Book review by Dr Alan Morton, part 1
The MHSG Green Book Club is a thriving group that meets every month to discuss a book that tackles climate change and sustainability from every angle: fictional and factual. If you are interested in more information or in joining the group, please contact us at info@mhsgroup.org
Kicking off a new series of book reviews, founder member of MHSG, Dr Alan Morton, has done the hard work for us by ploughing through 400 important, dense pages to report on Paul Ekins’ Stopping Climate Change: Policies for Real Zero. This is the first of two reviews, here analysing the policy issues tackled by the book.
Stopping Climate Change: Policies for Real Zero
by Paul Ekins
London: Routledge 2024
This is an important book for anyone interested in tackling climate change for real. In over 400 pages Paul Ekins covers a huge range of topics, the policies that work and, if deployed quickly and at scale, might get us close to real zero by 2050. Along the way he debunks ideas that won’t work or serve to divert us eg carbon offsetting, from what we should be doing. In this short note I can only outline a few points.
Many policies he advocates are familiar – renewables, more energy efficiency, eating less meat etc. What’s helpful is the background detail he gives, the detail missing from articles in newspapers – the problems of the National Grid, the energy cost of producing hydrogen etc. The detail that shows what we must do to reach real zero.
What’s inspiring is that he thinks we can do it – albeit requiring enormous commitments from governments, industry and us. All efforts that are conspicuously lacking today.
It won’t be easy. He makes his (and our) task even more difficult by assuming:
“…humans will continue to aspire to consumer lifestyles currently characteristic of more affluent industrial countries, and that the compromises that they are prepared to make to stop climate change are strictly limited. If technology, policy and economic incentives cannot stop climate change on these terms, then the evidence to date suggests that it will not be stopped.”(p.2)
While his conclusions may be familiar, his arguments are often novel. To emphasize the urgency, he compares the risk of dire climate change to air travel. Even at current GHG concentrations of 450 ppm, he explains, there’s a small probability – 0.3% – of a rise of over 6oC, resulting in civilisation – ending climate change. While that risk seems small, he compares it to flying ”…in 2018 there were around 38 million aircraft flights per year, with one fatal accident every three million flights, a probability of 0.000033%. But if the risk of flying was the same as the 0.3% of catastrophic climate change, …(this) would mean over 300 fatal accidents each day. How many people would fly given that kind of accident rate reported daily on the news? Yet that is the risk human societies are currently taking in respect of catastrophic climate change.” (p.27)
His remedies are stark:
“1. Humanity must stop emitting GHGs into the atmosphere. This means a shutdown of the fossil fuel industry as quickly as possible.
2. Humanity must put in place, more or less immediately a massive programme of removing GHGs from the atmosphere.” (p.40)
For Ekins the development of new oil and gas reserves by the fossil fuel industry is exactly what should not happen.
“The sobering evidence from this book suggests that they richest and most powerful industry the world has ever seen is not going to acquiesce in a majority of its fossil fuel reserves staying underground as ‘stranded assets’. It will rather do everything it can to produce them, even if this involves crashing the climate. As future generations struggle with the freak weather that climate instability will bring, it is hard to imagine that these companies, who have effectively chosen not to invest in climate solutions that were affordable and available, because they could not make more money out of fossil fuels, will not be viewed as climate criminals.” (p. 388)
And in this country:
“The UK …seems prepared to scupper global net zero even though it has a national net zero by 2050 in its own laws. This is climate vandalism, not climate leadership.” (p. 99).
Along the way he comments briefly on community energy in the UK which he supports but acknowledges the lack of government support. Community Energy England’s estimated community organisations providing 319 MW of UK’s generating capacity in 2020 – an impressive achievement but less than ½% of UK generating capacity (p.365).He contrasts the situation here in the UK with the much more favourable situation in Germany.
In this brief notice I’ve outlined some big policy issues. My next note raises some of the social justice issues.
In the meantime, do read the book!
Alan Morton
