disproportionately impacted by covid because often they are the key workers
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and they live in poor quality homes in multi-generational households again we went from the impossible to the deliverable in two years so i'm just i'm not saying these are good examples i'm just saying that there are analogies there that we went from
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what wasn't possible to what we actually did in just two years and i think it's just worth reflecting for a moment on covert emissions because a lot of people talk about the huge reduction of missions and the lessons we can learn but let's remind ourselves also it was a
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deeply and remains a deeply tragic event for um for many many communities many families around the world and it continues to be like that um we saw a drop in global emissions of somewhere around six to seven percent
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um and if that cut continued at a global level year one year from now that would give us a fighting chance of staying at about 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade so it gives us a handle on the sorts of levels of reductions but remember that was a global reduction
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and of course with the equity part um of paris which will come to in a minute that means actually the wealthy countries would have to be considerably higher than six or seven percent per year but the signs post covered at least post-covered uh
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well another postcode we seem to have many of them but another the current postcode the signs are not good from admissions point of view the poorest and the wealthiest countries are again seeking ongoing economic growth more energy more resources lots of
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rhetoric as we repeatedly hear from co-opted academics and from many others many policy makers and even some journalists um about this this language of decoupling growth from emissions but actually when you start to stand back and look at it from a system perspective it literally is
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just an appealing myth there's very little decoupling going on and the little that there is nothing like the scale of reductions or change that you would require this is the decoupling between growth and emissions so we're not
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delivering any any real decoupling and certainly economic growth is to be welcomed in poorer parts of the world but is it in uk and sweden the eu the us the wealthy parts of the world that we're still pursuing
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infinite economic growth so let's go now reign this forward to today 2021 um many countries have declared in many regions and many um even some companies have declared
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climate emergencies it's quite a widely used expression now um the eu has declared a climate emergency in sweden we've got london malmo and principal municipalities declaring climate
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emergency in the uk parliament we've got the climate emergency in fact we've got them in the scottish parliament the welsh parliament so it's it's becoming quite a common language lots of people are arguing always we're we recognize as an emergency and we'll
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respond accordingly but what are the responses to it well actually unlike coprite unlike covered unlike the banking crisis there are no no sweeping and rapid social changes going on
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there's no immediate and widespread penetration of low-carbon technology okay we've seen some renewables but they're plus oil gas and coal we've seen some electric vehicles and e-bikes and some other things like that but there again plus diesel cars and you know um suvs
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four-wheel drives we've seen some improvements in efficiency but they go along more along with more consumption so that we're not actually seeing a substitution we're just seeing in addition to and we've got the language that's come with this is this whole language of net
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zero net zero 2045 for sweden and indeed for scotland or net 050 for the uk this sort of language of net zero it's it's emerged it's ubiquitous it's everywhere you go it's just the language
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that is repeatedly trotted out um and what i want to try and do in this presentation is unpick this is this an appropriate response to our paris temperature and equity commitments and just to reflect for just a moment to
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remind us we're probably all quite familiar in this event but but the paris commitments we're committed to to you know hold keep emissions down so we stay well below 2 degrees c and they're ideally no more than 1.5 to do so in this site
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within accordance with the science and and on the basis of equity so hopefully something more fairly familiar with um what's also clear from from the science i mean that tells us quite a lot about
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what paris compliant mitigation needs to look like it tells us something about that and it brings us to the focus of these these three days actually it brings us to the focus of carbon budgets it's not long-term targets it's not what
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you've done by 2035 or 2040 or 2045 or 2050 in isolation those are actually i would argue they're probably part of the problem not part of the solution it's the carbon budgets the total amount
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co2 that emits that that we emit that matters and just just for anyone that's not familiar it's the area under the curve on a plot like this and if in the short term we did not decide we want to expand ireland the airport or in
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the uk spend 27 billion pounds on new road infrastructure then that means the emissions will likely go up and future generations will have to reduce their mission still further to mitigate further
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and i would argue that that's impossible now based on the ipcc the latest report sr 1.5 the intergovernmental panel on climate change if we adjust their carbon budgets to january 2022
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and we think about energy only then for to pursue paris pursuit 1.5 and stay well below two then from the beginning of next year of 2022 we've got a global budget of around about 600 billion tons it could
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be a bit higher than that it could be a bit lower than that but it gives us a good flavor of the sort of um number that massive emissions we can put into the atmosphere in 2019 emissions were about 36 and a half billion tons
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it looks like this year 2021 will be just slightly lower than 2019 so we're already seeing a real big bounce back from 2020. um so that's under 17 years of current emissions current emissions from 2022 before we wipe out the
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complete budget for a reasonable chance well below two degrees centigrade now just this week just a few days ago we we heard the great and the good that came together in the in big big event g7 climate environment
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minister event um and they in quite measured language in some respects but they've said we must focus on 1.5 so there's been quite a lot of weight it's been reported that there's a shift from
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2 degrees centigrade 1.5 is the focus which sounds good we'd all like to see the lower temperatures um were not not exceeding those lower temperatures would be good but let's play out that from the from the maths
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using the ipcc just a really simple graphic if you look at where we and where emissions will be in january they won't be hugely different from where we are today so we know what they're going to look like in january and you took the ipcc headline budget
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for a likely chance of 1.5 then you'd need zero co2 at a global level if you start in a straight line from january there was a simple stylistic graph by 2029
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zero emissions around the globe to stay in 1.5 for a lightly chance and even if you went for a 50 50 chance just using a bit of arithmetic and the budgets from the ipcc you still need to be zero emissions
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globally by 2038. this is a very different story i think from the one we're typically getting to hear so why is this so different to net zero this this whole language of net zero which i'm sure you're all very familiar
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with well first i think it's important to remember that net zero is a new phrase it's it's nothing we haven't had newton this language of net zero this framing of net zero is is something just appeared just in
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the last few years if you look at the sr 1.5 report 2018 in the summary for policy makers then um it's mentioned 16 times if you look at the ar-5 the previous report from the ipcc and their synthesis report
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for the summary for policy makers it's not mentioned once you look in the the committee on climate uk committee on climate change's sixth budget report and it's it's a long report 427 pages
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it's on numerous times on every page it's somewhere between it's referred to somewhere between three thousand and five thousand times they use the expression net zero look at the previous fifth budget report from the committee on
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climate change in 2015 it's not mentioned once now it is true to say that the language of net cumulative missions in various ways has been referred to if you like within the science but the appealing translation and the
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ubiquitous use of net zero by everyone is a very new phenomena and one i think that we've taken on board unproblematically because it allows us to to basically um avoid near-term action on climate
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change and we can hide all sorts behind it so it's important to recognize that net zero net zero 2050 net zero 20 20 45 for sweden firstly this is not based on the concept of a total carbon budget
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and it's interesting note that the uk previously had legislation that was based on the total carbon budget for the uk as i mean i think the budget was too large but it was deemed to be an appropriate contribution to staying below 2 degrees centigrade but now
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that's gone now we simply have this net zero 2050 framing so this whole language it moves the debate from what we need to do today which is what carbon budgets force us to
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face it moves it off to some far-off point 2045 or 2050 which we have to think about that in which which policymakers in sweden and the uk will still be policymakers in 2045 and 50 they'll either be dead
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or retired as indeed with the scientists that are behind a lot of this net zero language so it's in that sense it's we are passing that net zero is a is a generational passing of the challenge of the buck um to our children and our children's
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children it's also worth bearing in mind that net zero typically assumes some sort of multi-layered form of substitution between different greenhouse gases so carbon dioxide for me thing between different sources
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carbon dioxide from a car can be compared with agricultural fertilizer and nitrous oxide emissions but these these are very different things but across decades a flight carbon dioxide
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from a flight we take today can be considered in relation to carbon capture in a tree that's planted in 2050 that's growing in 2070. this assumption within net zero that a ton is a ton is a ton regardless of different
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chemistries different atmospheric lifetimes of the gases in the atmosphere and and different levels of certainty and indeed levels of risk and hugely different things this is this is incredibly dangerous and again it's another
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it's another thing that makes net zero attractive and appealing in a machiavellian way because it allows us to hide all sorts of things behind this language of net zero the other thing about net zero is that
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perhaps with no exceptions but typically anyway it relies on huge planetary scale carbon dioxide removal cdrs often well that's the latest acronym i'm sure there'll be another one out in the next year or two
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um carbon dioxide removal captures two important elements first negative emission technologies nets as they're often referred to and second nature-based solutions um nbs so these two approaches one is sort of
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using technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the other one is using various nature-based approaches like planting trees or peat bog restoration and things like this that are claimed to absorb carbon dioxide
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and just to get a sense of the scale of negative emissions that's assumed in almost every single 1.5 and 2 degree scenario at the global level but indeed at national levels as well we're typically assuming hundreds of
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billions of tons of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere most of it is post 2050 and quite a lot of it is beyond 2100 again look at those dates who in the scientific community that's
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promoting these who in the policy realm that's promoting these is going to be still at work working in 2015 and 2100 some of the early career researchers possibly some of the younger policymakers but most of us will
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will say be dead or um or retired by them and just have another flavor if those numbers don't mean a lot to you what we're assuming here is that technologies that are today at best small pilot schemes will be
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ramped up in virtually every single scenario to something that's that's akin to the current um global oil and gas industry that sort of size now that would be fine if it's one in ten scenarios or you know five and a
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hundred scenarios but when virtually every scenario is doing that it demonstrates the deep level of systemic bias that we've got now that we've all bought into this language of net zero so it's not to outline my position on
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carbon dioxide removal because it's often said that i'm opposed to it and that's simply wrong um i i would like just to see a well-funded research and development programs into negative emission technologies nature-based solutions and so forth
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and potentially deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria and i'll just reiterate that stringent sustainability criteria but we should mitigate we should cut our emissions today assuming that these carbon dioxide removal techniques of one
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sort or another do not work at scale and another important factor to bear in mind here and there's a lot of double counting that gotham goes on here as far as i can tell anyway is that we're going to require some level of carbon
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dioxide removal because there's going to be a lot of residual greenhouse gas emissions not you know not co2 principally methane and n2o nitroxites and fertilizer use um we're going to come from agriculture anyway if you're going to feed 9 billion
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people now quite what those numbers are there's a lot of uncertainty but somewhere probably around 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every single year so we'll have to find some way of compensating for the warming from feeding the world's population and certainly there are plenty of things we
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can do with our food eating habits and with our agricultural practices but nonetheless it still looks like there will be a lot of emissions from the agricultural sector and therefore we need to have real zero emissions
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from energy we cannot be using all of these other techniques nets mbs and so forth to allow us to carry on with our high energy use net zero has become if you like a policy
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framework for all and some argue and there's been some question discussion in some of the um journalist papers around climate change recently saying well actually that's what it's one of its real strengths is it brings everyone together
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but in my view it it's so vague that it seriously undermines the need for immediate and deep cuts and emissions so i can see some merit in a in an approach that does bring people together but if it sells everything out in that process then i think it's actually more
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dangerous than it is of benefit and i think net zero very much falls into that category i just like to use the uk now as an example of why i come to that conclusion and the uk is one of the more progressive countries
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um i wouldn't say that normally about the uk most things but in terms of it's sort of framing of the climate agenda it's thought about this quite hard at multiple layers but just look what's happening here we often hear this language and i heard
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one of my colleagues saying it the other day that we're going to have almost zero emissions um in 2050 and that's just rubbish you know if you look at the spreadsheets behind the government's policies behind the committee on climate change analysis
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they're still assuming 31 million tonnes of carbon dioxide for the uk from fossil fuel use in 2050 that's higher co2 per capita allowing for population growth in the uk in 2050 than a typical kenyan
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has today so it just demonstrates we're still locking in ongoing fossil fuels it also assumes that 31 million tons of co2 continues well on into the second half of the century and that plays out probably not about
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another half a billion tons you know plus or minus some of fossil fuel generated carbon dioxide emissions after 2050. so how do we call that net zero it's nothing like zero or even near zero
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um and it also embeds in in this analysis huge uptake of these negative emissions and nature-based solutions something like 50 to 53 megatons i think it is of negative emission technologies and a significant
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amount of nature-based solutions as well so these have been we've been relying on these within our models today our our children our children's children will deploy these at scale right through to 2100 and beyond and
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then this is normalized in the language of net zero the other part is worrying is that the net zero has allowed the uk as i said be as i was saying before it did have a carbon budget framework it
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doesn't have that anymore not at a total level it says sort of short-term carbon budgets not long-term ones so it shifted from a carbon budget framing to the language of highest possible ambition in other words it's really looked for the legal
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language in the paris agreement and stuck with that that's a fundamental shift in the uk's position that most academics and journalists and pontificators on climate change have not caught up on if you see the shift from the old
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policies of an 80 reduction by 2050 to net zero by 2050 that goes along with an estimate look at the spreadsheets a 40 increase in negative emission technologies that's the biggest increase is actually in what we pass on to future generations
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very weak near-term policies so remember this is the these are some of the some of the pinnacles of people working on climate change um and sort of intellectually within the committee on climate change and elsewhere and they're pushing their imagination to the furthest and
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actually in doing that they can imagine no reduction in car kilometers traveled in the uk by 2035 is that really highest possible ambition well it is if you've got net zero because you can do all sorts under that umbrella
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but there's also a complete neglect of national and international equity so if you look at the the uk's position it's really incredibly weak the language they use around this and it's worth just a couple of numbers here to remind ourselves of this
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huge imbalance in the responsibility for emissions fifty percent of global emissions come from about ten percent of the global population the top one percent of global emitters have twice the emissions of the bottom of
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fifty percent of the global population just think about that the top one percent twice the emissions of the bottom 50 percent so there's this huge asymmetry this is never captured in the swedish
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2045 net zero framing or the uk's 2050 net zero framing put simply net zero allow allows us to have large but still incremental changes to business as usual
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and it disguises this as if it's still in line with the paris temperature and equity commitments so how far is the uk net zero framing from what
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um i would argue indeed i think exactly where other colleagues would argue is the paris framing of 1.5 and 2 degrees centigrade and indeed equity as well in there but we did some sort of fairly detailed work on this and what we can say is that if the uk
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and swedish framing if that was followed at a global level the temperatures would be more in line with 2.5 to 3 degrees centigrade warming not 1.5 to 2 and net zero hides that
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so it's as i said become we came to a similar conclusion for sweden as we did for the uk both of these countries have have policies that imply carbon budgets that are two to three times higher than any reasonable interpretation of
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what would be paris compliant and they hide that behind this language of net zero so what alternatives could there be to a net zero framing well i would argue that we should stick
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with the carbon budget framing of addressing climate change and that we should have as our focus here um until we have something new at paris 1.5 and 2 degrees c um temperature thresholds and also this
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this concept of common but differentiated responsibility so the equitable response whereby the wealthy countries lead um by example and that's been locked into all negotiations back to the unf triple c in
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uh 1992 though it has been increasingly weakened by the rich countries over the years then we saw if if you had that carbon budget framing then we should be aiming into from energy for real zero co2 by about 2035.
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that's typical for sweden in the uk and slightly later if it was poland but probably slightly earlier if you're lichtenstein or switzerland in the richer countries so real co2 real zero co2 by about 2035 that's all
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energy planes trains ships industry everything i would have a separate target looking at process emissions this is the chemical emissions particularly from cement but also from steel as well um and they should also aim to be about
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zero co2 by about 2035 but absolutely key in this we cannot just focus on our own cement industries cement is a key constituent of development and if you look at the look at something like china it uses i
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think about 300 kilograms per year of cement compared to say the eu at about 30. if you look at some of the middle eastern countries when they were developing very rapidly there are about 1500 kilograms of cement used per person and the reason for that is because it's
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required for infrastructure development okay we can change the clink ratios we can use more timber we can use some substitutes for cement but nevertheless cement is an absolutely key constituent of of many of the infrastructure projects of of
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development and it would be unfair to penalize poor parts of the world for something where there are no real substitutes for unlike energy where there are many substitutes so i think it's really key that we help poor parts of the world decarbonize their um process emissions
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particularly cement and i think there are ways around that and carbon capture storage actually in that area is something i think could really help i think we should have separate annual cuts for non-co2 greenhouse gas emissions related to agriculture so
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particularly methane and n2o emissions and i think there's a bore part there something like a half to one tonne per person by 2035 on a consumption based assessment
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remember that sweden and the uk both import a lot of food you'd have to think about the total amount of food that we use that we eat in sweden and the uk and and think about that in terms of getting emissions down rapidly from methane and n2o so not just in their own
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countries but in other countries as well and then i have another separate target for negative emissions and nature-based solutions and bear in mind that if there was to be used they have to meet very stringent sustainability criteria and equity criteria as well
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and you'd have some sort of million tons of co2 captured in various forms but i'd say 2035 and maybe 2050. but what is what is different to the net zero framing is that these would not be you could not
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substitute between any of these you can't say we'll not do quite so much on a on on something on energy say aviation for example because we're going to do more on controlling emissions from pigs and um methane emissions from agriculture or whatever it might be
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you can't those substitutes wouldn't be allowed so it removes that sort of machiavellian that sort of um that's a fiddling process that a lot of people are going through now to try to avoid making the changes that they really
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should be making within their industries within their countries and in their regions so we need to treat it like the emergency it is you know we responded to the banking crisis we responded the code i'm not saying all the responses were in
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any way reasonable but we responded because we treated them like they were emergencies we're not doing that with climate change at all so we in respect of our carbon dioxide emissions to give a flavor for the sweden and the uk which is the countries
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that were the basis of the paper but this holds true for most of the developed parts of the world it will take us a little while to reach 10 per annum even if we try it now we have no intention of doing that at the moment but imagine we saw we actually were to treat it like an
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emergency then okay in a few years you might get 10 per annum the problem is because it's a cumulative problem and the emissions are so high today by the time you get to 10 per annum that means you've got to increase the
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rate of reduction after that to stay within the budget so you'd have to be something like 20 by 2030 um which is about a 75 reduction in total emissions
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compared with 2019 not compared to 1990 compared to 2019 you know just pre-copied we'd need about three quarters of our emissions to be removed from the system by 2030 and then zero carbon by around 20 35
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and that's real zero not net zero now that is immediate and profound system change there's nothing about that that you can capture in the in the current way that we're operating on our society so we are talking about huge shifts in the productive capacity
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of our society from furnishing the luxuries of many of us to actually delivering the low carbon infrastructure and the big behavioral changes that are going to be necessary so to conclude the headline choice for
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developed nations is that if we prefer to ignore international equity if we're happy to pass a huge burden on to our children in terms of reducing emissions if we'd be happy to be part of a two and a half to three degrees c future and
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possibly even more from additional feedbacks and we're happy to renege on our paris commitments but actually this allows us to dovetail dovetail with today's politics it allows us to maintain the current market economic market model it allows us to have faith sort of
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sizeable adjustments but there are only adjustments to business as usual it's not questioning business as usual in any way then let's carry on with five percent of mitigation at best and net zero by 2045 for sweden or 2050 for the uk
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you know and fail our children if however our preference is to take international equity seriously then we need a huge mitigation effort by this generation now then we have to cut our emissions in line with well below two degrees c and
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we have to abide by our paris commitments now that if you're going to do that that's going to require a huge ramp up in government intervention in every almost every single corner of our lives because we have chosen for
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30 years to do nothing about climate change um it can require a profound and rapid reshaping of our economics i would i would actually prefer to call it our finance system and it's going to require immediate and
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deep cuts across all sectors there are no exempt sectors from this every sector is going to be struggling to do this but this would give us about say 10 to 20 percent perennial reduction in emissions every single year but bear in mind the equity part will play out
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much more for some and much less for others and real zero by about 20 35 if that sounds impossible we should have started earlier and of course the what i said at the beginning what we did in 2006 the banking court 2007 and
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the banking crisis was seen to be impossible our response to covert was seen to be impossible we did the impossible within two years on both of those delivering paris requires new narratives
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it needs us to rethink what constitutes growth progress and development in our society we need to reframe the value structures of much of our society and some of the good parts of the value system are already there but we need to bring them bring them out bring out more
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the citizen concerns and perhaps less of the consumer concerns and how do we reward success what is success are the key workers people who we might think of as appropriately rewarding or do we continue to reward the other groups of people like us as
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professors so they rethink that rewarding process um think about our alternative relationships with time we typically discount the future we ignore the future at significant cost to uh to our own
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children um we need to rethink that learn lessons from the past and genuinely think very seriously about the implications of our behavior today on the future we need to embed genuinely um genuine concern for inter
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and intergenerational equity you know thinking about other people elsewhere in the world whether they're the people suffering from the storms exacerbated by climate change and or the typhoons exacerbated in severity and potentially in frequency in back in the coastal strip of bangladesh
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or the people suffering from sandy or in high-end in the philippines the people who suffering from the additional impacts of climate change on extreme weather think about them think also about future generations as well to embed into an
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intergenerational equity and finally on this i think a much much deeper appreciation the more the human world and that's important because we're not just facing a climate change crisis there's a whole suite of different ecological crises of one sort or another
00:31:51
which many of you here will know much more about than i do and but these are all coming together in a really messy and um and devastating way and i think we have to have a much greater appreciation of the more than the human world of which we are part
00:32:03
and we're not abstract from it so the final slide um it's in 2021 i would argue that we've left it so late and we've done that deliberately because it's meant we could maintain a politically palatable story for the last
00:32:16
30 years but now climate change because it's a cumulative issue has become system change and as einstein noted insanity is doing the same well it's attributed to einstein insanity is doing the same thing
00:32:28
over and over again and expecting a different result and thus far we've chosen to pass on to our own children the consequences of 30 years of such insanity and i would argue that the net zero framing that as i say is ubiquitous
00:32:41
is the latest sort of almost like the latest ruse in this in this process of insanity and i think we need to escape out of it very quickly if we're going to be um you know leave our our children with it with a good legacy and the
00:32:53
prospect of a um of a prosperous future so on that note thanks very much for listening thank you so much kevin now we've got some questions that are already filtering in
00:33:09
in our chat feel free to keep keep asking them um first off though we have a few clarifications for you kevin firstly simon from yarnshipping asks
00:33:21
what's the global budget um including all greenhouse gases is it still 600 gigatons of co2 and analyst asks does the 1.5 degree curve include
00:33:34
the decrease of aerosols yeah um both really important questions the one of the problems with trying to have a global budget for all greenhouse gases is that actually um many many of the
00:33:46
gases have very different lifetimes so how do you compare methane which is a much shorter lifetime than carbon dioxide and so i think there's a real danger in thinking that we can just put them all together and have a one big global carbon budget and the language of global warming potentially i
00:33:59
think has fed into a misunderstanding around these gases so actually within the science they don't look at it like that what they look at is the is this sort of instant take what they call the instantaneous warming they use sort of the science the pure science if you think like to think about it
00:34:12
and in that they make estimates of what they think will happen to the different gases over the century and the levels of warming that they will bring about and then they look at the carbon dioxide you know in you know purely as carbon dioxide and they work out the budget
00:34:24
you can emit so i think bringing them all together really risks this idea of substitution that you can swap out methane for co2 or nitrous oxide for co2 and but it doesn't mean so you can't consider the other gases as i said at the end you have to think about the other greenhouse gases they are
00:34:40
absolutely key to the story but carbon dioxide is the principal one but they don't all fit into a neat carbon budget framework in in theory you could have nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide you could bring together because they both last a long time in the atmosphere but i
00:34:52
think would be inappropriate to bring methane for instance and indeed some of the other greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide together um and on the second point was that those curves that i used there they include the latest understanding of aerosols
00:35:04
because those carbon budgets in the ipcc cv ports do have some feedback some aerosols which overall make things a little cooler and well maybe quite a lot cooler um but there's also a lot not known about aerosols so
00:35:17
there's quite a lot of feedbacks that aren't included quantitatively in the ipcc reports and that's simply because we don't understand them well enough but on average it's believed and some of the latest work systems tend to suggest
00:35:30
this that actually the budgets will be smaller because the feedbacks are likely to make the situation worse um and so yes if we remove the aerosols it probably would be that the budget would get a little bit smaller
00:35:43
no good news i'm sorry well we were definitely expecting that um rebecca has a reflection on the idea of fairness for you how are we going to be able to cut or stop these emissions in a fair way
00:35:57
um i guess reflecting on the idea of a fair outcome and also a fair process that doesn't um end up isolating different groups of people yeah i think we've left it so late that
00:36:10
the best we can hope for now is the least unfair approach um which seems a slight strange way of putting it fairness would have required us to respond a long time ago if we think of fairness between countries um
00:36:21
the framework i would take is the carbon budget framework i think it works well but it's whatever we do it's going to be massively challenging and we have a global carbon budget and the fairness argument there is how did you buy that between countries
00:36:33
and the problem is everyone plays poker with it and wants a larger amount which is what happens when you add up all the nationally determined contributions everyone every country's pledges it comes out to somewhere between three and four degrees centigrade of warming so we've got to find somewhere splitting
00:36:45
the global carbon budget up fairly between countries actually there are some techniques for doing that in philosophy where you get countries to represent each other so rather than sweden represent its position sweden would be represented by ghana ghana would be represented by nigeria
00:36:57
nigeria by the u.s the u.s by china and then actually what you can show us from philosophy is actually we get much fairer distribution if you're representing other people because you aim at fairness when you're representing yourself you aim your aim at greed
00:37:10
so there are some interesting tools for doing this but we have to find some way of doing that ultimately this is an issue of staying within the carbon budget but then within countries i think it's really interesting then how we play that out and that would be culturally specific
00:37:23
so we looked at countries like the uk and the us they're deeply uneven societies and i think they're what's going to well i don't think there's much choice about this really those of us that responsible for the lion's share of the missions are going to have to face some profound changes to how we
00:37:36
live our lives but but the majority of people in the uk and in the us and probably even in sweden by definition are below average consumers and for a lot of those people it's actually major structural change physical
00:37:48
infrastructural change that will bring the emission reductions down for them so fairness plays out very differently depending on your socio-economic group and other cultural facets as well but i i don't think we should have a global view of that i think it's up to
00:38:00
each country to determine how it is best to live within its carbon budget rather than rather than sort of a colonial view which we would have liked to have in britain years ago we will impose the approach that would every other country should adopt but i think they should do that
00:38:11
themselves thanks now we've got a few different questions that are coming in concerning carbon budgets in the swedish context and how we can count them so we have one question
00:38:25
about agriculture which in kalmar landscape for example ris is responsible for 33 of emissions so do you have any suggestions for how to incorporate
00:38:39
agriculture or complementary approaches to carbon budgets um to address this we've also got a question about consumption-based footprints and how to incorporate those within carbon budgets
00:38:50
in the swedish policy landscape and finally a question about historical emissions and including them within carbon budgets in sweden all hugely important questions that
00:39:03
would be in an hour's presentation on each um agriculture is not my forte but but it's a very important part of the of the emissions probably 20 25 percent and depending quite how you measure these things so the warming we see comes
00:39:15
from agricultural related emissions um i don't want to see it personally i do not want to see it captured within the carbon budget framing but i tried to say i think we need another one that runs alongside the
00:39:26
carbon so if you look to and you know and i don't know the the issues here around calm on the edge and the agricultural missions there but basically sweden needs to get its emissions down so the total amount of emissions from people eating sweden's as low as possible and i say
00:39:39
somewhere probably between half and one ton of co2 equivalent that would be a mixture of methane and n2o and probably if we moved away from animal-based diets significantly particularly ruminants so from um you know from cattle and
00:39:51
sheep towards pigs and chickens they're much lower emissions i think probably 75 low emissions but then if we move to more vegetarian-based diets it's lower again particularly if you move away from dairy and um and so forth and if you move to vegan diets lower again now i'm not saying
00:40:04
that we should be imposing those sorts of dietary constraints on societies overall but we need to think about how we how we change our diets to reduce our emissions but then there are also agricultural practices
00:40:16
but even if you move to sort of an organic a lot of people think all use organic fertilizer organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer both produce nitrous oxide they both produce greenhouse gases and so we have to really think about that as well
00:40:29
as i said we cannot eliminate all the emissions from agriculture but we can get them down significantly um from where they are today and i would say sweden should be aiming at something like half a tonne to a ton at most per person by say 2035 but that includes
00:40:42
looking at their emissions of the food they import as well um consumption-based emissions yeah i mean sweden talks a lot about this and it's a really big thing in sweden and i think it's really important to bear in mind that a lot of our
00:40:55
emissions relate to goods that are made elsewhere in the world and then we import them and blame the other countries for the emissions we hear that repeatedly in relation to china um the problem with the two issues about this i mean yes we should include them but i don't want to see them as a
00:41:08
separate i don't want to see them rather combined with our territorial missions i want to see it as separate territorial emissions for one thing we know the numbers very accurately yeah we know how much fuel we use with a high degree of accuracy
00:41:20
when you think about consumption-based emissions we don't know the energy systems that are making our things that we import particularly well and they might change as well so there's a much greater uncertainty with consumption-based emissions also the policy levers that we have for
00:41:32
our own emissions in our own countries are much stronger than the policy leaders they're direct levers than the indirect levers we might have for um energy use elsewhere in the world in producing the goods that we import but i do think it's really key that we think about consumption-based emissions
00:41:45
otherwise we just offshore the emissions to other parts of the world but i would have hold both of those inventories together and if one's going in the right direction and one's going the wrong direction then you need to stop and think about why is that are we just offshoring all our steel and our cement i mean
00:41:58
and think about that but they need they should be complementary they shouldn't be separate they shouldn't be um brought they shouldn't be sort of brought together as only one unit there's one budget so two complementary budgets and historically this is really true but
00:42:10
the problem as i said right the beginning we've we've you know we we have chosen the squander opportunity to do something fair about climate change and so now you're just down to doing what you can best do that's practical and the least unfair as possible i mean
00:42:23
if we were seriously fair about this we would all stop emitting now we'd close this this zoom event down and we would stop emitting in the wealthy parts of the world and we'd have to find we're pumping huge amounts of money into poor parts of the world we squandered
00:42:36
our budget years and years ago and and we still every single cop the rich company countries play out as much as they can that they're going to get a big share of the budget and we're going to reduce the amount of financial support to poor countries
00:42:48
um so the historical commissions need to inform our humility if you like um but but unfortunately i don't think we can practically take them on board and use them to allocate out the emission budget anymore because there simply isn't
00:43:01
enough budget to do that with good food for thought um now um you mentioned that most scenarios use 1.5 to 2 um sorry most 1.5 to 2 degree
00:43:19
ipcc scenarios use cdr within their modeling um there's a question are there any others that don't use this and if any scenario does exist that doesn't rely on cdr
00:43:31
um in a current sort of proposed pathway how could we incorporate these pathways in a wider domain yeah um well virtually all the scenarios in the ipcc use use some form of cdi i don't think
00:43:45
there's any exceptions there is one that doesn't use negative emissions but it uses huge levels of forestry um in an unproblematic way and they often used language for a forest station which actually i think is quite dangerous
00:43:56
um a fire station might indeed mobilize more emissions from the soil than you actually capture in the trees so i think we have to really think about forestry there's a real easy easy sort of easy win in the models you just plant a tree you look how big the trees in the gate look how much
00:44:09
carbon the weight of the tree and you know how much carbon you've got but it doesn't look at the complex ecosystems that are involved in forests or in soils so you really need to understand that and i think a lot of the modelers have not done a good job on that but there are so as far as i know there
00:44:21
are no models no global models out there um looking at due to greater 1.5 without some significant level of negative emissions and that's because they've all effectively so far been all the major models are all based on the same sort of
00:44:36
theoretical framework they're all neoclassical growth models general equilibrium models so they can't ask the questions that need to be asked because the models don't allow it so i would say that the wrong tool for the job and using a hammer to put a screwdriver
00:44:48
you know a screw in it's not it's just not not the right tool we need to rethink that there are some national models that look diff that do that differently so the the um the zero carbon britain ones produced by a small group in wales
00:45:01
for really just pennies for the the center for alternative technology they've produced some really interesting scenarios now they have got a lot of biomass use in there which they claim is sustainable and it's focusing particularly on the uk we're looking at other ones of those elsewhere in the world now so they've
00:45:13
got a they have a um a database of scenarios around the world the national scenarios that that um for aiming at two degrees centigrade that don't include lots of negative emissions so it might be worth looking at their
00:45:25
their database but the big models all include it and we need to move away from that we need new models new model structures and probably new modelers as well i mean the models are always based in wealthy high emitting countries
00:45:38
so it's not surprising that they take a wealthy high emitting approach to dealing with these issues yeah i'll follow up on that from um kim nichols asking are there any policy proposals or policies in place that
00:45:52
beyond just um not accounting or not including cdr and nets in their proposals also take into account your suggestion of separate non-substitutable carbon budgets between emission sources
00:46:05
so i i probably missed i missed a little bit of that then so i can say again isabel sure um are there any policy proposals in place that follow your suggestion of separate non-substitutable carbon
00:46:16
budgets between emission sources um not that i'm aware though we do have policies like we have policies say in the uk and i'm sure other parts of the world on um you know some sort of level of ev
00:46:31
penetration but but they're often very vague and the reason that they're so weak as well is that they are in a sense those policies that look like they're just focusing on evs are in place because they're allowed elsewhere to deal with negative
00:46:45
emissions so so the negative emissions are everywhere playing out even when it doesn't look like they're there so you know aviation policy in the uk is as it is because we're already issuing negative emissions but it's only when you look at
00:46:56
the system as a whole or all of the spreadsheets you start to see that playing off of the numbers so it looks like they're separate but they're not so unfortunately this is completely endemic in our system at the moment this idea the assumption that negative emissions
00:47:08
what's been interesting and this is uh i mean i tend to use twitter as a very sort of i find it a really useful form of engagement and other people may not find that but it's very constructive as well i think in lots of ways um but i put up this idea of um of separate
00:47:21
targets and it was very interesting to see how many people were in favor of it you know not just ngos but people were not so much in favor but found it interesting at least and that's something we should we should have a dialogue about and these are people um in quite on the
00:47:33
scientific community in the policy realm um in the journalistic realm as well as civil society so i think there is a real mood for looking at something beyond negative emissions and nets and net zero and indeed if you look at the civil
00:47:46
society movements they are very critical of that sort of net zero nets cdr framing so i i at the moment i think if you're really looking for um i don't think it's if you like
00:47:59
an accurate ass interpretation of the science into what we have to do i would look more for more civil society it's a sad state to have to say sad state of affairs i have to say this than to the academic community or the policy realm i think we've
00:48:12
we've hidden behind nets and negative missions and actually i think some civil society have seen through that and are now having their voices heard now so perhaps we should engage more with them we have a quick question about um
00:48:27
accounting for renewable energy resources within um net and real zero calculations how are the large carbon dioxide emissions during manufacture of
00:48:39
of green green energy technologies incorporated when you write zero carbon energy yeah and that's a really important question and i have quite a lot of discussions and some arguments some
00:48:52
polite courteous arguments with people about this because i think we often i'm not saying this this question is thinking of it like this but i think often we think of renewable energy and the shift to zero carbon has been on top of
00:49:03
the current system rather than instead of and so what we're gonna have to be doing is move as what i refer to as the productive capacity of society so we're no longer making cars and and there's sort of luxuries that many of us
00:49:16
have got used to we're gonna be making trams and wind turbine blades so we actually don't use a lot more energy than we're currently using we just shift across the labor and the resources and the energy for making this rapid shift to zero
00:49:27
carbon and the quick and initially that's going to mean ongoing fossil fuel use of course because you're going to have to be using fossil fuels because that's what dominates our energy system but the quicker we can build a renewable system and the quicker we can we can reduce energy consumption elsewhere
00:49:40
then actually the faster we can move away from fossil fuels so i think we have to recognize that this of course we will be a lot resources and so forth used but it's not in addition to businesses as usual it's an alternative to business as usual
00:49:53
and that is completely missing from the current dialogue it's always seen as a bolt-on to business as usual thank you we're in danger of running out of time on different fronts at the moment so i'll just try and group the final
00:50:07
questions we have yeah some questions on strategies um for example you're asking for your thoughts on a global carbon tax also on the potential for
00:50:20
other forms of um technologies like walter jenn's suggestion of restoring the fresh water cycle cooling the planet that way using its temperature regulating function
00:50:31
and finally some questions concerning communication how we can communicate the dangers of net zero thinking and where did this net zero framing even
00:50:45
originate um pre to paris in 2015 it wasn't really around so where did this narrative come from and how can we counter it yeah um i won't i won't focus on the the um the
00:50:58
freshwater cycle one because it's not something i know anything significant about so i'll just be rambling on in the way that academics often do about something we know nothing about um global carbon tax i think it's interesting and i i'm not a great fan of a global carbon tax firstly
00:51:10
if we people have been talking about it for years it's another delaying tactic what we need is a global carbon tax knowing damn well we're never going to get one or we won't get one for 30 years so it just delays things um i would much prefer that that nations
00:51:23
dealt you know try to live within their carbon budget and they might some countries might be appropriate using attacks others might use regulations some might use trading some might use personal carbon allowances or fee and dividend
00:51:34
so i think you have to you have to tailor the policies to the culture of the country that you're looking at rather than having this good idea of a grand global carbon tax which i think we're probably very unlikely to ever get and if we did it
00:51:46
would be incredibly low anyway um so i so i would rather use a different policy suites to recognize different countries so in sweden um you would use different different policy suites than we would use in the uk because you have a
00:51:58
different attitude towards governments if you went to china it would be very different again if you went to the u.s it would be different maybe even the states would do things individual states might do things differently um in terms of communication on this well yeah the net zero i think is really
00:52:10
dangerous and it has emerged it's primarily emerged because we've failed on climate change and and as we've continued to fail on climate change and the problem is cumulative it gets harder and harder it gets impossible to reconcile the changes that are necessary with the
00:52:23
current economic paradigm and the only way you can do that is to find some way to say well they'll suck the co2 out of the atmosphere in the future that allows us to maintain the the house of cards that we're that we're living in today um but we certainly recognize that's
00:52:36
deeply fraudulent and even the academic community is pulling out lots of papers saying this isn't appropriate how we communicate this i think we have to i don't think there's one way my view on communication is we need multiple narratives we need to engage much more with the arts and the
00:52:49
humanities you know i mean i like powerpoint presentations but they haven't changed the world so far so let's let's have you know let's have stories and poems and songs and just dialogues people chatting down the pub and in the cafe
00:53:00
and so we want multiple narratives you know eclectic visions of the future there's not one vision of what the right future is as long as it's sustainable it meets its climate meets the you know climate change criteria let's have all sorts of futures that we can postulate rather than a single
00:53:14
one you know i'll carry on with my powerpoint presentations and and other people can can write more interesting novels um so communication is key but i don't think there's a right way there's probably lots of wrong ways but there are multiple
00:53:24
right ways thank you kevin and we're at three o'clock which sadly brings us to the end of this part of the session um i'd like to remind everyone though that on in the spirit of of meeting in cafes
00:53:39
and pubs you now have a break and if you would wish you can take a stretch go and get some water or you can also write um in the chat and meet your fellow conference participants that way and
00:53:51
there's still a couple of questions that we didn't quite get time for um for kevin and as kevin said he is he is active on twitter so tweet him at kevin kevin climate right
00:54:02
yeah that's right yes yeah great so we'll now take a break and we'll be back at quarter past three swedish time to have a series of short presentations on rapid decarbonization
00:54:15
we'll see you then [Music] you
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