Climate Science, Power, and Engagement: Notes from a Conference

I witnessed something rather remarkable at the Planet Under Pressure (PUP) conference in London last week. PUP was a huge event: some 3000 scientists, of both natural and social stripes, assembling to present and discuss the latest science on climate change. There were in fact several aspects which could be called remarkable, such as the emerging consensus that we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which human activities are a dominant driver in many global systems. Also remarkable is how bleak the future looks from current climate modelling, with emissions on track to cause 4 degrees of warming or more, at which point all number of positive (destructive) feedback loops could kick in, leading to runaway change.

From a social science perspective, the organisation of the conference was itself remarkable, with its overt focus on influencing a political process, namely the Rio+20 UN summit this June. To this end, a 'state of the planet' declaration was worked on throughout the conference and read out at it's closing. This was not the scene I want to talk about, but in raising the question of where science should begin and where it should end, and what 'engagement' really means, it's a relevant framing.

The scene in question happened during the plenary sessions on the first morning of the conference. A panel of speakers were on stage to discuss 'The Planet in 2050'. One of them was a fellow called Martin Haigh from the oil company Shell, and shortly after he began speaking two protesters (from the group London Rising Tide) slipped on to the stage and unfurled a banner depicting the Shell logo as a human skull:

A burst of applause quickly gathered from a sizeable portion of the audience (myself included), before a wonderfully English scene played out in which the slightly shaken host politely asked the pair to leave and they quietly did so, flanked by flustered-looking men in suits.

Why this 30 seconds stuck in my mind was that one of the dominant themes of the conference was that politics at the national and supra-national level has failed to address climate change. The only real source of optimism is to be found at the city and community level, where activists are building the capacity to begin challenging the destructive status quo. Lord Anthony Giddens argued this in his plenary talk just an hour before the panel took to the stage, and it was a claim I heard repeated at several points during the following four days. What I didn't see during those four days, and what made the Shell protest remarkable, were any other activists. I did see panels featuring representatives from a couple of other corporations - the insurance giant Aviva and Sainsbury's - but the grassroots were nowhere to be seen.

I find this rather troubling. Alongside the missing grassroots was a missing question that the open recognition of political failure demanded be asked: why has politics at the national level failed? Beyond a few muttered comments no one seemed to want to talk about this. When panel members were asked similar questions by delegates there was generally embarrassed silence followed by a swift move on to something else. The lowest points in this discourse of omission were when speakers lamented the turn of publics, particularly in the US, towards climate change denial, as if this was simply a process sui generis, with no larger structural forces behind it.

Answering the Missing Question

In depth, the answer to this missing question could be terrifyingly complex, incorporating all number of actors, driven by diverse ideologies, economics, technologies and institutional cultures, but it can distilled down to a very simple answer: that many of the holders of power in the current paradigm feel threatened by what a systemic shift could entail, and are expending resources accordingly. The greatest single impediment to meaningful progress on climate change right now is the political toxicity of the issue in the US. This impasse is not the product of some organic bottom-up movement (as a couple of conference panellists seemed to imply) but an orchestrated effort by elites such as the Koch brothers, who have been major funders of the Tea Party movement, both directly in financial terms, but also indirectly in ideological terms though their funding for climate skeptic and 'free market' think tanks.

There was no doubt amongst the conference attendees about the lethality of the precipice that society is blithely marching off right now. It was also explicit in the organisation of the conference that science can no longer simply limit itself to generating knowledge - it must also concern itself with ensuring that this knowledge is acted upon, through engagement with wider society.

Putting these elements together, it seemed clear to me that many scientists are convinced by their data that a paradigm shift in the socio-economic organisation of society is required at this point. The current system is simply unsustainable. What wasn't clear to me was a willingness on the part of many to actually start thinking through (at least openly) what such a shift means for engagement. Is focusing on the defenders of the status quo really the best way of instigating change? As a strategy it doesn't seem to have got us far - carbon emissions rose at their fastest rate ever last year. Shouldn't we give a little more attention to those who do share our goals, and invite them on to the stage rather than ask them to leave it?

Ultimately, this is a question of power. Powerful opponents of change were invited on to the stage at PUP, whilst powerless proponents of change were not. Engagement with powerful actors is of course vital if paradigm change is to be achieved, but that engagement will not achieve anything if it is naively uncritical. Shell's appearance is a powerful example of this. No matter how many photos of wind turbines are placed on their website, they remain a company whose balance sheet relies on their holdings of billions (trillions?) of dollars of oil. How such an organisation can be recruited as a agent of transition to a carbon-free future is somewhat beyond me.

By no means was PUP a one note song: there were many at the conference who were thinking though these issues, and going beyond simply a desire for change to think about what it might mean in practice, both for society at large, and scientists themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these seemed mainly to be the social science delegates (after all, for many of us it's our day job), but there were notable exceptions like that of Anne Glover, the biologist and chief scientific advisor to the European Commission, who spoke passionately on some of these issues. My hope is that by the time of the next PUP, such awareness is more apparent amongst the conference organisers too. They achieved a great many successes during the week, but they failed to create a space conducive to the radical thinking the climate science is demanding. Perhaps in a setting in which Occupy are as visible as Big Oil, the delegates will feel better able to speak openly on what engagement entails when the goal is paradigm change.