10 Climate positivity

Climate Positivity is a way to approach our current climate crisis from an abundance mindset. The challenge we are facing is enormous: we need to start paying back a carbon debt that we have accumulated over centuries. Furthermore, everything that we do produces too many greenhouse gases: our energy use, our agriculture, our production system, our transportation, and our built environment. So, the key is not to produce less, but to produce differently: we need to reinvent everything. We can apply a simple carbon calculus to prioritize the most effective measures. What can you contribute as an individual, as a global citizen, with your organisation and your profession?

Transcript

Climate Positivity 

Welcome to cornucopia, the podcast in which we examine what it means to live abundantly, what it means to make a shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar. Today, I'm standing in the South of Spain, looking at a stunning mountain called La Maroma. I'm walking in the hills above a place called Competa. It's late afternoon, I'm walking downhill now. There is a little bit of wind, but it's very pleasant. 

On this walk, I want to talk about climate positivity. How can humanity be a positive contributor to the Earth's climate, to the climate that we need as humanity to thrive? Another way of saying it is: how do we reconcile the idea of abundance, our shift to abundance, with the climate problem, with the climate crisis? Now, often, when I talk about abundance and the possibilities we have with energy and creativity and production, people say: yes, well, even if we grant you all that, what about the climate problem? We can't continue as we're doing, because we're messing up the planet. We're messing up the climate. If we continue, then it's going to be a disaster. So this is a bit of a challenge. Yes, how do we adapt the shift we're making to abundance to specifically the issue of climate change?

I've been thinking about this for a couple of years now, I've been doing some research over the last year, trying to make sense of the numbers and the scale of the problem. And also, what an abundance mindset approach to the problem would be. One of the things I noticed in doing this research and thinking about this, first of all, is that it's quite confusing. There are a lot of articles, there are a lot of numbers being used. Some of the numbers are comparable, some are not, some people and sources disagree. It's quite confusing, really, we're talking about gigatons here, and percentages there, and parts per million there, and it's all quite confusing. 

The second is that it's quite alarmist. A lot of the stuff we read is about, oh, the earth is warming up at an incredible rate, or the ice is melting, what if this ice shelf drops off in Antarctica, sea levels will rise by a few metres, the earth will become unliveable by the end of the century, etcetera. If you read those articles, you often find that this is kind of the worst-case scenario. But of course, it's the scenario that draws a lot of attention to the article. 

If we talk to people about climate change, you also get a whole number of emotions. You sometimes still get the emotion of denial: well, this is not happening, and it's not as bad, and we'll figure it out, etc, etc., so this is not a problem - which I think is a very dangerous attitude, denial usually doesn't help. But there are also emotions of fear, fear for the future, there is an emotion of shame about human beings: “see , we’re messing up the planet again”. And that leads to this negative spiral of emotions where we think: well, perhaps human beings shouldn't be as populous as we are, we shouldn't be as many, or perhaps we shouldn't exist at all, or perhaps we should live as simply as possible, and not travel, and not breathe. Basically, human beings are a problem for the planet, so the fewer of us the better. 

And when people want to do something about climate change, it's focused on this idea that we should emit less greenhouse gases. There is a lot of focus on flying as something that is very bad for the environment, we should fly less or take the train; there is an emphasis on eating less meat because of the methane emissions. And so there are kind of personal choices that we can make, personal sacrifices really to our lifestyle, which are going to supposedly help with climate change. But in general, there's also the sense that even if we do that, the situation is still impossible, and it may not help. It's actually quite a negative, depressing feeling.

So, while I was reading this, I really wanted to see if I could come up with a notion of climate positivity. If I started, not from the scarcity mindset that we shouldn't be doing any of this, but from the abundance mindset. We have an abundance of energy, we have an abundance of human creativity, we have an abundance of possibilities. If we started from that mindset, how would we look at the climate problem? 

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Let's start with the problem. What is the problem of climate change? Well, we are putting too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through our production, and travel, and energy use. Those greenhouse gases trap some of the solar heat that comes on Earth, and this leads to global warming. This global warming in turn is changing the stable climate that we need to thrive. It is melting the ice caps, it is raising sea levels, it is causing all kinds of weather events, floods and droughts and things like that. Even though the climate on earth has changed over millions of years, this change is so rapid that we don't really have time to adapt. And it's very clear that this is a human-made climate change. This is the age of the Anthropocene. “Anthropos” is human being: we are changing the climate makeup, the geological makeup of the planet through our industrial activity, basically.

This started about 200 years ago. For the last 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution, we've been putting a lot more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the Earth can handle. A lot of these greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, CO2. Methane is one of them, and there's other ones. But let's just focus on CO2, because that makes the discussion a little bit simpler, and in the order of magnitude, it doesn't make much difference. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is that, of all the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere this year, the earth can deal with 40% of them, and it can't deal with 60% of them. So, every year, we're putting these extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which traps more heat, and which leads to more global warming. 

What we really want to do is go to “net zero”, basically only release as many greenhouse gases as the Earth can handle. And ideally, we want to go to a point which is called “Drawdown”, where we actually draw down the amount of CO2 that we've put in the atmosphere in the last two centuries. So, in a certain sense, if we put less greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the Earth can handle, then we can reverse the process, arguably, and we can reduce the parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that might lead to a little bit of cooling of the planet, or might at least leave us in this stable band of climate that we need to thrive. That's the argument. 

The word “drawdown” I think is a beautiful word, because it's the moment where we've achieved this point, this equilibrium point, we're not putting up more stuff than the Earth can handle, and also, we're getting to the point where we're putting out less stuff, so we can regenerate some of the earlier situation. Now, the word “drawdown” is a project: it’s  called the “Drawdown Project” - drawdown.org - and if you want a very clear explanation of the scale of the problem and some of the issues, you can look at that. If you want more numbers, you can also look at ourworldindata.org, which is a compendium of all kinds of scientific articles, and which has peer-reviewed research on all the issues that you can possibly care about in terms of global arguments. But from our point of view, we need to have a drawdown. 

One of the ways to think about a drawdown then, is that we've incurred a debt, we've put too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last few centuries, and we have to repay that debt. We have to basically pay it all back so that we come to the situation we had 200 years ago, a stable situation. If the idea of a debt is too negative, you could also think of it as an investment. When we burnt all this carbon, we actually powered the Industrial Revolution, so we made our modern world possible. And initially, we didn't know that we were doing anything wrong, or that we had such an effect on the planet. But of course, for the last 50 years, we've known that there's a problem, and we haven't done very much about it. And so thinking in terms of a debt that needs to be repaid, also allows us to think in terms of equity, namely, who is responsible for bringing back down the carbon, or who should pay for the solutions.? But that's a separate question. To redress the balance then, there's two things we can do: we can reduce the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, and we can increase the natural sinks, the forests and the oceans which capture the carbon. And if we managed to do that in a certain way, we could get to what is called “net zero”, that we don't put more carbon into the atmosphere. And we can get to the point of drawdown where in fact, we are kind of redressing the balance.

And so, let's look at both of these approaches. We need to get a sense of what causes our carbon emissions. And again, very roughly speaking, a quarter of our carbon emissions are caused by our energy: our energy usage, the way we burn gas and oil and coal to produce energy. A quarter of it is caused by agriculture: animal husbandry, and planting, and all these things releases carbon in the atmosphere and greenhouse gases. A quarter of it is caused by industry, the production of everything that we need. And the last quarter is caused by transport, and buildings, and everything else. When you look at that pie chart, when you look at where the carbon is coming from, I think the main realisation is: basically, everything that we do. The energy that we use, the food that we grow, the stuff that we make, the buildings we live in, the transport that we use. Everything we do releases carbon to a certain extent. Now, of course, there's some processes which release a lot less carbon than others. So, in fact, we want to shift to a carbon-free or a carbon-poor way of making things. In terms of increasing the sinks, the natural capacity of the Earth to capture carbon: well, in the past, we've said planting trees. If we increase the forest cover, that will capture a lot of carbon. The oceans capture carbon, but there's not much we can do about it immediately. And there might be some other solutions, about using some minerals to capture carbon, but we'll get to that a little bit later.

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Let's do a quick recap. We're facing global warming and a global climate crisis, because we're putting too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We can see this as a debt that we've accumulated over 200 years, and that we now have to pay back. First get to net zero, which means stop borrowing more money, and then pay back our debt, which is the “drawdown” where in fact, the earth starts taking back some of that carbon that we've put in the atmosphere, in order to guarantee a stable climate. That's the challenge that we're facing. 

The other realisation, which is a bit of a sinking feeling, is that everything we do contributes to the problem. So it's not just a case of flying less, or even stopping with flying completely, it's not a case of stopping to eat meat. That would only solve a few percent of the problem. Basically, what we need to do is to reinvent completely the way we produce things, the way we consume energy, our agriculture, our transport, etc. All aspects of our lives need to be rethought from the point of view of how much carbon they put in the atmosphere, and also how much carbon they can help take out. And the key point from an abundance perspective is that it's not about producing less, but about producing differently. Even if we produce less the way we do now, if we burn less coal, if we build fewer buildings, if we travel less, if we eat less meat, that is only going to reduce our current output by a few percent. Even if we halve our current output, that won't be enough to get to net zero or to drawdown. 

So instead, the solution is not about doing less, the solution is to do things differently. For example, in terms of energy, it's not about using less coal. It's about using forms of energy which are carbon neutral, or almost carbon neutral, like solar energy, or wind energy, or thermal energy, or maybe even nuclear energy. It's a shift to carbon-neutral or carbon-poor solutions. The same thing is true of agriculture. It's okay if there's some carbon put out by agriculture, because these are natural processes, but there's a way to change it. For example, the methane gas that is caused by cows, there are ways to do agriculture differently. If we talk in terms of our production methods, then we must make our factories work differently. Our buildings, for example: steel and concrete produce a lot of carbon. We need to make steel in a different way, we need to make concrete in a different way. Our whole built environment needs to become carbon-neutral or carbon-poor. And of course, in terms of transportation, we can have a shift to electric cars, we can have a shift perhaps in the future to electric planes, to electric shipping, or wind shipping, or all kinds of other forms. 

For 200 years, we've been living on a carbon credit card, and we're still drawing out money from that credit card. We have to stop borrowing that carbon, and we have to start paying it back. And that means changing everything that we do. So in that sense, it really is a major challenge. It is really about reinventing our environment, our transportation, our agriculture, and everything else. Now, on the other side of the ledger, we can try to increase the sinks, the natural sinks, the ways to capture carbon, or we could even perhaps find technological ways to capture carbon. There are a lot of projects in that direction. Planting trees is a temporary solution. There are different ways of doing agriculture where, for example, you're planting trees among the grazing fields, called silvopasture, which has a direct positive effect ,and actually quite a substantial effect. We're investigating ways to capture carbon in rocks. There are chemical processes through which we can do this at scale. There are technological processes to capture carbon directly from the air, but they're still very expensive, and also require a lot of energy. So on the other side of the ledger, we can increase the capacity of the planet to capture carbon.

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So the challenge is enormous. We need to basically reinvent, and rebuilt, and change, and transition in everything that we do: how we build our society, how we travel, how we produce things, our agriculture. And that's an enormous challenge. We've been living off our carbon credit card for a couple of centuries, we're still borrowing extra carbon that we're putting out in the atmosphere, we have in the coming decades to get to net zero, to stop borrowing that money, to stop putting that extra carbon in the atmosphere, and then come to the point of drawdown, where we start paying back this debt in order to stabilise the climate. 

So it's an enormous challenge. It's a massive challenge. It's a truly global challenge. And at the same time, a challenge of this size presents an enormous amount of possibilities. Because pretty much everything contributes to the carbon problem, pretty much everything can contribute to the solution. If you go to the website drawdown.org, you will see the solutions: everything that helps to reduce the carbon we put in the atmosphere, or to increase the capacity of the Earth to capture carbon. There's a whole list of surprising solutions. For example, ain griculture, there is silvopasture. That is planting trees among fields, and in that case, capturing quite a lot of the carbon. A large part of the problem is caused by refrigerants, things we've put into old air conditioners or old refrigerators, and when exposed to the atmosphere has an enormous impact. It's an enormously powerful greenhouse gas. Capturing those gases and destroying them, or putting them away safely, is an enormous contribution. That contribution by itself is bigger than all the flights we take in the world. There are social things that we can do. We can reduce population growth, for example, by helping young girls go to school and giving them more reproductive choices: that has an effect on greenhouse gases. There are things to do with heating, for example: helping people get cooking stoves, so they don't heat wood directly, which has all kinds of positive effects, not just in terms of climate, but also in terms of health, it's much better for your lungs, and in terms of prosperity. 

One of the things that really had an impact on me is to realise that there is an enormous amount of solutions, that really to just focus on flying, or eating meat, is really silly. That's just two of the things that you could do. And not very impactful: you need an enormous scale to do these two solutions, and you still won't have much of an impact. So rather than focus on a couple of things, we need to focus on everything. 

And the second realisation is that we can calculate the impact quite accurately. When I've said that the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere was like a large loan, we can actually use economics and mathematics to calculate it. It really is a question of: how many tonnes of CO2 do we put in the atmosphere? How many parts per million? And it's a completely global problem. It doesn't matter where we put the CO2 in, or where we take it out. You can't solve this locally. Even if we clean up our act on this side of the planet. If there's problems on the other side of the planet, it's not going to help.

We need a global organisation to really tackle this global problem. There's a wonderful book called The Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, it's a kind of near future science fiction, which imagines a United Nations organisation, which devotes itself to solving that problem. It starts quite dramatically, but it's still a hopeful book, because it shows you that there is an enormous amount of solutions, also financial solutions. We could create a carbon coin, where we calculate a way to reward people for taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and to make them pay if they put too much carbon into the atmosphere. A precursor of this carbon coin is, for example, the trading system that is being developed at the moment. The bad news is that it's a challenge, which deals with every aspect of our lives. The good news is that we can find solutions in every aspect of our lives. Some of these are technological. Some of these are social. Some of these are financial. Some of these are organisational. 

For example, there are methane leaks from uncapped gas wells, or from coal mines, or from other natural causes, that are putting so much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, that it's a lot more than our global air travel. So yes, we could stop flying completely. But there is also the solution of addressing that other problem: if we cap those wells, if we captured that methane, we would solve a similar problem. In terms of mathematics, in terms of the economics of the gas, the carbon that we're putting in the atmosphere, it's the same thing. And some of these solutions are an awful lot cheaper than other solutions. 

But all these solutions, of course, can also be really overwhelming. The question then could be, where should we start? Well, not all of these solutions are equal. Some of them are a lot more effective, a lot more impactful than others. Some of them are a lot cheaper:  ten times cheaper, a hundred times cheaper, maybe a thousand times cheaper. And because it's just a question of how much carbon we take out of the atmosphere, either by not putting it in, or by increasing the capacity of the Earth to take it out, it doesn't matter where we start. Let's start with the cheapest solution. Let's start with the thing that has the most impact, even if it's not the thing that seems to be the emotionally the most important, even if it's something that's not to do with personal sacrifice, about changing our way of life. If we cap those methane wells, we can continue flying. 

The second thing is that some of these solutions actually have multiple effects. For example, the clean cooking stoves, as we mentioned, not only help to reduce greenhouse gases, but they also help health and prosperity. Quite a few of the carbon solutions actually help to address the question of poverty, help to address the question of global health. An example that you all know is electrifying transport. Shifting to electric transportation is going to have enormous health benefits, as well as carbon benefits. So really, faced with this plethora of solutions, let's start with things that have enormous impact. Let's start with things that also solve poverty, and global health. 

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I'm on the last leg of the walk. The sun has set behind the mountains, and there's a red glow in the sky. And so now is the time to ask: what does it mean for us? What does it mean for you? How can we have an impact on this problem? How can we become climate positive? Now, I think there's three levels at which we can make a difference: the individual level, a global level, and that level of the organisations or companies that we work for. Let's take these in turn. 

On the individual level, you could help accelerate this transition to carbon-poor or carbon-free travel and building and energy use, if you can afford it, for example, in your own house, or with your own car. That's going to be helpful. You can make some choices about using less or fewer things, although that's not my preference. There are calculations of how much carbon you save by driving an electric car, or by heating your house differently, or by not travelling by plane. But it's also possible to calculate what the effect of these changes will be. You might find out, if you look into it, that with a small financial contribution to one of these other projects, whether it's silvopasture, or education, or clean cookstoves, or taking refrigerants out of the environment, you have a much bigger influence in terms of carbon capture than by making an expensive change in your heating system. Because it's a global problem, because it's an economic problem, because it's just a mathematical problem, it doesn't really matter, even with your individual contribution, where you're making it. It matters whether it has impact. So, there's a whole process of discovery, that you can do to find out where, as an individual, or as a family, or as a small community, you can make a difference. 

Now, second, there's the global level, there's the political level. Because it's a global problem, we will need to organise the solution globally. If we want to establish a global system, where we reward carbon capture, for example, and we penalise putting carbon into the atmosphere, we need a way to organise this, a way to administrate this. Perhaps it's a job for the United Nations, or if you don't trust that organisation, a different organisation. Perhaps it's a question of political parties or pressure, perhaps lobbying, a certain political arrangement to pass laws which make this possible. I think we have to realise that we are global citizens. This is a global problem, it affects everybody on the planet, it will affect our descendants as well, so if you have children, you're also doing it for their sake. Really seeing yourself as a global actor: you are a citizen of the planet, you are a citizen of Earth, you are part of the problem, but you're also part of the solution. And political decisions, and laws and regulations and rules, will have an enormous impact. A gigaton-level impact, much more than you could do individually, so it's worth to see what role you can play there. 

But it's the third one, that third level, the organisation or the company that you work for, that I think has the greatest promise. And the reason I think it has this greatest promise, is that we are not thinking about it very much. Most of us work. We work for an organisation, or for government, or for a private company. Most of us work in a certain function. We work in education, or we're programmers, or we work in production, or administration, or we work in healthcare, or whatever. It's worth asking what we can contribute from that perspective, from our job, from our skill. Because, since everything needs to change, every aspect of life needs to be reinvented to be made carbon-poor or carbon-free, we can really contribute whatever our position. 

For example, if you know a lot about finance and economics: we need a system of accountability for carbon. If you're an accountant, you might be able to calculate the effect of carbon for your own team, your own organisation, your own company. This also happens on two levels. The first is the organisation itself. It uses energy, it has buildings, it might have a fleet of cars or trucks, it produces things, it buys things. And so, in all these aspects, we could calculate what the carbon cost of that organisation is. You could create awareness in your organisation to become a carbon-neutral or a carbon-poor organisation. And many organisations have started to think like that: they can integrate it in the cost structure of what they're making. And it's really the awareness of everybody who works for such an organisation to say: I'm proud to work for an organisation that is carbon-neutral, or that strives to be carbon-neutral, that is aware of its impact in terms of this carbon calculus. And that first thing will have a huge impact because it's scaled to the size of an organisation. 

The second way you can have an impact is by your own job description. If you're an accountant, you might be able to contribute to calculating this carbon calculus, you might come up with great ideas to be able to do this for an organisation, or for a community ,or for a county. If you are a political operator, you might be able to help with lobbying. If you're a programmer, you might be able to programme a utility to use energy differently or to save energy. If you're an educator, you might raise awareness of this issue in the people that you're educating, you might make them realise that we're all global citizens. If you're an engineer or a chemist, you can help build carbon capture solutions. If you're an entrepreneur, you can have a start-up that acts in this field. The possibilities really are endless. For every job that we do, there is a way that we can contribute. 

And the question I want to leave you with, at the end of our walk, as I'm coming back to my car, and to the noises of the town below me, in the last light, is: how are you going to be engaged with this issue? Right, we started off by saying the problem is huge, it's big. There's an enormous debt that we've incurred in order to produce the society that we have today. We need to reinvent everything that we do in order to get to this drawdown. There are hundreds of possibilities to do this: every aspect of our lives can be rethought. 

And the question is really: how will you engage with them? How will you find out about them? What are you going to do on an individual level? How are you going to be a global citizen? And how are you going to do this from the perspective of your working life? It's a huge problem. But from our abundance mindset: we have energy, we have creativity, we've created this world in the way we have over the past two centuries, and we can create it in a different way. It's all within our reach, it's all within our possibility. And it will improve our lives: the future is going to be bright. We can be a thriving humanity on a thriving planet. I'll see you in the next episode of Cornucopia. Thanks for listening.