The Climate Crisis Needs Many Solutions – but Reducing Consumption Is Crucial

Kapil Subramanian, The Wire, 10 March 2020: The UN Environment Programme’s emissions gap report, published in November 2019, has estimated that the world needs to increase its climate ambition by threefold to limit warming to 2º C, and fivefold to keep warming within 1.5º C. At the core of any solution to the climate crisis has to be a global transition away from fossil fuels; this has been known since at least the IPCC’s First Assessment Report (1990), although the scale of the challenge has increased with every passing year of inaction. And the scale also necessitates a plurality of solutions.

Thus, when the noted editor Martin Wolf elegantly restates the case for renewable energy, writing in the Financial Times, one must take exception to his argument that this is the only solution.

In particular, Wolf challenges the idea that halting economic growth can be part of the solution, arguing that even if all growth was stopped, global emissions will drop only 40% by 2050, rather than the necessary 100%, at the current rate of decarbonisation. So relying on de-growth to deliver 95% emissions cut would take the average global per capita GDP back to “Victorian levels.” Thus, to him, the challenge of climate change is to maintain “our high standards of living” in the process of decarbonisation.

However, consumption levels associated with a high standard of living vary widely, even within the EU where living standards are considered homogenous enough to constitute a single market. This is exemplified by the crucial metric of power consumption per capita: a Finn consumes six-times as much as a Romanian. A similarly wide variation is seen with the wider OECD1 group of advanced economies: a Norwegian consumes nearly 10-times what a Mexican does.

Economic development can thus be achieved with moderate levels of consumption. The ‘finer things in life’ are also attainable at a low cost to the climate. At least 34 countries achieved a high human development index with per capita emissions lower than the global average.

A recent report authored jointly by the WHO, UNICEF and the medical journal The Lancet highlights this point: only nine countries – Albania, Armenia, Grenada, Jordan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Uruguay and Vietnam, none particularly wealthy – provided an acceptable level of child welfare without jeopardising the future of the same children with high emissions. On the other hand, richer countries provide good welfare but their high emissions chain them to the bottom of the overall pile.

The rhetorical, even extreme, “95%” of all the required emissions cuts by 2050 need not and likely can’t be provided by reducing consumption alone. But a more modest proportion can – and this must be part of any serious plan to tackle climate change. Consumption de-growth can deliver emissions cuts and reduce the mitigation burden required of the crucial energy transition. Targeted at rich countries, such de-growth can improve the global standard of living (even in rich countries) without anyone being reduced to Dickensian poverty.

Lowering consumption can speed up the global energy transition by reducing the capacity of renewables necessary to replace fossil fuels. As the Centre for Science and Environment’s recent report on US emissions highlighted, rising consumption – from already world-leading 1990 levels – has overwhelmed any gains in carbon efficiency in that country. (Editor’s note: The author of this article was involved in drafting the report.)

Rising consumption has been concealed by richer countries outsourcing emissions associated with value production to countries that they import from. Imports add 40% to the UK’s domestic carbon footprint; A ‘carbon border adjustment’, or carbon tax, as proposed in the EU Green Deal will penalise developing countries while only mitigating inefficiencies, which are a small fraction of the total emissions due to consumption. Reducing consumption must be part of the global mitigation agenda; demand can no longer be seen a factor extraneous to climate policy.

A special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that to limit the global mean surface temperature rise to 1.5º C, the world as a whole needs to attain net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and become a net sink thereafter. The UK, France and New Zealand quickly brandished their green credentials by passing “net zero by 2050” laws; the draft of the new EU Climate Law recently published by the European Commission also sets a 2050 deadline.

But given the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC), enshrined in every climate agreement including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement (2015), developed countries need to attain net-zero sooner, around 2030, according to analysis of data from the Climate Action Tracker (which constructs a vision of equity based on 40 studies referred to by the IPCC). Early rich-world decarbonisation will also enable allow countries to reach their own net-zero targets sooner by rendering the necessary technologies cheaper.

A reduction in first-world consumption levels will be crucial for an early domestic and global net-zero. It will also give developing countries the crucial carbon space necessary to meet the basic subsistence needs of their poor as they endeavour to simultaneously decarbonise. Even climate champions like Germany are going in for natural gas (delivered from Russia through the Nordstream 2 pipeline) as a bridge fuel, following the UK’s example of using North Sea gas. India is the largest of the developing countries that need this carbon space. In 2014, its per capita power consumption was barely a third of Mexico’s – the lowest in the OECD – despite being far from the bottom of the pile. But India is also the only G20 economy whose climate efforts have been rated “2º C compatible” by Climate Action Tracker. No other major economy has committed to its fair share of the 1.5º C mitigation burden. India does well on target achievement too; the UNEP emissions gap report estimated that the country will exceed its target by at least 15%, the only such major economy to do so.

Nevertheless a significant proportion of future global emissions will come from developing countries like India and China. Such countries must do their fair share. But any more than that will require substantial financial and technology transfer, as developing countries simply don’t have more money to invest in climate action. Given that most growth will happen in developing countries and investment there is likely to offer the cheapest mitigation options, it is crucial that such transfers take place.

So for effective climate action, it’s necessary that finance directed at developing countries also be central to any solution. Besides meeting their own domestic mitigation targets, if developed countries provided adequate climate finance, global emissions mitigation could be maximised at least global cost.

There has been an attempt to further squeeze equity in recent months. In November, IPCC luminaries including former chairperson Sir Robert Watson lent their name to ‘The Truth Behind the Climate Pledges’, a study measuring countries’ climate ambition published by FEU-US, an obscure Washington, DC based non-profit. The study abandoned the principle of CBDR-RC to arrive at the startling result that the EU and six other European countries – and only them – were the only ones doing enough to limit global warming to 1.5º C. During the CoP 25 meeting in Madrid, The Guardian published an infographic based on the report to accompany its climate coverage. In the US, the CEOs of the World Resources Institute and the Rocky Mountain Institute blessed Michael Bloomberg’s climate plan – the one too inadequate to deliver even its promised 2050 decarbonisation.

In this state of affairs, the media must be vigilant and go beyond merely trying to defeat the odd remaining climate sceptic with declarations of a “climate emergency”, and facilitate rich discussion on the multitude of mitigation solutions, a plurality of which the climate crisis demands.

Kapil Subramanian is a climate policy researcher at the Centre for Science and Environment.