This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction (and another long one!).
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.
― Niccolò Machiavelli
Last time we looked at the political ideologies that largely rule the world. Those ideologies must take physical form via institutions. Governments, banks, supermarkets, crime syndicates, your local knitting club. The world is made via institutions. The structure of those institutions shapes the outcomes they are able to produce.
Climate change requires institutions capable of bold actions under extreme uncertainty. Rapid change. Innovation. Long-term thinking. Those institutions must be staffed by similarly minded individuals. The people who rise to the top need to be capable of leading a radical transition into an unknowable future.
Let’s look at the institutions we actually have.
The World’s Institutions
Climate action, of the kind compatible with the status quo, has relied on four sets of institutions:
National governments
Global governance
Market economies
Civil society
All have contained structural weakness and conflicts which have left them struggling to act on climate change. National governments have routinely pursued self-interest while being hamstrung by economics. Global governance has produced vast amounts of noise, and very little action. Market economies are arguably causing the problem, and being very sluggish to stop doing so. Civil society has produced both climate activists and climate deniers.
Overall it’s a bit of a mess.
Many good things are happening. Many bad things are happening. Summed up they mostly cancel out. A slight imbalance does favour the good things, but at this rate the victory of The Good will take many, many decades.
We don’t have the time.
Pathways consistent with the implementation and extrapolation of countries’ current policies see GHG emissions reaching 57 (52–60) GtCO2-eq yr –1 by 2030 and to 46–67 GtCO2-eq yr –1 by 2050, leading to a median global warming of 2.4°C to 3.5°C by 2100 (medium confidence).
Today we’ll mostly look at government (though some of this applies to business too). Later we’ll look at the economics, then we’ll jump to psychology before coming back to civil society - because that’s were life gets freaking wild.
Okay. Time for the most boring and dull way to end a civilization…
Bureaucracy!
THE WRONG TOOLS
The entire point of an institution is to take a social process that would otherwise be chaos and make it organized. Institutional decision making involves standardized procedures. That’s great. It makes life so much easier.
Those procedures require certain tools.
The tools used reflect the worldview that created the institution in the first place. That worldview probably did not include climate change. You cannot paint a wall with a screwdriver. You cannot tighten screws with a paintbrush. You can’t solve climate change with the wrong tools.
Most of the tools which have become commonplace over the past forty years exist for the routine operation of the neoliberal economy. Therefore a significant portion of decisions being made in society simply cannot deal with climate change.
I’ll pick on a couple of the big ones here.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Anyone involved in any kind of official planning will likely do a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) at some point. This is standard planning practice across business and government. You add up all costs and benefits, put it financial terms, then apply the time-value of money to decide if it’s worth doing this thing today.
Unfortunately, the attempt to turn climate change decision making into accounting has some limits.
....CBA has a number of strengths, can be applied in many contexts, and is generally seen as the dominant analytical tool in the policy toolkit. However, CBA has major limitations specifically regarding transformative change:
a status quo bias
a tendency to underplay environmental and other non-market impacts which may be the very goal of transformative change
a narrow focus in general, which may fail to identify the potential of a sum of multiple projects to collectively achieve transformative change.
....Overall, CBA seems ill-suited to situations where fundamental relationships in the economy might be changing.
This has the potential to get very messed up.
Complex decisions do need a way to balance multiple priorities. In techniques like CBA that means assigning everything a money value. That’s fine when you’re a factory balancing Sprocket-A vs Widget-B. That’s less fine when it’s the fate of Bangladesh, or the survival of the Amazon rain-forest.
Climate decision making involves profound philosophical questions. Reducing everything to its market value locks in some horrendous and absurd views that few would ever dare to articulate without those dollar signs attached.
If you ever see an economist confidently declaring that some outrageous idea is our most economically rational option, there was probably some cost-benefit style thinking going on behind the scenes.
Economic Models Can’t Deal With Reality
We saw this previously with questions around Integrated Assessment Models. Economic modelling of climate change can get kind of funky.
A number of economic models have been predicting that catastrophic climate change will in fact merely reduce GDP by a few percent, while recommending anything from 2°C to 6°C as a viable option.
The discipline of economics is the intellectual foundation for political and business decision making. When the world’s major institutions decide what pathway to follow, this is what they look at.
In spite of these basic problems of methodology and sensitivity, the IAMs have had enormous influence, especially in the United States, and their shortcomings have had serious policy consequences. The IAMs have been particularly influential in the calculation of carbon prices for use in appraisal of public programmes. They have been used to suggest relatively low levels for carbon taxes. And they have been used to argue that policy on climate change should be overwhelmingly dominated by carbon pricing. They have played a major role in IPCC reports on policy, which, in turn, have played a prominent role in public discussion. They continue to play a very powerful role in the research activities of economists working on climate change.
To put it more bluntly:
Correcting for these errors makes it feasible that the economic damages from climate change are at least an order of magnitude worse than forecast by economists, and may be so great as to threaten the survival of human civilization.
- Keen (2020), The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change
An academic fight is in progress here. One side was awarded the Noble Prize. The other side is less than impressed (to say the least). This debate is, in part, an argument over neoclassic economics, which means it’s also a fight over the intellectual underpinnings of the neoliberal capitalist world order.
Central in all this academic kerfuffle is William Nordhaus. This article by The Intercept presents the critique if you want more. All this in turn reflects quirks within academia specifically: the intellectual silos, the path dependence created by past theories and established names, the Nobel prizes and other factors which catapult certain ideas to global significance while sidelining others.
Where people get their ideas from matters. If academics put out bad theory, the result is a cascade of institutional failures across society.
Now, economic modelling is valid and useful when used appropriately. We just need to keep in mind all the limitations and caveats.
Because there’s a lot of them.
Even when done well, this kind of economic modelling is not neutral. The ethics embedded in these models is utilitarianism. The choice of discount rates reflects how much value we give to future people. Questions of risk tolerance and fairness loom over the whole thing. Those are deep philosophical and political questions.
But that mess is hidden amid 2000 pages of dense academic reporting. What makes it out to policy makers and the general public is a nice looking graph.
The Overshoot Plan
What is the goal of climate policy? A common approach today is to set climate objectives as hard targets based on climate history or ecological principles. Perhaps we should aim to limit the global temperature increase to 2°C, or even more ambitiously to 1½°C.
However attractive a temperature target may be as an aspirational goal; the target approach is questionable because it ignores the costs of attaining the goals. If, for example, attaining the 1.5°C goal would require deep reductions in living standards in poor nations, then the policy would be the equivalent of burning down the village to save it. If attaining the low-temperature path turns out to be easy, then of course we should aim for it.
These points lead to an approach known as cost-benefit analysis, in which climate policy is set by balancing costs and benefits. Cost-benefit approaches pose deep problems just discussed because they require putting all changes, plus and minus, into a common metric. Moreover, many impacts are ones that may be difficult to measure, or ones that we may be reluctant to monetize. However, in the view of most economists, balancing of costs and benefits is the most satisfactory way to develop climate policy.
And what is the most cost effective thing to do?
Another finding, much more controversial, is that the cost-benefit optimum rises to over 3°C in 2100 – much higher than the international policy targets. Even with the much more pessimistic alternative damage function, the temperature path rises to 3°C in 2100.
- William Nordhaus, 2018, Nobel Prize lecture
Guess what we’re on track to achieve?
Yeah.
If you’re really keen you can make the argument that meeting the 1.5°C target is actually worse than simply doing nothing at all. Literally nothing. Just let climate change happen.
So how is the world going to survive being so extremely economically efficient?
Good question.
Pathways following current NDCs until 2030 reach annual emissions of 47–57 GtCO 2-eq yr –1 by 2030, thereby making it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot and strongly increasing the challenge of limiting warming to 2°C (>67%) (high confidence). A high overshoot of 1.5°C increases the risks from climate impacts and increases dependence on large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere.
- IPCC, AR6, WGIII
NDCs are our Nationally Determined Contributions. That is what each of our governments has agreed to do under the Paris Agreement. All of these plans got run through each country’s economic advisors. Sum all our contributions together, and what we have collectively agreed to is the Overshoot Plan, followed by inventing magic.
You can’t call it failure if we done it on purpose.
Hyper-specialist Managerial Silo-world
Successfully responding to climate change requires institutions capable of dealing with “wicked problems”. What we actually have are institutions designed to handle routine tasks using established practices to give predictable results.
Routine management.
Tools created for routine management.
People trained for routine management of the status quo.
Predictable tasks are best done by specialists. Much of the world’s expertise is embodied in hyper-focused specialists. They live in silos. Institutional promotion rewards people for being narrowly focused. That just happens to be the opposite of what is required for solving wicked problems.
What happens when a managerial hyper-specialist meets a wicked problem?
It aint pretty.
Massive over-confidence and bureaucratic inertia hits a brick wall of complexity and ignorance. We get stuff like the Einstellung effect. The experts are so focused on their narrow corner they become locked, unable to break free from their established habits. They are incapable of seeing stuff like the possibility that their entire approach to the problem can in fact be part of the problem.
And that’s how you get economic models that think 3°C of global warming is a good idea, based on the assumption that climate change can’t hurt you if you’re indoors.
Wicked problems require a particular mindset. The willingness to drop everything you’ve ever known. Interdisciplinary expertise. Diversity of perspectives. A recognition of the limits of knowledge. Generally you need to be a pain in the ass for any institution based on clear demarcations of authority and expertise built to support the status quo.
But we don’t like doing that. We tell people not to.
Specialization leads to expertise, and expertise remains the requirement of employers looking to add top talent. The more knowledge you accumulate in a niche, the more likely you can find the career to which you aspire.
GOVERNMENTAL FAILURE
Politics has... problems. Have you noticed?
Governments can fail in a spectacularly large number of ways. Climate change trips over an awful lot of them.
Here’s a few.
The Great Filter: To successfully make it in politics you have to be someone capable of being an insider. So here’s a fun fact - climate denial beliefs are strongest among those groups that benefit from the status quo, have power in the status quo, and wish the status quo to continue. White, male, religious, conservative, wealthy. Authoritarian tendencies. Such people are over-represented in positions of institutional power. Cool!
The Global Free-rider Problem: Climate is global. Governments are local. We all benefit regardless of who does the hard work, so the incentive is to make sure that it’s being done by someone else.
The Principle-Agent Problem: If you want climate action, but the only politicians available are former oil CEOs, this just isn’t going to work now, is it?
Incompetence: Politicians are not guaranteed to have skills or to think. Woopsie! Someone just crashed your carbon trading scheme.
Toxic Culture: Get ready for confusion, backbiting, sexual harassment, and a pervasive sense of fear. In this environment we would like you to come up with a plan to create utopia. Good luck.
No Policy: Nothing can happen if no one ever comes up with a plan. And we don’t plan on it!
Cassandra Advisors: A key to successful climate policy is getting a together a bunch of experts. These experts can then be ignored.
Paper Policy: A significant amount of climate policy exist only in theory, Net Zero targets being the prime example.
Policy Myopia: 2050 is a long way off. Right now the important thing is... tax cuts!
Backwards Policy: We start with a policy we like, say tax cuts, and then we figure out how this actually solves... what was it again? Climate something?
Weak Policy: We installed a single EV charging station. Say cheese!
Impossible Policy: Just because you have an ambitious plan, doesn’t mean it can be successfully implemented by humans on Earth.
Ineffective Policy: Sure, the economic analysis said this was a good idea. Sadly when you actually try to do this in the real world none of it actually works (refer to “wrong tools” above).
Backing the Wrong Horse: Cool, you made a real choice in difficult circumstances. Turns out it was the wrong one.
Single Action Fetishism: It’s a carbon trading scheme. We’re done here!
Moral Hazard: Almost any climate policy will dump you in a swamp. Should the government buy flood damaged homes? Cool. Now people will ignore climate risks. But if you don’t... homeless people? Good luck.
Bureaucratic Snafus: We are pretty sure something was being done but no one can remember who, what, where, how, or when. We might in fact be doing it twice in different places or not at all. We’ll get back to you.
Weak Institutions & Lack of Resources: You can have a great plan, but if you give it to people who are unskilled / underfunded / afraid / etc, not much will happen.
Unreliable Institutions: Screw the rest of you and your plans. This department does what we do what we want to do.
The Resource Curse: Having large fossil fuel wealth in your borders will frequently send you down a path towards a decay of your public institutions leading to...
Regulatory Capture: In this department, what we want to do is decided by our buddies in the oil industry.
Conflicts of Interest: Are you saying I ought to sell my shares in Exxon-Mobil. Why?
Ye Olde Corruption: Just bribe me!
Lack of Accountability: You can do anything if no one knows and you never get punished!
Perverse Policies: Screw it, let’s just give billions to our buddies in the oil industry at the same time as we’re coming up our climate plan.
Unfair Policy: Okay. So this plan is real and achievable. However, it does involve screwing over some people. Those people are very upset.
Watered Down Policy: To counter the unfairness we will add various complications, exceptions, loopholes, and bamboozlements until everyone is sufficiently confused to be happy.
Fear of Backlash: We are ungodly terrified of disruptive change. Perceptions of Unfair Policy are hard to avoid. Paper Policy and No Policy are much safer. Let’s do those.
Actual Backlash: Ask President Macron and the Yellow Vests about what happens when all this goes wrong.
Two Party Flip Flopping: Oh, we see you managed to implement actual policies that actually work. Ha! Not anymore you haven’t. Repealed!
Partisan Political Gridlock: We don’t even have to be in government to screw this up. No deal!
Electoral Irrationality: Who wants to campaign for those swing voters who think everything is a plot by Reptilians in the Moon?
Authoritarian Irrationality: Putting one guy in charge does not solve the above. Let’s start a war!
Political Alienation: The sheer overwhelming cynicism and despair generated by all this failure means large numbers of people do not engage with politics. They tend to be poor and young, exactly the people being most harmed. They are precisely the people who need to engage if anything is to change. The worse it gets the less they engage.
Governments of all types have been failing in these ways. Theocracies, Democracies, and Communists. This is not merely a problem of neoliberalism. Those above forms of failure might be the mechanism by which failures take shape, but they’re not the underlying cause.
That is related to the nature of nation states as an institution.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE FAILURE
The League of Nations was formed by the victors of World War One, before getting reassembled by the victors of World War Two into the United Nations. This, along with a bunch of other institutions have been humanity’s baby steps towards a unified global political order – the solution people once proposed as the answer to the crisis of global population. We’ve touched on global government in fiction already, thanks to HG Wells.
These global institutions are inarguably needed. Planetary questions need planetary coordination. The alternative is raw geopolitical rivalry – entirely unmediated. However, the results have been mixed.
Planetary Questions Require Planetary Science:
The United Nations brought together the world’s scientists in the form of IPCC. Climate change was put on the agenda, and the facts were presented.
However, this process also allowed lobbying by national interests to undermine the communication of that science. The facts have not been spoken as clear and free from bias as they could’ve been. Special interests stripped out the urgency, and stripped out solutions they didn’t like.
We got the message, but that message came in a particular shape.
Planetary Questions Require Planetary Cooperation:
The United Nations brings together representatives of almost all of humanity. That is a significant accomplishment. However it does so under the banner of nation-states, lead by the military alliance that won World War Two.
Global institutions are ultimately dependent on nations and even corporations for resourcing. Those funding decisions are rife with geopolitical rivalries and self-interest. Hence we get the absurdity of a climate change conference hosted in a petro-state awash with fossil fuel lobbyists.
If You’re Gonna Have Planetary Hegemons, They Better Be Doing Some Planetary Leadership:
Our current set of global institutions were significantly shaped by the United States’ desire to acquire global hegemony. They got that hegemony. It’s a big part of why the world has pursued liberalism’s climate strategy of markets and free choice, rather than say, Communist shock-industrialism, or Nazi death-squads culling the surplus population.
Congrats ‘Murica! It’s an okay world, given the options.
That power was America’s to burn.
And they did.
During the era of climate change the USA crashed the global economy, invaded the Middle East for oil, then started psyching itself up to fight a civil war over transgender toilets. Not great, ‘Murica. Not great. Climate agreements have repeatedly been collateral damage in this “leadership”.
Nobody trusts the United States anymore. That leadership is dead.
If You’re Gonna Have Planetary Hegemons, They Better Have Ideas that Make Planetary Sense:
I think we will look back on the Thatcher-Reagan era as a period of disaster, actually, where we entered into decades of inaction, of a misunderstanding of how the public sector, the private sector and civil society need to work together to solve our problems. I know in the United States that the time since the early 1980s has been an era of degradation of our institutions and a worsening of the texture of our society, marked by more poverty and more people falling through a tattered safety net. It’s not just that we have lost time on the environmental issues – we have also spent 27 years since Dr. Prebisch’s inaugural lecture filling up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and bringing us ever closer to the thresholds that can lead to devastation for large parts of the world.
- Jeffrey Sachs, 14th Raúl Prebisch Lecture, United Nations, Geneva, 2009
Enough said.
Governance Requires Legitimacy And Authority:
You aren’t governing anything if no one listens to you.
Fundamentally we live in a system of nation-states, a political system going back to 1648 (climate change was low on the agenda for the Peace of Westphalia). Nation-states are not well adapted for solving planetary questions. What they are is well adapted for fighting wars against other nation-states.
The United Nations attempts to stand above the fray, but has little meaningful authority or legitimacy, and therefore little actual power. Any sovereign nation can ignore the United Nations if they choose. Hence why all these climate agreements end up voluntary and don’t get followed very well.
Meanwhile nations are so unequal in wealth and power that solo agreements between the United States and China are arguably more important that much that happens at the United Nations. The rest of us will stand as their accidental beneficiaries or victims – decisions made by unaccountable bureaucrats in lands we’ve never been to and cannot vote for.
In reverse, an agreement at the United Nations looks as antiquated as the US electoral college for giving 800 thousand Fijians and 125 million Japanese equal weight.
Cooperation Requires Shared Interests, Not Mutually Incompatible Conflicts:
Take Russia: if the world were, by some set of rapid technological and industrial advances, able to more fully and more rapidly decarbonize economic production, the resultant drop-off in global sales of oil and gas would devastate the Russian economy and collapse the political economy of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. .... For Putin’s government, climate change is not an existential threat—climate change policy is. ....
India accepts the threat from climate change, parts of which directly threaten it as a polity (e.g., air quality and water supply), but it also fundamentally needs to further urbanize and industrialize, tackle the profound poverty that remains in India, and address the nearly four hundred million Indians who have almost no access to modern energy. If India industrializes and urbanizes using the same technologies that the West and China did, the world will blow past 4°C of average global temperature rise. ....
As for Europe: in principle, the United States and Europe should be aligned on climate, but they have not been for the past several years, since former President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. ....
As rising global temperature averages put pressure on agricultural production, competition will likely intensify among Western, Chinese, and Indian buyers for agricultural land, especially in Africa. Overall, climate adaptation—ostensibly, the ultimate “we’re all in this together” issue—looks set to stoke competition, not collaboration.
- Council on Foreign Relations, Major Power Rivalry and the Management of Global Threats, 2021
Geopolitical Rivalry is the Death of Cooperation, to be Replaced with Strategizing under Mutual Distrust:
The brief moment of post-Cold War American hegemony is unwinding. The world is dividing into competing blocks. About now people compare the world to 1914, or mention the “Thucydides Trap”, or suggest we are in a new Cold War.
So, how do you get climate action in a world of rivals?
As Beijing and Moscow intensify their internal repression, expand their international ambition, and increase the scope of their collaboration, the notion that the United States or other Western countries should set aside their differences over core strategy in order to cooperate on global issues is deeply problematic, not to mention politically infeasible.
....
The United States should eschew the temptation to approach negotiations as if they were trust-building exercises, or trust-requiring ones. Doing so risks setting the table for failure, not necessarily in terms of reaching a negotiated outcome but in terms of actual policy implementation. Almost nothing in the domestic politics of Washington, Beijing, or Moscow supports the notion that such an approach can be sustained. Rather, those issues should be approached as ones requiring leverage.
- Council on Foreign Relations, Major Power Rivalry and the Management of Global Threats, 2021
This is not your Solarpunk utopia kids. This is a world of great power strategy. The same kind of thinking used to navigate Mutually Assured Destruction.
THE ERA OF OVERSHOOT
We are about to enter a new phase in climate change – the point where we have officially failed. We will pass the 1.5°C limit soon. Climate change is shifting from being a possible future, to a realized present.
With this shift, the entire debate will change.
Things might be about to get wild.
All that abstract economics is about to become physical reality. We will get to see what a utilitarian financially optimized pathway into a global mass extinction looks like in the real world. We will get to see what a nuclear armed nation-state system driven by Cold War era geopolitical rivalry looks like when it hits a global catastrophe.
All the “Time is running out” and “This is our last decade” rhetoric will pass away. Time ran out.
The institutions that got us here will still be going. The new economically optimal survival plan will unfold. That plan will most likely be a mix of adaptation, carbon dioxide removal, and solar radiation management. Riot police, border control, and the military might also be required.
The fight for the climate will go universal. No longer will the struggle be primarily over ending fossil fuels. This will be a fight for who gets to survive and how.
Get ready for social discontent to skyrocket.
The fight for who gets to control, indeed to destroy and to re-create, the world’s institutions will be on.
Next time is money, money, money!
Return to menu.