Oliver Morton

TippingPoint

Stories of Change Project

OLIVER MORTON from Stories of Change on Vimeo.

OM: I’m Oliver Morton, I’m a writer and editor about scientific and technological change mostly and about the effects that they have. I discovered in the 1990s that I particularly liked writing about the distinction, you might say, we draw between planets and worlds, between planets as considered from the outside and worlds as considered from within. I first learnt about this interest of my own in writing about the planet Mars and how we imagined building worlds within it. And other planets that aren’t the Earth being significantly less interesting than Mars, I turned my attention to the Earth and so started writing about the distinction between the bio-geophysical, bio-geochemical ways of conceiving of the Earth as a whole thing and ways of conceiving of it as a world that is inhabited and only ever experienced subjectively through humans. JS: And with the topic of energy and climate change, have you written about that? OM: Yes, I’ve written and edited as an active journalist about energy and climate change topics; I used to have the energy and climate change beat at The Economist. I’m also currently working on a book that’s very much about climate and energy flows which is a book under the working title The Deliverer Planet which is about geoengineering, which is about trying to take control of the flows of energy and materials through the planet other than just with market mechanisms and mechanisms of consumption. JS: So that’s what you’re working on right now? OM: That’s the book, I’m working on that book at the moment. JS: Do you want to say something about how you see the future of geoengineering or the current status of our thinking with geoengineering. OM: My interest in geoengineering is twofold and the two folds of it are actually entangled, if you can do that with folds; some sort of origami mixes two ideas about geoengineering for me. One is that I think that it is genuinely practically a good idea to look at ways that one might intervene in the climate system other than directly through changing demand for different energy services. I think that the energy and climate debate is too narrowed down onto the idea of just reducing carbon dioxide emissions because I think that’s a very problematic idea in various ways. So partly I think that there’s a real practical need for people to think more about geoengineering, I also think there’s a broader epistemic need to broaden ones sense of imagination as to what one does when a species like humans is so largely involved in so many of the processes of our planet. You have to have a much wider imagination than we’ve managed, both in terms of the spatial distribution, the scales that you operate on, the temporal distribution of scales – the idea that we’re making decisions that move thousands of years into the future. The idea that we can somehow come to terms with that level of human involvement simply through a conception of the environment which is that we should try to do as little as possible to it, it’s an unproven assertion that we can solve these problems that way. I think we need a broader way of looking at the Earth and geoengineering, in that way, I see as a way of broadening debate. JS: Can you say why you think that just talking about carbon emissions reductions is problematic? OM: I think just talking about carbon emissions is a response that came about to ideas about climate change remarkably quickly from about 1987 to 1992, during the processes that went up to the signing of the UNFCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at Rio. It was very convenient for a lot of different people to make climate change simply a matter of carbon dioxide emissions. It worked for people who were really just interested in the processes of the atmosphere; it also worked for people with broader agendas in terms of modernisation because carbon dioxide is a good proxy for industrial modernisation. It worked for economists who saw carbon dioxide in the mould of a classic pollutant that they could tax. It worked for negotiators because they had experience in negotiating ways of having less of things, whether those things be CFCs in the stratosphere or nuclear weapons. So having a reified thing called carbon dioxide that there needed to be less of worked for everyone. But if you look at this in the broader context of how humans have felt about their relationship with the climate and if you think about it in the context of an ongoing problem that’s going to last with us for hundreds of years, the idea that the answer you first thought of, which is to massively reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is necessarily the whole story seems incredibly hopeful. For one thing I’ve seen in my own life dealing with these how carbon dioxide emissions talk systematically took adaptation off the agenda for quite a long time and to my mind climate adaptation is an absolutely vital part of how one lives with climate, let alone climate change. Another thing is it has turned out so far, as a matter of practice, that it has proved very difficult to do things about carbon dioxide emissions. Now if that was the only problem I might feel differently and so I’m not saying that this is a counsel of despair because there’s nothing to do about carbon dioxide emissions but certainly the fact that it proves to be very intractable to deal with carbon dioxide emissions suggests that one ought to look at other modalities as well. JS: The reason why only talking about emissions… OM: I think it’s really important to remember that people have been thinking about how humans relate to the climate for ever and on a global scale for centuries. They’ve only decided that carbon dioxide was the only way of thinking about this in a very brief period from about 1987 to 1992, which is the period that leads up to the signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Carbon dioxide proved useful as, I guess what some people would call, a boundary object. It was something that lots of people could talk about and could all agree on basically what it was about. So scientists could see carbon dioxide as a key part of the greenhouse gas issue and environmentalists could see carbon dioxide not merely as a pollutant in a quasi-classical way but also as a proxy for various forms of industrial modernisation with which they had other issues. Economists could see it as a pollutant that they could put a price on and thus reduce the emission of. Negotiators and politicians could see it in terms of other treaties which had succeeded in reducing something, whether that something be CFCs that damage the ozone layer or nuclear warheads, the idea of negotiating down to a lower level of something was a comfortable idea. So I can see why, as a matter of practical politics, the whole wide discourse about climate collapses down into something measured in parts per million and gigatonnes very, very quickly. But I don’t think that it’s plausible to suggest that the conversation that we’re going to have in very, very rich and different ways about climate that’s going to go on for the rest of history, there isn’t really a point in history where climate isn’t part of the discussion, there’s certainly not going to be now, the idea that all that discussion will always be a managerial discussion about carbon dioxide emissions seems to me a very unlikely one. And I think that’s right, it’s not just that I think the discussion is unlikely to be that narrow, I think it shouldn’t be that narrow. People should talk much more broadly about what they expect from climate; they should talk about climate adaptation, talk about climate mitigation through carbon dioxide emissions reduction very much marginalised as part of the international discussion, certainly in the 1990s and much of the 2000s. They should be able to talk about things that are, in some ways, easier. I don’t think the only reason to avoid carbon dioxide emissions talk as being the be all and end all of climate is that carbon dioxide emissions are difficult to reduce but it’s clearly objectively the fact that they have proved difficult to reduce. It’s not unreasonable to say, well, maybe we should look at a broader mix of things. JS: It’s a difficult question coming up. If carbon emissions reductions isn’t the only modality that we should use, what do we replace it with? Is it just more and plural discussion? OM: I think we need a plural discussion. Part of why I think we need a more plural discussion about the causes and solutions to issues of climate change is I think we also need to think about climate more generally in the context of global development. So I think the way to which climate discussions get held in a different place from discussions about increased energy access is quite troubling and we need to be able to find contexts that bring those all together. The fact that there are something like 1.5 – 2 billion people on the planet who have no access to modern energy services at all is certainly as big a problem, to my mind, as the climate externalities of the current fuel mix. We need to be able to talk about those things all together and climate can form an envelope for those discussions but when you narrow it down to being a subject of specific management I think you lose a lot of opportunities for seeing how to do good. So I suppose my answer to the question of what’s the correct measure for climate progress is that it’s human welfare. JS: Looking out now into five years hence, ten years hence, twenty years hence, how do you see your own engagement with the topics of energy and climate change changing? OM: That’s a very hard question to take into the answer. Thinking into the future I’d like to think that I can contribute to some sort of broadening of the debate in the ways that I’ve described – the way of thinking about energy and the environment in a context both of planetary geophysical systems and in terms of social justice and finding ways to do that. Whether I will continue doing that as a writer or whether I’ll either find other ways to pursue those goals or just find other things to write about, I don’t know. My books have taken me from writing about Mars to writing about plants to writing about, effectively in the book about geoengineering, politics. I’ve no idea quite where that goes next. It’s conceivable that it might take me in a much more personal direction and much of what I think about this may end up being more part of my lived experience than part of my remunerated output, as it were. I really don’t know. I hope it will be interesting to find out. JS: And how about the wider picture? Where are we all going to be in that same sort of time? OM: There’s a problem - people often ask things in terms of where will we all be or what will happen to us. My biggest problem with questions like that is the problem of who is us? You hear in all sorts of these discussions, and I’m sure that I’ve been using the same language in this talk, it’s very hard to get rid of this ‘we’ talk but how do you constitute an us about which to talk? Talk by people who talk about climate and us tends not to be talk about the people who have no energy services. JS: Could you just repeat that again? OM: My biggest hope for the next twenty years would be that the world would see further erosion into the huge mountain of poverty that came with the demographic transition of the twentieth century. There has been a great deal of that already - the number of people in true destitution on the planet has shrunk both as an absolute number and as a proportion of the population. I would like to see that continue; I would like to see that continue in the context of not exposing large numbers of people to enhanced climate risk which is where I think the climate debate should be going in terms rather of climate risks than of climate outcomes and how to look at those risks and how to adapt to those risks where appropriate and how to share the burden of reducing those risks. JS: And you said that you hope that’s what will happen but are you broadly optimistic or pessimistic about that trajectory? OM: I find the more that I look at history the more I find both optimists and pessimists to be likely to be fooling themselves to some extent. I think that a lot of people will get wealthier and some of those people will get happier over the next few decades. I think there are significant chances of things that we either don’t expect or don’t like to think about, for instance when friends talk about climate change as a unique possibility of ending the world you have to remember that this country and other countries actually build machines with which to end the world and put them in oceans around the world for that eventuality. So I worry about big wars, in fact they’re probably the things that I worry about most. I worry to some extent about unexpected climate outcomes, it’s a low-level worry but because the outcome would be very bad it’s a risk that I take seriously. Am I optimistic or pessimistic? I like to think that the arc of history bends towards justice but I think it does so slowly and there are various torsional effects and wobbles in between in the bending. So I would like to think that we will do things better. I’d like to think that we can build a we to do those things better. JS: Do you have a question to ask and who would you ask it of? OM: I have linked questions. The climate scholar Rob Socolow in the States has a very useful way of starting some of his discussions which is to ask two questions which is: one, do you think that there are serious society-level risks involved within climate change? And, two, do you think that it is easy to decarbonise the economy? That allows you to divide people into four groups and serious people, by Rob’s and my standing, are people who are in the yes/yes camp, they say yes, there are serious risks from climate change and yes, it is hard to decarbonise an economy. If I’m only asking one I would like to ask front bench politicians from all parties do you really think it is easy to decarbonise the economy to an 80-100% level? JS: We will try and ask them. OM: Thank you.