Excessive optimism by the IPCC

The IPCC has been praised for the stark realism of its recent Synthesis Report[1]. And it’s true that the tone is bleaker and the language more forceful than in previous reports.

But overall I believe it’s far too optimistic. I don’t doubt the science. We do need “deep global GHG emissions reductions this decade” (paras A.4.3 and B.5.1) in order to have even a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C.

It’s the recommendations! They would be right for a world in which world leaders were good people. People who followed the evidence to find then implement solutions to the climate crisis.

That’s not the world we live in.

The climate emergency is a global crisis, well beyond the control of any one state. The IPCC rightly describes international cooperation as a “critical enabler” (para C.7.6, also para C.1). But you might as well ask Boris Johnson to unite with the EU or Vladimir Putin to respect human rights.

Over and over again progress at the UNFCCC COPs has been blocked by leaders who care more for short-term national advantage and the profits of oil companies than long-term global survival. In the UK, USA, Russia, China, Hungary, Italy, India – it would be tedious to go on – the last decade has the rise of nationalists who barely even claim to respect international law and democratic values. The willingness of countries to collaborate on anything except trade is markedly lower than it was when the UNFCCC process started.

And let’s look at money. We need, the IPCC says, “improved access to finance for low-emissions infrastructure and technologies, especially in developing countries (C.2.5)”.

In the real world the major nations have so far failed consistently to provide climate finance at the long-promised $100B per year. And they have yet to agree numbers or a mechanism to pay for the loss and damage they have caused.

There is just no chance that they will suddenly see the error of their ways and do what’s necessary.

So I just ask this. Shouldn’t the IPCC  be writing for the world we actually live in?

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[1] IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report (2023)

Casino tail wags the environmental dog

The press is full of banking this week. The Barclays LIBOR scandal has reminded all of us that banking reform is unfinished business - just what the bankers want it to stay. Two things should be obvious:

1. The banking system has created the current recession and will create another unless reformed.
2. The culture of the major banks tolerates, even encourages, fraud. Customers cannot trust their banks.

The first hardly needs evidence. In support of the second I'd mention LIBOR, interest rate collars, payment protection insurance and pension mis-selling. A financial journalist could doubtless triple that list without drawing breath. So what's needed is comprehensive systemic change embracing regulation, leadership, culture, bonus structures, risk management systems, compliance and much else.

But what has this to do with climate?

Let's go back to basics. Human life depends first on our abilities to find water and to gather food and then, in most societies, on getting fuel with which to cook it. After that we need safety, shelter, clothing and warmth. For all these things we need a supportive community and once they're secured we'd like some luxuries.

We have had some of these things for tens of thousands of years but in the last two hundred years we have created an extraordinary industrial system that provides them in abundance to many - though far from all - of the Earth's now greatly increased population. Industry and industrialised farming provide food, clothing, housing and many luxuries. To support both we have a large service sector and this includes financial services such as cheques, savings, loans and insurance.

Now in getting to this point we've moved a fair way from picking apples and herding sheep, or even making cars; that is from the activities that meet people's needs and wants. But there is still a connection. I pay a shop for my groceries. I take out a mortgage to buy a house. I borrow money to buy a new lathe for my business. I save spare money for retirement. Financial services facilitate activities that meet needs and wants. So the businesses and people who provide these services have to have some understanding of the ordinary activities they enable.

But attached to ordinary banking we find casino banking. Casino banking is essentially very high stakes betting in which successful traders are highly rewarded for using other people's money to bet against each other. Volumes are enormous and almost unrelated to the activities that meet most people's needs and wants. Casino banking is a parasite on farming and industry, even on ordinary banking itself. It draws money from these businesses to deliver huge profits to its owners and huge bonuses to the most successful traders and executives. Casino banking has become so profitable that it increases inequality and holds governments to ransom. It lobbies vigorously for policies that suit it. The casino banks are not merely too big to fail - they are also too big to regulate!

The dominant position of casino banking should be offensive to all democrats and to anyone who wants avoid being victimised by the banks but it's particularly offensive to anyone who cares about our environment. For it distracts attention away from the real economy and the real environment. It fixes attention on a fantasy world made real only in computers. And it has corrupted ordinary banking - substituting clever 'products' for real understanding and making profit the only measure of value.

Neither a healthy environment nor a healthy economy matters to the casino bankers or to ordinary bankers who see the money they make. If money is the master measure, the only true goal, then everything else - customer service, social responsibility, ethics, even the health of the planetary environment - seems trivial. That's the exact reverse of the values we need to reverse climate change.

To misquote John Dunning, 1st Baron Ashburton, "the influence of the banks has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished".

The cancer in our midst

Once upon a time - hundreds of millions of years ago - all the animals were single-celled. each pursued its own self-interest - surviving, eating and reproducing basically. But evolution took a hand and some of these animals found advantages in co-operation In time they changed into fishes, amphibia, dinosaurs - and more recently us.

Our cells are co-operative. They reproduce enough to make our organs and then they stop. Well, mostly. Some selfish cells don't stop but reproduce without limit. To do this they grab from our blood nutrients and oxygen that ought to go to other organs.

We call this cancer. Sometimes it kills us.

Human society is not a super-organism; we do not abandon our own interests and judgement to be part of it. But there are parallels. Both provide benefits, such as safety and access to resources, that the individual units could not get separately, Both require solidarity and self-restraint from those units.

And there are social equivalents of cancer. Sometimes the people in one part of society - a clan, a class or a sector - cease to show solidarity and self-restraint. They grab resources that should go to others and swell up so that they threaten the health, even survival, of the whole.

Today the finance sector is just such a social cancer. It's excesses have brought recession to the whole developed world and fierce austerity to Iceland and Ireland - and probably to Greece and Italy in the near future. It has grabbed a great share of our resources and, by increasing inequality, made our societies worse places to live. And it's compulsive pursuit of profit and growth is a major driver for the greenhouse gas emissions which are likely to make the planet deeply hostile to the societies of which it is part.

The finance sector is, like a cancer, damaging social health and threatening social survival. It must be cut back to size and made to see that it must be a partner not a ruler.

Though this blog is about climate change I believe that we cannot solve those problems without putting finance back in its proper place.