Eko Atlantic, a new city being built on reclaimed land just outside the Lagos lagoon, may be underwater by the end of the century. Because of global warming, the sea could cover Nigeria’s costal regions, up to 90km inland, and the city could become one of the ruins that help geologists of the future chart the history of our planet.
Three million years ago, in the Pliocene era, the atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it does today; temperatures were 2-4°C higher, sea level 10-20 metres higher. Scientists today are uncertain how fast the Antarctic ice cap will melt. Some scenarios, notably that suggested by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, claim that if all fossil fuel reserves are burned, sea level will rise by three metres a century over the next millennium (1). The chemical composition of our atmosphere is exceptional in the context of natural fluctuations of the greenhouse effect over the last million years. A 3°C rise in temperature over the 21st century (the median scenario) is comparable in scale to a glacial-interglacial transition, but much faster, since the last one involved a rise of 1°C every thousand years. Traces of the industrial age — a brief interlude in human history — will still be visible in a millennium; in 3015 the atmosphere will contain 30% of the carbon dioxide it does today.
Humanity is now the main factor governing how our planet functions. In just over two generations, we have become a geological power, and there are signs that our activities are having a lasting impact, comparable to ice ages, volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes. The geological strata laid down by urbanisation, the damming of river, industry, mining and agriculture all contain many fossils from this unprecedented era. A feature of the Anthropocene era is the presence of entirely new substances, created since 1945, including radioisotopes, fluorinated gases and the products of biotechnology and nanotechnology. The globalisation of the petrochemical industry has produced a “palaeontology of plastic”, according to University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz. Particles of industrial soot have been detected at the North Pole. Industrial enterprise will leave its mark on the soil, the atmosphere and the oceans for millennia.
Climate change is part of what geographer Will Steffen, geochemist Paul Crutzen and historians Jacques Grinevald and John McNeill call the great acceleration of human history (2). This exuberant period, from 1945 to now, coincides with the golden age of oil, decolonisation, and the democratisation of consumption. Negotiations at the UN have been slow to respond to this dynamic process, failing to challenge obsession with production and growth, or to tackle energy, justice and development issues. Preparatory meetings for the coming Conference of Parties (COP) to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in Geneva and Bonn, working on texts made complex by a need for unanimous agreement among 196 countries, have been very slow.
Nature as a store of commodities
So the negotiations, cut off from reality, have made little headway. Climate change, with its uncertainty and urgency, presents a challenge for environmental diplomacy; climate policies have been unable to create tools and modes of thought adequate to the task. The extent of the denial can be heard in the language, which uses the accountancy rhetoric of economics, where costs and benefits are estimated on the basis of statistical projections. In the belief that growth will continue indefinitely, modern industry treats nature as a store of commodities, or as a source of funds to pay for services rendered by the world’s ecosystems. The 2°C “safe” threshold for warming, on which the UN negotiations are based, is part of this way of thinking and assumes a degree of stability or predictability; the issue is seen as a matter of controlling the climate through human ingenuity and political mobilisation. In reality, it is hard to determine what level of emissions would be acceptable, and would allow the climate to stabilise. Nobody knows when the tipping point may come.
Political scientists and sociologists of science Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan describe the profound disconnect between the processes leading to climate change and the multilateral organisations established over the last 20 years as a “reality rift”. It seems futile to attempt to solve problems caused by burning of fossil fuels by targeting the waste they generate without addressing their extraction. The negotiations are targeting CO2 emissions without addressing economic development, international trade rules or the mechanisms of the world energy system.
The Kyoto protocol even confirms the hegemony of international market mechanisms as a way to protect the environment, by treating the climate as a measureable and homogeneous economic good. The protocol’s flexibility mechanisms are intended to encourage the reduction of emissions where most economically efficient. This logic of compensation has been extended to emissions caused by deforestation with the UN’s REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) programme, and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which has been a humiliating failure.
Moreover, UNFCCC has no control over the free trade system established by the World Trade Organisation, whose rules take precedence over environmental protection. This hierarchy can also be seen in the current transatlantic trade negotiations; the negotiations on the free trade agreement between the EU and Canada, which started in 2013, threaten climate policy — Europe is to allow imports of tar sands oil from Canada (3) and according to a study by the US Natural Resources Defence Council, EU imports could rise from 4,000 barrels a day in 2012 to 700,000 by 2020 (4). The Energy East pipeline, built by TransCanada, will supply European refineries in an entirely free transatlantic market.
Collision of histories
Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty says the climate crisis reveals the collision between the histories of planet Earth, of human evolution and of industrial civilisation (5), which are unfolding on different scales and at different speeds, forcing modern societies to change their way of thinking. Life on Earth no longer rests on stable foundations. The Anthropocene era has opened up a breach in the history of the Earth, forcing a rethink of human destiny to take account of the fundamental uncertainty about threshold effects, tipping points, irreversible changes and the possibility that the climate will go out of control.
Under these circumstances, climatologist James Hansen recommends that politicians plan to abandon the use of coal as fuel, not a precaution but as an essential measure that will allow us to hope for the “least worst case scenario”. According to Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins of University College London, 33% of the world’s oil reserves, 50% of its gas, and more than 80% of its coal should stay buried to avoid global overheating (6). Reserves of fossil fuels economically viable with current extraction technology are equivalent to 2,900 gigatonnes of CO2, three times as much as the emissions ceiling if global warming is to be limited to +2°C.
There are new movements around the world campaigning against the extraction of minerals and fossil fuels. The Environmental Justice, Liabilities and Trade network records hundreds, from the Niger delta to Yasuní National Park in Ecuador (7). The pope has called for sobriety in an encyclical (8). Thinktanks have proposed per capita emissions allocations. In India, the Centre for Science and Environment, founded by environmentalist Anil Agarwal and directed by Sunita Narain, makes a distinction between survival emissions from the cooking stoves of the poor, and luxury emissions from the vehicles of the rich, and calls for the sharing of common goods. In Ireland, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta, which also means “future” in Gaelic) suggests rationing fossil energy as a global good: an international climate fund would auction permits to produce a fixed annual quantity each year and distribute the financial benefits equitably.
Chakrabarty emphasises that the climate crisis raises major questions of justice: between generations, small island states and major polluters, past and future, developed countries (historically responsible for most emissions) and industrialising countries. (About a dozen countries and a fifth of the world’s population are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions; see map).
The other way is by law. The UN’s Rio+20 conference on sustainable development in 2012 produced a popular movement of 500 organisations with a mission to end the impunity of multinationals. The End Ecocide on Earth movement campaigns for an amendment to the Rome Statute (which established the International Criminal Court in the Hague), to cover the crime of ecocide. A group of legal experts proposes conventions on ecocrime and ecocide (9) to strengthen and harmonise prevention and suppression of such crimes: ecocide would be on a level with crimes against humanity. The report recommends appointing an international prosecutor for the environment, the creation of an international criminal court of the environment, an environmental investigation and research group, and a compensation fund. The purpose of this unprecedented collection of measures, as legal expert Mireille Delmas-Marty writes, is as much to make censure widespread, as to “open us up to the hope of a common destiny” (10).
