Goodnight London: April 2019

Last Thursday (4th April), I delivered a speech to my local Labour Party ward on climate change, along with two other colleagues. My colleagues focused on, variously, the work of groups such as SERA (Socialist Environment and Resources Association - the arm of the Labour party that focuses on the environment); Extinction Rebellion (the grassroots organisation that recently protested nearly naked in Parliament - EDIT UPDATE: and have also been ubiquitous over the last month for their worldwide protests against climate change); Red Green Labour; and what local Councils in London have been doing. Meanwhile, my portion of the speech - we each had ten minutes - focused on the general background of climate change. That meant covering what has happened in the Arctic; how a steady-state economic model could help combat climate change; and what needs to be done next. My speech has been adapted below, in Courier font. The speech was accompanied by some visuals, which are also included below.

To accompany the speech, we also designed some leaflets to help with what is a dauntingly complex topic. The leaflets included resources and tips on what groups to follow - particularly if Hackney-based - and a relevant reading list. Those leaflets can be viewed at the bottom of this blog post.

I'd like to start this speech by mentioning the Plimsoll line. In 1872, a campaign took place to introduce a load line – a mark on the side of boats that would indicate, if level with the water, that the ship's maximum safe-loading capacity had been reached. Its inventor, Samuel Plimsoll, initially received opprobrium from big businesses, the media, and politicians, despite the fact that it saved countless lives.

A parallel can be drawn towards an overloaded ship bound for its watery grave, and the Earth as an increasingly overburdened planet facing an unstable equilibrium, with climate change analogous to a heavy sea. We have pushed the planets' carrying capacity too far, and are likely to see catastrophe. Like Icarus ignoring his father's advice and flying too close to the Sun, we have become so carried away with economic growth and hubris that we have ignored the warnings from environmental experts. It's not hard to see, then, that we need an environmental Plimsoll line that needs to be set fast. In fact, we pretty much are in a sinking ship already, and need to move straight to last ditch emergency measures – things are that bad.

However, it's also not hard to draw a parallel between the complaints that were made against the Plimsoll line by big businesses in the 1870s, and the complaints made by international Governments – most recently Trump when rejecting the Paris accords – and big businesses today when attempts are made to induce legally compliant or binding environmentally-sound regulations. The same argument is employed again: that obligating Governments and businesses to cut their carbon footprint in order to stop climate change could lead to a curtailing of endless economic growth and rising consumption.

Meanwhile, in the UK, all of the focus on Brexit in the last two years has meant that this compelling of global Governments and businesses to sign up to environmental charters to impede the effects of climate change has effectively been side-lined.

Above: A nearly-empty House of Commons discussing a climate change motion.

It's important to clarify a few things here. First of all, climate is not the same as weather. The climate is generated by four components:

* The atmosphere;
* The hydrosphere, i.e. the Earth's water;
* The cryosphere – the Earth's ice sheets and glaciers;
* The biosphere – the planet's plants and animals.

Every one of these four components has been significantly altered by human activity.

Our emissions of CO₂ have significantly modified the atmosphere, to the point where we are already past the safe level (considered to be considerably lower than 350ppm (parts per million)). Instead, current levels are about 410ppm and rising steadily.

Our enormous water use has significantly modified the hydrosphere. That water use is not just used for drinking – it's also used for producing all kinds of consumer goods (including bottled water). Meanwhile, climate change has led to rising sea levels. We are already over 1°C (degrees centigrade) of warming compared to pre-industrial levels. At 1.5°C, 80% of the coral reefs are expected to die, and 2°C warming should see around 100% of coral reefs die – especially alarming given that they are the rainforests of the sea and are considered essential to life in the oceans. In addition, rising sea temperatures force the plankton to move, affecting the feeding habits and places of a whole range of fish.

Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures have significantly modified the cryosphere. In the Arctic alone, four tipping points look set to be crossed within a few years:

(1) Loss of the Arctic's sea ice's ability to act as a buffer to absorb incoming ocean heat;
(2) Loss of Arctic's sea ice's ability to reflect sunlight back into space;
(3) The destabilisation of seafloor sediments in the Arctic Ocean;
(4) Permafrost melt.

The Arctic and Greenland ice sheets have begun to shrink, losing around 475 billion tons of mass per year into the sea. Arctic coastlines are retreating by 14 metres per year. The ice just off the north coast of Greenland broke up last year in the summer. Ice is becoming so thin that the ice could break up and lead to a dark ocean. The current trajectory is so bad that the Arctic may be ice-free within half a decade, and permanently ice-free all year round a decade after that. The consequences would be a huge release of the methane deposits that lie under the ice, the permafrost in Siberia, and the bottom of the sea. If the Arctic melts, these will be released, 'turbo charging' global warming, with methane's global warming effect between twenty to one hundred times greater than CO₂.

Above: graph showing decline in ice in the Arctic from the 1970s, as well as projection for the next five years. Source: PIOMAS, Polar Science Center, University of Washington, USA (link).

Above: declining Arctic Sea Ice in the last seven years. National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder (link).

Meanwhile, increasing use of land, and the accompanying pollution, has led to the biosphere being significantly modified. Deforestation has severely impacted the forests' ability to act as a carbon sink.

The chances of the Earth staying below the 2°C limit as set in the Paris Agreement – itself a kind of Plimsoll line - remains less and less likely, particularly now that, as mentioned, the US under Trump has pulled out of the Accords. Instead, projections show that we are on course for three degrees of warming. This would be catastrophic, in that it could lead to runaway climate change.

We are already seeing unusual weather in Australia, which has endured huge heatwaves; and in the Northern US states and Canada, which have seen abnormally cold weather even by their standards.

It would also lead to knock-on effects for everyone in this room. London would not be spared the effects of climate change. We have already seen unusually hot weather in the last few weeks, in contrast to this time last year. In 2010, for the videojournalism module of my journalism post-graduate course, I completed a three-minute documentary on the Thames Barrier, looking at its future, in which I interviewed a member of the Environment Agency for the Thames Estuary 2100 Program. She made it clear that rising sea levels due to climate change will mean that an entirely new Thames Barrier will need to be built soon enough. The river Thames is rising significantly.

Now I'm going to shift to talk about the economy and Labour. Politicians favour economic growth at all costs. What the constant obsession with GDP fails to take into account is that growth in GDP will almost certainly lead to corresponding growths in resource depletion. We need to confront the taboo that economic growth is the only importance in the well-being of a nation, and acknowledge that a steady-state economy – also known as 'degrowth' or 'a circular economy' - is desirable for combating climate change. As many studies have shown – particularly The Spirit Level by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and Cancel The Apocalypse by Andrew Simms - economic growth does not automatically contribute to individual happiness.

What have Labour specifically done to tackle climate change? The local context of Hackney will be tackled in a bit, but before then it's worth mentioning that Labour have scrambled to find their own version of the Green New Deal resolution that US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has helped draft as part of a massive green economic stimulus across the pond, backed by Democrat presidential candidates. Ocasio-Cortez's plans have aimed to eliminate the vast majority of US greenhouse gas pollution over ten years – though this may already be too late a deadline, given the advancing feedback rates of climate change.

In the UK Clive Lewis, the Shadow Treasury Minister for sustainable economics, convened a meeting in the last month at which the broad framework for a British Green New Deal has been drawn up, backed by Caroline Lucas and economist Ann Pettifor, both of whom were part of The Green New Deal Group ten years ago that proposed such a thing. In addition, the shadow secretary for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Rebecca Long-Bailey, has launched a year-long "unprecedented call for evidence" that can guide Labour's "green jobs revolution". At the same time, such moves could face resistance from the Unions, who fear losing jobs and growth, as with their vote on a third runway at Heathrow – which takes us back to the steady-state economy conundrum. And in breaking news, Labour has in recent days now declared a climate and environmental emergency.

More generally, the stark truth facing us is that we need to move to a 100% emergency footing to deal with this direct existential threat. We need to change the economy at a level at least equal to that seen in World War II.

There are two mainstream views which are both catastrophically bad. The first is that there is widespread ignorance of this direct existential threat. The second is that most of the rest of society knows that the situation is extremely bad, but assumes that we will somehow muddle through in a typically British way and put up a few flood defences.

Former NASA scientist James Hansen, who alerted the world to global warming in 1988, instead tells us in his book Storms of My Grandchildren that the Earth is out of energy balance and that if we don't stop the warming and return it to energy balance, it will keep on heating up until the effect that happened on Venus is replicated here and the seas will boil off into space. At that point, all life on Earth would subsequently become impossible.

Even if this nightmare scenario doesn't materialise, we are looking at mass crop failures due to extreme weather and also loss of insect life like bees just a few years down the line, which would lead to mass starvation – including in Europe and the rest of the developed world.

So what can be done at this point? We need to initiate action immediately to start the three pronged approach outlined by climate system scientist Paul Beckwith (pictured above):

* Step 1: General Public, Policy Makers, Governments, Military, Scientists and Citizens must "get-with-the-program" and recognise our Climate Change EMERGENCY;

* Step 2: Governments around the planet MUST declare a Global Climate Change Emergency;

* Step 3: Deploy a "Three-Legged-Approach" to have a decent chance to survive the wrenching changes caused by climate change:
o Leg 1: Slash fossil-fuel emissions;
o Leg 2: Deploy Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology to lower atmosphere concentrations to less than 350ppm;
o Leg 3: Deploy Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technology to cool the Arctic. Methods can be achieved by things such as marine cloud brightening, as pioneered by Stephen Salter, Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, with his specially designed ship (below). Solutions that are deemed to be 'geo-engineering' are very controversial, but this is a completely clean example that uses zero fossil fuels, utilises only sea water and would cost a paltry $100million per year.

Above: artist visualisation of a Flettner rotor ship / spray vessel, pioneered by Stephen Salter, Professor of Engineering Design at University of Edinburgh.