decarbonisation

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

There are many such projects, but we can’t yet make carbon-neutral fuel at scale, not at a price that is competitive.39 We should invest in this area as another route to decarbonising the aviation and shipping industries, and because a recent projection has synthetic fuels as being ultimately more competitive than batteries for cars driving long ranges.40 The authors recommend developing various forms of synthetic fuels in a Darwinian manner, to discover the best route to scaling up production and achieving decarbonisation. Eventually, shipping, which comprises 3 per cent of total global emissions, will be powered by synthetic fuels, or hydrogen, or perhaps by solar.

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London: Profile Books. 25 Gunther Glenk and Stefan Reichelstein (2019) ‘Economics of converting renewable power to hydrogen’. Nature Energy 4, 216–222. DOI: 10.1038/s41560-019-0326-1 26 BloombergNEF (2020) ‘“Hydrogen economy” offers promising path to decarbonization’. https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promising-path-to-decarbonization/ 27 E&E News (2019) ‘Details emerge about DOE “super-grid” renewable study’. www.eenews.net/stories/1061403455 28 Peter Fairley (2020) ‘How a plan to save the power system disappeared’. Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/how-trump-appointees-short-circuited-grid-modernization/615433/ 29 Mark Jacobson et al. (2017) ‘100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight all-sector energy roadmaps for 139 countries of the world’.

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It is already as cheap to make hydrogen by electrolysis from renewable sources of energy as it is to make it conventionally, from fossil fuel.25 And a 2020 report from BloombergNEF26 showed that hydrogen made from renewable energy will become as cheap as natural gas, but obviously without the associated carbon emissions of the fossil fuel. The report finds that this clean hydrogen could cut 34 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, including from hard-to-decarbonise industrial sectors such as steel-making and shipping. Economics is already driving this transition; it won’t need a huge investment from us to speed things along. As the technology matures, it will get cheaper, and better electrolysis will make it easier to store surplus grid energy, by driving hydrogen production.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

If the electricity used to charge the battery has been generated without using fossil fuels, then the operation of the vehicle does not have an emissions footprint.15 Not just for passenger vehicle transport but across a range of other sectors, too, the decision has seemingly been made that the world’s best hope for decarbonization is the latter approach. That is to say, instead of decarbonizing various significant greenhouse-gas-emitting activities directly – by substituting clean fuels for dirty fossil fuels in powering vehicles, firing industrial processes and generating heat – these activities are predominantly to be decarbonized indirectly – by shifting them to electrical sources of energy while simultaneously decarbonizing the electricity thereby consumed. There are immediately two things to note about this. The first is the logic itself, such as it is, which is that electrification – that is, moving sectors from non-electric to electric forms of power – is the most expeditious means of rapid, affordable and large-scale decarbonization.

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Meanwhile, the second factor that renders our simplistic starting picture of global electricity decarbonization requirements both more complicated and more challenging is regionality. Electricity production needs to be decarbonized globally, certainly, but different world regions have reached vastly different stages of such decarbonization, will experience vastly different rates of future growth in electricity demand, and will hence face challenges on vastly different scales. Some regions are already a considerable way along the path of successfully decarbonizing; some have barely begun. To contextualize what follows in the remainder of this book, it is therefore helpful to foreground the question of where different regions broadly are ‘at’ in this regard.

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Not only is it the single biggest existing source of CO2 emissions, but, equally importantly, the powers that be worldwide have evidently decided that the best way to decarbonize activities such as transport and heating is to electrify them while decarbonizing the electricity systems upon which they will increasingly come to rely. So, electricity – and the speed and comprehensiveness with which it is weaned off fossil fuels – is going to become even more important to climate than it already is. As the Economist put it in 2022, the world’s current decarbonization strategy can effectively be captured in two words: ‘Electrify everything.’16 Electrification ‘does not deliver everything that is needed’, the magazine conceded.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

It also required that Congolese contractors should be used by mining companies and Congolese should hold at least ten percent of the shares of new mining ventures. Some investors decided to exit Glencore, fed up with the company’s ties to Gertler and its promotion of coal. ‘Not only do Glencore perpetuate the slowing of decarbonisation of thermal coal they actively lobby against coal regulation in emerging markets,’ one London fund manager said. ‘Clearly, Glencore faces a tough dilemma. Either it could continue its business relationship with Mr. Gertler – now on the US sanctions list – to protect its valuable copper and cobalt assets, or it could end this relationship,’ London fund Sarasin & Partners, which sold its holdings in Glencore, said.

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It was a jarring image – few people in the Congo would be driving an electric car any time soon and there were no superchargers in the country. The electric car represented a new front in the persistent inequality of globalisation and trade. Benjamin Sovacool, an academic at Sussex University who had written a study on artisanal miners of Kolwezi, called it the ‘decarbonisation divide’.22 As demand for electric cars rose, miners in Kolwezi responded by digging more cobalt out of the ground, in basic conditions. They responded to global prices as much as anyone along the global supply chain, yet they received the least value. Money from the trade did not help the Congo move up the value chain or even become prosperous.

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In September 2015 he became famous for writing a note saying that Glencore’s equity was worthless, causing the stock to fall by thirty percent, wiping £2 billion off the company in the biggest fall of any FTSE 100 company ever from an analyst note. By 2016, however, the China-led commodity boom was over and life as an analyst was becoming increasingly constrained by regulation. At the same time sales of electric cars were taking off, and the mining industry was beginning to focus on the raw materials needed to decarbonise the world economy. Coal mines were out and lithium was in. In February 2016 Wrathall was walking to work in the City when he remembered a remark from a friend who had worked for the South Crofty tin mine in Cornwall, which had shut in 1998 with the loss of 200 jobs. The friend had said there was lithium in the hot salty fluid that flowed through the rock at the bottom of the mine.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates
Published 16 Feb 2021

* * * — Keep in mind that although we need to pursue all these ideas, we probably don’t need all of them to pan out in order to decarbonize our power grid. Some of the ideas overlap each other. If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to worry as much about getting a magic battery. What I can say for certain is that we need a concrete plan to develop new power grids that provide affordable zero-carbon electricity reliably, whenever we need it. If a genie offered me one wish, a single breakthrough in just one activity that drives climate change, I’d pick making electricity: It’s going to play a big role in decarbonizing other parts of the physical economy.

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That’s why all the electricity used by buildings—for air-conditioning as well as lights, computers, and so on—is responsible for nearly 14 percent of all greenhouse gases. The fact that air-conditioning relies so much on electricity makes it easy to calculate the Green Premium for cool air. To decarbonize our air conditioners, we need to decarbonize our power grids. This is another reason why we need breakthroughs in generating and storing electricity like the ones I described in chapter 4; otherwise, emissions will keep going up, and we’ll be stuck in a vicious cycle, making our homes and offices progressively cooler while making the climate progressively hotter.

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Switching to electrofuels would add nearly $2,600 each winter. Clearly we need to drive down the price of these alternative fuels, as I argued in chapter 7. And there are other steps we can take to decarbonize our heating systems: Electrify as much as we can, getting rid of gas-powered furnaces and water heaters and replacing them with electric heat pumps. In some regions, governments will have to update their policies to allow—and encourage—these upgrades. Decarbonize the power grid by deploying today’s clean sources where they make sense and investing in breakthroughs for generating, storing, and transmitting power. Use energy more efficiently.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

Carbon offsetting as an idea has been around for decades, and was first formalised in the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol in 1997, through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).29 It is easy to see the appeal of offsetting for high-carbon industries with limited options to decarbonise in a commercially, technologically or morally viable way, and it has always been positioned as a ‘last resort’ remedy for the ‘residual’ emissions left over after industry has done everything else it can to decarbonise activities. The largely insurmountable barriers to decarbonising commercial flight suggest this is a sector in which offsetting might have an important role to play in the zero carbon transition. But environmentalists have always regarded offsetting with extreme suspicion, fearing that it could be used less as a last resort and more as a ‘get out of jail free card’ to justify the continuation and expansion of high-carbon economic sectors and their emissions – an alternative to within-sector emissions reductions, rather than an addition to them.

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Hence, the industry’s hopes are focused on what they call ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuels’ (SAFs) – non-fossil-derived hydrocarbon substitutes for kerosene which can function as ‘drop-in’ fuels for standard aircraft engines.9 But as the UK’s scientific authority the Royal Society put it in a recent briefing paper, ‘there is no clear or single net zero alternative to jet fuel’.10 Biofuels from agricultural feedstocks compete with food crops and rarely result in real world emissions reductions, while fuels derived from waste oils cannot substitute for more than around 2 per cent of kerosene consumption. Overall, existing alternatives to kerosene can be scalable or sustainable, but not both.11 The most promising long-term option, and one that is relied on heavily in aviation decarbonisation ‘roadmaps’ to 2050, seems to be e-fuels – synthetic kerosene created from renewable electricity and carbon captured directly from the air. But a recent study finds that even this low-regrets possibility isn’t without problems, as the huge amounts of energy input needed and low efficiency of the multi-stage production process could see use of these fuels at scale consume 9 per cent of all global renewable electricity supplies in 2050.12 But modelling shows that almost every other industrial use of a unit of renewable electricity yields a bigger reduction in carbon.13 These system-level effects lead the authors to conclude that rather than contributing to efforts to tackle climate change, ‘SAF production undermines global goals of limiting warming to 1.5°C.’

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We should also be careful what we wish for; airlines are now demanding vast public subsidies to cover the additional costs of increasing the share of these rarified fuels in their supply mix.15 This technical tangent matters to the thesis of this book because of the unavoidable implication that the lack of technological solutions to the warming impact of air travel presents: that meeting climate targets requires us, collectively, to fly less. This is indeed the conclusion of every major deep decarbonisation pathway produced by anyone other than the aviation industry itself.16 The UK’s statutory advisers on achieving net zero, the Climate Change Committee, have told the UK government to ‘Implement a policy to manage aviation demand as soon as possible so the mechanisms are in place in the likely event that low emission technologies are not commercially available to meet the Government’s aviation pathway.’17 Even the global net zero pathway produced by the techno-centric intergovernmental establishment body, the International Energy Agency, projects that policies to reduce demand for flights will contribute more to reducing emissions from air travel than technological advances in the aerospace sector by 2050.18 In other words, behaviour change will be more effective than widgets.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

So here is the radical end to the Concert scenario. It works. By the end of the twenty-first century humans are emitting only about 2 gigatonnes of carbon a year, a lot less than today’s 10 gigatonnes and a great deal less than the mid-century peak. Processes that could be decarbonized over a few generations have been decarbonized; that includes essentially all electricity production. Hydrocarbons are still used for some recalcitrant industrial processes and some forms of transport where alternatives are hard to find, like flight, and while some of them are specially made for the purpose, others are still sourced from the Earth’s crust.

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For an excellent overall account of the science of climate change, see IPCC (2013); for an enlightening discussion of why people answer Socolow’s questions in many ways, see Hulme (2009), and for an authoritative account of the lack of progress towards an international climate regime capable of curbing emissions, see Victor (2011). For Arnulf Grübler’s thoughts on energy transitions as cited, see Grübler (2012). The estimates of decarbonisation rates come from Anderson and Bows (2009). The pre-1980 history of nuclear power in America is discussed in Walker (2006), and in France in Hecht (2009); see also Morton (2013). The case for new nuclear power is made in Stone (2013) and Lynas (2014). A very good general account of renewable energy can be found in MacKay (2008).

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A sense of where geoengineering stood in the early 1990s can be taken from the National Academies of Science (1992); see also MacCracken (1991), a paper presented at the Palm Coast conference. The interlinked growth of carbon-dioxide politics and climate-change science are traced in Weart (2008) and Howe (2014). The lack of decarbonisation in British consumption, as opposed to production, is discussed in Helm (2012). The best account of why international progress on climate change is hard is in Victor (2011). Chapter Six: Moving the Goalposts The Livermore paper is Teller, Wood and Hyde (1997). Responses to Lowell Wood’s Aspen talk are in Keith (2000a) and Bala and Caldeira (2000).

Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie
Published 9 Jan 2024

At that point, Chile had no solar power. Now it has 13%. Many more countries will follow in their footsteps. The continued plummeting costs of renewable energy technologies and batteries will soon make these choices the default. A switch to these sources, alongside batteries and energy storage, is how we decarbonise our electricity systems. But we also need to decarbonise other uses of energy, such as transport, heating and industry. This is harder to do. There’s no sustainable liquid fuel that can just take the place of petrol or diesel. So the mantra to fix these energy sources is: ‘electrify everything’. If we can electrify our cars, industry and heating then we can just build more and more nuclear and renewable energy to power them.

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The average car today is more than twice as carbon-efficient as the average in 1975.32 These improvements are impressive and have been important in keeping some of our emissions in check. But transport emissions are still rising because we’re travelling further, and there is a limit to how efficient cars running on fossil fuels can get. We’re not going to decarbonise our transport using petrol and diesel. Some suggest that we use biofuels instead. Again, this is not going to cut it. Studies have shown that biofuels can often emit more CO2 than petrol, especially when we take into account land use.33, 34 As the following chapters will show, putting cereals that people could eat into cars is not a good solution.

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Around 5% of our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry comes from cement production. That might not seem like much, but over the coming decades, billions of people will make the move to towns and cities, so this will grow. When it comes to energy, we already have a lot of the solutions we need. Decarbonising how we make stuff is going to be trickier. Making cement needs energy, which is not a barrier in itself: if we can make our energy from low-carbon sources, this wouldn’t be a problem. The real issue with cement is that the chemical processes involved in its manufacture also produce CO2.vi Tweaks to the process might be able to reduce these emissions a bit, but they won’t get us close to producing zero-carbon cement.47 What we’re going to have to do is capture the CO2 and do something else with it.48 We could store it underground, to make sure it doesn’t escape into the atmosphere.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
by Varun Sivaram
Published 2 Mar 2018

A survey of eighteen different models of the global economy concluded that to halt runaway carbon emissions in the atmosphere, emissions from electricity would need to fall by between 80 and 100 percent by 2050, and emissions from all other sources would need to vanish by 2100.23,24 The urgency behind cleaning up the power sector is that many other uses of energy—including aviation, shipping, heavy-duty trucking, and fertilizer production—are tougher or impossible to decarbonize.25 So it is crucial to apply existing and emerging technologies to slash emissions in the power sector, while electrifying as many other uses of energy—among them, passenger vehicle transportation—as possible. Down the road, it will also be important to find clean fuels to replace oil to zero out emissions from more stubbornly dirty sectors. It may even be necessary to figure out how to suck carbon out of the air. Decarbonizing power is the least difficult of these monumental tasks, so it makes sense to start there. Complicating the path to deep decarbonization of the power sector is the pesky fact that eliminating the first 10 percent tranche of emissions is much easier than eliminating the last one.

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Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of The Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Review-Jenkins-Thernstrom-March-2017.pdf. 28.  James H. Williams et al., Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (San Francisco: Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc., 2016), https://usddpp.org/downloads/2014-technical-report.pdf. 29.  Gang He et al., “SWITCH-China: A Systems Approach to Decarbonizing China’s Power System,” Environmental Science & Technology 50, no. 11 (2016): 5467–5473, doi:10.1021/acs.est.6b01345. 30.  

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See also specific cities duck curve of demand in, 74–77, 75f grid in, 199, 211, 242 intermittency problems in, 4 power market in, 240, 269 renewable energy growth in, 73, 74 renewable portfolio standard in, 268 rooftop/residential solar in, 100, 104 solar water heaters in, 30 value deflation in, 71, 72f, 83, 146 California Independent System Operator (CAISO), 74–77, 75f, 290g California Institute of Technology, 174 Canada, 206, 207 Capacity, 47b, 284g Capacity markets, 240, 284g Capital cost of, 90, 287g debt, 91, 98, 100–101, 126 defined, 287g equity, 90–91 for new solar projects, 90–92 for off-grid projects, 138–139 for SHS up-front costs, 125, 126 venture, 39, 257, 258f, 288g working, 128, 138–139 Carbon-based fuels from sunlight. See Solar fuels Carbon capture, utilization, and storage cost of, 237–238 in deep decarbonization efforts, 61, 62 defined, 284g for fossil-fueled power plants, 82, 225 Carbon dioxide, 180, 181, 188 Carbon emissions. See also Deep decarbonization and climate change, 22 in Deep Decarbonization road map, 245 economics of eliminating, 234 and future of solar energy, 5–6, 10 in India, 16 Carbon intensity, 106 Carbon price (carbon tax) and global energy transition, 23 political coalitions and, 166 stimulating innovation with, 253, 266, 270–271 Carter, Jimmy, and administration, 30, 35, 255, 256 Catalysts, 176, 177, 182–183 Cathodes, 175 Cavendish Laboratory, 143 CdTe.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Wright, ‘Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes’, Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 3(4), February 1936, pp. 122–128 <https://doi.org/10.2514/8.155>. 26 Béla Nagy et al., ‘Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress’, PLOS ONE, 8(2), 2013, e52669 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0052669>. 27 Peter Ha, ‘All-TIME 100 Gadgets’, Time, 25 October 2010 <http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2023689_2023703_2023613,00.html> [accessed 21 February 2021]. 28 ‘The Drive to Decarbonize: Ramez Naam in Conversation with Azeem Azhar’, Exponential View with Azeem Azhar [podcast], 15 April 2020 <https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/04/the-drive-to-decarbonize> [accessed 21 February 2021]. 29 Marcelo Gustavo Molina and Pedro Enrique Mercado, ‘Modelling and Control Design of Pitch-Controlled Variable Speed Wind Turbines’, in Ibrahim H. Al-Bahadly, ed., Wind Turbines (InTech, 2011), p. 376 <https://doi.org/10.5772/15880>. 30 Vaclav Smil, ‘Wind Turbines Just Keep Getting Bigger, But There’s a Limit’, IEEE Spectrum, 22 October 2019 <https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/wind-turbines-just-keep-getting-bigger-but-theres-a-limit> [accessed 14 March 2021]. 31 Hyejin Youn et al., ‘Invention as a Combinatorial Process: Evidence from US Patents’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 12(106), May 2015, 20150272 <https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0272>. 32 Jonathan Postel, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (Information Sciences Institute, August 1982) <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821> [accessed 28 March 2021]. 33 David Crocker, Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages (University of Delaware, August 1982) <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822> [accessed 28 March 2021]. 34 Azeem Azhar, ‘Disrupting the Insurance Industry with AI’, Exponential View with Azeem Azhar [podcast], 14 August 2019 <https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/08/disrupting-the-insurance-industry-with-ai>. 35 Author’s analysis of the UCS Satellite Database, 8 December 2005 <https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/satellite-database> [accessed 16 February 2020]. 36 Tereza Pultrova, ‘ArianeGroup Futurist Sees Smallsat Standardization as Key for Timely Launch’, SpaceNews, 25 October 2017 <https://spacenews.com/arianegroup-futurist-sees-smallsat-standardization-as-key-for-timely-launch/> [accessed 21 February 2021]. 37 Ian J.

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Today’s GPTs riff off each other in unpredictable, constantly shifting patterns. And as these novel uses of technology are pioneered, they help other technologies evolve in fresh directions. One good example of the power of combinatorial invention comes from the work of Bill Gross. He is trying to help decarbonise the economy by building new systems of energy storage – his attempt to solve the storage problems facing renewable energy that we encountered earlier. His company, Energy Vault, is building a huge electricity storage system – enormous, insect-like cranes with six arms radiating out from a central tower, and gigantic blocks of reconstituted building rubble.

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The Exponential Age is a near-inevitable consequence of human ambition. Even if we could slow the pace of exponential change, it’s not clear this would be desirable. Many of the most urgent issues of our time can only be solved with exponential technology. Tackling climate change, for example, requires more radical tech, not less. In order to decarbonise our economies, we will need to rapidly shift to renewable sources of energy, develop alternatives to animal proteins for food, and scale building materials that have a zero-carbon footprint. What’s more, figuring out how to deliver good-quality healthcare, education, sanitation and power to the poorest billions on the planet is another problem that technological innovations can address.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

In late 2008, Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the IEA, averred that “preventing irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonization of world energy sources.”17 Of course, not all countries are decarbonizing at the same rate. And some countries, including China and India, are increasing, rather than decreasing, their coal consumption. But the long-term decarbonization of the global economy is continuing, and given concerns about climate change, that trend is likely to accelerate as countries around the world build more nuclear reactors and increase their consumption of natural gas. Decarbonization favors natural gas and nuclear power at the same time that environmentalists and some politicians are working to impose countryby-country limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

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In the meantime, natural gas provides the most attractive option. Together, natural gas and nuclear are essential to the ongoing decarbonization of the world’s primary energy use, a trend that has been ongoing for about two hundred years. Decarbonization, the trend favoring fuels with lower carbon content, is occurring because energy consumers are always seeking cleaner, denser forms of energy that allow them to do work cleaner, faster, and more precisely. Embracing N2N offers a no-regrets energy policy that will lead to further decarbonization while providing multiple benefits to the United States and the rest of the world. The structure of this book follows the basic outline contained in the title.

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That’s the equivalent of about 30.7 billion barrels—or one cubic mile—of oil.14 The surging use of natural gas and nuclear power demonstrates and reinforces one of the most important energy megatrends of the modern era: decarbonization. Decarbonization is the ongoing global trend toward consumption of fuels that contain less carbon. This megatrend was first identified by a group of scientists that included Nebosa Nakicenovic, Arnulf Grübler, Jesse Ausubel, and Cesare Marchetti,15 who found that over the past two centuries, the process of decarbonization has been taking place in nearly every country around the world. Because consumers always want the cleanest, densest forms of energy and power that they can find, the trend will surely continue.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Going Global: The Private Sector and Climate Policy Business must push governments everywhere to address climate change, insisting that policy be based on current science, and advocating strongly for market-friendly policies that could help us to avert disaster. Appropriate regulation—something like a carbon tax or a carbon cap—would not only allow the global economy to decarbonize at minimal cost but would also open up billions of dollars in new market opportunities. Decarbonization will be expensive. But unchecked climate change will cost billions of dollars more. Current estimates suggest that climate change could cost the US economy as much as 10 percent of GDP by the end of the century and destabilize the world’s food supply.42 The IPCC estimates that keeping GHG emissions to a level that offers a 66 percent chance of not exceeding 2°C warming would cost 3 to 11 percent of world GDP by 2100.43 But leaving global warming unchecked might cost 23 to 74 percent of global per capita GDP by 2100 in lost agricultural production, health risks, flooded cities, and other major disruptions.44 Unchecked climate change will also impose irreversible harm on coming generations.

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The “+” stands for the sixty-one additional “focus companies” that were added to the list six months later either because they will be significantly affected by climate change or because they have a particularly important role to play in mitigating it. 74. https://climateaction100.wordpress.com/. 75. “Power Companies Must Accelerate Decarbonisation and Support Ambitious Climate Policy,” FT.com, Dec. 20, 2018. 76. “Proposal: Strategy Consistent with the Goals of the Paris Agreement,” Ceres, https://ceres.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#A0000000ZqYY/a/1H000000bxTX/VMk1IZrSUtwbmXzkJ_DVFFsrtiQBpMuOiZMnzu7V7Y8. Chapter 7. Protecting What Has Made Us Rich and Free 1.

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We have been in business for over 100 years, and we want to be in business in 2050, but that doesn’t mean you take action in 2049. You have to move down this path and be ahead of the curve as the world moves. This is the key to understanding CLP’s strategy. The flip side of risk is opportunity. If Asia’s power sector was going to decarbonize—and CLP believed that it was—moving to carbon-free energy ahead of the competition was potentially an exceedingly attractive business opportunity. Fifteen years later, their early commitments look prescient. Between 2010 and 2018, for example, the global weighted-average cost of solar- and wind-generated electricity has fallen by 35 and 77 percent, respectively.51 Installation costs have dropped by 22 and 90 percent.52 In some places solar and wind are already cheaper than coal.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

In relation to CO2 emissions – certainly one important measure of environmental impact – the places that are adding the most people to the world aren’t the places that are adding the most CO2, and to raise the spectre of population as the problem effectively offloads the blame where it doesn’t belong and diverts attention from specific damaging practices to a more superficial calculus of human numbers. So in relation to CO2 emissions, population growth may be a problem, but it isn’t the problem. Since far greater decarbonisation can be achieved by acting directly on emissions than by population policy, it seems fair to say that if human population is the elephant in the room, there are some even bigger critters roaming elsewhere in the house.5 On the other hand, the places that are adding the most plastic pollution to the oceans are located in lower-income countries.

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My main climate-related arguments for a small farm future aren’t directly about the net emissions achievable through small-scale and low-impact means relative to other possibilities. Bigger questions turn on what kind of societies, economies, infrastructures and politics will be possible in a world that by design or default is decarbonising or warming. It’s in this situation that the case for a small farm future presents itself most strongly. It’s conventional to distinguish between mitigating and adapting to climate change. The former involves reducing or removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere while the latter involves finding ways to cope with the effects of climate change.

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Or, to put it another way, it requires the equivalent of about 16 litres (4 gallons) of gasoline on-farm to produce one adult’s entire annual food energy requirements (which are the equivalent of about 100 litres of gasoline) from wheat. Incidentally, nearly seven of those litre-equivalents are devoted to producing synthetic fertiliser; organic wheat uses less energy.50 This is just an illustrative example. It would be naïve to assume that in a future decarbonising world of small-scale farming, refineries would still be trickling out a 16-litre-per-head allocation of gasoline so that farmers didn’t have to bend their backs. And it wouldn’t be a good idea to grow only wheat. But the wider point is that a little fossil or concentrated energy can go a long way on the farm.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

In Cupertino, California, Apple Park is steeped in an artificial forest of 9,000 trees, and is covered in so many solar panels that CEO Timothy Cook calls it ‘the greenest building on the planet’.7 To perfect this display of purity, the headquarters of some Californian companies are said to paint their lawns green during dry spells. And to decarbonise all their activities, digital companies have, for the last ten years, been signing energy contracts left, right, and centre with solar and wind companies. Apple and Amazon are even directly involved in the construction of renewable-energy power plants in China, the US, and Japan.8 Following their lead, the entire industry is claiming adherence to renewables.

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Until new forms of protest emerge, ‘the big internet companies want to maintain this aesthetic of the immaterial’, by Asta Vonderau’s account, for it is also ‘a way for them to obscure the impact of their infrastructure on the environment and natural resources’.44 The dam of contention A case in point is the Luleälv river and, more specifically, its 460 kilometres of ‘liquid gold’, as some local residents call it. The fifteen or so hydroelectric power stations running along its length generate abundant, inexpensive, and decarbonated electricity for the dozens of data centres operating in the region — two of which belong to Facebook, which alone consume 1 to 2 per cent of the energy generated in Sweden. Along the 130 kilometres separating Luleå from the town of Vuollerim runs a sinuous road hemmed in by the dark pelt of pine forests.

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Marc Roberts of Utah visits The Jason Stapleton Program to discuss NSA Reform Bill’, The Jason Stapleton Program, The Live Show, 2 December 2014. 75 Interview with Michael Maharrey, 2020. 76 Ibid. 77 ‘New pictures show Facebook’s massive new data center taking shape in Utah as tech giant plans 900,000 sq. ft expansion to house its servers’, The Daily Mail, 2 March 2021. 78 I refer you to Mél Hogan’s excellent research, ‘Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center’, Big Data & Society, 13 July 2015. 79 An opinion already expressed by Ben Tarnoff, a journalist at The Guardian. In the article ‘To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution’, published in The Guardian on 18 September 2019, he writes: ‘[p]reventing a local police department from constructing an ML-powered panopticon is a matter of […] climate justice’. 80 The inspiration for this hybridisation of causes goes back to ‘environmental racism’ which emerged in US in the 1980s.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

In 1986, for example, a group of British scientists discovered a hole in the earth's ozone layer, a finding that led just two years later to the Montreal Protocol, the first international agreement to protect the ozone layer and the first United Nations treaty to achieve universal ratification. The discovery raised awareness of environmental risks,2 and climate change became an important political issue for the first time. This issue has since taken on far greater dominance and is becoming central to policy and politics, particularly in Europe, where legal commitments to decarbonisation may, in part, change the nature and structure of our economies in the years to come. The wave of new technologies in this period facilitated many other social changes in the mid-1980s when I entered the workforce. In July 1985, just before my first job started, the Live Aid concert had taken place, staged both in London's Wembley stadium and the JFK stadium in Philadelphia.

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Although this may reduce volatility in financial assets, it is likely to be accompanied by low returns. With rising demand for returns given ageing populations and long-run liabilities in the form of health care and pension costs, it will be harder to generate the required returns without taking increased risks. Perhaps the greatest challenge will come from climate change and the need to decarbonise economies. Although efforts to do this will be costly, it would also provide significant opportunities for investment and retooling economies so that future growth is more sustainable. Technology is beginning to yield results. In the past 8 years, wind power costs have fallen by 65%, solar costs by 85% and battery costs by 70%.

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Index 100 year bond 34 1920s, United States 148, 154, 157, 160 1945-1968, post-war boom 129–131 1960s ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 130–131, 233, 235 structural bear market 130 1970s Dow Jones 131 equity cycle 56 oil crisis 108 1980s bull markets 131–133 Dow Jones 15–16, 131–132 equity cycle 56–57 Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 technology 12–15 1990s 16–17 Asia crisis 108, 133 equity cycle 57 S&P concentration 114 technology bubble 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 2000-2007 equity cycle 57 2007-2009 financial crisis 169–174 emerging markets 171–173 forecasting 19–21 growth vs. value company effects 94–96 impact 169–170 phases 171–174 quantitative easing 173–174, 178–179 sovereign debt 170, 171–173 structural bear market 110, 118–119 A accounting, bubbles 163–165 adjustment speed 74, 89–90 Akerflof, G.A. 23 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) 154, 225, 235–236, 238 Asia crisis, 1998 108, 133 ASPF see Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds asset classes across phases 66–68 contractions and expansions 63–65 cyclical 83–89 defensive 83–89 diversification 42, 45–47, 178–179 growth 83–84, 90–96 and inflation 65–66, 70 levels of yield 74–76 relationship through cycle 68–76 returns across cycle 63–79 speed of adjustment 74 structural shifts 76–79 value 83–84, 90–96 see also bonds; commodities; equities Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds (ASPF) 77 AT&T see American Telephone and Telegraph austerity 239 Austria, 100 year bond 34 B bank margins 214–215 bear markets 49, 99–125 1960s 130 characteristics 100–106, 117–118 cyclical 105, 106–107 deflation 109, 113 duration 100–101, 106–111, 117 employment 121–124 event-driven 105, 107–109 false negatives 119–120 financial crisis 118–119 growth momentum 122–123 indicators 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 inflation 101–103, 109, 121–122 interest rates 106, 111–113 prior conditions 121–124 private sector financial balance 124 profitability 115–117 recovery 101 risk indicator vs MSCI index 124–125 S&P 500 103–105 structural 105 triggers 101–105, 106, 108, 111 valuations 123 yield curve 122 behavioural factors 5, 22–25 Berlin Wall, fall of 133 Bernanke, B. 133 betas 65, 85 ‘Big Bang’ deregulation 12 Bing 237 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 Black Wednesday 16–17 ‘bond-like’ equities 96 bonds, 100 year 34 bond yields across phases 66–68, 72–76 current cycle 95–96, 191–193, 201–220 cyclical vs. defensive companies 87–88 and demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 72–76, 206–208 and growth companies 92–94 historical 43, 202 and implied growth 210–215 and inflation 65, 70 quantitative easing 173–174, 202–205 and risk asset demand 217–220 S&P 500 correlation 72–73 speed of adjustment 74, 89–90 ultra-low 201–220 and value companies 92–94 vs. dividends 78–79 vs. equities 43–45, 68–76, 78–79 Bretton Woods monetary system 102, 130–131 broadcast radio 154, 225 Bubble Act 147, 157 bubbles 143–165 1920s US 148, 154, 157, 160 1980s Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 accounting 163–165 canal mania 152 characteristics 145–146 deregulation 157–159 easy credit 160–161 famous 145 financial innovation 158–159 government-debt-for-equity swaps 151–152 Mississippi Company 147, 151 ‘new eras’ 150–157 personal computers 155 psychology 144–145 radio manufacturing 154 railways 148, 152–154, 157, 160, 163 Shanghai composite stock price index 156 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 structural bear markets 113 sub-prime mortgages 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 technology, 1990s 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 tulip mania 146–147 valuations 161–162 bull markets 49, 127–142 characteristics 127–141 composition 138 cyclical 134–136 disinflation 131–133 duration 136–138, 139–141 equity performance 135–136 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 non-trending 138–141 post-war boom 129–131 quantitative easing 134 secular 127–134 United States 136 C canal mania 152 CAPE see cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio capital investment, Juglar cycle 3 CDO see collateralised debt obligations characteristics bear markets 100–109, 111, 117–118 bubbles 145–146 bull markets 127–141 cyclical bear markets 106–107 event-driven bear markets 108–109 structural bear markets 111 China 15, 156 Cold War 14–15, 133 collateralised debt obligations (CDO) 159 commodities across phases 66–68 Kitchin cycle 3 composition of bull markets 138 concentration structural bear markets 115 and technology 238–240 contractions asset performance 63–65 mini cycles 60 see also recessions Cooper, M. 162 corporate debt 65, 110, 114, 160–161 corporate profitability bear markets 107, 115–117 current equity cycle 185–186 monetary policy 239 credit crunch 78–79, 170, 171 crowds, psychology of 21–22, 144–145 cult of the equity 77–78 current equity cycle 57–58, 167–240 bank profitability 214–215 bond yields 191–193 demographic shifts 215–217 drivers 179–180 earnings per share 195–196 employment and unemployment 183–185 equity valuations 206–208 ‘first mile problem’ 226–227 future expectations 246–247 global relative performance 193–196 growth momentum 174–178, 182–183, 227–231 growth and value companies 190–196, 239–240 implied growth 210–215 inflation 180–182, 203–205 interest rates 180–182, 239–240 Japan, lessons from 196–200 lessons from 244–245 market and economy incongruence 174–178 monetary policy 178–179, 201–205 opportunities 230–231 profitability 185–186 quantitative easing 202–205 returns 174–179 risk asset demand 217–220 structural changes 76–79, 93–96, 169–200 technology 189–190, 221–241 term premium collapse 204–205 ultra-low bond yields 201–220 valuations 233–235 volatility 187–189 cycles 1970s 56 asset returns 63–79 cyclical vs. defensive companies 85–89 equities 49–62 growth vs. value companies 90–96 investment styles 81–96 long-term returns 29–47 riding 11–27 sectors 83–85 valuations 53 cyclical bear markets 105, 106–107, 117, 118 vs. event-driven 109 cyclical bull markets 134–136 cyclical companies bond yields 193 inflation 88 sectors 83–84 vs. defensive 85–89 cyclical growth 83–84 cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (CAPE) 37–38, 44–45 cyclical value 83–84 D DDM see discounted dividend model debt levels bubbles 160–161 structural bear markets 110, 114 decarbonization 13 defensive companies 63–65 bond yields 193 inflation 88 Japan 198 sectors 83–84 vs. cyclical 85–89 defensive growth 83–84 defensive value 83–84 deflation bear markets 109, 113 Volker 102, 131 delivery solutions 226–227 demographics and zero bond yields 215–217 deregulation 12, 132–133, 157–159 derivative markets 158–159 design of policy 25–26 despair phase 50–52, 53, 55–56, 60, 66–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86, 88 growth vs. value companies 92 Dice, C. 161 Dimitrov, O. 162 discounted dividend model (DDM) 36, 69 discount rate 68 disinflation 131–133 disruption 1980s 12–15 current equity cycle 189–190, 221–241 electricity 226 historical parallels 222–227 printing press 223–224 railway infrastructure 224–227 telecoms 225–226 divergence, and technology 238–240 diversification 42, 45–47, 178–179 dividends asset yields 38–41, 69 reinvestment 38–40 value of future streams 209 vs. bonds 78–79 Dodd, D. 163, 164 domain registrations 12–13 dominance of technology 231–233 dotcoms 12–13, 33, 93–94, 102, 161, 237 Dow Jones 1970s 131 1980s 15–16, 131 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 Draghi, M. 17, 173 drivers of bull markets 138 current equity cycle 179–180 duration bear markets 100–101, 106–111, 117 bull markets 135–138, 139–141 cyclical bear markets 106–107, 117, 118 cyclical bull markets 135–136 dominance of technology 231–233 event-driven bear markets 108–109, 117–118 non-trending bull markets 139–141 structural bear markets 109–111, 117 term premia 204–205 DVDs 227 E earnings per share (EPS) bear markets 115–117 historical 189 since pre-financial crisis peak 195–196, 209–210 easy credit, and bubbles 160–161 ECB see European Central Bank Economic Recovery Act, 1981 132 efficient market hypothesis 4 electricity 226 email 13 employment 121–124, 183–185 Enron 164 environmental issues 13 EPS see earnings per share equities across phases 66–68 ‘bond-like’ 96 and bond yields 72–73, 74–76, 206–208 bull market performance 135–136 CAPE 37–38, 44–45 dividends 38–41, 69, 78–79, 209 and inflation 65–66, 70 mini/high-frequency cycles 58–61 narrowing and structural bear markets 114–115 overextension 36–37 phases of investment 50–58 quantitative easing 173–174, 178–179 S&P 500 historical performance 42 valuations and future returns 43–45 vs. bonds 43–45, 68–76, 78–79 equity cycle 49–62 1970s 56 1980s 56–57 1990s 57 2000-2007 57 current 57–58, 76–79 historical periods 56–58 length 49 mini/high-frequency 58–61 phases 50–56 structural shifts 76–79 equity risk premium (ERP) 35–38, 69–72, 210 ERM see exchange rate mechanism ERP see equ ity risk premium ESM see European stability mechanism Europe dividends 39–40 exchange rate mechanism 16–17, 111 Maastricht Treaty 17 market narrowing in 1990s 115 privatisation 132 quantitative easing 17, 204–205 sovereign debt crisis 170, 171–173 European Central Bank (ECB) 17, 171, 173 European Recovery Plan 129–131 European stability mechanism (ESM) 173 event-driven bear markets 105, 107–109, 117–118 vs. cyclical 109 excess see bubbles exchange rate mechanism (ERM) 16–17, 111 exogenous shocks 108 expansions, asset performance 63–65 F false negatives, bear markets 119–120 fat and flat markets 128, 139 features see characteristics Federal Reserve 16, 102, 131, 134, 150–151, 157, 203 financial crisis, 2007–2009 169–174 forecasting 19–21 growth vs. value company effects 94–96 impact 169–170 structural bear market 110, 118–119 financial innovation 158–159 ‘first mile problem’ 226–227 Fish, M. 19 fixed costs 84–85, 173–174 fixed income assets 35, 65, 69–70, 205 flat markets 138–141 see also non-trending bull markets forecasting 2008 financial crisis 19–21 bear markets 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 behavioural aspects 22–25 difficulties of 18–22 future growth 211–212 neuroeconomics 24–25 and policy setting 25–26 recessions 20–21 and sentiment 21–25 short-term 17–18 weather 18–19 France Mississippi Company 147, 151 privatisation 132 Fukuyama, F. 15 future expectations 246–247 G Galbraith, J.K. 160 GATT see General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 129 Germany Bund yield 207 fall of Berlin Wall 133 wage inflation 185 Glasnost 14 Glass-Steagall Act, 1933 132 global growth 182–183 globalisation 14–16 global relative performance 193–196 global sales growth 212 global technology bubble 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 Goetzmann, F. 151 ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ 129–131 Gold Standard 130 see also Bretton Woods monetary system Goobey, G.R. 77 Google 237 Gorbachev, M. 14 Gordon Growth model 209 government-debt-for-equity swaps 151–152 Graham, B. 161, 163, 164 Great Britain South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 see also United Kingdom Great Depression 4 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 Greenspan, A. 16, 113, 150–151 gross domestic product (GDP) cyclical vs. defensive companies 87 labour share of 185, 238–239 phases of cycle 52–53 profit share of, US. 186 growth bear markets 122–123 current equity cycle 174–178, 182–183, 227–231 technology impacts 227–231 and zero bond yields 208–210, 210–215 growth companies bond yields 92–94, 191–193 current cycle 190–196 definition 90–91 since financial crisis 94–96 interest rates 92–94 outperformance 239–240 sectors 83–84 vs. value 90–96 growth phase 50–52, 54–56, 67–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 92 Gulf war 102 H herding 21–22, 144–145 high-frequency cycles 58–61 historical performance 10 year bonds, US 43 bonds 43, 202 equities cycles 49, 56–58 S&P 500 38–39, 42 trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 Holland, tulip mania 146–147 hope phase 50–52, 53–54, 55–56, 66–67 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 92 housing bubble, US 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 Hudson, G. 163 I IBM 13, 155, 236 IMAP see Internet Message Access Protocol IMF see International Monetary Fund impacts of diversification 42, 45–47 financial crisis, 2007-2009 169–170 technology on current cycle 221–241 ultra-low bond yields 201–220 Imperial Tobacco pension fund 77 implied growth 210–215 income, Kuznets cycle 3 indicators bear markets 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 cyclical bear markets 106 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 109–110 industrial revolution 224–226 industry leadership, S&P 500 232–233, 237–238 inflation asset performance 65–66, 70 bear markets 101–103, 109, 121–122 current equity cycle 180–182, 203–205 cyclicals 88 Volker 102, 131 Institute of Supply Management index (ISM) 59–61 bear markets 123 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86–87 interest rates bear markets 106, 111–113 current equity cycle 180–182, 239–240 growth vs. value companies 92–94 structural bear markets 111–113 and yield 69, 74–76 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 129 internet 12–13, 225–227 search 237 see also dotcoms Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) 13 inventories 84–85 Kitchin cycle 3 investment, Juglar cycle 3 investment cycle bear markets 122–123 current 57–58, 76–79 historical periods 56–58 lengths 49 mini/high-frequency 58–61 phases 50–56 structural shifts 76–79 see also cycles ISM see Institute of Supply Management index J Japan bubbles 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 defensive companies 198 dividends 39–40 lessons from 196–200 John Crooke and Company 160 Juglar cycle 3 K Kahneman, D. 22–23 Kennedy Slide bear market 102 Keynes, J.M. 22 Kindleberger, C.P. 22 Kitchin cycle 3 Kondratiev cycle 3 Kuznets cycle 3 L labour share of GDP 185, 238–239 land and property bubble, Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 laptop computers 13 largest companies S&P 500 237–238 technology 234–237 light touch regulation 157–159 see also deregulation Live Aid 13–14 Loewenstein, G. 21–22 long-term returns 29–47 M Maastricht Treaty 17 Mackay, C. 21 market forecasts short-term 17–18 see also forecasting market narrowing structural bear markets 114–115 and technology 238–240 markets current equity cycle 174–178 psychology of 21–25, 144–145 see also bear markets; bubbles; bull markets market timing 41–43 market value of technology companies 234, 235–238 Marks, H. 6–7 Marshall Plan 129–131 MBS see mortgage-backed securities Microsoft 12, 236–237 mini cycles 58–61 Mississippi Company 147, 151 monetary policy 157–159, 178–179, 201–205, 239 austerity 239 European Central Bank 17, 171, 173 Federal Reserve 16, 102, 131, 134, 150–151, 157, 203 quantitative easing 17, 70–71, 119, 133–134, 173–174, 178–179, 202–205 Montreal Protocol 13 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) 159 MSCI indices 91 N narrow equity markets 114–115, 238–240 NASDAQ 149–150, 161 negative bond yields 201–220 demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 206–208 and growth 208–210 implied growth 210–215 monetary policy 201–205 quantitative easing 202–205 risk asset demand 217–220 neuroeconomics 24–25 ‘new eras’ 113–114, 150–157 ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 233 non-trending bull markets 138–141 nudges 26 O oil 108, 226 opportunities, technology 230–231 optimism phase 50–52, 54–56, 67–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 91–92 output gaps 4 Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) 171, 173 overextension 36–37 ozone layer 13 P pension funds 77, 218–219 Perestroika 14 Perez, C. 159 performance bull markets 134–136 current equity cycle 174–179 and cycles 53–56 diversification impacts 42, 45–47 dividends 38–41 equities vs. bonds 43–45 factors 41–45 historical trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 interest rates 69, 74–76 long-term 29–47 market timing 41–43 risks and rewards 35–38 valuations 43–45 volatility 30–31 personal computing introduction 12–13, 155 phases 2007-2009 financial crisis 171–174 asset classes 66–68 bear markets 123 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 of equities cycle 50–56 growth vs. value companies 91–92 Phillips curve 182 Plaza Accord, 1985 148–149, 158 PMI see purchasing managers’ index policy, design of 25–26 population decline 216 post-financial crisis see current equity cycle post-war boom 129–131 prediction see forecasting price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) 53–56 printing press 223–224 prior conditions to bear markets 121–124 private sector debt 65, 110, 114, 160–161 private sector financial balance 124 privatisation 132 productivity growth 227–230 profit labour share of 185, 238–239 share of GDP, US. 186 profitability banks 214–215 bear markets 107, 115–117 current equity cycle 185–186 property and land bubble, Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 psychology bubbles 144–145 of markets 21–25 policy setting 25–26 public ownership 132 purchasing managers' index (PMI) 59–61, 86–87, 89–90 Q QE see quantitative easing Qualcom 149–150 quality companies 193 quantitative easing (QE) asset returns 70–71, 119, 178–179 bond yields 173–174, 202–205 start of 17, 133–134, 171 United Kingdom 17, 204–205 United States 134, 171, 202–204 R radio, expansion of 154, 225 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) 154 railways bubbles UK 148, 152–153, 157, 163 US 153–154, 160 infrastructure development 224–227 Rau, P. 162 RCA see Radio Corporation of America Reagan, R. 14, 131–132 real assets 68 real estate bubble, US 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 recessions bear markets 101–103 current equity cycle 174–178 forecasting 20–21 recovery bear markets 101 current equity cycle 174–178 reinvestment of dividends 38–40 return on equity (ROE) 43–45 returns bull markets 134–136 current equity cycle 174–179 cycles 53–56 diversification impacts 42, 45–47 dividends 38–41 equities vs. bonds 43–45 factors 41–45 historical trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 interest rates 69, 74–76 long-term 29–47 market timing 41–43 risks and rewards 35–38 valuations 43–45 volatility 30–31 reverse yield gap 77 risk assets, demand for 217–220 risk-free interest rate 68 risk indicators bear markets 119–125 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 110–111, 113–114 risk premia equity 35–38, 69 neuroeconomics 25 term premia 204–205 ROE see return on equity Rouwenhorst, G. 151 Russian debt default, 1997 108 S S&P 500 bear markets 103–105 and bond yields 72–73 concentration in 1990s 115 dividends 38–39 historical performance 38–39, 42 industry leadership 232–233, 237–238 and ISM 60 largest companies 237–238 US Treasury yields 206 sales growth 212 savings, current equity cycle 182 Schumpeter, J. 150 search companies 237 ‘search for yield’ 217–220 secondary-market prices 229–230 sectors across the cycle 83–85 dominance 231–233 secular bull market 127–134 disinflation 131–133 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 post-war boom 129–131 secular stagnation hypothesis 181 sentiment 5, 21–25 see also bubbles Shanghai composite stock price index 156 Shiller, R.J. 4–5, 23 short-term market forecasts 17–18 skinny and flat markets 139–140 smartphones 226, 229–230 Solow, R. 229 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 sovereign debt crisis 170, 171–173 Soviet Union 14–15, 133 speed of adjustment 74, 89–90, 122–123 Standard Oil 235 structural bear markets 105, 109–115 1960s 130 bubbles 113 debt levels 110, 114 deflation 113 duration 109–111, 117 financial crisis, 2007 118–119 interest rates 111–113 narrow equity markets 114–115 ‘new eras’ 113–114 risk indicators 110–111, 113–114 triggers 111 volatility 105, 115 structural changes 6 1980s 12–15 current equity cycle 76–79, 93–96, 169–200 sub-prime mortgage bubble 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 Summers, L. 181 Sunstein, C.R. 26 ‘super cycle’ secular bull market 127–134 see also secular bull market T technology 1920s America 154 bubble in 1990s 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 current equity cycle 189–190, 221–241 and disruption in 1980s 12–15 dominance 231–233 and growth 227–231 historical parallels 222–227 industrial revolution 224–226 Kondratiev cycle 3 largest companies 234–237 market value 234, 235–238 opportunities 230–231 personal computers 12–13, 155 printing press 223–224 railway bubbles 148, 152–154, 157, 160, 163 railway infrastructure 224–227 and widening gaps 238–240 telecommunications 13, 154, 225, 235–236, 238 telegrams 225 term premium collapse 204–205 TFP see total factor productivity growth Thaler, R.H. 26 Thatcher, M. 14, 132 Tokkin accounts 158 ‘too-big-to-fail’ 133 total factor productivity (TFP) growth 238–240 triggers bear markets 101–105, 106, 108, 111 cyclical bear markets 106 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 111 tulip mania 146–147 Tversky, A. 22–23 U ultra-low bond yields 201–220 demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 206–208 and growth 208–210 implied growth 210–215 monetary policy 201–205 quantitative easing 202–205 risk asset demand 217–220 UNCTAD see United Nations Conference on Trade and Development unemployment 121–124, 183–185 unexpected shocks 108 United Kingdom (UK) Black Wednesday 16–17 bond yields, historical 202 canal mania 152 deregulation 132 exchange rate mechanism 16–17, 111 privatisation 132 quantitative easing 204–205 railway bubble 148, 152–153, 157, 163 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 129 United States (US) 10 year bond returns 43 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 bull markets 136 credit crunch 78–79, 170, 171 disinflation 132 dividends 38–39 Dow Jones 15–16, 131 equities in current cycle 207–208 housing bubble 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 labour share of GDP 185, 238–239 market narrowing 114 NASDAQ 149–150, 161 ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 130–131, 233, 235 post-war boom 129–131 profit share of GDP 186 quantitative easing 133–134, 171, 202–204 radio manufacturing 154, 225 railway bubble 153–154, 160 stock market boom, 1920s 148, 154, 157, 160 vs.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Among the gas networks, one operator has close to 50% of the total market share. It also has higher profit margins than any other sector in the economy.26 Large oil companies are making huge profits in 2022 – a year that saw energy costs rise 23 times faster than wages – and are distributing these profits to shareholders rather than investing in decarbonisation.27 This doesn’t have to be the case. Some of the owners of energy companies operating in the UK are foreign governments, such as French-owned EDF. In France, energy bills went up by 4% in spring 2022, while in the UK, they went up by 54%. While EDF made £106 million in the UK in 2020 alone, that was followed by overall losses, partly due to reduced nuclear output and to the cap imposed by the French government to shield consumers from soaring energy prices.28 In contrast, the UK economy remains dominated by monopolistic practices, with some of its biggest corporations using the cash generated from profiteering to maintain their position, buying up or pricing out smaller rivals, and, increasingly, investing in financial markets.

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We are also the outlier in possessing a billionaire class that, in controlling much of our politics, has kept such proposals off the public agenda.47 In other words, vested interests in highly unequal countries, such as the UK and the US, have a fear of enlarging the nation’s sense of what is reasonable for the government to do for its citizens. And that is why, for example, the public have not been given any serious hopes about the government’s role in investing in the UK’s adaptation to climate change or to expect it to lead in a green industrial revolution in areas such as hydrogen, electric vehicles, decarbonising or renewable energies. Previous governments ended onshore wind projects, cut solar subsidies and slashed energy-efficient schemes, referred to as ‘the green crap’,48 Truss’s short-lived government even announced a commitment to extract ‘every last drop of oil and gas’ and lift the ban on fracking.49 In the meantime, while we are in the slow lane, other European countries are moving ahead with adapting much more quickly.

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However, the 176 ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’ UK government seems to be ‘missing in action’.70 The state’s top priority should be to protect low-income households from the upfront costs.71 It should lead the way by, for example, reinstating grants for home insulation that would give thousands the chance to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Any tax reform therefore will be part of a broader package that includes investment in a Green New Deal, direct job creation, strengthening the social safety net and redistribution. Chancel warns us that ‘there can be no deep decarbonization without profound redistribution of income and wealth’.72 Still, globally, decade by decade, countries have become more unequal in most regions of the world. In many places, the 10% richest take over 50% of national incomes. Earth4All, a group of leading economic thinkers, scientists and advocates warns that this is a recipe for deeply dysfunctional, polarised societies.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Osborne, meanwhile, with his focus on fiscal austerity, was determined that such initiatives as were forthcoming in this area were implemented as inexpensively as possible. He did not want to add significantly to the tax burden or threaten the sustained supply of relatively cheap energy. Nor was he persuaded by arguments that investment in decarbonization could boost growth, in particular by addressing market failures and by promoting knowledge spillovers from new innovations – that is to say, it was argued that decarbonization might ‘crowd in’ investment rather than ‘crowd it out’.25 All this meant that while the 2050 target remained in place, funding related to climate change was cut back and various related public bodies were downsized or wound up.

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(See https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/279460/Sir_Nicholas_Macpherson_-_Scotland_and_a_currency_union.pdf.) 20 Interview with Lord MacPherson, detailed in Davies (2022). 21 In due course, Scotland was to benefit from the devolution of significant tax-raising powers. 22 This section draws heavily on the annual OECD Economic Surveys and the IMF’s Article IV Staff Reports on the UK. 23 IMF. 2018. Article IV 2017 Staff Report on the UK (February). 24 HM Treasury. 2015. Fixing the foundations: creating a more prosperous nation. Cmd. 9098 (July). 25 D. Zenghelis. 2019. Securing decarbonisation and growth. National Institute Economic Review, No. 250 (November). 26 D. Blanchflower. 2019. Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? Princeton University Press. HMG. 1942. Social insurance and allied services. Cmd. 6404. 27 P. Bunn, A. Pugh and C. Yeates. 2018.

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The report accepted that there was no choice between the maintenance of economic growth and preventing serious climate change: rather, acceptable economic performance was conditional on global heating being arrested. The Treasury also significantly reduced official estimates of the associated costs, even if there was still an apparent reluctance to embrace the notion that decarbonization, if appropriately undertaken, could substantially boost growth for an extended period. It is also notable that, in their regular assessments of UK supply-side policy, the IMF and the OECD, while applauding the actions mentioned above, continued to identify many all-too-familiar inadequacies and recommend many all-too-­familiar responses.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

The way the advocates put it now is that the difficulties are going to be overcome not by threats and bribes, but by the changes in the underlying costs of decarbonising. It is widely claimed that renewables are cost-competitive with fossil fuels already. Hence the problems dissolve: decarbonisation is no more expensive than sticking with fossil fuels. Wind and solar electricity generation, electric cars, hydrogen ships and planes, and biofuels and biomass are the future anyway. This is the miracle solution. We can decarbonise and it won’t cost us any more than not decarbonising. Even better, if we don’t decarbonise we will end up with higher costs, because the fossil fuels will be more expensive than the wind turbines and solar panels that we will all be rushing to install.

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They are mainly nationally planned, and most have universal service obligations (USOs), requiring operators to meet not just the demand of those willing and able to pay whatever price is imposed on users, but also those citizens who cannot. This all matters because the climate change problem requires transport and energy to decarbonise. In turn, the energy and transport systems cannot function without a digital enabling communications system, and that in turn needs a fibre and broadband infrastructure to support these decarbonising networks. Recent arguments about whether broadband and fibre should be free throw into sharp relief the issues at stake. Consider some of the requirements of decarbonisation. Air transport, at least short-haul, will need to be replaced by trains, and we probably need high-speed networks (although not necessarily HS2 as currently configured).

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Here again the politics resurfaces. The politicians do not want to confront voters with the costs of their pollution, and a carbon tax does this very much ‘in your face’. Recall the earlier discussion about the myth that decarbonisation will not cost much, if anything, and the easy political offer of painless decarbonisation as a path to economic growth. Once the truth is out, that decarbonisation is costly and will force us to live within and not beyond our environmental means, voters get higher bills. One of the quickest ways to get demonstrators out on the street is to raise fuel prices – the Gilets Jaunes protests in France being a recent example, joining other diverse examples stretching from Hungary to Chile to Iran.

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future
by John Whitelegg
Published 1 Sep 2015

In this study spatial planning and accessibility planning measures produced a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions from the road transport sector and fiscal measures produced a 25% reduction. The remaining amount of car use was then assumed to be EV powered by electricity that was 100% decarbonised. This combination of spatial, fiscal and technological measures together with some behavioural changes produced a 100% decarbonisation of the road transport sector in the UK and a decarbonisation that was assisted by electric vehicles but was delivered through highly integrated layers of policies that first of all reduced demand for car transport and then applied the EV technology to the residual demand.

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Society will be much fairer with much improved access for everyone, much fewer demands on those with constrained budgets through the elimination of the need to own a car as a default option and the availability of many more transport choices. Achieving the Vision Achieving a maximum decarbonised future by the year 2050 is desirable and achievable on quality of life, fiscal and climate change grounds. It will involve more action than those applied to the transport sector including a decarbonised electricity generation system and a new grid distribution system to support a very different pattern of domestic and transport production and consumption of energy. Nevertheless transport holds the key to decarbonisation simply on the grounds that it is a fast growing source of greenhouse gases and, so far, shows very little sign of following successful reductions in GHG emissions in industry, offices and homes.

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The links between mobility, lifestyle and climate change The scientific debate around climate change is important but it can obscure lifestyle issues and the ways in which a decarbonised world (i.e. at least a 90% cut in CO2 by 2050 on a 1990 base) would be different to the world we now know. This is possibly even more important in a mobility discussion where we are exploring a scenario characterised by less mobility measured in vehicle kilometres of motorised transport but much more accessibility and many more of our journeys than now would be made on foot, by bike and by public transport. In addition it is not “just” a transport issue. Our cities, in a decarbonised world, would be different. They would be more compact, denser, more walkable, cleaner, less congested and with health damaging air pollution largely eliminated.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

After all, if we are serious about making a transition sufficiently quickly to prevent catastrophic warming, a large margin of error matters. Of paramount importance is that decarbonisation start immediately. In 2017 the International Energy Agency announced the beginning of ‘decade zero’, saying that if a global transition away from fossil fuels didn’t start over the next ten years, warming beyond two degrees would become close to certain. The following year the IPCC repeated those sentiments, concluding wide-scale decarbonisation had to begin before 2030 to avoid ‘catastrophic’ climate change in excess of 1.5 degrees centigrade. This means that beginning in 2020, the wealthier countries of the Global North must initiate a transition to renewables, cutting CO2 emissions by 8 per cent each year for a decade, aiming to completely decarbonise by 2030.

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As well as helping fund energy transition in the Global South this would also create an additional incentive among the wealthier nations to decarbonise in the decade following 2020, not to mention stimulating a market in carbon sequestration technologies. A reasonable projection is that this alone would raise around $250 billion a year – not an insignificant sum. If the measure fell short in raising as much, which would represent success from the perspective of decarbonisation, the remainder would be generated from countries paying into the fund based on a GDP per capita basis. In addition to capitalising EIBs in some of the poorest countries in the world, whose role would be precisely the same as their equivalents in the Global North, the One Planet Tax would also pay for technology transfer and research and development into modular renewable solutions adapted to low-infrastructure, low-income environments.

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The UN expects the world’s population to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050, 2 billion more than today, with almost all of that increase coming from the poorer countries of the Global South. What is more these populations will increasingly consume energy, for heating, transport, home appliances and holidays, on par with the Global North. Switching the present global economy to renewables seems an immense task on its own, but the reality is even harder: we’ll have to decarbonise a planet that uses twice as much energy as we do right now. It is not all bad news, however. While increased energy consumption has correlated with economic growth for the last two centuries, demand for energy in the world’s richest countries has started to decline over recent years. In the UK for instance, energy consumption peaked at the turn of the millennium, and has fallen by 2 per cent every year since.

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth
by Chris Goodall
Published 30 Jan 2020

The second source of CO2 from cement is easier to decarbonise. At the moment, most cement producers use coal to provide the heat, much as in a steel plant. We can replace this with hydrogen, low carbon biomass or, indeed, simple electricity. The extra cost of this, however, may be high, and the resulting cement may be double the price of today’s product once we have also added the price of capturing CO2 from the chemical reaction. As the Energy Transitions Commission says: ‘Cement is almost certain to be the most difficult and costly sector of the economy to decarbonise’. Rather than despair, I think we need to set our carbon tax at a level that provides a strong incentive both to use low carbon alternatives and to capture CO2.

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For those energy uses that cannot easily use electricity, such as aviation, fuels made by low carbon hydrogen will offer us a direct replacement for oil and its derivatives. This route potentially gives us a 100 per cent low carbon energy system, entirely based on renewable electricity. It is, in my opinion, the only way of completely decarbonising the modern economy while still allowing us to maintain many aspects of our current lifestyle, at least in relation to energy use. Even a couple of years ago, it might have seemed an unconventional plan, but it is one that has rapidly become mainstream. The extremely conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) issued an extensive report in October 2019 about the potential for low cost hydrogen generated from offshore wind around the world.

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It owns the local distribution network and large electricity generating plants at hydroelectric dams in the foothills of the Alps. It promises that by 2025 it will be generating as much zero carbon electricity as it currently supplies to its customers over the course of the year. Much of this will not come from local generation but from wind turbines in central Norway. In addition to decarbonising electricity, Stadtwerke München is pushing forward with plans for providing heat supplies without any fossil fuels. It intends to use geothermal reservoirs under the city to provide hot water for district heating systems. The utility already supplies low carbon heat from a district heating system powered by burning wood.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Changing policy in response to events only increases risk and raises costs. None of these crucial dynamics which determine the viability of decarbonisation are captured in standard economic models. Conclusion Climate change poses a challenge to capitalism both from its consequences and its causes. If global warming is to be controlled at a safe level, net emissions will have to fall to zero within this century. Because of the centrality of carbon to our economies, this can only be done through a profound structural transformation—the decarbonisation of production, distribution and consumption systems. Assessing whether this is achievable requires a form of economic analysis which focuses less on static market failures and more on the dynamic processes of innovation and structural change.

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Inequality and Economic Growth Introduction The great rise of inequality Explaining inequality The price of inequality Reversing inequality Conclusion: redefining economic performance Acknowledgements Notes 9. The Paradoxes of Privatisation and Public Service Outsourcing Introduction The limits to competition The mutual convertibility of economic and political resources Conclusion: capitalism and democracy Notes 10. Decarbonisation: Innovation and the Economics of Climate Change Introduction The challenge to capitalism The challenge to economics Innovation and growth Path-dependence and innovation Economic models Climate change policy Conclusion Notes 11. Capitalism, Technology and a Green Global Golden Age: The Role of History in Helping to Shape the Future Introduction: growth without technology or sustainability without growth?

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Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2013. 25 C. Crouch, Post-democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004. 26 C. Crouch, ‘Can there be a normative theory of corporate political power?’, in V. Schneider and B. Eberlein, eds., Complex Democracy: Varieties, Crises, and Transformations, Berlin, Springer, 2015, pp. 117–31. 10. Decarbonisation: Innovation and the Economics of Climate Change DIMITRI ZENGHELIS Introduction CLIMATE CHANGE will alter the nature of our economies. The average global surface temperature of the Earth has now risen 1 degree Celsius above preindustrial times, and the atmospheric concentration of the principal greenhouse gas carbon dioxide has reached more than 400 parts per million (ppm), rising at a rate of 2 ppm every year.1 At around 450 ppm climate modelling indicates the likelihood that the average temperature rise will ultimately exceed 2°C, the level set by the international community as the threshold of ‘dangerous’ warming which should not be crossed.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

The nuclear power figure includes the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima; the displayed range is due to differing estimates of the longer-term effects of low-radiation exposure—for more detail, see whatweowethefuture.com/notes. Estimates for other power sources are based on data from Europe. Decarbonisation—that is, replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy—therefore has large and immediate health benefits in addition to the longterm climate benefits. Once one accounts for air pollution, rapidly decarbonising the world economy is justified by the health benefits alone.48 Decarbonisation is therefore a win-win, improving life in both the long and the short term. In fact, promoting innovation in clean energy—such as solar, wind, next-generation nuclear, and alternative fuels—is a win on other fronts, too.

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Global average price of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, measured in 2019 US$ per watt (i.e., adjusted for inflation). However, we shouldn’t get complacent. There is a substantial chance that our decarbonisation efforts will get stuck. First, limited progress on decarbonisation is exacerbated by the risk of a breakdown in international coordination, which could happen because of rising military tensions between the major economies in the world, which I discussed in Chapter 5. Decarbonisation is a truly global problem: even if most regions stop emitting, emissions could continue for a long time if one region decides not to cooperate. Second, the risk of prolonged technological stagnation, which I discuss in the next chapter, would increase the risk that we do not develop the technology needed to fully decarbonise.

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This might not be as unlikely as it seems: if civilisation has collapsed once, that suggests that civilisational collapse is not extremely unlikely, and it might well happen again.114 Second, we might fail on the “last mile” of decarbonisation—eliminating the hardest-to-replace quarter of emissions, such as the use of coal to provide high-temperature heat in the cement and steel industries.115 To wholly do away with fossil fuels, we’ll need a suitable combination of cheap, controllable low-carbon power and cheap zero-carbon fuels such as hydrogen. While innovative ways to improve these capabilities have been proposed, it is unclear whether we will get there.116 Worse, solving decarbonisation through the wrong mix of technologies might backfire: the final way we might continue to burn a lot of fossil fuels is if we make extensive use of carbon capture and storage.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

If we wanted everyone in the world to have the same amount of embedded steel as we enjoy in the rich world – 15 tonnes per person – that would imply increasing the total global stock of this alloy to 144 billion tonnes. And since that is nearly four times what we have ever produced since the beginning of humanity, and since methods of producing steel without any emissions remain experimental and expensive, we are caught in the horns of a dilemma. The world’s twin goals of decarbonisation and development are heading for a collision. As countries become richer and more prosperous, are they really to be denied the concrete or steel the West poured and forged as it developed? The Power of Steel This stuff matters . Steel is not just any other substance; it is a foundational material we have used for thousands of years to progress and become richer.

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Average copper mine head grade, 2004: 1.1 per cent, 2016: 0.65 per cent. Data on grades: https://www.cochilco.cl/Presentaciones%20Ingls/Chilean%20Copper%20Mining%20Costs.pdf . 22 Jeff Doebrich, ‘Copper – A Metal for the Ages’, USGS, 2009. 23 Paul Gait, ‘Metals & Mining: Copper and the Green Economy – Thoughts from Our Decarbonisation Conference’, Bernstein, 2019. 12. The Deep 1 This section incorporates material from a trip to the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, in 2018, including interviews with Secretary General Michael Lodge. Again in 2018, I travelled to Zurich to interview Gretchen Früh-Green, the scientist who was the first to spot the Lost City on that fateful expedition in 2000.

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, Journal of Hazardous Materials 422 (January 2022); ‘Microplastics in household dust could promote antibiotic resistance’, The Economist , 10 November 2021, https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/microplastics-in-household-dust-could-promote-antibiotic-resistance/21806204 . 16 IEA, World Energy Outlook 2022 (IEA, 2022). Postscript: Peak Oil 1 ‘North Field: Sharing the Weight of the World?’, Thunder Said Energy, 28 July 2022, https://thundersaidenergy.com/2022/07/28/north-field-sharing-the-weight-of-the-world/ . 2 Vaclav Smil, ‘What We Need to Know about the Pace of Decarbonization’, Substantia 3/2 (2919), Supplement 1: pp. 13–28. 3 Demand projections from Announced Pledges Scenarios in IEA World Economic Outlook 2022 (IEA, 2022), and from BP Energy Outlook 2023 Edition (BP, 2023). 16. White Gold 1 Seth Fletcher, Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy (Hill & Wang, 2011). 2 IEA, Net Zero by 2050 – A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector (IEA, 2021). 3 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/whittingham/facts/ . 4 Jarod C.

Climate Change
by Joseph Romm
Published 3 Dec 2015

The IEA said that a systematic effort to use renewable energy and energy efficiency and energy storage to keep global warming below the 2°C threshold (their 2DS scenario) would require investment in clean energy of approximately 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year. However, it would still be exceedingly cost-effective: The $44 trillion additional investment needed to decarbonise the energy system in line with the 2DS by 2050 is more than offset by over $115 trillion in fuel savings—resulting in net savings of $71 trillion. A key point is that the investment is not the same as the net economic cost, because many of the investments reduce energy consumption and thus generate savings.

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In May 2015, 70 of the world’s leading climate experts who were involved in this dialogue reported back. They noted that, “Parties to the Convention agreed on an upper limit for global warming of 2°C, and science has provided a wealth of information to support the use of that goal.” The authors state bluntly, “Limiting global warming to below 2°C necessitates a radical transition (deep decarbonization now and going forward), not merely a fine tuning of current trends.” After reviewing the Fifth Assessment report and various presentations of observed climate impacts on regions around the world and agriculture, they point out, “Significant climate impacts are already occurring at the current level of global warming and additional magnitudes of warming will only increase the risk of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts.”

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

If the global economy grows at 2.6% per year (as PwC predicts), this requires decarbonisation of 14% per year. This is nearly nine times faster than the business as usual rate of decarbonisation (1.6% per year), and more than three times faster than the maximum rate assumed in best-case scenario models (4% per year). In other words, it is out of scope. To have a 50% chance of staying under 1.5°C emissions must fall by 7.3% per year, with decarbonisation of 10.7% per year, which is also out of scope. To have a 66% chance of staying under 2°C (as per the Paris Agreement) emissions must fall by 4.1% per year, with decarbonisation of 7% per year: again, out of scope (however, it may be feasible to achieve if the economy does not grow).

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Growth keeps outstripping our best efforts to decarbonise. Think about it this way. If we continue to grow the global economy at projected rates, it will more than double in size by the middle of the century – that’s twice as much extraction and production and consumption than we are presently doing, all of which will suck up nearly twice as much end-use energy than would otherwise be the case.14 It will be unimaginably difficult for us to decarbonise the existing global economy in the short time we have left; impossible to do it nearly twice over. It would require that we decarbonise at a rate of 7% per year to stay under 2°C (which is dangerous), or 14% per year to stay under 1.5°C.

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Of course, renewable energy is more efficient than fossil fuels, to the point where transitioning to renewables by 2050 could lead to no increase in total energy use, despite business-as-usual growth, but it would still be 1.83 times higher than it would otherwise be without growth (under any given energy mix). 15 These decarbonisation figures assume a 66% chance of staying under the target threshold, and average annual global GDP growth of 2.6% per year. The maximum decarbonisation rate assumed in best-case scenario models is 4% per year. For a review of relevant literature, see Hickel and Kallis, ‘Is green growth possible?’ 16 Christian Holz et al., ‘Ratcheting ambition to limit warming to 1.5 C: trade-offs between emission reductions and carbon dioxide removal,’ Environmental Research Letters 13(6), 2018. 17 The IPCC’s 2018 report has only one scenario for staying under 1.5°C without using BECCS.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism
by Grace Blakeley
Published 14 Oct 2020

Proponents of the Green New Deal are clear on this question: the wealthy are responsible for far more carbon emissions than the poor and should therefore bear a greater part of the burden of decarbonisation. According to Oxfam, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the global population is responsible for half of all emissions, and the top 10 per cent of the UK population is responsible for three times the level of domestic household emissions of the poorest 10 per cent.15 Moreover, if we want to build mass support for decarbonisation, we must recognise and respond to the concerns of working people worried about the impact on jobs, transport and taxes. Contrary to the insistence of many liberals, climate justice can only be brought about through systems change, not individual behavioural change.

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We also need to introduce public ownership and democratic control of our largest corporations and financial institutions. If the government does embark upon a programme of mass bailouts, the corporations it saves should be run by the people, not just a tiny elite. The aim of such a democratic agenda would be to decarbonise our economies while raising living standards and reducing inequality. Free marketeers will trot out the same arguments against such plans, but they will be confronted by the reality that we already live in an uncompetitive, monopolistic and state-planned economy. They may argue for a return to a different kind of capitalism, but unless they are able to chart a course to actually get there – impossible without huge social and political costs – their arguments will be untenable.

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But if socialists seek to use this moment to argue for a transition to a green, sustainable economy – on the basis that climate breakdown presents a far more pressing existential challenge to humanity than the coronavirus over the long term – the Right will simply argue that such spending is unaffordable. Even on a superficial level, this is false. A global Green New Deal of the kind that would allow advanced economies to reach net zero by 2030, giving the rest of the world more time to achieve their decarbonisation objectives, would entail huge levels of investment in green transport and energy infrastructure, research into green technologies and a substantial programme of green housebuilding and retrofitting. Such a programme would create jobs today, boosting demand, as well as expanding the amount the economy can produce over the long term, increasing tax revenues and therefore the creditworthiness of the states that participated.9 On a deeper level, the costs of failing to tackle climate breakdown are astronomical.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Peters et al., “Rapid Growth in CO2 Emissions After the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 2. 27. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 35; Kevin Anderson, “EU 2030 Decarbonisation Targets and UK Carbon Budgets: Why So Little Science?” Kevin Anderson.info, June 14, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info. 28. Gro Harlem Brundtland et al., “Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act,” joint paper by the Blue Planet Prize laureates, The Asahi Glass Foundation, February 20, 2012, p. 7. 29.

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The “8 to 10 percent” range relies on interviews with Anderson and Bows-Larkin as well as their published work. For the underlying emissions scenarios, refer to pathways C+1, C+3, C+5, and B6 3 in: Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 35. See also: Kevin Anderson, “EU 2030 Decarbonisation Targets and UK Carbon Budgets: Why So Little Science?” KevinAnderson.info, June 14, 2013, http://kevinanderson.info. HUGELY DAMAGING: Anderson, “Climate Change Going Beyond Dangerous,” pp. 18–21; DE BOER: Alex Morales, “Kyoto Veterans Say Global Warming Goal Slipping Away,” Bloomberg, November 4, 2013. 49.

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(Which was the stated goal of “sustainable development” as championed in Rio.) Indeed this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn’t do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, “There’s a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Smart investment, aimed at raising incomes, reducing inequality and greening economic growth, would also increase tax revenues as well as achieving a variety of other objectives. This investment agenda should be undertaken under the mantle of the “Green New Deal”, involving a dramatic increase in state investment to decarbonise the economy. This would involve decarbonising transport, energy, and other infrastructures through nationalisation and a programme of green investment; investment in research and development in green technology; and investment in decarbonising production, at home and abroad. The first plank would require direct state spending, but the second two could be undertaken through a National Investment Bank. The returns from this lending could then be shared equally through the creation of a People’s Asset Manager.

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Only a mass mobilisation of society’s resources, along the lines of the Green New Deal recently advocated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, will be enough to avert climate catastrophe. And this will require an increase in state spending directed into greening production, promoting research and development in green technology, and decarbonising energy and transport infrastructure, which would be unthinkable under the political economy of finance-led growth. The fate of our planet will never be ascribed the same importance as the fate of our banks until we change who is in charge, and to whom they are accountable. It is no exaggeration to say that today we must choose between protecting free-market capitalism and safeguarding the future of the humanity.

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The most recent fix was to allow capitalism to expand not just spatially, but temporally — financialisation allowed for profits to be extracted from the future through debt, ultimately leading to the financial crisis, but not before sustaining several decades of growth. It would be unwise to assume that such a fix will not be found again. But even if it is, without a massive decarbonisation programme — which would require coordinated state investment, tax changes, and regulatory changes of the kind unthinkable under finance-led growth — capitalism, and indeed human civilisation, may end anyway within our lifetimes. It is up to us to save ourselves. CHAPTER SEVEN THE WAY FORWARD You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
by Tim Flannery
Published 10 Jan 2001

WILLIAM NORDHAUS, Climate Change, 1996 One of the key decisions in our war on climate change is whether to focus our efforts on transport or the electricity grid. Many would argue we must do both, and I would agree, if we had the resources and the time. But when it comes to the really big effort required to stop carbon emissions from one or the other, decarbonising the power grid wins hands down. For with that achieved, we can use the renewable power thus generated to decarbonise transport. Researchers Steven Pacala and Robert Socolow from Princeton University investigated whether the world possesses the technologies required to run an electricity network of the extent, scale and reliability of that we currently enjoy, while at the same time making deep cuts in CO2 emissions.

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As a result humans are thrust into a protracted Dark Ages far more mordant than any that has gone before, for the most destructive weapons ever devised will still exist, while the means to regulate their use, and to make peace, will have been swept away. These changes could commence as soon as 2050. Humanity acts promptly—on individual, national and corporate levels—to reduce emissions, and so avoids serious climatic consequences. Based on current trends, we will need to have commenced significant decarbonising of our electricity grids by around 2030, and to have substantially decarbonised transport systems by 2050. If we are successful, by 2150 or thereabouts greenhouse gas levels will have dropped to the point where Gaia can once again control Earth’s thermostat. Emissions are reduced sufficiently to avoid outright disaster, but serious damage to Earth’s ecosystems results.

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In 2002 the surface temperature of the planet as a whole was 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels, the land surface was 1.2°C warmer, while the troposphere at one to eight kilometres above our head (as measured by satellites) was 0.25°C warmer than it was on average over the preceding twenty years; different parts of the Earth system vary in their response to warming, and distributing the extra heat is one reason for the lag. Our commitment is also influenced by the CO2 we have already released, the positive feedback loops that amplify climate change, global dimming and the speed at which human economies can decarbonise themselves. Of these, the first—existing greenhouse gas volumes—is known and gives us our ‘existing commitment’. The second and third—positive feedback loops and global dimming—are still being explored by scientists. And the fourth—the rate at which we humans can change our emissions—is being argued over right now in parliaments and boardrooms around the world.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

An increasing number of environmentalists, activists, and politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are advocating the “Green New Deal”. This strategy aims to both address the climate emergency and ameliorate capitalism through an agenda of government support for green technologies and a focus on decarbonisation and shift to renewable energies. But the practical implementation of these still mainly abstract principles obviously depends on governments being amenable to these policies or open to pressure for them from below. Even though the Welsh government, for instance, was the first in the world to declare a “climate emergency” in 2019 in response to public protest on the issue, the capacity to implement policies on this basis without international consensus and coordination remains limited.

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In the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party successfully appealed to former Labour voters in the “red wall”, while post-Corbyn Labour have accepted the need to reconnect with voters in the North and with neglected towns, but without losing sight of priorities like the Green New Deal. Local initiatives that see economic and social improvement generated by the community’s own actions, and which fit within the Green New Deal’s agenda on decarbonisation, renewables and sustainability, are a way of taking up these priorities at a grassroots level rather than waiting for top-down direction from Westminster. Beyond Discredited Models and Malaise As Preston itself adapted economic and democratic experiments in community wealth-building from the US and Europe, so several other cities, towns and boroughs around the UK, some of which we explore in Part Three, are establishing or developing their own versions of democratic localism, with greater or lesser degrees of involvement from local authorities and with attention to different priorities and projects.

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New policies now being incorporated include municipalising energy production, embedding targeted anchor recruitment and progression from under-represented groups and deprived areas, converting existing businesses to employee-owned ventures and making community wealth-building a central part of a drive to decarbonise the economy. Challenges and Criticisms There have, of course, been challenges, problems and scepticism to deal with as Brown and his allies have developed and established the Preston Model. Before 2011 highlighted the need for a new economic approach in Preston, Brown’s suggestions on increasing the city’s base of cooperatives and commitment to economic democracy had often been treated with suspicion and uncertainty even within the council’s Labour group.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

State and corporate repression of the left has significantly intensified in recent decades, legal changes have made it more difficult to organise, generalised precarity has made us more insecure, and the militarisation of policing has rapidly gathered speed.1 And beyond this lies the fact that our inner lives, our social world and our built environment are organised around work and its continuation. The shift to a post-work society, much like the shift to a decarbonised economy, is not just a matter of overcoming a few elite interests. More fundamentally, it is a matter of transforming society from the ground up. An engagement with the totality of power and capital is inevitable, and we should be under no illusions about the difficulties facing such a project.

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It is something embedded in human minds, social and political organisations, individual technologies and the built environment that constitutes our world.20 And, whereas the social forces of hegemony must be continually maintained, the materialised aspects of hegemony exert a force of momentum that lasts long past their initial creation.21 Once in place, infrastructures are difficult to dislodge or alter, despite changing political conditions. We are facing up to this problem now, for example, with the infrastructure built up around fossil fuels. Our economies are organised around the production, distribution and consumption of coal, oil and gas, making it immensely difficult to decarbonise the economy. The flipside of that problem, though, is that once a postcapitalist infrastructure is in place, it would be just as difficult to shift away from it, regardless of any reactionary forces. Technology and technological infrastructures therefore pose both significant hurdles for overcoming the capitalist mode of production, as well as significant potentials for securing the longevity of an alternative.

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A series of emerging contemporary phenomena must be thought through carefully: for instance, the causes and effects of secular stagnation; the transformations invoked by the shift to an informational, post-scarcity economy; the changes wrought by the introduction of full automation and a universal basic income; the possible approaches to collectivising automated manufacturing and services; the progressive potentials of alternative approaches to quantitative easing; the most effective ways to decarbonise the means of production; the implications of dark pools for financial instability – and so on. Equally, research should be revived on what postcapitalism might look like in practice. Beyond a few outdated classics, very little research has been done to think through an alternative economic system – even less so in the wake of emerging technologies like additive manufacturing, self-driving vehicles and soft AI.68 What role, for instance, could non-state cryptocurrencies have?

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All
by Chris Goodall
Published 6 Jul 2016

The crucial thing is that a continuation of the trends of the last decades (40 per cent annual growth and a 20 per cent slope on the experience curve) can get the world free of fossil fuels within about thirty years. If world energy demand doesn’t rise as fast as I have assumed then the process of complete decarbonisation would be even quicker. If current trends continue, the price of installing solar PV will fall to less than a sixth of current levels by 2041. The even more surprising conclusion is that the net cost of this to the global economy may be less than zero. As solar increases, the amount of money that the world needs to spend on fossil fuels falls.

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Any attempt to build a renewables-based future in places like the UK and some other places in northern Europe will fail unless combined with massive reductions in the heat losses of almost all homes, and many commercial buildings. The average home in the UK uses over four times as much energy in the central heating boiler as all electric appliances and lights combined. Decarbonisation of heat is a harder challenge than creating a renewables-based electricity supply. Even if we invested in a huge oversupply of solar panels, countries in northern Europe could not easily supply enough heat from electricity to keep people warm in midwinter. What do we do? As well as enforcing the highest standards on new construction, we urgently need to improve older buildings.

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These are usually called ‘first generation’ biofuels because they have used these easily fermentable foods to make liquids. When combusted, the CO2 initially captured by the plant is returned to the atmosphere. So, in theory, using foods for making fuel can be done at near carbon neutrality. But using food for storing chemical energy in transport fuels is not a good means to decarbonise the world economy. The average person eats about 2.5 kilowatt hours of food energy each day, while a car driver in Western Europe uses about ten times that amount of energy in the form of motor fuel alone in the same period. So even if all the food in the world was fermented into a fuel, it would not come close to providing the energy needed to keep internal combustion engines on the road.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

But he realised that in a world that is taking climate change seriously, companies helping the world transition to a low-carbon economy were likely to be successful both financially and environmentally. ‘I just thought it was a great theme to invest in, but over the last couple of years I must say that my interest in climate change has got much more serious,’ he says. ‘There’s no question that we are in an energy transition and we are going to be decarbonising the global economy, so companies looking in that field are obviously investing in the grain.’ Pensions The reality is that many retail investors may have limited choice over where they can invest their money. That is because, for most people, their main investment is their pension. Many people will hold a pension through a workplace scheme, which will match contributions or even double them.

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The answer to the question of whether divestment will have a negative impact on the fossil fuel industry is therefore also yes: not in the financial sense one might expect, but through public shaming and world opinion. How to invest after you divest So if you want to ditch fossil fuels, what should you do? Morningstar has identified two types of mutual funds, low carbon and ex-fossil fuel, which it reckons may appeal to investors who want to decarbonise their portfolios. Remember that the case for divestment can be made on moral grounds – you don’t want to personally profit from any oil and gas companies – or performance grounds – you believe that oil and gas companies are going to struggle in a world that is reorienting itself towards climate change mitigation.

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Professional investors speaking up Small investors can also work with big investors to effect change. The ShareAction resolution attracted attention from more than 10 institutional investors in Barclays as well. One of those, Sarasin & Partners, said: ‘Given the systemic threats posed by climate change, and the rising regulatory scrutiny of banks’ resilience to accelerated decarbonisation and climatic impacts, this resolution supports the long-term economic interest of shareholders.’ Professional fund managers who are overseeing hundreds of millions or billions of pooled money can have much greater clout with the company – and they are increasingly putting pressure on the companies they invest in to do more to combat climate change.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

It models a range of scenarios, including sectoral emissions under current policies, under ‘announced pledges’ (emissions if the promises of governments are truly met), and under a ‘net zero by 2050’ scenario, in which industry becomes carbon neutral and warming is limited to around 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial temperatures. It then compares our actual technological progress on decarbonizing industry against these three scenarios. There is a huge gap between the projected emissions under current policies and what’s required to hit the best-case scenario of 1.5°C. Even relative to announced pledges, assuming these are actually met with policy and effort, the decarbonization gap remains vast. The IEA splits this gap by the various technologies and processes available for decarbonizing industry – increased recycling of plastic, for example. Of these, carbon capture, use and storage (CCS) has the biggest job to do.

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Policy and social movements can combine with technological development to accelerate the needed energy system transition. The essential tools are readily available – the world knows how to do solar and wind power, how to store energy with batteries or hydrogen and how to decarbonize transportation. It is important to note, however, that decarbonizing the energy system is not just a simple engineering problem; it’s not just a question of no longer burning fossil fuels and using renewable energy sources instead. Every aspect of the production system that sustains our lives is intertwined with energy and therefore CO2 emissions – from simple communication to the provision of essential food and shelter – and even alternative energy sources come with environmental and emissions costs.

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Resilient, biodiverse forests should be left alone and considered a ‘bridging technology’ – buying time for other sectors to decarbonize while maximizing the benefits to biodiversity. Maximizing the climate change mitigation role of forests will probably mean limiting the availability of wood products. In order to prevent this reduced supply from being compensated for by fossil fuels, demand-side strategies need to be explored that allow decreases in material use while safeguarding human well-being and ensuring just access to resources. / Resilient, biodiverse forests should be left alone and considered a ‘bridging technology’ – buying time for other sectors to decarbonize. 4.8 What about Geoengineering?

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

Accounting uncertainties cannot change this conclusion: unlike in the case of CO2 emissions, global dematerialization of sulfur emissions has taken place not only in relative, but also in absolute, terms and it has done so despite the rising combustion of coal because of an effective technical fix (FGD). Unfortunately, decarbonization of flue gases is a much greater technical challenge than their desulfurization, and recent years have seen too many exaggerated promises regarding its near-term performance and too many unrealistic forecasts (Metz et al., 2005; Muradov and Vezirolu, 2012). During the next two decades it should become clear if effective (and affordable) decarbonization of large stationary sources is a practical solution, or if the best way to decarbonize is to keep changing the make-up of the primary energy supply. Chapter 6 Material Outlook Those readers who have persevered (and have, along the way, complained about too many numbers) have now reached the point where they should be impressed by the magnitude and complexity of the global material edifice erected by modern civilization since the middle of the nineteenth century, and no less so by the magnitude of incessant material flows required to operate and maintain it.

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5.1 Apparent Dematerializations 5.2 Relative Dematerializations: Specific Weight Reductions 5.3 Consequences of Dematerialization 5.4 Relative Dematerialization in Modern Economies 5.5 Declining Energy Intensities 5.6 Decarbonization and Desulfurization Chapter 6: Material Outlook 6.1 Natural Resources 6.2 Wasting Less 6.3 New Materials and Dematerialization 6.4 Chances of Fundamental Departures Appendix A: Units and Unit Multiples Units Used in the Text Unit Multiples Submultiples Appendix B: US Material Production, GDP and Population, 1900–2005 Appendix C: Global Population, Economic Product, and Production of Food, Major Materials, and Fuels 1900–2010 Appendix D: Global Energy Cost of Major Materials in 2010 Appendix E Decarbonization and Desulfurization of Global Fossil Fuel Supply, 1900–2010 Decarbonization and Desulfurization of the World's Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES), 1900–2010 References Index This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Registered office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.

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Studies show their effects ranging from negligible (less than 5% increase) to substantial, with more than a 50% rise in specific energy consumption – and there is even greater uncertainty about indirect rebound, that is, on spending the income freed by savings on products or services that are equally or even more energy-intensive, particularly on a nationwide scale (IRGC, 2013). 5.6 Decarbonization and Desulfurization Decarbonization of national and global energy supply – a gradual shift toward burning fuels with lower carbon content and generating more primary electricity – can be seen as a form of dematerialization that is particularly welcome from the environmental point of view because it reduces specific emissions of CO2, the most important greenhouse gas, as well as the generation of acidifying sulfur and nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

The protesters were joined by Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez called for the creation of a select committee in the incoming House tasked with the mission of creating a “Green New Deal” for America. The committee would set a one-year deadline to create an industrial plan to address climate change, decarbonize the economic infrastructure within ten years, create new business opportunities, and employ millions of disadvantaged workers in an emerging green economy—a bold “aspirational” proposal far beyond anything yet put forward by America’s cities, counties, and states.5 In the new term, congressional leadership equivocated on the proposal and ultimately established a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis with little power to act.

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PART I THE GREAT DISRUPTION The Decoupling Stampede and Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets 1 IT’S THE INFRASTRUCTURE, STUPID! We need a Green New Deal economic vision for America and the world. It must be compelling and executable in big cities, small towns, and rural communities. And it will have to be deployed quickly and scaled within twenty years or so if we are to meet the deadline of decarbonizing the global economy and reenergizing it with green electricity and accompanying sustainable services. We should step back, then, and ask the question, “How do the great economic paradigm shifts in history emerge?” If we know how they occur, governments everywhere can draw up roadmaps to deliver the Green New Deal.

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Just as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement have captured the attention of the country with an urgent “slap in the face” reality check, that feeling and sense of urgency surfaced across the European Union more than a decade ago. The EU was on the move. By 2007, Europe had surpassed the United States and become the “idea factory” and deployment engine for decarbonizing society. That year, the EU was finalizing the 20-20-20 formula, binding the EU member states to the Great Disruption that would bring on an ecological age. These new protocols required all EU member states to increase their energy efficiency by 20 percent, reduce their global warming emissions by 20 percent (based on 1990 levels), and increase their generation of renewable energies by 20 percent by the year 2020, making the EU the first major political power to establish a formal, legally binding commitment to address climate change and transform the economy of hundreds of millions of citizens.1 I’ll come back to the history of this path-changing event and what has happened since in the coming pages.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

The Dutch Energiesprong whole-house refurbishment is not cheap but wraps homes in insulated panels that snap on easily like Lego. Thermal wallpaper, which can be decorated over, is another option. Fully decarbonizing means replacing (and electrifying) inefficient heating and cooling systems, which are, in turn, responsible for more than half of a building’s energy use, in addition to hot water and lighting. Heat pumps can be placed under parks, public squares, roads, rivers and canals in every city to heat and cool buildings. The city of Ithaca in New York has raised $100 million through an innovative investment programme to decarbonize all of its buildings while creating new jobs by 203012 – something more cities could try.

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Yet, by 2100 we are expected to use seven times more energy than today – partly because as poor rural people migrate to cities, they use more energy. Decarbonizing the world’s energy is the work of the next two to three decades. By the time my kids are in their thirties, this energy problem should have been solved. The problem is at once overwhelmingly enormous, but also solvable within the lifetime of most mortgages. The first step is to decarbonize electricity production; the next is to power everything possible with electricity. Meanwhile, we need to capture any greenhouse gases created in the production of energy.

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Kung peoples; lack of water resources; low levels of migration to; migration from as relatively low; poor infrastructure and city planning; population rise in; rainfall due to Indian irrigation; remittances from urban migrants; and restoring of planet’s habitability; Transaqua Project of water diversion; transatlantic slave trade; transport infrastructure in; urbanization in African Union agoraphobia AI and drone technology aid, development/foreign air-conditioning/cooling airships or blimps Alaska algae Aliens Act (UK, 1905) Alps, European Amazon region Americas Anatolia Anchorage, Alaska Anderson, Benedict animals/wildlife; global dispersal of; impact of fires on; impact of ice loss on see also livestock farming Antarctica; ice sheet Anthropocene era; four horsemen of Aravena, Alejandro Archaeology architecture/buildings: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; energy-efficiency retrofits; floating infrastructure; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-carbon concrete; prefabricated and modular housing; in successful migrant cities; wooden skyscrapers; zero-carbon new-builds Arctic region; first ice-free summer expected; opening up of due to climate change Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia: cities vulnerable to climate change; drought-hit areas; extreme La Niña events; extreme precipitation in monsoon regions; Ganges and Indus river basins; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; huge populations of South Asia; lack of water resources; rivers fed by glaciers; small hydropower installations; urbanization Aswan High Dam asylum-seekers: Australia’s dismal record on; Britain’s proud history on; dominant hostile narratives about; drownings in English Channel; limbo situation due to delayed claim-processing; misinformation about see also refugees Athens Australia: Black Summer (2019–20); energy-supply economy; impact of climate emergency; indigenous inhabitants; low population density in; migration to; and mineral extraction in Greenland; renewable power in; treatment of asylum-seekers; White Australia Policy aviation Aztecs Babylon bacteria, in food production bamboo Bangkok Bangladesh; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; Burmese Rohingya refugees; impact of climate emergency; migration across Indian border; population density in; relocation strategies; training for rural migrants Bantu people Barber, Benjamin Barcelona Beckett, Samuel Belarus Belgium Bergamo, Italy Bhutan Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam) biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; coral reefs as probably doomed; crash in insect and bird populations; depletion of fish stocks; due to agriculture; due to farming; four horsemen of the Anthropocene; and human behaviour; Key Biodiversity Areas; links with climate change; and marine heatwaves; and overuse of fertilizers; restoring of; species extinction; and urban adaptation strategies see also environmental sustainability bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) biotech industry birds black soldier flies black-footed ferrets BoKlok (IKEA spinoff) Bolivia Borneo Bosch, Carl Boston, Massachusetts Boulder, Colorado Brazil Brexit Brin, Sergey British Columbia Brown, Pat bureaucracy Burke, Marshall Burma business/private sector Cairo California; forest fires in Cambodia Cameroon Canaan Canada; and charter cities model; Climate Migrants and Refugee Project; economic benefits from global heating; expansion of agriculture in; first carbon-neutral building in; forest fires in; indigenous populations; infrastructure built on permafrost; regional relocation schemes Capa, Robert, capitalism Caplan, Bryan Caprera (Italian warship) carbon capture/storage; BECCS; ‘biochar’ use in soil; carbon capture and storage (CCS); direct capture from the air; by forests; in grasslands; Key Biodiversity Areas; in oceans; by peatlands; by phytoplankton; vegetation as vital carbon pricing/taxing carbon/carbon dioxide: amount in atmosphere now; Arrhenius’ work on; and biomatter decay in soil, ‘carbon quantitative easing’; continued emitting of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in tropical rainforests Carcassonne, France Card, David Cardiff Castro, Fidel Çatalhöyük, ancient city of Central African Republic Central America Chad ‘char people’ charcoal (‘biochar’) Chicago children: childcare costs; deaths of while seeking safety; ‘invisible’/living on the margins; left behind by migrant parents; and move to cities; numbers at extreme risk; in refugee camps; and sense of ‘belonging’ Chile China: adaptation for heavy rainfall events; Belt and Road Initiative; cities vulnerable to climate change; demography; desertification of farmland in north; economic domination of far east; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; extreme La Niña events; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou mega-region; hukou system; integrated soil-system management; internal migration in; migrant workers in Russia’s east; and mineral extraction; net zero commitment; small hydropower installations; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; ‘special economic zones’; Uyghur Muslim communities in; and water scarcity; ‘zhuan‘ documents Chinatowns Churchill (town in Manitoba) Churchill, Winston cities: adapting to net-zero carbon economy; city state model; coastal cities; as concentrated nodes of connectivity; ‘consumption cities’ in Africa; control of migration by; deadly urban heat; demand for cooling; devolving power to communities; in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Europe; entrenched assets; and extreme flood risk; flood defences; as focal points for trade networks; food production in; genetic impacts of; in high altitude locations; large megacities; merging into mega-regions; as particularly vulnerable to climate change; phased abandonment of; population densities in; private gardens in; relocation of; relocation strategies within; sprawling shanty towns in; strategies against impact of heat; zero-carbon new-builds see also migrant cities; migration, urban citizenship; patriotism of welcomed migrants; ‘UN/international passport’ idea Clemens, Michael climate change, historic: Cretaceous–Palaeogene meteorite impact event; in late-bronze-age Near East; and migration; in Miocene Era; and transition to farming climate change/emergency; 3–5° C as most likely scenario; as affecting all of Earth; cities as particularly vulnerable to; destruction of dam infrastructure; enlisting of military/security institutions against; every tenth of a degree matters; extreme weather events; global climate niches moving north; global water cycle as speeding up; greenhouse gas emissions as still growing; impact of cities; impact on lives as usually gradual; inertia of the Earth’s climate system; lethality by 2100; links with biodiversity loss; near-universal acceptance of as human made; net zero pledges; Paris Agreement (2015); path to 3–4° C-hotter world; situation as not hopeless; slow global response to; as threat multiplier; warming as mostly absorbed by oceans see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; drought; fires; floods; heat climate models: future emissions scenarios; heating predictions; impact of 4° C-hotter world; IPCC ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs); optimum climate for human productivity; threshold for mass migrations coastal areas: coastal cities; migration from; retreating coastlines; seawater desalination plants cochineal scale insect Colombia colonialism, European Colorado Columbia Concretene construction industry copper coral reefs Cornwall Costa Rica cotton Covid-19 pandemic; cooperation during cross-laminated timber (CLT) Crusaders Cruz, Abel Cuba cultural institutions/practices: cultural losses over time; diversity as improving innovation; migration of; in well-planned migrant cities cyclones Cyprus Czech workers in Germany Dar es Salaam Death Valley Delhi Democratic Republic of Congo demographic changes/information: and decline of nationality viewed in racial terms; depopulation crisis; elderly populations in global north; GenZ; global climate niches moving north; global population patterns; global population rise; ‘household formation’; huge variation in global fertility rates; migrants as percentage of global population; population fall due to urban migration; population-peak projection; post-war baby boom; and transition to farming Denmark Denver, Colorado desert conditions Dhaka Dharavi (slum in Mumbai) diet and nutrition: edible seeds of sea grasses; genetically engineered microbes; global disparities in access to nutrition; and Haber–Bosch process; insects as source of protein and fats; loss of nutrition due to heat stress of crops; move to plant-based diet; vitamin D sources; zinc and protein deficiencies dinosaurs direct air capture (DAC) disease; waterborne Doha Domesday Book (1086) Driscolls (Californian berry grower) drone technology drought; as affecting the most people; in Amazon region; impact on farming; in late-bronze-age Near East; and rivers fed by glaciers; and sulphate cooling Dubai Duluth, Minnesota Dunbar, Robin economies; Chinese domination of far east; economic growth; forced move towards a circular economy; GDP per capita measure; Global Compact for Migration; global productivity losses due to heat; immigrant-founded companies; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; migration as benefitting; mining opportunities exposed by ice retreat; and nation state model; need to open world’s borders; new mineral deposits in northern latitudes; northern nations benefitting from global heating; ‘special economic zone’ concept; taxing of robots see also employment/labour markets; green economy; political and socioeconomic systems; trade and commerce education: availability to migrants; as key to growth; and remittances from urban migrants; systems improved by migration Egypt; Ancient electricity: current clean generation as not sufficient; decarbonizing of production; electric vehicles; grid systems; hydroelectric plants; and net zero world; renewable production Elwartowski, Chad employment/labour markets: amnesties of ‘illegal’ migrants; and arguments against migration; and automation; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen-style scheme; occupational upgrading of locals due to immigration; refugees barred from working; role of business in migrant integration; rural workers moving to cities; skilled migrants; support/access for migrants; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in USA; workforce shortages in global north energy systems: access to in global south; air-conditioning/cooling demand; and carbon capture; ‘closed-loop’ radiator construction; decarbonizing of; and economic growth; geothermal production; global energy use as increasing; new dam-construction boom in south; nuclear power; oceans as source; poor grid infrastructure in global south; power outages; power sharing as not equitable; reducing growth in demand; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; transmission/transport see also electricity English Channel Environmental Protection Agency, US environmental sustainability: decarbonizing measures; decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions; and economic growth; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-energy plastic recycling methods; and migrant cities; need for open mind in planning for; phytoplankton as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to movement; Mediterranean climate moving north; migrant indentured labour in; migration of women working in domestic service; small hydropower installations; three mass migrations in Stone and Bronze Ages European Union: free movement within; fund for aid to Africa; Green New Deal; no ‘asylum crisis’ within; nuclear power in; open-border policy for refugees from Ukraine; as popular migrant destination; seeks quota system for refugees; as successful example of regional union; war against migrants Fairbourne (Welsh village) farming: in abandoned areas in south; in Africa; ancient transition to; bad harvests as more frequent; barns/storehouses; benefits of warming in Nordic nations; biodiversity loss due to; cereal crops; closing the yield gap; early nineteenth century expansion of; ever-decreasing, sub-divided plots of land; expanded growing seasons; fertile land exposed by ice retreat; genetic research to produce new crops; genetically modified crop varieties; global disparities in food production; Green Revolution; greenhouse gas emissions from; in Greenland; Haber–Bosch process; heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crops; high-yielding wheat and rice variants; impact of climate emergency; indoor industrial systems; modern improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations: artisanal fishers; boost of in Arctic region; and decommissioned offshore oilrigs; fish farming; future pricing of fish products; as under huge pressure; insects as farmed-fish feed; land-based fish-farming Five Points slum, New York floods; flash floods; low-lying islands and atolls; sea walls/coastal defences; three main causes; in urban areas; water-management infrastructure Florida food: algal mats; carbon-pricing of meat; impact of soaring global prices; insect farming; kelp forest plantations; lab-grown meats; meat substitutes; for migrant city dwellers; move to plant-based diet; need for bigger sources of in global north; need to cut waste; photosynthesizing marine plants and algae; plant-based dairy products; reduced supplies due to temperature rises; refrigerated storage; replication of Maillard chemical reaction; sourced from the oceans see also diet and nutrition; farming; livestock farming food security Ford, Henry forests: advance north of in Nordic nations; deforestation; impact of climate emergency; ‘negative emissions activity’; replanting of; Siberian taiga forest fossil fuels; carbon capture and storage (CCS); as embedded in human systems France Fraser, Sean freedom of movement French Polynesia Friedman, Patri Gargano, Gabriele gas industry Gates, Bill gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide; solar radiation reduction tools; sulphate cooling concept; thin-film technology; tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth geology GERD dam, Ethiopia Germany; Syrian refugee resettlement in Ghana Glasgow climate meeting (2021) Global Parliament of Mayors global south; benefit of solar cooling idea; capital costs of deploying new renewables; cutting of food waste in; future repopulation of abandoned regions; global income gap as rising; little suitable landmass for climate-driven migration; migration to higher elevations with water; need for improved infrastructure; need for sustainable economic growth; new dam-construction boom in; new domestic sources of energy; population rise in; remittances from urban migrants; resource extraction by rich countries; and vested interests in the rich world see also Africa; Asia; Latin America and entries for individual nations golf courses Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Gothenburg Grand Inga hydroelectric dam project (Congo River) Granville, Earl grasslands Great Barrier Reef Great Lakes region, North America Greece; Ancient green economy; and building of fair societies; Green New Deals; migration as vital to; multiple benefits of see also environmental sustainability; renewable power production; restoring our planet’s habitability greenhouse gas emissions; charging land owners for; in cities; emitters trying to avoid/delay decarbonization; from farming; national emissions-reductions pledges; underreporting of; unfair global impact of see also carbon/carbon dioxide Greenland; ice sheet; potato farming in Gulf states Haber, Fritz Hangzhou Hawaii health: climate change as threat multiplier; dementia care; diseases of poor sanitation; healthcare in successful migrant cities; heat related inequalities; lethality of extreme heat; and life in cities; mental illness and migration; migration as benefitting social care systems; pathogens in frozen tundras; rural living as single largest killer today; and smoke pollution heat: 35°C wet bulb threshold crossed; climate model predictions; cloud and water vapour feedbacks; combined with humidity; and demand for cooling; extreme hotspots; global productivity/work hour losses; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact on farming/food supplies; infrastructure problems due to; lethality by 2100; lethality of extreme temperatures; Paris pledge of below 2°C; solar radiation reduction tools; subtropical climate spreading into higher latitudes; temperatures above 50°C; threshold for mass migrations; ‘threshold of survivability’; urban adaptation strategies; urban heat island effect; ‘wet bulb’ temperature calculations Held, David Hernando, Antonia HIV Höfn, southeastern Iceland Holocene epoch Honduras Hong Kong horses, domestication of housing: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; controlled by city authorities; equitable access to; floating infrastructure; in flood-affected areas; and heat related inequalities; and migrants; planning and zoning laws; policies to prevent segregation; prefabricated and modular; twentieth-century social programmes see also slum dwellers Hudson Bay Huguenot immigrants human rights, universal Hungary hunter-gatherers hurricanes hydrogen ice age, last ice loss; as accelerating at record rate; in Antarctica; in Arctic region; artificial reflective snow idea; artificial sill proposals; and flash floods; loss of glaciers; permafrost thaw; reflective fleece blankets idea; retreat of ice sheets; rising of land due to glaciers melting; tipping points for ice-free world Iceland ICON, construction company identity: accentuation of small differences; and ancient transition to farming; borders as ‘othering’ structures; language as tool of self-construction; mistrust of outsiders; pan-species; sense of ‘belonging’; social norms of ‘tribe’; social psychology; stories crafting group identity see also national identity immigration policies: bilateral or regional arrangements; deliberately prejudicial policy; development of since later nineteenth-century; and harnessing migrant potential; immigrant inclusion programmes; immigration lottery schemes; move needed from control to managing,; points-based entrance systems; poorly designed; quota systems; responses to terrorist incidents; restrictions as for people not stuff; restrictive border legislation; Spain’s successful policy Impossible Foods India; crop irrigation in; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; falling fertility rate in; Ganges Valley; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; impact of climate emergency; internal migration in; lime-washing of roofs in; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); National River Linking Project; population density in; young population in indigenous communities Indo-European language Indonesia industrial revolution inequality and poverty: and access to reliable energy; benefit of solar cooling to south; climate change as threat multiplier; climate migration and social justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient transition to farming; as matter of geographical chance; migration as best route out of; and modern farming; and national pride; need for redistributive policies; the poor trapped in vulnerable cities; and post-war institutions; rural living as single largest killer today; slow global response to crisis of; superrich and private jets; tribalism as not inevitable; and vested interests in the rich world insects; collapsing populations; farming of; as human food source insulation insurance, availability of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Labour Organization Iquique (Chile) Ireland iron, powdered Islam islands, small/low-lying Israel Italy Ithaca, city of (New York) Jakarta Japan Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Jordan kelp Kenya Khan, Sadiq Khoisan Bushmen Kimmel, Mara King, Sir David Kiribati knowledge and skills: better environment for in rich countries; ‘brain drain’ issue; channelled through migrant networks; diversity as improving innovation; global knowledge transfer; Global Skill Partnerships model; impact of European colonialism; migrants returning to origin countries; and Nansen-style schemes; need for rapid transference of; and points-based entrance systems Kodiak Island, Alaska krill Kuba Kingdom, West Africa !

The Rare Metals War
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 15 Feb 2020

Like demigods, we have carved out a multitude of applications in two fundamental areas of the energy transition: supposedly ‘green’ technologies and digital technologies. Today, we are assured that the convergence of the two will create a better world. The first examples of this convergence (wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars) are packed with rare metals to produce decarbonised energy that travels through high-performance electricity grids to enable power savings. Yet these grids are also driven by digital technology that is heavily dependent on these same metals. (See Appendix 11 for the main industrial applications of rare metals.) Jeremy Rifkin, a leading US theorist of this energy transition and the resulting third industrial revolution, takes this a step further.7 He writes that the crossover of green technologies and new technologies of information and communication (NTIC) already enables each of us to abundantly and inexpensively generate and share our own ‘green’ electricity.

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Winchester, Simon, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the birth of modern geology, HarperCollins, 2001 Essential reading: reports Arndt, Nicholas (Institute of Earth Sciences), Augé, Thierry (French Geological Survey) and Cuney, Michel (Geo-Resources Laboratoire of the Université de Lorraine), ‘Les Ressources minerals en Chine’, July 2014 ‘The Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy: achieving US national security objectives in a changing environment’, US Department of Defense, 2015 ‘Commission on Limits of Continental Shelf Meeting at Headquarters, 11 July–26 August’, Background release, United Nations (UN), 11 July 2016 Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions on the 2017 list of Critical Raw Materials for the EU ‘Critical Metals in the Path towards the Decarbonisation of the EU Energy Sector’, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, 2013 ‘Defense Science Board Task Force on High Performance Microchip Supply’, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2005 ‘Les dessous du recyclage: dix ans de suivi de la filière des déchets électriques et électroniques en France’, rapport Les Amis de la Terre France, December 2016 Draft Critical Mineral List — Summary of Methodology and Background Information — U.S.

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These fifteen metals are antimony, tin, lead, gold, zinc, strontium, silver, nickel, tungsten, bismuth, copper, boron, fluorite, manganese, and selenium. The five additional metals are rhenium, cobalt, iron ore, molybdenum, and rutile. See ‘De surprenantes matières critiques’ [‘Surprising Critical Materials’], L’Usine nouvelle, 10 July 2017. ‘Critical Metals in the Path towards the Decarbonisation of the EU Energy Sector’, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, 2013. Interview with John Petersen, 2017. ‘Dwindling Supplies of Rare Earth Metals Hinder China’s Shift from Coal’, TrendinTech, 7 September 2016. An eventuality not ruled out by Vivian Wu, who saw it as a ‘fine’ idea for China to keep all its rare-earth resources to itself.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince
Published 19 Oct 2014

With global temperatures almost certain to exceed the 2°C of warming this century that scientists consider ‘safe’ for humanity, quick-cooling options look increasingly attractive. Deflecting the sun’s energy back into space would do nothing to counteract the ocean acidification effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide – which I’ll come to later – but it is a valuable way of buying time while societies decarbonise, adapt to warmer conditions and new climates, and figure out an effective and efficient way of removing the carbon dioxide we’ve put into the atmosphere. Some engineers are proposing erecting Earth-orbiting space mirrors that would bounce sunlight back out before it even enters our atmosphere.

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Perhaps it is because the intent is so explicit; although humans are artificially warming the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions, the intent behind burning fossil fuels has always been to produce energy, not to warm the planet. Some argue that even research in this area should be banned because it implies intent to carry out the practice; others say that it draws effort away from climate-change mitigation – from decarbonising our energy production. But surely freedom of inquiry should be preserved – carrying out scientific research into whether something would work and what its consequences might be does not make a scientist an advocate for deployment, and there are scientific questions that need to be answered, such as the impact on rainfall, and whether or not it would even be technologically possible, before society can start to decide whether or not to deploy such techniques.

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‘We need to educate people and bring some of the more isolated villages into the twenty-first century so that they are better able to deal with the challenges ahead, whether that be moving to another island or country,’ he says. For oceans as much as anywhere, the extent of change in the Anthropocene depends on us – on how poor people develop their economies, on how rich people reduce their environmental impact. Anni is uniquely attempting to decarbonise the country’s energy supply and heed environmental limits while industrialising. It’s a brave decision, I say; perhaps unnecessarily painful . . . ? Anni interjects sharply: ‘No, it is the only way to progress. We have no choice. It is brave – foolhardy even – to build power stations using fossil fuels when we know it is making things worse for the climate, for sea levels.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

There are a handful of places that touch on episodes in the previous book, but the narrative in this one makes an ascent across new terrain. Were it not for its impact on industrialized societies’ reliance on hydrocarbon energy, theories of man-made climate change would principally be of limited academic interest. In fact, these theories were first politicized precisely because of the demands they make to decarbonize energy. Sweden debuted global warming as part of its war on coal when Al Gore was still at law school. It was meant to have ushered in an age of nuclear power. The reason it didn’t, instead becoming an age of wind and solar, is principally because of Germany. Despite being Europe’s premier industrial economy, German culture harbors an irrational, nihilistic reaction against industrialization, evident before and during the Nazi era.

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A former Jesuit, he is chief economist at Schellnhuber’s Potsdam Institute and research director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, an outfit supported by the Mercator Foundation, which also funded the Essen conference. Since 2008, Edenhofer has been co-chair of the IPCC working group III on climate policy, a position deemed so important that, when first created, the United States insisted it be chaired by a U.S. government official. At Essen, Edenhofer spoke of a strategy of deep decarbonization of the world economy.30 The term would be picked up and used by the Obama White House when it announced its climate and energy agreement with China in November 2014.31 The anticapitalist agenda of the Great Transformation was unmistakeable. Hermann Ott, a former Greenpeace activist, now a Green member of the German federal parliament and also linked with Mercator, talked of the need to “break down the last resistance of the big oil and chemical companies.”32 The German press noted the conference’s huge political implications.

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Industrialized nations could achieve the other half by “revisiting the nuclear power option,” and advanced biomass conversion technologies could be deployed in the developing world, something that would encourage reforestation.4 Wind and solar were not mentioned in the final conference document. It would take the best part of two decades for wind and solar to become de rigueur as the principal tool of decarbonization, a function they are ill-equipped to perform. The Toronto climate conference had set out a general approach: “to internalize externalized costs and thereby consider the costs of the energy systems in their broadest sense.”5 “Here’s a hunch,” The Economist editorialized in May 1989. Within the next half-century the governments of many industrial countries will raise perhaps one-fifth of their revenues from taxes and charges on pollution.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

A new international climate bank is required to provide the funding required for states in the poor world to protect their people from the effects of climate breakdown today and support decarbonization over the long run.76 Like the domestic national investment banks proposed above, the climate bank should be both democratic and representative, with every state being given an equal vote. Decarbonizing the world economy will require new funding as well as additional finance. We need a new Marshall Plan for decarbonization, whereby rich states transfer funds, as well as skills and technologies, to states in the Global South to facilitate the transition to net zero.

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As the “universal owners” of most of the world’s largest companies, the Big Three should be less interested in “the performance of each individual firm it owns” and more interested in “the performance of the economy as a whole.”126 The argument that people like Fink could become the guardians of a new, responsible “stakeholder capitalism” is a familiar one, which has been promoted by organizations like the World Economic Forum—host of the annual Davos economic conference.127 Advocates of this perspective tacitly acknowledge that corporations and financial institutions have the power to plan our lives, while pleading with them to do so in the general interest.128 In 2020, Larry Fink wrote a strongly worded letter to the CEOs of the world’s largest companies stating that BlackRock would be using its power as a major shareholder to pressure these firms into becoming carbon neutral by 2050.129 But beneath Fink’s alleged commitment to decarbonization, BlackRock has voted with management against the majority of shareholder resolutions in favor of decarbonization. Academic research has shown that, most of the time, the Big Three “generally vote with management.”130 And BlackRock has now said it plans to vote against most climate motions put forward by activist shareholders as they are becoming too “prescriptive.”131 Stakeholder capitalism is a kind of “autocritique” of capitalism by capitalists themselves.

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As we have seen, many of the challenges faced by businesses in a capitalist economy take the form of collective action problems. When a crisis like climate breakdown threatens capitalism’s very foundations, private businesses must coordinate to respond. In more competitive economies, such coordination is difficult. If every business leader agreed to decarbonize, a few less responsible companies could edge ahead of their competitors by continuing to use fossil fuels. It’s up to capitalist states to solve these problems by forcing capitalists to cooperate. Whether the state is levying taxes to reduce inequality, investing in infrastructure, or employing workers during a recession, state institutions act as an organizing and coordinating force in nominally free-market economies.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Relative death rate from nuclear vs. fossil fuels: Kharecha & Hansen 2013; Swain et al. 2015. A million deaths a year from coal: Morton 2015, p. 16. 83. Nordhaus & Shellenberger 2011. See also note 76 above. 84. Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project 2015. Deep decarbonization of the United States: Williams et al. 2014. See also B. Plumer, “Here’s What It Would Really Take to Avoid 2°C of Global Warming,” Vox, July 9, 2014. 85. Deep decarbonization of the world: Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project 2015; see also the preceding note. 86. Nuclear power and the psychology of fear and dread: Gardner 2008; Gigerenzer 2016; Ropeik & Gray 2002; Slovic 1987; Slovic, Fischof, & Lichtenstein 1982. 87.

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Some fourth-generation nuclear technologies are shovel-ready, but are trussed in regulatory green tape and may never see the light of day, at least not in the United States.95 China, Russia, India, and Indonesia, which are hungry for energy, sick of smog, and free from American squeamishness and political gridlock, may take the lead. Whoever does it, and whichever fuel they use, the success of deep decarbonization will hinge on technological progress. Why assume that the know-how of 2018 is the best the world can do? Decarbonization will need breakthroughs not just in nuclear power but on other technological frontiers: batteries to store the intermittent energy from renewables; Internet-like smart grids that distribute electricity from scattered sources to scattered users at scattered times; technologies that electrify and decarbonize industrial processes such as the production of cement, fertilizer, and steel; liquid biofuels for heavy trucks and planes that need dense, portable energy; and methods of capturing and storing CO2

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Bituminous coal is mainly C137H97O9NS, with a ratio of 1.4 to 1; anthracite is mainly C240H90O4NS, with a ratio of 2.67 to 1. 68. Carbon-to-hydrogen ratios: Ausubel 2007. 69. Decarbonization: Ausubel 2007. 70. “Global Carbon Budget,” Global Carbon Project, Nov. 14, 2016, http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/. 71. Ausubel 2007, p. 230. 72. Carbon plateau, GDP rise: Le Quéré et al. 2016. 73. Deep decarbonization: Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project 2015; Pacala & Socolow 2004; Williams et al. 2014; http://deepdecarbonization.org/. 74. Carbon tax consensus: Arrow et al. 1997; see also “FAQs,” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/faqs/. 75.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

In the United States, where separate grids exist on the East and West Coasts and in Texas, the deployment of wind power has been slower, partly because the lack of a common grid makes it harder to generate power in Texas, where it is windy, and transport it to the East or West Coast, where renewable energy is in high demand. Germany, which embarked on an ambitious and expensive programme to decarbonise its electricity supply by investing in renewables, was stymied by the need to decommission its nuclear power plants. The problem was not one of physical capital but rather of social licensing and providing safety regimes that voters deemed acceptable—an intangible failure, not a tangible one. We see more intangible failure when we look beyond electricity generation. Energy experts tend to agree that the hard part of decarbonising an economy is not electricity generation but rather transport systems and domestic heating.

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Both problems share another feature: the curious gap between knowing how to solve them and actually doing so. Countries from Taiwan to Thailand have shown that the right policies can help to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths and the amount of economic damage. Likewise, detailed and credible plans for decarbonising the economy exist. But the gap between knowing and doing is wide, and most countries seem unable to bridge it. Another indication of fragility is the declining ability of central banks to offset economic shocks. In the nine US recessions leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by an average of 6.3 percentage points.2 In the United Kingdom, the cut was 5.5 percentage points in the five pre-COVID-19 recessions.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

As a paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics explained, “Whether the transition to a climate-neutral economy will improve or hurt growth is a quantitative issue. Unfortunately, we know too little about it.” While arguing that prosperity depends long-term on decarbonization, it said that over the next five to ten years, “decarbonization will inevitably reduce economic potential.” Figure 2: Emissions by Country/Region Global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion, by major country/region (2019) Source: IHS Markit based on IPCC methodology © IHS Markit 2020 The green deal got a jump start in an $825-billion anti-crisis package that von der Leyen introduced in May 2020.

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Yet, while energy transition has become a pervasive theme all around the world, disagreement rages, both within countries and among them, on the nature of the transition: how it unfolds, how long it takes, and who pays. “Energy transition” certainly means something very different to a developing country such as India, where hundreds of millions of impoverished people do not have access to commercial energy, than to Germany or the Netherlands. Solar and wind have become the chosen vehicles for “decarbonizing” electricity. Once “alternatives,” they are now mainstream. Yet, as their share of generation grows larger, they confront the challenge of “intermittency.” They can flood the grid with electricity when the sun shines and the wind blows, but then almost disappear when the day is cloudy or there is only a murmuring breeze.

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It was not necessarily against long-term contracts, but it wanted market-related pricing—that is, based on the short-term prices that emerged at the “trading hubs”—the places primarily in the UK and the Netherlands, where pipelines, LNG terminals, and gas trading converged. The EU also wanted contracts to be transparent to prevent what it defined as “anti-competitive” behavior, and it prohibited Gazprom from owning the pipes through which its gas moved across Europe.3 The second major thrust of the EU was around climate, aiming at decarbonization and efficiency and making a rapid march to renewable energy. At the forefront was Germany. Under the rubric of its Energiewende, or “energy turn,” Germany provided extensive subsidies for wind and solar development. Although not the intent, it also ended up indirectly providing large subsidies to Chinese solar companies, which became the main low-cost suppliers of solar panels to the world.

Smart Grid Standards
by Takuro Sato
Published 17 Nov 2015

Here, we will briefly outline the research approaches and the most important findings related to the role of variable generators in the future grid. 9.3.1.1 Decarbonizing Scenarios for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) This study was performed using the SWITCH model that has been developed by researchers in our Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California – Berkeley [16–18]. SWITCH is a capacity expansion and dispatch model developed to study policy options for decarbonizing the power sector in the entire geographic extent of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC). The model is a mixed-integer linear program whose objective function is to minimize the cost of meeting electricity demand between the present day and some future time, say the year 2030.

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Such capability may be able to reduce the worry about the customer-side generators. 10.2.3 Affordable Service No one would expect that adding information and communication technologies, building new generating technologies, and providing better service could come at no cost. But, as usual, we expect electricity services to be affordable. According to various studies exploring options for decarbonizing the power grid, building the cleaner version of today’s grid costs a lot of money over a long period [1–4]. Nevertheless, many planning studies have shown that under almost all scenarios, the cost per unit of electricity by the year 2050 does not show a significant change, from their base case decarbonized scenario [1–3]. Figure 10.1 presents the average generation by technology and the cost of electricity, for various scenarios discussed in Chapter 9, in the geographic region of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) of North America as estimated using the SWITCH model [1].

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It may be good to identify a few of the most probable local decarbonized scenarios and perform some heuristic and economic optimization modeling of those potential grids to identify the challenges, advantages, and possible policies that may help achieve that goal. Secondly, for effective and lowest-cost grid automation and design, it may also be helpful to know how new technologies such as electric vehicles, DRs, and distribution generators contribute to/impact the future grid. The above activities may help in identifying the algorithms to be developed, the best grid skeletons for the decarbonized grid, inform the type of local and network control framework, and so on.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
by Vaclav Smil
Published 4 May 2021

Indeed, these renewable sources have been advancing steadily and impressively: in 1992 they supplied only 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, and by 2017 they contributed 4.5 percent. But this means that, during those 25 years, more decarbonization of electricity generation was due to expanded hydroelectricity generation than to combined solar and wind installations. And because only about 27 percent of the world’s final energy consumption is electricity, these advances translate to a much smaller share of overall carbon reduction. But solar and wind electricity generation are now mature industries, and new capacities can be added quickly—increasing the pace of decarbonizing the electricity supply. In contrast, several key economic sectors depend heavily on fossil fuels and we do not have any non-carbon alternatives that could replace them rapidly and on the requisite massive scales.

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Large plastic blade of a modern wind turbine: difficult to make, more difficult to transport, even more difficult to recycle A lot of energy goes into making steel. Sintered or pelletized iron ore is smelted in blast furnaces, charged with coke made from coal, and receives infusions of powdered coal and natural gas. Pig iron (iron made in blast furnaces) is decarbonized in basic oxygen furnaces. Then steel goes through continuous casting processes (which turn molten steel directly into the rough shape of the final product). Steel used in turbine construction typically embodies about 35 gigajoules per ton. To make the steel required for wind turbines that might operate by 2030, you’d need fossil fuels equivalent to more than 600 million tons of coal.

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By 1900, as coal mining expanded and oil and gas production began in North America and Russia, biomass supplied half of the world’s primary energy; by 1950 it was still nearly 30 percent, and at the beginning of the 21st century it had declined to 12 percent, though in many sub-Saharan countries it remains above 80 percent. Clearly, it has taken a while to accomplish the transition from new carbon (in plant tissues) to old (fossil) carbon in coal, crude oil, and natural gas. We are now in the earliest stages of a much more challenging transition: the decarbonization of the global energy supply which is needed in order to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. Contrary to a common impression, this transition has not been proceeding at a pace resembling the adoption of cellphones. In absolute terms, the world has been running into—not away from—carbon (see running into carbon, this page), and in relative terms our gains remain in single digits.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

This target is a modest one. Presently, only 2 percent of publicly funded R&D is devoted to these challenges. Why shouldn’t the percentage be comparable to spending on medical or defence research? Bill Gates and other private philanthropists have pledged a parallel commitment. The impediment to ‘decarbonising’ the global economy is that renewable energy is still expensive to generate. The faster these ‘clean’ technologies advance, the sooner their prices will fall so they will become affordable to developing countries, where more generating capacity will be needed, where the health of the poor is jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and where there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations.

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The immediate aftermath of a nuclear incident is not the optimum time for a balanced debate. That is why this topic needs a new assessment now and wide dissemination of clear and appropriate guidelines. *   *   * What will actually happen on the climate front? My pessimistic guess is that political efforts to decarbonise energy production won’t gain traction, and that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase at an accelerating rate through the next twenty years, even if the Paris pledges are honoured. But by then we’ll know with far more confidence—from a longer time base of data, and from better modelling—just how strong the feedback from water vapour and clouds actually is.

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid
by Meredith. Angwin
Published 18 Oct 2020

People who are actually trying to figure out how to put more renewables on the grid seldom claim batteries are a significant portion of the answer for the intermittency problems of renewables. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford (Wind Water Solar) makes an assumption that there is more hydro available than is truly available, but he does not claim that batteries will make the difference. An article by Nestor Sepulveda, Jesse Jenkins, et al. discussed the path to deep decarbonization. (“Deep decarbonization” is a shorthand way to describe a very-low-emissions grid. It can also mean other ways of lowering greenhouse-gas emissions). Both of the lead authors on this paper were at MIT at the time. The Sepulveda paper describes how they modeled more than 900 scenarios.147 Their conclusion was that using only variable renewables plus energy storage would lead to wasteful overbuilding, with curtailment wasting huge amounts of renewable energy.

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With this eye-popping tour de force, author Meredith Angwin paints an infuriating portrait of fat-cat insiders making backroom deals to sweeten their profits even at the expense of the reliability of the grid they are supposedly entrusted with operating. Meanwhile, the public is left out of the loop and out in the cold. Essential reading for anyone interested in clean energy policy and decarbonization. — David Schumacher, Director of The New Fire Copyrighted Material Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid © 2020 by Meredith Angwin. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

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The Sepulveda paper describes how they modeled more than 900 scenarios.147 Their conclusion was that using only variable renewables plus energy storage would lead to wasteful overbuilding, with curtailment wasting huge amounts of renewable energy. However, if “firm low-carbon technologies,” such as nuclear and fossil with carbon capture and storage, were added to the mix, this would make deep decarbonization far easier and more cost effective. What do I mean by saying the Sepulveda paper described “wasteful overbuilding” and “huge amounts”? Those are my words, not from the paper, and I need to back up my statements with a few quotes from the paper itself. Overbuilding To quote the paper: “For zero-emissions cases without firm resources, the total required installed generation and storage-power capacity in each system would be five to eight times the peak system demand, compared with 1.3 to 2.6 times peak demand when firm resources are available.”

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

No major move toward electric road transport took place until the very end of the 20th century. In 1995 the California Energy Commission set the target of 2% of all new vehicles sold in the state to be electric in 1999, but no commercial electrics were actually sold (Lazaroff 2001). The outlook had finally shifted as a part of a broader quest for the decarbonization of energy supply. We are, finally, in the early stages of another epochal transition, from internal combustion engines to electric motors in road transport: more than a century after they were first widely seen as the best choice, electrics are finally ascendant. But it will take many decades to complete this transition (Smil 2017c).

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Recent advances in generating electricity from renewable sources, mostly by wind turbines and PV cells; relatively rapid adoption of electric vehicles in some countries; and the announcement of bold national plans for rapid transitions away from fossil fuels have raised many unrealistic expectations about the pace of future decarbonization. Similarly, recent advances in genomics and genetic engineering have raised hopes for an early exploitation of designed organisms (synthetic species) whose commercialization could help us to solve challenges ranging from nutrition to material production. And recent ceaseless claims about the progress of artificial intelligence and the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution lead many to believe that future in which machines will make people redundant is imminent.

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That appraisal concluded that basic physical needs (adequate nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity, and the elimination of extreme poverty) could be met for today’s more than 7 billion people without transgressing planetary boundaries—but reaching higher qualitative goals would require resources two to six times larger than the sustainable level based on current relationships. Decarbonization of energy supply Modern global civilization could not have been created without the transitions from traditional biomass energies and animate power to fossil fuels and inanimate prime movers powered by their combustion. This period of high dependence on fossil carbon began in the early years of the 20th century when coal began to supply more than half of the world’s primary energy.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans
by Mark Lynas
Published 3 Oct 2011

It is perhaps testament to our stupidity, however, that despite decades of research and advocacy on climate, all pointing at the need to control greenhouse gas production, human emissions today continue inexorably to rise. Thankfully the technologies and strategies that humanity needs to achieve the climate boundary are today no mystery. We have all the tools necessary to begin a wide-scale decarbonization of the global economy and to achieve this at the same time as both living standards and population numbers are rising rapidly in the developing world. But environmentalism will need to change at the same time. Much of what environmentalists are calling for will either not help much or is actually thwarting progress toward solving climate change.

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As the climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., writes in his 2010 book The Climate Fix, “if there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.” Greens may despair, but I think Pielke is right. The implication, however, is not that we are all doomed, but that any successful policy to decarbonize the global economy “must be designed such that economic growth and environmental progress go hand in hand.”54 In a related sense, although Greens often insist that energy is too cheap, this too is incorrect. Energy is actually too expensive, certainly for the 1.5 billion poor people in the world who lack access to electricity because they do not have the purchasing power to demand it.

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One suggestion, proposed by the Canadian economists Isabel Galiana and Chris Green, is for a low—say $5 per tonne—price on carbon, which would barely be noticed by consumers (and hence not attract political opposition) but could raise $150 billion globally per year for RD&D.79 An analogy might be the nuclear industry, which has to pay a small charge for each megawatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity toward eventual decommissioning costs. The airline industry, for example, could do the same, with a small fee per passenger or flight going to a technology fund that will find ways to decarbonize the industry and so reduce its damage to the atmosphere. Galiana and Green also suggest that this carbon price should rise gradually over time, sending a forward price signal to the energy markets. Another option is to remove the trading elements from cap and trade schemes like the European Emissions Trading Scheme, shifting the system into a simple auction of carbon credits with the proceeds allocated to an independently administered energy RD&D trust fund.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

The Socialist Calculation Debate Since the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and its acceleration following the end of the Cold War, economic planning at scale has been widely derided from right to center-left, and planned endeavors such as public healthcare have been under attack from marketization in most countries. In most jurisdictions, the electricity systems that were once in public hands have long since been privatized; therefore governments committed to efforts to decarbonize electricity companies have had little choice but to employ market mechanisms such as emissions trading or carbon taxation, rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions via democratic fiat—that is, simply ordering the electricity provider to switch to non-emitting fuel sources. Almost everywhere, transportation, communication, education, prisons, policing and even emergency services are being spun off wholly or in part from the public sector and provided instead by market actors.

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A vast build-out of dependable baseload electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric plants, supported by more variable renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar, could replace nearly all fossil fuels in short order, cleaning up the grid and delivering enough clean generation to electrify transport, heating, and industry. Decarbonizing agriculture is more complicated, and we still need better technology, but we understand the overall trajectory. Unfortunately, wherever these practices do not create profit, or do not create enough profit, companies will not put them in place. We hear regular reports claiming that investment in renewable energy is now outpacing investment in fossil fuels.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that while nuclear energy is clean and non-intermittent, and has a tiny land footprint, “without support from governments, investments in new … plants are currently generally not economically attractive within liberalized markets.” Private firms refuse to begin construction without public subsidies or guarantees. This explains why the most rapid decarbonization effort so far occurred before European market liberalization wrapped its fingers around the neck of its member-state economies. The French government spent roughly a decade building out its nuclear fleet, which now covers almost 40 percent of the nation’s energy needs. Similarly, to integrate intermittent renewables to their maximum potential, we would need to build load-balancing, ultra high-voltage, smart transmission “super-grids” that span continents or even the entire globe so as to shave off as much as possible their volatile swings.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

Meeting these targets before 2035, instead of 2050, would mean reducing carbon intensity of the economy by anything up to 18 per cent year on year, at least one hundred times faster than we are doing at the moment. Beyond 2050, with incomes still growing at 2 per cent a year, the challenge is only exacerbated. The economy in 2100 would have to be 30 times the size of today’s economy. And to all intents and purposes, nothing less than a complete decarbonisation of every single dollar would do. Even before the middle of the century, we will need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The long-run net carbon intensity of each dollar of economic output will have to be less than zero. What kind of economy is that? What are its consumption activities?

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Simplistic assumptions that capitalism’s propensity for efficiency will allow us to stabilise the climate or protect against resource scarcity are nothing short of delusional. The truth is that there is as yet no credible, socially just, ecologically sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for upwards of nine billion people. And the critical question is not whether the complete decarbonisation of our energy systems or the dematerialisation of our consumption patterns is technically feasible, but whether it is possible in our kind of society. The analysis in this chapter suggests that it is entirely fanciful to suppose that ‘deep’ emission and resource cuts can be achieved without confronting the structure of market economies.

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The same level of warmth (or thermal comfort), for instance, can be achieved in many different ways. In a well-insulated house, you can have comparable warmth with much lower consumption of oil or gas. And the critical point here is that lower consumption of oil or gas means fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Thinking in terms of services reveals new ways to decarbonise or dematerialise human activities. When the value proposition of enterprise revolves around the delivery of dematerialised services rather than the manufacture of material products, there is a huge potential to rethink the relationship between economic output and material throughput. ‘Servicization’, this strategy has sometimes been called.4 It’s vital to note that this is not simply another framing of the transformation to ‘service-based economies’ that has characterised development in the rich world over recent decades.

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future
by Chris Goodall
Published 1 Jan 2010

This book argues that we have reason for very considerable optimism. Each of the ten chapters looks at a technology or technique that could reduce CO 2 emissions by at least 10 percent of the annual world total. All of them are comfortably within our scientific and technological reach. So, to use that ugly phrase, we should be able to “decarbonize our economy” at an affordable price. In fact, we can implement many of the technologies in this book, such as zero-till farming or improved home insulation, today with no permanent increase in costs. They will improve incomes, make agricultural yields more reliable, or reduce household expenditure.

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But CSP has the very substantial advantage of being based on simple and easily reproducible technology. PV technology is still the exclusive preserve of a small number of very secretive companies, all understandably eager to protect their intellectual property. This doesn’t improve the chances that PV will grow fast enough to decarbonize the world’s electricity production any time soon. CSP has more of a following wind: many companies around the world should be able to install relatively efficient power plants. The Spanish construction companies currently leading the world have fewer technological advantages over potential competitors than First Solar or Nanosolar have in the field of photovoltaics.

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But Vattenfall itself has optimistically said that it eventually hopes to be able to drive the cost down to below $30 when it learns the lessons from its early plants. Others aren’t quite so optimistic, and analysts talk of costs of $45 to $60 for several decades to come. Whatever the correct number turns out to be, it represents the single most important figure in the policy-making debate about how to decarbonize the world economy. If the eventual carbon price is significantly above this figure, we know that power station operators will have good financial reason to install CCS equipment and will do so voluntarily. Much below this level and we can be quite sure that they won’t do it except under determined legislative attack.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

An increasing number of countries today fully understand that their development in the twenty-first century can and should be clean; that by decarbonizing their economies, they can reap the benefits of more jobs, cleaner air, more efficient transportation, more habitable cities, and more fertile lands. This shift toward a mindset of creating abundance does not negate the limitations of a carbon economy; instead, it gives every country a wealth of positive individual and collective reasons to stay within that limit. As one country moves forward demonstrating the national benefits of clean technologies and policies, others will follow, momentum will be built, and the global rate of decarbonization will increase, protecting the planet.

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Globally, governments spend about $600 billion every year keeping prices of fossil fuels artificially low.36 That’s around three times as much as subsidies provided for renewable energy.37 Governments may claim their administrations support renewable energy, but until they stop subsidizing fossil fuels, our progress will stall. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, famously said that unless we make a smooth transition from today’s fossil-fuel-based economy to the fully decarbonized economy we need in the future, at some point there will be a “jump to distress,”38 meaning that high-carbon assets will suddenly drop in value by a large percentage. Carney urged us to avoid that at all costs. When you think about how much of our economy is built on a foundation of fossil fuels, his prediction comes as no surprise.

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AI-informed energy grids can be much more decentralized, acting as neural networks, dynamically predicting what power is needed when. AI-informed grids would “intuitively” map supply and demand, flexing between storage and energy flow so that greater amounts of renewable energy can be produced, thus reducing gas and coal use, perhaps completely.80 AI is accelerating our decarbonization efforts in many other areas. Machine learning is being used to prevent the leakage of methane from gas pipelines, to accelerate the development of solar fuels (synthetic chemical fuels produced directly/indirectly from solar energy), to improve battery storage technologies, to optimize freight and transport for better efficiency, to reduce energy use in buildings, to plant forests using drones, and much more.81 AI is also showing promising signs of improving our ability to predict extreme weather and even of removing greenhouse gases directly from the air.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

A world population in 2100 of ten billion people is two and a half billion more—25 percent more—than the world population of 2017. Another way to say “limiting global warming” is to speak, as energy experts do, of “decarbonizing” the energy sources the world uses. Switching from coal to natural gas is decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal. Switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power produces greenhouse gases (GHG) only during construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning—about as much as solar power does.10 Both nuclear and solar generate only about 2 percent to 4 percent as much CO2 as a coal-fired power plant and about 4 percent to 5 percent as much as a natural-gas-fired power plant.11 Yet nuclear power development was slowed in 2017 in the wake of the third nuclear accident worldwide in more than forty years of development.

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It’s not, any more than renewable energy systems alone are. Every energy system has its advantages and disadvantages, as this excursion through four hundred years of energy developments should have made clear. And given the scale of global warming and human development, we will need them all if we are to finish the centuries-long process of decarbonizing our energy supply—wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas. As a harbinger of what’s coming, the Iranian city of Bandar Mahshar suffered a heat index—a measure of temperature and humidity combined—of 165°F (74°C) in August 2015. Temperatures in the Middle East in recent years have frequently exceeded 125°F.

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The Millennium Myth: Love and Death at the End of Time. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1997. Grübler, Arnulf. “Diffusion: Long-Term Patterns and Discontinuities.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 39 (1991): 159–80. ———. Technology and Global Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Grübler, Arnulf, and Nebojsa Nakicenovic. “Decarboning the Global Energy System.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 53 (1996): 97–110. Grübler, Arnulf, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, and David G. Victor. “Dynamics of Energy Technologies and Global Change.” Energy Policy 27 (1999): 247–80. Gugliotta, Angela. “Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Justice in the City: A Theme for Urban Environmental History.”

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
by Robert Bryce
Published 16 Mar 2011

That is, it has just 1 carbon atom for each 4 atoms of hydrogen. The inexorable decarbonization of the global economy is occurring because energy consumers are always seeking ever denser forms of energy to allow them to do ever greater and ever more precise amounts 284 GUSHER OF LIES of work. (Lasers are a prime example of this trend toward superconcentrated energy forms.) Jesse Ausubel, the director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University in New York City, said the trend toward decarbonization may waver for a decade or two as countries like India and China add massive amounts of new coalfired power plants, but “over the long term H gains in the mix at the expense of C, like cars replacing horses, colour TV substituting for black-and-white, or email gaining the market over hard copies sent through the post office.”84 Second, while the decarbonization trend is important, it’s just as important to realize that gas can be substituted for oil in many different applications.

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The growing global supplies of gas—and the demand that’s eager to make use of those supplies—are positive trends that should be encouraged for a number of reasons. First and foremost among them is that gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. It emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal and creates far fewer air pollutants.83 Environmentalists should applaud the increased use of natural gas, as it is part of the ongoing “decarbonization” of the world’s energy mix. This trend has been going on for about two centuries. And the trend can be understood from the ratio of carbon to hydrogen atoms in the most common fuels. From prehistory through, say, the 1700s and early 1800s, wood was the world’s most common fuel. Wood has a carbonto-hydrogen ratio (C:H) of 10 to 1.

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Jesse Ausubel, the director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University in New York City, said the trend toward decarbonization may waver for a decade or two as countries like India and China add massive amounts of new coalfired power plants, but “over the long term H gains in the mix at the expense of C, like cars replacing horses, colour TV substituting for black-and-white, or email gaining the market over hard copies sent through the post office.”84 Second, while the decarbonization trend is important, it’s just as important to realize that gas can be substituted for oil in many different applications. With some modifications, most standard automobiles can be converted to run on natural gas. Gas can be used to generate electricity and heat homes, and as a feedstock for an array of chemicals and other products.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published 15 Jan 2011

Schiphol airport is going to increase its volume by forty to fifty thousand flights a year and expand to six runways, which will make it a truly huge airport." Echoing Sips's call for systemic reform, Van Zist added that meeting the challenge of mitigation allowed for "only one option: we have to decarbonize our economies." But instead the Dutch have been slow to develop solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources. "All the visionary documents on this are okay—I've coauthored some of them—but the proof is where the rubber meets the road," sa id Van Zist. Complaining that the government has often reduced subsidies for alternative energy when short-term goals such as the Kyoto reductions appeared to be in sight, he argued, "That means the big industrial companies stop moving toward the larger goals.

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Schellnhuber did not favor relying on geoengineering to solve this problem; like many scientists, he believed it would "only make things worse." Right or wrong, that assumption meant that global greenhouse gas emissions had to fall at incredible speed. To have a two-out-of-three chance of meeting the 2°C target—"worse odds than Russian Roulette," Schellnhuber wryly observed—the world's leading economies had to decarbonize completely within ten to twenty years, according to the WBGU study. In other words, they had to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent within the next two decades. Specifically, the United States had to cut its emissions by 100 percent by 2020—in other words, quit carbon entirely within ten years.

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Indeed, I recalled Chinese officials lecturing me during my 1996–97 visit about the sanctity of the per-capita principle. "What do you expect us to do?" one asked rhetorically. "Go back to no heat in the winter?" But Schellnhuber explained that because China had already burned massive amounts of coal and had so many people, it had to decarbonize by 2035. Back in 2007, Chancellor Merkel surprised almost everyone when she endorsed the per-capita principle at the annual summit of the G8 nations, the only G8 leader to do so. Schellnhuber told me one reason Merkel had done so was that she was the daughter of a Protestant minister and fairness mattered to her.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

Many of the large companies that transport their goods on his ships have made sweeping net-zero commitments of their own that require them to get carbon shipping out of their supply chain. So they need Moller-Maersk to come up with a carbon-free solution. “We have moved away from thinking about decarbonization in terms of cost and capital expenditure investment to thinking about it equally as a market opportunity,” he said. Big business “is way ahead of the politicians on this issue.… We are not driven by regulations. Actually, we are trying to drive regulation forward so that we can maintain a level playing field as much as we possibly can.”10 Looking at the climate transition, not as a government-imposed cost but rather as a market-driven opportunity, is also leading financial firms to make sizable commitments to climate change.

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Develop internal governance mechanisms that introduce emissions as a steering mechanism and align the incentives of decision-makers with emission targets. In its report, BCG addresses the issue of cost, which is usually cited as the stumbling block—especially the passed-along cost to consumers—and revealed the surprising data that decarbonization can be less expensive at the end of any supply chain. As an example, consider the steel that goes into a midsize family car with a $35,000 sticker price. Producing steel is one of the most emissions-intensive activities in the supply chain. Producing zero-carbon steel can increase the steel makers’ costs significantly—by as much as 50% in some cases.

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In September 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced that Walmart was going to up its game beyond the sustainability measures it had been employing for more than fifteen years. Those measures had been triggered by Walmart’s engagement in helping the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. The goal now, he said, was to become a regenerative company. “Regenerating means restoring, renewing and replenishing in addition to conserving,” McMillon explained. “It means decarbonizing operations and eliminating waste along the product chain. It means encouraging the adoption of regenerative practices in agriculture, forest management and fisheries—while advancing prosperity and equity for customers, associates and people across our product supply chains. And, working with our suppliers, customers, NGOs and others, we hope to play a part in transforming the world’s supply chains to be regenerative.”14 As part of that plan, Walmart targeted zero emissions in the company’s global operations by 2040 and committed to helping to protect or restore fifty million acres of land and one million miles of ocean by 2030.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Air travel could apply this insight differently. Rather than shuffling through terminal buildings and speeding into onward journeys – eyes red, head pounding – passengers could sleep at the airport. Designs might range from sleeper pods in the arrival terminal to luxury sleeper coaches parked on the runway. The urgent need to decarbonize means that long-haul travel must think more creatively than simply making planes bigger, faster and more frequent. International hub airports have historically been most reliant on retail concessions from high-end shopping. In a world of more discretionary travel (and more online shopping), they will be the first to diversify their offering to satisfy a wider range of passenger needs.

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In coming up with this estimate, the appraisal had tragically assumed that we do not, indeed could not, work on trains.30 This leads us to wonder if the analysts had ever been on a train. In fact, they relied on a survey of travellers from the 1990s. Fortunately, the revised business case for HS2 accounts for a much wider range of benefits: increased capacity on regional lines, decarbonization from car passengers and freight switching to railways, and a much stronger strategic case for enabling employment growth as important organizations like HSBC and ­Channel 4 move their headquarters to Birmingham and Leeds. The revised Green Book takes another bold step beyond time savings by accounting for transport’s impact on the fluffy aspects of our existence: people’s well-being.

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Hopkinson and S. Cairns. 2021. Elite status: global inequalities in flying. Report, March, Inspiring Climate Action (https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1439908/elitestatusglobalinequalitiesinflying/2067509/). 14 M. Klöwer, D. Hopkins, M. Allen and J. Higham. 2020. An analysis of ways to decarbonize conference travel after COVID-19. Nature, 15 July, comment article (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02057-2). 15 We prefer the human-friendly term ‘dependable’ to the more statistical term ‘reliable’. One hundred percent of bus journeys being 10 minutes late is very different from ten percent of journeys being 100 minutes late.

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

We think we can do this without relying on raising taxes, or pursuing long-shots like global cooperation over the hidden wealth of oligarchs or on new wealth taxes, as proposed by economists around Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example. Thirdly, we want to finance a boom in sustainable investment that really begins the effort to decarbonize our economies. We can then use all of these policies to mitigate micro-stressors and empower individuals. Let’s start with one of the most innovative of these policies: a National Wealth Fund to tackle inequality. Before we do so however, it’s worth outlining what a measure of good policy is. Too many of the solutions on the table – like a global wealth tax – are non-starters from a tactical political standpoint.

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Some innovation by jurisdiction is required, but it can clearly be done. Central banks need to get cash into the hands of households instead of pursuing damaging experiments with negative interest rates. Let’s now discuss the second tool you’ve recommended that central banks should adopt, which could also be used to turbocharge investment in decarbonization and regional development: dual interest rates. What are dual interest rates, and how would they work? ERIC: Dual interest rates would allow central banks to separately target the rate of interest savers receive on their deposits and the rate borrowers pay on their loans. The best way to explain the power of dual interest rates is to contrast it with the current policies of negative interest rates.

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I have suggested, for example, that using its existing TFS scheme (the UK’s equivalent of the ECB’s TLTROs), the Bank of England could make 5-year loans available to UK banks at −2 per cent fixed interest rates, contingent on these loans being extended to the private sector at negative rates to fund investments in decarbonization such as wind energy. Wind power already accounts for as much as 25 per cent of UK energy generation – why not target 50 per cent or 75 per cent? Dual interest rates turn recession and low inflation into a huge opportunity to finance a boom in sustainable energy. My beef with Greta Thunberg is not with her ambition – it’s with her fear.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 5 Oct 2020

And they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonize. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion, a protection racket squeezing its victims; but the victims were the national populations, so in effect they were putting the squeeze on themselves. Or their elected politicians were putting the squeeze on them. So the situation was bizarre, both hard to define and constantly changing. So meetings kept happening. Mary kept on pushing the idea of creating the money to pay for decarbonization and all the necessary mitigation work. As the weeks passed and the global economy went from recession to depression, Dick almost convinced her that taxation might be a good enough tool to do the job all by itself.

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The Indian delegation arrived in force, and their leader Chandra Mukajee was excoriating in her denunciation of the international community and its almost complete failure to adhere to the terms of the agreement that every nation on Earth had signed. Reductions in emissions ignored, payment into investment funds that were to be spent on decarbonization not paid— in every way the Agreement had been ignored and abrogated. A performance without substance, a joke, a lie. And now India had paid the price. More people had died in this heat wave than in the entirety of the First World War, and all in a single week and in a single region of the world.

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Very digital themself. Esmeri Zayed. Third of the E gals. Jordanian Palestinian. Refugees, liaison to UNHCR. Rebecca Tallhorse, Canada. Indigenous peoples’ rep and outreach. Mary starts meeting by asking for new developments. Imbeni: Looking into plans to redirect fossil fuel companies to do decarbonization projects. Capabilities strangely appropriate. Extraction and injection both use same tech, just reversed. People, capital, facilities, capacities, all these can be used to “collect and inject,” either by way of cooperation or legal coercion. Keeps oil companies in business but doing good things.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

* * * — If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation—that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live. The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet. In 2018, the IPCC compared the necessary transformation to the mobilization of World War II, but global. It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.

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Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year.

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It also helps explain frustration with other leaders, from Justin Trudeau, who has seized the rhetorical mantle of climate action but also approved several new Canadian pipelines, to Angela Merkel, who has overseen an exhilarating expansion of Germany’s green energy capacity, but also retired its nuclear power so quickly that some of the slack has been taken up by existing dirty plants. To the average citizen of each of these countries, the criticism may seem extreme, but it arises from a very clearheaded calculus: the world has, at most, about three decades to completely decarbonize before truly devastating climate horrors begin. You can’t halfway your way to a solution to a crisis this large. In the meantime, environmental panic is growing, and so is despair. Over the last several years, as unprecedented weather and unrelenting research have recruited more voices to the army of environmental panic, a dour terminological competition has sprung up among climate writers, aiming to coin new clarifying language—in the mode of Richard Heinberg’s “toxic knowledge” or Kris Bartkus’s “Malthusian tragic”—to give epistemological shape to the demoralizing, or demoralized, response of the rest of the world.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside
by Dieter Helm
Published 7 Mar 2019

In national taxing and spending, this is the Treasury and the national budget.4 At the environmental level, the best way to entrench and manage the separation is in the creation of a Nature Fund. Looking after the future The helpful analogy here is with the sovereign wealth funds that many countries that are depleting non-renewable resources have set up. The poster example is Norway. It has abundant oil and gas that it is extracting now. These resources will run out, or if we decarbonise effectively, the market for them will fall away.5 It would be unfair for the current generation to reap all the benefits of the oil and gas production and for the next generation to get the global warming that results. It is a non-renewable resource. It can be used only once. So the Norwegians put the surplus economic rents into their sovereign wealth fund for the benefit of future generations.

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There is an opportunity to reduce Stamp Duty and use some of the reduction for the compensation payments, therefore leaving the total cost constant to the house buyer (but not to the developer). 4 Even local taxation is determined to a considerable extent by the Treasury. 5 In Burn Out I explain how the oil price is likely to fall as decarbonisation takes effect. Helm, D., Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels, London: Yale University Press, 2017. 6 www.nbim.no/­. 7 Stern, N., ‘The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review’, HM Treasury, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, January 2007. For my discussion of the objections to Stern’s approach to discounting, see Helm, D., The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – And How to Fix it, Revised and Updated, London: Yale University Press, 2015. 8 See Williams, B., Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 9 Two versions of aggregate natural capital rules are set out in my book Natural Capital.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

In 2007 Parliament passed a major climate-change bill that mandated a 26 percent reduction below 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by 2020, and a 60 percent cut by 2050. On the other hand, the Labour government has been adamant about its commitment to growth, arguing that efficiency, clean energy, and a market for carbon will do the trick. They claim that they can decarbonize, or sever the link between emissions and GDP. The environment ministry has enacted programs on food waste and plastics use to encourage behavior change among citizens, and a variety of efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of businesses. In the academic literature, this approach is known as ecological modernization.

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So all the work of reducing impact must be done by technology, and in sixteen years it’ll need to do twice as much as today. Reductions in carbon emitted per dollar of income under BAU will be 1.2 percent per year. That just about offsets the population increase, with no contribution to reducing emissions or to counteracting higher income. Estimates are that we’ll need 5-7 percent annual improvements in decarbonization alone, or a quadrupling of carbon productivity, to stay within the now-inadequate two degrees Celsius target. This is already far outside the range of experience. To achieve the safe 350 ppm level, improvements in technology have to be even larger. This simple arithmetic makes clear that we’ve got to address the growth of production.

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John Holdren: Ehrlich and Holdren (1971). 95 more complex formulations have been developed: For different functional forms, see York, Rosa, and Dietz (2003). 95 medium scenario is that population will peak at 9.1 billion in 2050: United Nations (2009). 95 world population is growing at just under 1.2 percent per year: Central Intelligence Agency (2009). 95 Reductions in carbon emitted per dollar of income under BAU will be 1.2 percent: McKinsey and Company (2009), p. 24. 96 5-7 percent annual improvements in decarbonization alone: McKinsey & Company (2009), p. 26. See Speth (2008) for a discussion of these issues. 96 improvements in technology have to be even larger: For a new study of the economics of 350 ppm, see Ackerman et al. (2009). 96 From 1980 to 2005 . . . 30 percent on a worldwide basis: Sustainable Europe Research Institute (2009b), p. 23.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

In Chapter 9, we explore the potential disruption that cities will face from climate change in the decades ahead, the actions that need to be taken to protect populations from the rising impact and frequency of flood, drought and heat extremes, and the role that cities must play in helping to accelerate decarbonization and slow climate change. We conclude the book, in Chapter 10, with a summary of the agenda required to ensure cities rise to their potential and contribute to a fairer, more cohesive and more sustainable world. If humanity is to ensure that the coming age is our best yet, we must overhaul urban design, rebuild for the knowledge economy and accelerate sustainable development.

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Disasters like Hurricane Katrina are no longer an abnormality: warming ocean temperatures are making storm winds more intense by increasing air moisture levels, while rising sea levels are exacerbating storm surges.8 Nine of the ten hottest years on record all occurred in the past decade, causing heatwaves, droughts and wildfires.9 And unless action on decarbonization is rapidly accelerated, recent events will pale in comparison to the devastation that lies ahead. The world’s cities are poorly positioned for the effects of climate change. 90 per cent of urban areas today are coastal, placing many cities at risk of being engulfed, especially as storms become more severe.10 Around 800 million people live in urban coastal areas where sea level rise is projected to reach at least 0.5 metres by 2050.11 Paved surfaces not only ease the movement of flood waters, but also magnify heat, raising city temperatures above the surrounding countryside.

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While these are a step in the right direction, much more will be needed. And in the rapidly growing cities of the developing world, a lack of resources is limiting the available options. More importantly, adaptation will simply not be enough to indefinitely prevent a collapse in standards of living. Decarbonization is our duty to future generations. Cities already account for most of the world’s emissions, and their share will rise further as the global urbanization rate continues to climb. Cities must therefore be front and centre in efforts to avert the catastrophe we are hurtling towards. A History of Vulnerability Humankind’s endeavour to tame its environment has long been part of the story of the city.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

Hence, from the very start, ‘climate infrastructure’, broadly conceived, has been understood and effectuated predominantly as a private-sector affair. The data attesting to this fact really are quite striking, but are seldom acknowledged for what they are. Let us focus for the sake of illustration on the specific infrastructure sector in which decarbonisation is widely seen as both most urgent and, fortuitously, most achievable: power generation. To begin with, it is important to note that, as one would expect, the proportion of overall generating capacity of all types owned privately has generally been increasing: the average privately owned share in OECD and G20 countries increased from 48 to 55 per cent between 2000 and 2014.47 It is also important to note that this average, of course, masks huge variance: in Argentina, Spain and the United States, for instance, the share is now above 90 per cent, while in Croatia and South Africa it is below 10 per cent.

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Partly to pay off this costly private debt and partly to pad their own profits, asset managers and other private investors active in the UK have for decades been charging inflated infrastructure fees, ‘often for very limited or non-existent risks’, and with zero evidence of improved operating efficiencies (see Chapter 4). UK households have effectively been paying a premium for ‘the privilege of keeping assets off the government’s balance sheet’.79 ‘With the country facing fresh [infrastructure investment] demands from the need to decarbonise rapidly’, Ford warned somewhat ominously – perhaps with Larry Fink’s words ringing in his ears – ‘it cannot afford more of the same’. Ford made another important point. Think, he implored readers, about what it is that a government is in fact spending money on, on the increasingly rare occasions that it borrows to build publicly owned infrastructure (or indeed publicly owned rental housing).

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

Moreover, in 2018, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that to avoid massive and dangerous environmental destruction the world should be aiming to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C, rather than the 2°C targeted by the Paris Agreement. Yet, without urgent and decisive action, we will hit the critical 1.5°C temperature rise from pre-industrial levels by 2030. Rapid decarbonization is the only way forward. One necessary measure is a substantial increase in carbon taxes. A statement issued at the UN Climate Summit in Poland in December 2018 by a powerful group of multinational investment funds managing $32 trillion of investors’ money called for ‘meaningful’ taxes on carbon and an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

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See also individual entries definition 1, 4–8 reasons for need 8–9 security 98, 113, 114 system 1, 20, 23, 26, 32, 37, 52, 70, 84, 90–1, 122 n.7 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 94 behavioural conditionality 70, 73, 77, 114 behaviour-testing 4, 39, 70, 84 benefits 5, 7, 27 conditional schemes 41 social assistance 23 BET365 11 Beveridge, William 8–9, 38 Beveridge model 21 Big Bang liberalization 18 BJP 92 black economy 40, 60 B-Mincome 99–100 Booker, Cory 101 brain development 98–9 132 Branson, Richard 54 Brexit 53 Britain 6, 8–10, 12–18, 20, 23–4, 26–7, 30–1, 33–4, 37–8, 40–2, 55, 57, 59, 90, 101, 104, 112 British Columbia 95 British Constitution 1 Buck, Karen 57 bureaucracy 40, 49, 100, 102 Bureau of Economic Analysis 16 Business Property Relief 58 California 69, 96–7 Canada 35 capacity-to-work tests 6, 104 cap-and-trade approach 34 Capita 50 capital dividend 59 capital fund 89–90 capital grants 59, 75, 76, 92 carbon dividends 37 carbon emissions 33–4 carbon tax 34–5, 37 care deficit 53 care work 36, 53, 67, 74, 84 cash payments 111 cash transfers 99 ‘casino dividend’ schemes 88 charities 48 The Charter of the Forest (1217) 1 Chicago 99 Child Benefit 57, 58, 72, 123 n.4 childcare 99, 110–11 child development 88 Child Tax Credits 81 chronic psychological stress 26 Citizens Advice 46–8 Citizen’s Basic Income Trust 7, 122 n.7, 123 n.4 citizenship rights 1, 29 civil society organizations 79 Index climate change 34 Clinton, Hillary 126 n.4 Clinton, Bill 105 Coalition government 41, 50 cognitive performance 33 collateral damage 53 common dividends 7, 20, 21, 59–60, 69, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85 Commons Fund 8, 35, 57, 59, 89 community cohesion 3 resilience 23 work 84 ‘community payback’ schemes 102 Compass 59 compensation 2, 7, 16, 104 ‘concealed debt’ 24–5 conditional cash transfer schemes 90 Conservative government 9, 85 Conservatives 23 consumer credit 24 consumption 23 contractual obligations 46 Coote, Anna 113 cost of living 25, 49, 52, 83 council house sales 76 council tax 25 Crocker, Geoff 122 n.15 cross-party plans 80 crowd-funded schemes 100 deadweight effects 102 ‘deaths of despair’ 27 Deaton, Angus 10 debt 23–6, 67, 85 debt collection practices 24–5 decarbonization 34 dementia 33 democratic values 69 Democrats 37 demographic changes 15   Index 133 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) 11–12, 42–8, 50–2, 73, 81, 92, 129 n.6 depression 28, 94 direct taxes 56, 58 disability benefits 6, 49–52, 83 Disability Living Allowance (DLA) 49–51 Disabled People Against Cuts 52 Dividend Allowance 58 ‘dividend capitalism’ 8 domestic violence 29, 87 Dragonfly 92 due process 46, 49 ecological crisis 33, 37, 39, 114 ecological developments 21 ecological disaster 35 ecological taxes and levies 37 economy benefits 20, 60 crisis 106 damage 34 growth 20, 36, 106 industrialized 20 insecurity 21, 35, 39, 89 security 75, 80, 84, 88 system 15, 27, 38 tax-paying 60 uncertainty 8, 22–3, 31 ‘eco-socialism’ 8 ecosystems 33 Edinburgh 80 education 88, 108 Elliott, Larry 122 n.15 employment 16, 22, 39, 60–1, 81, 89, 93–4, 102, 106, 107, 110, 114 Employment Support Allowance (ESA) 27, 41, 49–51 England 28, 63, 110–11 Enlightenment 85 Entrepreneurs’ Relief 18 equality 31, 85 Europe 37 European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) 120 n.1 European Heart Journal 33 European Union 6, 17, 41 euthanasia 113 extinction 33–7 ‘Extinction Rebellion’ 33 Fabian Society 57–8 Facebook 97 family allowances 56 family benefits 56 family insecurity 23 federal welfare programs 106 Fife 24, 80 financial crash (2007–8) 23, 26, 34 financialization 116 n.22 financial markets 18 Financial Services Authority 123 n.15 Financial Times 19, 123 n.15 financial wealth 18 Finland 28, 61, 93–5 food banks 10, 29–30, 43, 109 food donations 29 food insecurity 108–9 fossil fuels 33–4 France 12, 17, 18, 32, 38, 57 free bus services 112 freedom 8, 30, 84, 85, 101, 114 ‘free food’ 108–9, 129 n.6 ‘free’ labour market 106 free trade 13 Friends Provident Foundation 75 fuel tax 35 fund and dividend model 89 funding 29, 59, 62, 69, 71–2, 112 134 G20 (Group of 20 large economies) 15 Gaffney, Declan 57 Gallup 105 GDP 14, 17–18, 23–4, 34, 36, 59, 89, 108 General Election 91–2, 94 ‘genuine progress indicator’ 36 Germany 17–18, 38, 100 Gillibrand, Kirsten 101 Gini coefficient 9, 12 GiveDirectly 91 Glasgow City 80 globalization 14 Global Wage Report 2016/17 14 global warming 33, 37 Good Society 75, 106 The Great British Benefits Handout (TV series) 92 Great Depression 9 Great Recession 23 greenhouse gas emissions 34, 36 gross cost 110 The Guardian 101, 103, 122–3 n.15 Hansard Society 37 Harris, Kamala 101 Harrop, Andrew 57 Hartz IV 100 HartzPlus 100 health 67, 87, 100 human 33 insurance premiums 35 services 60 healthcare costs 28 hegemony 14 help-to-buy loan scheme 76 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) 64, 73, 81 Hirschmann, Albert 56 household debt 24 Index household earnings 16 household survey 12 House of Commons 110–11 housing allowance 95 Housing Benefit 24, 41, 53, 71 housing policy 53 hub-and-spoke model 112 Hughes, Chris 97 humanity 33 human relations 3 ‘immoral’ hazard 109 ‘impact’ effects 78 incentive 62 income 81 assistance 88 average 83 components 11 distribution system 4, 13–14, 38, 67, 84, 107, 114 gap 9 growth 16 insecurity 27 men vs. women 15–16 national 14, 36 pensioners’ 16 rental 13–15, 20 social 14, 16–17 support payments 110 tax 1, 7, 57, 89, 111 transfer 85 volatility 22 India 68, 80, 90–2 Indian Congress Party 91 inequality 2, 4, 9–13, 21, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 54, 80, 85, 114 growth 17 income 9–10, 15–17, 19 living standard 20 wealth 18–19, 76 informal care 111   Index 135 inheritance tax 58 in-kind services 111 insecurity 21–3, 29, 38, 39, 47, 67, 85, 106 Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 10 Institute for Public Policy Research 125 n.17 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 75, 111 Institute of New Economic Thinking 123 n.15 Institute of Public Policy Research 59 insurance schemes 8 intellectual property 14–15 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 34 International Labour Organization (ILO) 14, 122 n.4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 31, 34 international tax evasion 18 interpersonal income inequality 83 inter-regional income inequalities 83 intra-family relationships 3 involuntary debt 26 in-work benefits 22 Ireland 35 Italy 18 labour 31, 107 inefficiency 106 law 101 markets 8, 14, 32, 39, 40, 60, 62–3, 96, 100, 106 regulations 13 supply 67, 95 Labour governments 85 labourism 106 Lansley, Stewart 59 Latin America 90 Left Alliance 94 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 113 Liberal government 35 life-changing errors 51 life-threatening illness 33 Liverpool 80 living standards 20, 23, 33, 36, 53, 59, 92 Local Housing Allowances 24 London Homelessness Project 92–3 low-income communities 33 low-income families 21 low-income households 17 low-income individuals 86 Low Pay Commission 63 low-wage jobs 60, 107 Luddite reaction 32 lump-sum payments 35, 59, 76 Jackson, Mississippi 99 JobCentrePlus 47 job guarantee policy 101–7 job-matching programs 106 Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) 41, 46 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 21 McDonnell, John 129 n.13 McKinsey Global Institute 31 Macron, Emmanuel 35 Magna Carta 1 ‘Making Ends Meet’ 97 ‘mandatory reconsideration’ stage 51 Manitoba 87–8 Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome) 87 market economy 105, 114 master-servant model 101 Kaletsky, Anatole 123 n.15 Kenya 90–2 Khanna, Ro 103 Kibasi, Tom 113 136 Index Maximus 50 means-testing 4, 39, 42, 48, 58, 61–2, 70, 84, 88, 90, 109–10, 114 benefits 5, 7, 27, 40, 46, 56, 71–3, 81, 129 n.6 social assistance 23, 41, 95, 122 n.7 system 6 medical services 28 Mein Grundeinkommen (‘My Basic Income’) 100 mental health 26, 28, 94 disorders 88 trusts 28 mental illness 33, 68 migrants 7, 113 ‘minimum income floor’ 45 Ministry of Justice 51 modern insecurity 22 modern life 31 monetary policy 59 Mont Pelerin Society 13 moral commitment 75 moral hazard 109 mortality 27, 76 multinational investment funds 34 Musk, Elon 31, 54 Namibia 90–2 National Audit Office (NAO) 24, 43–4, 46, 76 National Health Service (NHS) 8, 24, 27–8, 44, 68, 80, 108, 111 National Insurance 18, 22, 124 n.4 nationalism 37 National Living Wage 63 National Minimum Wage 63–4 national solidarity 3 Native American community 88 negative income tax (NIT) 23, 87, 95, 100 neo-fascism 37–8 neoliberalism 13, 84 Netherlands 96 New Economics Foundation (NEF) 57, 113, 122 n.15 non-resident citizens 113 non-wage benefits 16 non-wage work 74 North America 67 North Ayrshire 80 North Carolina 88 North Sea oil 89–90 Nyman, Rickard 23 Oakland 96–7 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 14–15, 17, 36 Ontario, Canada 95–6 open economy 84 open ‘free’ markets 13, 15 opportunity dividend 59 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 18, 23, 27, 31 Ormerod, Paul 23 Osborne, George 19 Paine, Thomas 2, 75 Painian Principle 2 panopticon state 55 Paris Agreement (2015) 34 participation income 74–5 paternalism 42, 55 pauperization 63 Pawar, Alderman Ameya 99 pay contributions 21 pension contributions 18, 58 Pension Credit 41 Pericles Condition 75 permanent capital fund 71 personal care services 110–11   Index 137 personal income tax 35 Personal Independence Payment (PIP) 49–51 personal insecurity 23 Personal Savings Allowance 58 personal tax allowances 17, 58, 59 perverse incentives 50 physical health 26, 94 piloting in Britain 67–81 applying 80–1 rules in designing 70–80 policy development 3, 69 political decision 78 political discourse 92 political instability 35 political system 38 populism 37–8, 75 populist parties 37 populist politics 39 Populus survey 55 post-war system 8 poverty 2, 4, 10–12, 22, 27, 29, 36, 38, 40, 60–1, 89, 100, 108–9, 114, 125 n.17, 129 n.6 precarity 29–30, 38, 39, 60–1, 85, 103, 129 n.6 Primary Earnings Threshold 124 n.4 private debt 23–4, 39 private inheritance 2 private insurance 85 private property rights 13 private wealth 18 privatization 13, 17, 112 property prices 76 prostitution 43 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 51 public costs 28 public debt 23 public inheritance 61 public libraries 47 public policy 97 public sector managers 103 public services 4, 17, 62, 108, 112, 114 public spending 89 public wealth 18 ‘quantitative easing’ policy 59 quasi-basic income 89, 98 quasi-universal basic services 30 quasi-universal dividends 35 quasi-universal system 61, 70, 90 Randomised Control Trial (RCT) 124–5 n.14 rape 44 Ratcliffe, Jim 12 Reagan, Ronald 13 Reed, Howard 59 refugees 7 regressive universalism 57 regular cash payment 7 rent arrears 24 controls 53 rentier capitalism 13–21, 107, 116 n.22 republican freedom 2–3, 30, 84 Republicans 37 Resolution Foundation 10, 15, 19, 25, 76 ‘revenue neutral’ constraint 7 right-wing populism 37–8 robot advance 31–3 Royal College of Physicians 33 Royal Society of Arts 55, 59, 124 n.12 RSA Scotland 125 n.17 Rudd, Amber 9 Russia 113 138 Sanders, Bernie 101 scepticism 31 schooling 67, 89 Scotland 69, 80, 111 Second World War 19, 21 security 8, 38, 55, 68, 84 economic 3, 4, 49, 56 income 73–4 social 8, 22, 49 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 68 self-employment 45 Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 3, 115 n.3 Smith, Iain Duncan 42 ‘snake oil’ 113 social assistance 3, 28 social benefit 20 social care 102, 104, 110–11 social crisis 106 social dividend scheme 92 Social Fund 29 social inheritance 2 social insecurity 21 social insurance 22, 85 social integration 44 social justice 2, 8, 20, 69, 84, 101, 114 social policy 8, 23, 26, 30, 42, 53, 84–5, 96 social protection system 32 social relation 100 social security 10, 70–1, 95 social solidarity 3, 8, 39, 61, 84–5, 91 social spending 17 social status 104 social strife 35 social value 29 ‘something-for-nothing’ economy 19–20, 61 Index Speenhamland system 63 State of the Global Workplace surveys 105 statutory minimum wages 106 stigma 47, 55 stigmatization 41, 109 Stockton 97–9 Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) 97 stress 26–9, 39, 51, 67, 68, 85, 93 student loans 24 substitution effects 102–3 suicides 26–7 Summers, Larry 105–6 Sweden 113 Swiss bank Credit Suisse 12 Switzerland 35 tax advantages 49 and benefit systems 17, 18, 69, 110 credits 3, 17, 24, 63, 105, 106 policies 16 rates 72 reliefs 17–18, 57–8, 61 tax-free inheritance 19 technological change 105 technological revolution 14, 31, 114 ‘teething problems’ 42 Thatcher, Margaret 13 Thatcher government 9, 18 The Times 92 Torry, Malcolm 122 n.7 Trades Union Congress 24 tribal casino schemes 76 ‘triple-lock’ policy 16 Trump, Donald 37 Trussell Trust 29, 43 Tubbs, Michael 97–8   Index 139 Turner, Adair 123 n.15 two-child limit 44 UK.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Change won’t come from above but from below – and change cannot happen unless it addresses the monstrous injustices that are built into our highly destructive, unsustainable, high-carbon economy. An economy in which the wealthiest 10 per cent are responsible for more than half of all greenhouse-gas emissions. One based on an industrialized farming system that destroys forests, decarbonizes and depletes soil, drives biodiversity loss and yet, globally, receives hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Above all, an economy sustained by a finance sector that fuels endless consumption with seemingly endless credit – all in the name of vast capital gains, regardless of the ecological cost to both this generation and future generations.

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That means cuts in consumption, more recycling and drastic improvements to resource-use efficiency – especially of our leaky, Victorian housing stock. We must also abandon the fetish of ‘growth’ – a fetish first devised by neoliberal economists at the OECD and the Financial Times in the 1960s. They sought to encourage exponential economic growth to parallel the vast expansion of the globalized finance sector. Instead, our goal must be a decarbonized economy of full employment, based on renewables, recycling technologies, biodiversity, stock replenishment, sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices and other areas necessary for this transformation. This transformative programme will redefine what it is to be progressive. As the parliamentary debate on Heathrow’s expansion demonstrated, the twenty-first-century Left will split down into two camps.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel
by David Metz
Published 21 Jan 2014

There is scope for adding capacity by means of longer trains, better signalling and new track. The rail network as a whole can offer travel that is speedy, reliable, safe, secure, seamless, productive, and also sustainable, when, as is largely the case, electric traction is employed and when, in time, the electricity supply system is decarbonised. There are prospects for a considerable revival of rail travel, particularly in countries where there is an existing network that can be developed. Population growth and urbanisation result in larger, denser cities whose travel needs cannot be met by road transport. To be successful they must invest in rail‑based transport.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

As forests burned, the prison crews on which the Golden State normally relies to fight its fires were quarantined by the Covid lockdown.55 Europe was, in fact, spared most of these blows, but opinion polls show that people understood coronavirus as an indication of how seriously to take tail risks.56 The year 2020 had been billed as one of climate action. The key date was to have been COP26 in Glasgow in November.57 Five years on from the Paris climate agreement of 2015, it was time to update the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to decarbonization. If Europe was to maintain its credibility as a climate leader, it needed to do better than the 40 percent cut by 2030 it had promised in 2015. Though COP26 was postponed, negotiations and planning continued. On March 2, just prior to the shutdowns across Europe, the EC had released a draft climate law that would bind Europe to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.58 This received enthusiastic backing from most members of the EU, but Eastern European formerly Communist states, heavily wedded to coal, were far less enthusiastic about the climate agenda.

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Germany’s world-leading car manufacturers were developing their new electric models in and for China. VW alone had poured $17.5 billion in investment into its EV ventures in China.61 Would a bold gesture from Europe persuade Beijing to go further? At Paris in 2015, China had accepted the need for all countries, not just the advanced economies, to propose decarbonization plans. Would Xi Jinping commit to a peak for China’s emissions and fix a date by which it would achieve carbon neutrality? Ahead of the Glasgow COP26 meeting, a Sino-European summit had been scheduled for September 2020. Germany was in the chair of the European Council and Merkel threw her weight behind the commission’s effort to secure a grand bargain with China.

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Given that Europe was China’s major export market and that China relied heavily on coal-fired electricity generation, this was an alarming prospect for Beijing. Following the European lead, China was in the process of launching its own carbon pricing system.64 What the Europeans wanted was a matching commitment from Beijing to decarbonization, thus constituting a climate club led by the number one and number three emitters in the world.65 Would Beijing take the bait? Chapter 10 CHINA: MOMENTUM The Europeans would have loved nothing better than to have staged a historic climate summit with Xi, like the one that Obama had hosted at the White House in September 2015.1 But 2020 put a crimp in diplomatic style.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

I find it kind of interesting that the foreign policy consequences of moving to a clean energy business footprint would change the geopolitics of the world dramatically.” Wallace-Wells explained to the senators why the world needed to act immediately to start reducing carbon emissions—and the missed opportunity of failing to act earlier. “If the world had begun decarbonization in the year 2000, carbon emissions would only have had to fall by a couple of percentage points a year to safely avoid two degrees of warming,” he said. “Now the number is almost 10 percent. Wait a decade and it will grow to 25 percent or more.” After Wallace-Wells, Litterman talked about the new tool he’d developed to examine, measure, and price climate risk.

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“Everyone I knew who was involved in the process had low expectations,” he told me. The goal of the Paris Accords of 2015, keeping global temperature increases at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius, was in the rearview mirror, he believed. One pocket of personal success that he could point to was Kepos Capital, which had bet strategically on a rapid transition to decarbonization. By mid-2022, his Kepos bet was up nearly 22 percent since its launch, despite a big rally in oil driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a recent downturn in clean-tech stocks. A lot of the gains for Kepos were driven by Tesla, which Didier Sornette believed was in a massive Dragon King bubble, having surged above $1 trillion in market value.

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Similar phenomena could be found in book sales, species extinctions, social unrest, and more. He wrapped up his speech with a nod toward a looming problem he said gave him the greatest concern in the world today—the clean-energy transition away from fossil fuels. Sornette said he believed much of the talk behind efforts to decarbonize the global economy was an “aspirational infantile fantasy” that didn’t take into account the fact that the project was an energy replacement, rather than an addition of new energy sources. It was a monumental effort on a scale of World War II, taking place at a time when vast regions of the world were clamoring for more energy.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

Human movement has fundamentally shifted from one carbon source to another: We used to flex our muscles and burn calories to get from one place to another. We burned sugar. Today we sit behind the steering wheel. We burn no sugar, and lots of oil. The more we adopted motorized power, the more the planet suffered, and the more human health suffered. Just as we have to decarbonize our energy industry, we need to decarbonize our food industry. We live at a time when there’s very few regulations if you want to sell high-sugar foods or alcohol. But if you try to sell a medical remedy to those addictions, it takes ten years of clinical trials and hundreds of millions of dollars to wind through the regulations.

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Both require prevention and repair. Both are going to cost a lot. Both have been ignored for decades. Both are encountering problems we’ve never seen on this scale before. So without going through every little detail of the Green New Deal, let’s hit some highlights of this crazy analysis. 1. DECARBONIZE THE ENERGY SUPPLY Oil is 87 percent carbon. Coal is 88 percent carbon. When we burn it, we fill the atmosphere with trouble. At first glance, this has nothing to do with health care. But consider this: Of all the things we eat, the big troublemaker is sugar. Sugar leads to obesity, and in turn to diabetes, and in turn to NASH.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Vast tracts of the earth will face severe drought and become desert, lacking water. Regions far beyond the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa are vulnerable. Lack of water is now crippling agricultural and livestock production across California and the Southwest United States, among many other regions. b. The trend toward decarbonization has caused underinvestment in fossil fuel development without yet sufficient increases in the supply of green energy. Energy prices are apt to rise so long as this imbalance persists, and closing the gap in ten years would require a fast track toward green energy, an unlikely scenario. c. “Natural” disasters and the resulting human devastation will interrupt supply and production of vital goods.

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These and other commitments to restrain global warming fall far short, though, on every key measure watched by the Climate Action Tracker. “Yet the hard truth is that despite these bright spots, none of the 40 indicators are making progress at the pace necessary for the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and fully decarbonize by mid-century, which are both necessary to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade.”7 Deadly consequences stare us in the face. As water warms, it expands. Never mind the melting polar icecaps—because oceans cover two thirds of the earth’s surface, we have a massive challenge.

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Vacuuming up vast amounts of airborne carbon looks like another mission impossible. Capping the rise in global average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees C, “a whopping 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide would need to be removed annually,” says a report by the United Nations.42 In 2019, human activity pumped 43.1 billion tons of CO2 into the air.43 Aggressive decarbonization requires phasing out fossil fuels—such as coal, oil, and natural gas—and replacing them with green renewable energy such as solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and a variety of other small but promising alternatives. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned in May 2021 that to reach the goal of net zero emissions in 2050, the world must immediately halt investment in fossil fuel supply projects and table plans for unabated coal plants that do not mitigate carbon dioxide emissions.44 Progress in the last decade has not been fast enough to slow global warming to any significant extent.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power
by Keith Barnham
Published 7 May 2015

Another example of Professor MacKay’s scepticism about renewable energy can be found in a memorandum he wrote for the House of Commons, Environmental Audit Committee in 2009. You can find the reference in the Bibliography. It was written in response to the question, ‘Is it technically possible to decarbonise Britain by 2050?’ MacKay predicts that by 2050 the UK will need a massive 70 GW of nuclear power, as large as France has currently. In contrast, MacKay’s prediction for PV is that expanding ‘at roughly the maximum rate I think is plausibly achievable’ there will be 7.5 GW of PV in the UK by 2050.

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We urgently need to start making major reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by transport. So, before we look at my manifesto for the solar revolution, and consider how the revolution might develop round the globe, I want to introduce you to the existing technology, and the research and development of new technologies that can decarbonise our transport. One low carbon technology, the electric car, is already performing well. Some future developments, such as fuel cells, will encourage more people to use electric cars. Fuel cells will extend the range of the electric car and reduce the time spent refuelling them. We will also meet solar fuels and the challenge of producing them from carbon dioxide in the air and sunlight on our own rooftops.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

Figure 5.9 Michael Faraday. Wellcome Library, London, photograph. Figure 5.10 Thomas A. Edison in 1882, the year his first coal-fired electricity-generating station began operating in lower Manhattan. Library of Congress photograph. Figure 5.11 Nikola Tesla in 1890. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Figure 5.12 Decarbonization of the world’s primary energy supply, 1900–2010. Plotted from data in Smil (2014b). Figure 5.13 British coal production, 1700–2015. Plotted from data in Nef (1932) and Department of Energy & Climate Change (2015). Figure 5.14 Wells of al-Burqan oilfield (on the right, eastern, side of the image) were set on fire by the retreating Iraqi army in 1991.

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Second, numerous technical advances have been the most important enablers of this expansion, resulting in cheaper and more productive extraction, transportation, and processing methods as well as in reduced specific pollution rates (and, in one remarkable case, even in an absolute global emission decline). Third, there has been a clear secular shift toward higher-quality fuels, that is, from coals to crude oil and natural gas, a process that has resulted in relative decarbonization (a rising H:C ratio) of global fossil fuel extraction, while absolute levels of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere have been rising except for a few temporary slight annual declines. The H:C ratio of wood combustion varies but is no higher than 0.5, while the ratios are 1.0 for coal, 1.8 for gasoline and kerosene, and 4.0 for methane, the dominant constituent of natural gas.

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As a result, the average carbon intensity of the world’s fossil fuel supply kept on declining: when expressed in terms of carbon per unit of the global total primary energy supply, it fell from nearly 28 kg C/GJ in 1900 to just below 25 in 1950 and to just over 19 in 2010, roughly a 30% decrease; subsequently, as a result of China’s rapidly rising coal output, it rose a bit during the first decade of the twenty-first century (fig. 5.12). At the same time, global emissions of carbon from the combustion of fossil fuels rose from just 534 Mt C in 1900 to 1.63 Gt in 1950, 6.77 Gt in 2000, and 9.14 Gt C in 2010 (Boden, Andres, and Marland 2016). Figure 5.12 Decarbonization of the world’s primary energy supply, 1900–2010. Plotted from data in Smil (2014b). The generation of electricity has combined technical improvements with large-scale spatial expansion, with the latter process surprisingly delayed even in parts of the United States and still far from completed in many low-income populous nations.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

And even countries with no oil or natural gas reserves can adopt a renewable energy program by installing solar and wind farms, and by investing in energy efficiency for housing and transportation. And to the extent that we encourage a global effort to contain the effects of climate change, policies that help the developing world to decarbonize their economies not only lessens their dependency on US dollars to purchase fossil fuels, but also enhances global cooperative efforts to reduce harmful carbon emissions that continue to threaten our planet’s long-term survival. As long as most developing countries have to import basic necessities, they will remain “developing”—caught in a desperate scramble to acquire the currencies of the rich world.

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One possibility might be that the federal government could allow electric utilities to sell to the government at book value any high-emission generator, no matter its age, in order to remove those costs from rates—a bit like the “cash for clunkers” program (Car Allowance Rebate System), which encouraged US residents to trade in their old, less-fuel-efficient vehicles for more-fuel-efficient ones, but aimed at grid decarbonization. This would free up private capital for a rapid transition to renewable energy and avoid burdening households and businesses with higher costs for electricity due to a change in public policy. The federal government could go further and increase funding for research and development and scaled-up deployment of energy storage technologies.

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In the United States, where we have an abundance of resources and labor, there is no reason we cannot embark on a policy agenda that results in provisioning our entire population with quality health services, providing each worker with adequate and appropriate advanced education and job training, upgrading our infrastructure to meet the demands of a low-carbon world, and ensuring adequate housing for everyone while redesigning our cities to be clean, beautiful, and nurturing of community spirit. We can be a global force for good, leading the way in decarbonization, providing assistance to countries with real needs, while ensuring our domestic economy thrives and no communities, from small towns to urban neighborhoods, are left behind. With the knowledge of how we can pay for it, it’s now in your hands to imagine and to help build the people’s economy.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
by Jake Bittle
Published 21 Feb 2023

The leaders of this collaborative effort must be the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, most of which are also the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases. There are some reasons for optimism. In the past few years these developed nations have taken a series of strides on climate action that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago, beginning the long and difficult work of decarbonization. The European Union, for instance, has endorsed a binding commitment to slash emissions by more than half before the year 2030, and its member states have already cut emissions by more than a quarter from 1990 levels. China, now the world’s largest single emitter, says it intends to reach net-zero emissions by 2030 through a phaseout of its domestic coal industry.

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No amount of political intervention and investment can stop that from happening, and thus for many Americans climate change will look like letting go of their old ideas of home, ideas that in many cases are synonymous with ideas of the American dream. On the other side of this loss, there is an opportunity—an opportunity to rethink this idea of home, or reform it, or create it anew. Tackling climate change in the short term will mean ending the hegemony of oil and gas, decarbonizing the economy, and retrofitting vulnerable communities for a dangerous new world. In the long term, it will require building a political system that can support people through the climate shocks that are already inevitable. If the most pervasive impact of the climate crisis will be property destruction, it follows that the best way of resolving the crisis will be to ensure that everyone has access to housing, before and after disasters.

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what experts then called “global warming”: Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988. deadline for decisive climate aciton: Kevin Anderson, “Real Clothes for the Emperor: Facing the Challenges of Climate Change,” lecture delivered at Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, November 2012. difficult work of decarbonization: Jonathan Watts, “Key COP26 Pledges Could Put World 9% Closer to 1.5C Pathway,” The Guardian, November 11, 2021. before the year 2030: “Climate Change: EU to Cut CO2 Emissions by 55% by 2030,” BBC News, April 21, 2021. domestic coal industry: Steven Lee Myers, “China’s Pledge to Be Carbon Neutral by 2060: What It Means,” New York Times, September 23, 2020.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

Above all, it will require a great deal of finance, for example to transform the transport system, erect flood defences, retrofit ageing housing stock, or to make buildings more energy efficient. Such investment will, however, generate employment and other economic activity. Employment in turn will generate income with which to repay the credit or debt. The fact is that carefully managed and regulated public and private credit will help finance vital de-carbonising activities. The small, individual pools of money from savings accounts, credit unions or crowdfunding would be woefully insufficient for the Herculean task of transforming the economy away from fossil fuels. The ‘People’s QE’ and ‘helicopter money’ With the discovery that private banks can create money ex nihilo – out of thin air – came a simultaneous discovery: that central banks can do the same.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

‘I want to stress the urgency of the challenge,’ said Bill Clinton once: ‘This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts.’ He was talking not about climate change but about Y2K: the possibility that all computers would crash at midnight on 31 December 1999. Decarbonising the economy In short, a warmer and richer world will be more likely to improve the well-being of both human beings and ecosystems than a cooler but poorer one. As Indur Goklany puts it, ‘neither on grounds of public health nor on ecological factors is climate change likely to be the most important problem facing the globe this century.’

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pp. 344–5 ‘Once solar panels can be mass-produced at $200 per square metre and with an efficiency of 12 per cent, they could generate the equivalent of a barrel of oil for about $30’. Ian Pearson, 8.9.08: http://www.futurizon.net/blog.htm. p. 345 ‘human energy use over the past 150 years as it migrated from wood to coal to oil to gas’. Ausubel, J.H. 2003. ‘Decarbonisation: the Next 100 Years’. Lecture at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, June 2003. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/PDF_FILES/oakridge.pdf. p. 346 ‘Jesse Ausubel predicts’. Ausubel, J.H. and Waggoner, P.E. 2008. Dematerialization: variety, caution and persistence. PNAS 105:12774–9. See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/earth/21tier.html.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

They have argued that this could be done through a strategy of carbon intensity (more output per unit of carbon emitted from fossil fuels burned), by “green growth” and a range of “market ecology” measures to shift consumer behaviour towards energy saving. On the other side, many Aboriginal nations and ecological and labour organizations have pushed for a transition to an “ecologically sustainable” economy built around “green” technologies, a renewable energy regime, and “green jobs” that would “de-carbonize” production processes. (For the Aboriginal nations, this also could involve reclamation, if on an entirely different foundation, of traditional territories and economies.) This could be accomplished, it is argued, through “Keynesian-style” public policies that build non-market institutions that embed and guide capitalist markets along a more sustainable and equitable growth path—in effect, an “institutional ecology.”3 For reasons of both theoretical clarity and the political injunction to address climate change, the varied strategies for “greening work” need dissection.

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Workers and communities adjust as the capitalist classes shift to value extraction in new “green” sectors. A more ambitious just transition would extend workers’ collective rights and point towards new socio-ecological relations21—that is, a militant rejection of the quantitative commodification of nature and life, for a transition to qualitative growth in de-carbonized and de-commodified sectors of production and work. Such an “eco-imaginary” is a rupture with the chase after “green jobs” in a thoroughly commodified society. It could inform specific interventions at the scale of workplaces and building workers’ collective capacities, such as: the incorporation of carbon-reduction strategies within collective agreements through clauses on reductions of the carbon footprint, energy committees, and adjustment plans for jobs affected by climate change; workers’ plans forged to extend best practices for carbon reduction in labour processes and between workplaces; building democratic planning capacities for plant conversion to sustain capital equipment, workers’ skills, and community infrastructure as ecologically responsible production norms are internalized; and participatory planning structures built at the level of local wards for carbon reduction and ecological clean-up in neighbourhoods.

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The core left program is also strikingly carbon reducing in its implications: a sharp reduction in standard work time, to share out work and increase the time for democracy and self-management of workplaces; a shift from private to public transit in electrified systems tied to “transit justice” and “free fares”; the extension of de-commodified public spaces in terms of parks, museums, galleries, and other cultural and recreational spaces; the mass public expansion of the caring sectors; the universalization of free post-secondary education for all age groups; the dismantling of military production and mobilization of civil brigades for ecological restoration. These demands could easily be extended.26 They should be at the centre of any ecological justice movement. In practical outline, they present a possible future directly connecting a de-carbonized energy regime to quality-intensive, democratized work, and from there to the provisions of everyday life as social need. They are essential to overcoming the claims the neo-liberal period has had on our political imaginary, even in activist circles, and the claptrap of carbon markets and “greening growth.”

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Published 19 May 2009

Regional differences aren’t just important; they are absolutely critical to understanding what has been driving global oil consumption. Beneath the surface of seemingly robust growth in world crude demand over the last decade run two very divergent trends. While one part of the world is attempting to decarbonize its economies and wean itself off oil, the rest of the world is burning oil along with other hydrocarbons at a record pace. The global average is simply the netting out of two opposite forces. Where the demand for oil is the weakest is where historically it’s been the strongest. Whereas in the past, economists would have looked at North America and Western Europe to gauge the pace of world demand, now they need to consider the bustling energy demand from developing countries to determine that pace.

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Ironically, the US may ultimately yet comply with the Kyoto commitments it never signed on to. Emission reductions will be mandated not by legislation or international treaties, but by soaring fuel prices at the pumps and comparable increases in the price of jet fuel. A smaller world is a less carbon-intensive world. But the developed countries have not begun to decarbonize just by traveling less. They have done it by turning their backs on the fuel that set them up as industrial powers in the first place—coal. France, for example, gets about 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear generators, while Denmark and Germany are world leaders in renewables. The mix of nuclear and hydroelectric power in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec is particularly climate-friendly.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

The specter of climate change takes on a very different shape in a world of fuel abundance and robust economic growth than it does when fuel is scarce and economies are faltering. WHY EMISSIONS CONTROLS DON’T WORK To date, attempts to regulate emissions have been driven by a belief that we need to decarbonize our economies. Therefore, governments try to reduce fossil fuel consumption by putting a price on carbon emissions. Some countries do this through carbon taxes, while others try to control pollution using elaborate cap-and-trade systems, which involve shuffling around carbon credits. The rationale behind these policies is straightforward: make emitters pay for emissions and they’ll emit less.

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Indeed, triple-digit prices for oil and coal could relegate government emissions policies to the sidelines. WHERE WILL WE GET ALL THAT COAL? Higher energy prices will accomplish what politicians and environmentalists can’t: a permanent reduction in carbon emissions. Governments around the world have long thought that the path to a greener atmosphere begins with decarbonizing our energy systems—electricity generation in particular. Despite efforts to usher in more renewable power generation, however, the amount of carbon emitted per unit of electricity produced has actually increased by 6 percent globally in the last two decades. Even environmentally unfriendly coal still commands a 41 percent share of global power generation.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell
Published 2 Aug 2021

Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have risen dramatically over the last few hundred years, increasing almost 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution. The Earth hasn’t seen levels of CO2 this high for at least eight hundred thousand years.15 Dr. David Kingham, vice chairman of Tokamak Energy, told me that the deep de-carbonization of the planet was going to be a bigger, more important challenge than getting to space. There’s certainly more at stake. We don’t yet fully know the consequences of messing with the global climate system, but what we do know is very bad. The planet is a complex machine; each part interacts with every other part.

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That’s a lot of nuclear power stations, but they’d take up a tiny fraction of the land area that solar power would need. I should declare now that I’m a fan of fission power, and not just because it involves nuclear physics—countries that heavily rely on it are managing to get off fossil fuels. France and Sweden have gone further than most in de-carbonizing their electricity generation, with 75 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of their energy supplied by fission. France also exports a lot of that sweet, clean electricity to other nations. But I’m in the minority: an IPSOS poll, conducted after the tragic meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, found that fission had the lowest public support globally of any source of power, including solar, wind, hydro, gas, and coal.

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies
by Matt Simon
Published 24 Jun 2022

And every bit of microplastic out in the environment belches greenhouse gases as it ages. Even after we’ve decarbonized our civilization, switching to electric vehicles and renewable energy, we’ll still in a sense be burning fossil fuels: we’re pulling carbon out of the ground, turning it into plastic, and releasing the material into the environment to off-gas that carbon. Worse yet, waste managers staring at ever-bigger piles of plastic are just burning more of the stuff. We’ll have decarbonized energy production and transportation, sure, but not the material central to every aspect of our lives. “When you think of a future that has successfully dealt with the plastics crisis, or you think of a future that has successfully dealt with the climate crisis, those futures look pretty similar,” says Steven Feit, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

We can’t have the patience to be happy with small achievements,” he told me during one conversation. The urgency of the climate crisis also drives his impatience with incremental progress: “A relatively progressive agenda will be a world without people. The planet won’t survive,” he said, referring to the slow rate of decarbonization in supply chains and energy production. He studied sociology at a university in Amsterdam and worked as a cleaner at the business-class lounge at Schiphol Airport. Through the university’s debating society, where he won tournaments, he met Adrian de Groot Ruiz, who was earning his PhD in economics at the time.

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Shifting the definition of a real job from the source of funding to its social importance and experienced meaningfulness reconfigures concepts of work and value. John Maynard Keynes famously said that burying old bottles and paying people to dig them up again is better than doing nothing.39 But he also recognized that these are not the only options. The urgent need to decarbonize infrastructure and supply chains across many economic sectors and to provide adequate care for the youngest and oldest members of society are demands that the private sector has failed to address. A federally funded but locally administered job guarantee would allow nonprofits, citizens, and city and state governments to identify the most important local needs and the best ways to use existing systems and resources to meet them.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It
by Erica Thompson
Published 6 Dec 2022

So we can do fantastic science and make what are probably very good, high-confidence predictions about global average temperature, and at the same time completely fail to imagine or communicate the scale of what it could mean for humans and ecosystems in the twenty-first century. The second failure of imagination is a failure to understand the scale of the solution required. Climate scientist and engineer Kevin Anderson has said that there are no non-radical futures any more, since we will either make radical voluntary change to decarbonise our systems or else be forced to accept the radical change that will occur due to the influence of climate and ecosystem changes on economies and geopolitics. Integrated Assessment Models of climate and economy, as we saw earlier, are incredibly conservative in terms of the kinds of future pathways that they can represent: everything must be costed, costs must be minimised and the only way to effect change is by changing the costs.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

They calculate that it would take another twenty years of temperature observations for us to be confident that climate sensitivity is on the low end and more than fifty years of data to confirm the high end of the projections. This ongoing controversy is important because lower climate sensitivity would mean that future warming will be slower, giving humanity more time to adapt and to decarbonize its energy production technologies. Higher climate sensitivity would mean the opposite. Ocean Acidification As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the amount of carbonic acid is increased, thus making the ocean more acidic. As noted previously, the acidity of the surface waters of the oceans has increased by about 26 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

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For example, the draft offers several options with regard to setting a firm goal for greenhouse gas emissions cuts. Countries might agree to cut emissions to 40 to 70 percent below their 2010 levels by 2050; or cut them by 50 percent below their 1990s levels with a continued decline thereafter; or go for full decarbonization by 2050. Or rich countries could agree that their emissions will peak in 2015 and then aim for zero net emissions by 2050. The section on the financial resources to be provided to poor countries to help them to adapt to climate change and to pay for losses stemming from climate change suggests an annual floor of $100 billion in aid from rich countries; or, alternately, the agreement might not specify any amount of climate aid at all.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

His response was quick and earnest: “Where do I sign up?” As our team finished its business in Monaco, packed up, and headed for the airport, my thoughts turned to whether the mecca that drew the rich and famous could be rebranded as the place where cutting-edge, high-tech sustainability became the new aesthetic standard for the world. “DECARBONIZING” UTRECHT If Monaco is all about play, Utrecht is all about work. Industrious by nature, entrepreneurial in spirit, and pragmatic to a fault, this small province, tucked into the hinterland of the Netherlands, is a no-nonsense place where business rules the day. The province is one of the fastest-growing regions in the European Union.

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Once this information is available, it then becomes much clearer where the first investments should be made. With both the energy savings potential identified and the investment cost estimated, the only steps remaining are securing financing and vetting projects and proposals. The virtual, 3-D decarbonization model creates an online marketplace for energy. One of the largest barriers to residential retrofits is profitability. For this reason, energy services companies (ESCOs) mostly focus on large, commercial projects because they are more profitable, while the margin on a single house, by comparison, is very small.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

The list goes on; there are endless projects capable of paying ample dividends to recover the cost of investment in them. What is odd is that this idea of investment seems to be entirely associated with the private sector. As economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued, the state must share in this prestige as well, especially for long-term projects like decarbonization and adaptation to AI, which a short-termist private sector will never address adequately.62 Of course, not all MMT-funded projects will bear fruit. Even those that do may temporarily cause shortages of resources. This is the foundation for the legitimate fear that increasing the money supply will cause inflation.

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In our time, the disastrously pollutive effects of much consumption are well known. So the political face of MMT in our time is not simply an argument for a “people’s quantitative easing” or a universal basic income (both of which would undoubtedly reduce unemployment to some degree). Rather, it is a Green New Deal, an investment in the types of productive capacity that can decarbonize (or at least not contribute to the carbonization of) the atmosphere.63 This substantive emphasis is a major advance past classic Keynesian doctrine. It recognizes that the earth has limits, that we are on the brink of surpassing them, and that we can try to undo the damage. Given pandemic threats, a “Public Health New Deal” should also be on the table.64 As the massive interventions in the economy by central banks in 2020 showed, even establishment voices stop worrying about debt when an emergency strikes.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

Then there were the liability risks. Coal and gas companies might face lawsuits for the environmental damage they caused today. Finally, there were transition risks. Anytime something massive and systemic changed what sort of financial bets paid off, where costs and opportunities lay, instability was a possible outcome. Decarbonization would likely be no exception. “Work done here at Lloyd’s of London estimated that the 20-centimeter rise in sea-level at the tip of Manhattan since the 1950s, when all other factors are held constant, increased insured losses from Superstorm Sandy by 30 percent in New York alone,” Carney had said, referencing the massive flooding and destruction that swept parts of the East Coast in 2012.

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Was America’s central bank meant to be the quiet economic puppet master it had become since Marriner Eccles’s days, one that tried to set broad policies with an eye on the entire economy and tried to stay out of the private sector’s way to the extent possible? Or would it better serve the public as a powerful arm of government that could use its authorities to help advance goals like decarbonization and cheap financing for state and local governments? Should the Fed take its cues narrowly from the law and tradition, or should it fill in the cracks of the democratic process by stepping up to help when politicians struggled to pass economic policies? It was a philosophical divide between the hands-off economic enablement that people like Quarles had long stood for and the more hands-on pursuit of common goals that many progressives, and to a more muted extent Brainard,[*5] hoped to see.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Two days before Earth Day, McKinsey announced the formation of “McKinsey Sustainability,” a platform aimed to help its clients meet the goal of cutting the world’s carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. “Our aim is to be the largest private sector catalyst for decarbonization,” Sneader said. The Earth Day talk by the firm’s leaders reiterated that notion. Sneader, then still heading the firm, and Sternfels, joined by a few other senior partners, including Pinner and Pacthod, answered questions. The message from the firm’s leadership was blunt: McKinsey would continue to serve the big polluters because, they said, the firm couldn’t help them decarbonize if they didn’t have a relationship. “How can we not serve fossil fuel clients if we’re going to be relevant?”

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Taking temporarily high rates of annual exponential growth as indicators of future long-term developments is a fundamental mistake—but also an enduring habit that is especially favored by uncritical promoters of new devices, designs, or practices: they take early-stage growth rates, often impressively exponential, and use them to forecast an imminent dominance of emerging phenomena. Many recent examples can illustrate this error, and I have chosen the capacity growth of Vestas wind turbines, machines leading the shift toward the decarbonization of global electricity generation. This Danish maker began its sales with a 55 kW machine in 1981; by 1989 it had a turbine capable of 225 kW; a 600 kW machine was introduced in 1995; and a 2 MW unit followed in 1999. The best-fit curve for this rapid growth trajectory of the last two decades of the 20th century (five-parameter logistic fit with R2 of 0.978) would have predicted designs with capacity of nearly 10 MW in 2005 and in excess of 100 MW by 2015.

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Steam-powered electricity generation ended the reliance on windmills in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1980s that the first modern wind turbines were installed in a commercial wind farm in California. The subsequent development of these machines, aided both by subsidies and by the quest for the decarbonization of modern electricity generation, brought impressive design and performance advances as wind turbines have become a common (even dominant) choice for new generation capacity. Waterwheels The origins of waterwheels remain obscure but there is no doubt that the earliest use of water for grain milling was by horizontal wheels rotating around vertical axes attached directly to millstones.

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Anticipations of technical progress have been always affected by unrealistic expectations belonging to several categories of distinct errors. The combination of the early hype and of the replacement hype error is perhaps the most common, with recent cases including the claims of extraordinarily rapid decarbonization of global energy use and, perhaps most notably, the promise of a fourth industrial revolution “that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before” (Schwab 2016, 1).

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Indeed, one technique proposed to offset global warming is a fleet of ‘cloud seeding ships’ that will scoop up seawater and force it through a system a bit like an inkjet printer to place tiny droplets of just the right size into the air, around which clouds can form. The argument is that more clouds could temporarily offset the heating effects of global warming, giving us longer to decarbonise our economies.* We also know that some aerosols can reflect sunlight away from the planet by themselves. In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines sent roughly twenty million tons of volcanic ash twelve miles high into the atmosphere and average global temperatures went down by about half a degree centigrade the following year.

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 13 May 2019

Thus the oxygen-poor soil of the Carboniferous coal swamps and the sediment of the Cretaceous sea floor also locked up future acid rain.46 Burning fossil fuels has been like releasing a trapped genie: it granted us our seventeenth-century wish for virtually limitless energy, but has done so with mischievous malice for the unintended consequences further down the line. The challenge facing us now is to reverse the trend since the Industrial Revolution and once again decarbonise our economy. As we saw earlier in the chapter, throughout history, our intensification of agriculture and harvesting of woodland has enhanced the rate at which humanity could gather solar energy. This sunlight is transformed into nutrition for our bodies, as well as into the raw materials and fuel we need, and we learned how to harness mechanical power from the natural world with waterwheels and windmills.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness
by Dan Dimicco
Published 3 Mar 2015

That would lower the price of goods Americans buy, boost our competitive advantage with other countries, and create millions of jobs in the process. What’s not to like?” But in order for that to happen, the United States needs a new energy policy. DiMicco favors an “all of the above approach” that includes other energy resources, including wind and solar, but also nuclear power. But he doesn’t believe it’s feasible to “decarbonize” the U.S. economy anytime soon. Government can encourage all of this without picking winners and losers or taxing less-favored sources of energy out of existence. Spurring energy development must go hand in hand with revitalizing American manufacturing. As DiMicco explains in chapter 10, creating real wealth is the only path back to full employment.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

Walk into an IKEA showroom today and you will see many products made from recycled materials, such as baskets made from recycled PET bottles, rugs made from scraps of linen and spray bottles made from the protective film that is used to cover furniture.118 Impact is also beginning to affect the company’s logistics operations. IKEA aims to ‘fully decarbonize its delivery fleet’, starting in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Shanghai. As Jesper Brodin puts it, ‘Climate change is no longer just a threat – it’s a reality.’ Retailers of products designed for mass consumption ‘will simply not be around unless you have a business model that harmonizes with the resources of this planet.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock
Published 1 Jan 2009

We already face the adverse consequences of a total accumulation of greenhouse gases amounting to over 430 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent – the loss of land‐based ecosystems, the desertification of the land and ocean surfaces, and the loss of polar ice; these act together in positive feedback and probably commit the Earth to irreversible heating. There may be no alternative but the direct use of the global cooling techniques discussed in Chapter 5 on geoengineering, including an attempt to massively decarbonize the atmosphere by burying charcoal. Whether or not these efforts succeed in cooling the Earth to its previous self‐regulating interglacial state, we have to prepare for failure by adaptation. The crux of it is that there are far too many of us living as we do – Paul and Ann Ehrlich said so forty years ago in their book The Population Bomb.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

We have gone from technology as a particular artifact or machine that just does its job to understanding that it emerges from social systems and thus necessarily reflects, internalizes, and often changes power relations and cultural assumptions. We recognize that social systems are in reality techno-social systems, that these systems impose certain orders of behavior on our lives about which we have little choice, and that these systems lock in paths of dependency that make a mockery of human agency-just try decarbonizing the global energy system! Techno-social systems also make possible hierarchies of expertise, influence, and exploitation-who, today, can argue with an auto mechanic? We know that technological systems are now as complex, pervasive, and incomprehensible as natural systems; in fact we know that the distinction between technological and natural systems is no longer very meaningful.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

“We have got to be super aggressive if we love our children and if we want to leave them a planet that is healthy and is habitable,” Senator Bernie Sanders said at the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit in July 2019. “What that means is we got to take on the fossil fuel industry.”21 Progressive Democrats united upon a plan for a Green New Deal that rapidly pivoted away from decarbonization to endorse state ownership of industries, government-guaranteed unionized jobs, and a proliferation of committees of “frontline and vulnerable communities” to “plan, implement, and administer” the spending of government clean-energy money, all while protecting “every business person” from “unfair competition.”22 Climate is a summons to human reason and problem solving.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change
by Ehsan Masood
Published 4 Mar 2021

Lawson’s position was essentially that of the Conservative government in 1972: the evidence of impending catastrophe is thin, he would tell me in an interview in the summer of 2013. Indeed, global warming could even be good for some northern European countries, as it could boost industries such as wine growing and tourism. On the contrary, according to Lawson, the costs to decarbonize industry are way too high and will make countries such as the UK uncompetitive. “Global warming,” Lawson would tell me, “is essentially a religion.”16 All of this is an echo of Aurelio Peccei’s and Maurice Strong’s experiences from four decades earlier in the run-up to the 1972 Stockholm environment conference.

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win
by Sachin Khajuria
Published 13 Jun 2022

The lending banks hire Wall Street firms to explore what they can do with the pledges they hold over the teetering empire’s energy division: deep water oil fields, oil storage tanks and pipelines, and a refining facility specialized in processing unleaded gasoline and bioethanol. Surely, plenty of cash can be wrung out of them to repay the loans that soon will come due. Raptor’s energy assets are large enough to rule out all but the largest, most sophisticated buyers but too small to be of scale to survive long-term in a decarbonizing world. The oil majors would rather the energy division die in the family’s hands than spend their shareholders’ money on a purchase that might attract the attention of the antitrust authorities. When Wall Street bankers call them, they show little interest, asking only for a last look if other bidders fail to materialize.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Published 21 Jun 2023

‘I think people thought this stuff was going to be arriving by the truckload through the Lake District National Park. It is here now.’ Nuclear power is itself undergoing a sudden renaissance. As I write this, Russia has invaded Ukraine, pushing global gas prices to record highs, and prompting fears of energy shortages throughout Europe. And with many countries racing to hit decarbonisation targets, nuclear energy is regaining support as a low-carbon and reliable energy source. France recently announced its intention to build up to fourteen new nuclear reactors by 2050.23 Germany has delayed plans to close two of its three remaining plants, which had been winding down after Fukushima.24 China alone has announced more than 150 new reactors.25 And the UK has confirmed that it will build at least one, and perhaps as many as eight new reactors in the coming years.26 It is likely that future plants will be smaller, and use alternative fuels and reactor designs that create less waste (perhaps the uranium and plutonium stored at Sellafield will be used after all).

New York 2140
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 14 Mar 2017

They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact. Too late, of course. The global warming initiated before the First Pulse was baked in by then and could not be stopped by anything the postpulse people could do. So despite “changing everything” and decarbonizing as fast as they should have fifty years earlier, they were still cooked like bugs on a griddle. Even tossing a few billion tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption and thus deflect a fair bit of sunlight, depressing temperatures for a decade or two, which they did in the 2060s to great fanfare and/or gnashing of teeth, was not enough to halt the warming, because the relevant heat was already deep in the oceans, and it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter how people played with the global thermostat imagining they had godlike powers.

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Average weight loss for adults worldwide through the late 2070s amounted to several kilos, less in the prosperous countries where it was sometimes welcomed as a diet that worked (at last), more in developing countries where the kilos were not there to be lost, except to death. So this incident forced the governments of the world to refocus attention not just on agriculture, which they did posthaste, but also on land use more generally, meaning civilization’s technological base, meaning, as a first order of business, what got called rapid decarbonization. Which meant even some interference with market forces, oh my God! And so the closing of the barn door began in earnest, and the sophisticates advocating adaptation slid away and found other hip causes with which to demonstrate their brilliance. At that point, as it turned out, despite the chaos and disorder engulfing the biosphere, there were a lot of interesting things to try to latch that barn door closed.

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times
by Lucy Lethbridge
Published 18 Nov 2013

Looking back at his butlering glory days in the late nineteenth century, he missed the ‘gaily caparisoned horses’ of the past and found the people of the 1920s worn down by speed and ‘hurry and scurry’; he even speculated that marriages were breaking down, the old order of discretion rotting from within, now that a chauffeur could be kept waiting for hours while his master or mistress conducted assignations.4 But at Rectory Farm House, the new automobile was a great source of enjoyment to Alice and Daphne. Alice’s entries are full of details about the car, its ‘de-carbonisation’ problems and its too-long spells spent in the garage for repairs. Most pleasurably of all, she records the two of them, Daph and Obbs, motoring all over the country visiting friends, shopping in Maidenhead, collecting weekend visitors from the station, driving to Brighton. Daphne plays tennis, goes to house parties and to London (unchaperoned), and takes part in charity theatricals put on by her friend Imogen Grenfell at Taplow Court.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

That so-called demographic transition would lead to a peaking of the world population in this century of perhaps 9 billion, a faster reduction in poverty, and far less adverse stress on the natural environment than if the world population continues to rise throughout the century to more than 10 billion. 9.2 Low, Medium and High Fertility Projections Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Population Prospects 2019, Online Edition Social-Democratic Ethos The 193 UN member states are pursuing sustainable development with widely varying degrees of consistency and commitment. Some countries are on track to achieve most or all of the SDGs, including the decarbonization of their energy systems and reduced levels of inequality. Others continue on the path of highly polluting fossil fuels and growing inequality. An examination of the relative progress and commitment of different countries can provide evidence of “what works” to achieve the SDGs. The countries in the global forefront of achieving the SDGs are the countries of northern Europe.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

It would be hard for either companies or individuals to hide from a global carbon tax, particularly if the tax was collected at the point where the carbon was mined or drilled rather than at the point of use. Using the revenues from a global carbon tax to protect and reinvest in the environment, as well as provide for national basic incomes, could compensate for damage to the environment we all share. This would set up the right system of incentives for rapidly decarbonizing the global economy while giving ordinary people the economic freedom and support that they need to be genuinely productive in this new world of ours. What could be better? * * * Next up, more revolutionary ideas: how Peers Inc could democratize power. As Cory Ondrejka, former vice president of engineering at Facebook, asked me: “What is the role of corporations and governments in a world where individuals have superpowers?”

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

As we saw earlier in this chapter, businesses are increasingly sensitive about their contributions to global warming. In the future we’ll see more companies launch efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, households will have more ways to determine which of these efforts are most sincere and effective. This will allow them to reward decarbonizers by buying their goods and services. Strong evidence suggests that efforts to highlight good corporate behavior and socially responsible business practices work. Economists Raluca Dragusanu and Nathan Nunn studied the effects of Fair Trade certification on coffee growers in Costa Rica from 1999 to 2014.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

A 2018 study by the US Department of Energy estimated that American electricity consumption could increase by 38 percent by 2050 to account for the needs of electric vehicles. That is on top of the extra capacity that will be needed to replace the natural gas we use to heat our homes, cook our food, and so on. And the reality is, most countries in the world have been struggling to decarbonize electricity grids at a time when demand for electricity is actually falling. Wind farms are brilliant, but there are too few of them, and many people dislike the sight of them. Solar has similar problems. Germany, one of the world’s great petrolhead countries, has managed to increase its renewable electricity supply to roughly 45 percent.

Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1
by Steve Melia

This act established the Committee on Climate Change to report to parliament and make recommendations to the government about how to meet the targets under the act. In their reports on surface transport, the Committee placed great faith in electric cars. In 2009, they recommended or forecast (the distinction is blurred by the reports’ use of ‘scenarios’) a market share for electric cars of 60 per cent by 2030, coupled with a 90 per cent decarbonization of electricity generation.7 A few years later, that scenario was starting to look rather optimistic. By 2013, fully electric cars represented just 0.1 per cent of new car sales.8 And despite reasonable progress on renewables, 65 per cent of electricity was still being generated from fossil fuels in 2013,9 while the government approved a new generation of gas-fired power stations.10 Electric cars are more energy efficient than petrol or diesel cars.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

A capitalist economy in which consumption, particularly of energy, levels off and ‘enough is enough’ is an impossibility. Green growth in the rich countries of the world is a pipe dream. The idea that once we get over the financial crisis and annual compound growth resumes at 2–3% per annum we can decarbonise the economy is absurd. Carbon-capture technology is still in the experimental phase. ‘Geoengineering’ projects, such as cloud seeding or putting giant reflectors in space or fertilising the oceans to absorb more CO2 are hugely risky, and only encourage governments to stall on CO2 reduction. So is there another way out of the double crisis?

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

National rejuvenation demands a vibrant democracy that empowers the government of the day to take on incumbent elites and monopolists and build a powerful, legitimate national narrative. Fortunately, the new coalition government seems to appreciate this, and has already outlined its commitment to political reform. The rest of the world is confronting multiple challenges too. Growth must be progressively decarbonised to limit atmospheric concentrations of ‘CO2 equivalent’ to 450 parts per million, a level that is believed to be consistent with a global average temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade. During the 2010s the foundations will be laid of an economy and society that must burn fewer fossil fuels and generate a lower carbon footprint.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

He did not question Britain’s over-reliance on financial services before the financial crash of 2008. He had little to say about artificial intelligence, robotics, or nanotechnology. Despite his relative youth he had no feel for social media (he said that people who used Twitter were ‘twats’). He continued to push Britain’s decarbonisation – closing the last coal plants, and dramatically expanding renewable energy. But he failed to make industrial investments sufficient to benefit from the emerging green economy. He inherited a British battery industry which was larger than any in Europe, and talked often about the importance of electric vehicles, but it was Germany and Sweden, not Britain, which under his premiership were taking the lead in battery technology and production.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
by Paul Gilding
Published 28 Mar 2011

What they’re not taking into account is the similarly breathtaking opportunities to save money through energy efficiency, perhaps one of the most exciting areas of short-term opportunity for investors in this whole space. The IEA’s current estimates suggest that the economic benefits of energy efficiency will be significantly greater than all the costs of the investments required to start decarbonizing the energy system. Their assessment suggests that from now to 2050, the incremental investment required to reduce emissions by 50 percent is around $46 trillion, with a major focus on energy efficiency. It sounds like a lot until you consider that resulting fuel cost savings of $112 trillion delivers a net economic benefit of around $66 trillion.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford
Published 15 Mar 2006

If • 99 • T H E U N D E R C O V E R E C O N O M I S T it turned out that the permits were expensive, then we would have the information for an informed debate. We could ask if the costs of climate change were worse than the cost of emission reduction. But many economists believe that, like sulfur permits in California, the carbon permits would quickly reveal that decar-bonization is cheaper than we expected, and we will wonder why we took so long to start. Is the environment too important to be a moral issue? “How did you travel here today?” “I’m sorry?” I’m puzzled. Here I am, going to a panel discussion organized by an environmental charity, and a very earnest young member of staff is grilling me before I even get past the door of the lecture hall.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 15 Apr 2014

In terms of carbon content, steel lies in between pure wrought iron (usually less than .01 percent carbon) and brittle pig or cast iron (3–4 percent carbon): from about 0.2 percent carbon for tough steel for machine gears or structural members, to about 1.2 percent for particularly hard steel for ball bearings or the cutting tools of your lathes. So how do you decarbonize pig iron? The Bessemer converter is a giant pear-shaped bucket, lined with refractory bricks and mounted on pivots so it can be tipped. The vessel is charged with molten pig iron, and then air is pumped in through holes in the bottom, not unlike the action of a bubbling aquarium aerator. The excess carbon reacts with the oxygen and escapes as carbon dioxide gas, and other impurities are also oxidized and scrubbed out into the slag.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

10 The alternative to “fighting back” is to accept temperatures 2°C or more above pre-industrial levels, something that—in addition to the submergence of many coastal cities beneath water—would render current global levels of agricultural production impossible. Fighting back is therefore essential. The Climate Mobilization is an environmental advocacy group that seeks to draw together lessons from the Second World War to consider how a rapid decarbonization of the economy might work in practice. They point to the way car manufacturers rapidly retooled to become arms manufacturers to demonstrate that widespread “mobilization”—including divestments and reinvestments—is possible. Such action does require vast levels of state intervention, of up to 45% of total GDP (US defense spending peaked in 1944 at 44% of GDP).

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

Schwartz had helped build a large-scale climate model in the late 1970s at his previous job at the Palo Alto think tank SRI International, which had invented not only the computer mouse but also VALS (“values and lifestyles”), a research methodology that advertisers used to target specific segments of the American public. By the time of his arrival at Shell in 1982, climate change and emissions were already part of the oil company’s scenarios, and it seemed inevitable, he told me, “that we would decarbonize over time—for many reasons, climate among them.” This was one reason Shell began moving aggressively into natural gas, which is less carbon intensive than oil. In 1998, another onetime scenario planner, Jeroen van der Veer, who would soon become CEO, directed a formal, company-wide study of climate change’s impacts on Shell’s global business.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

r=US&IR=T 690 miles per hour Yeo, Mike, ‘Japan blames spatial disorientation for F-35 crash’, Defense News (10 June 2019). https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/06/10/japan-blames-spatial-disorientation-for-f-35-crash/ once in 2002 In Oruzgan, leading to at least 30 civilian casualties: Harding, Luke and Engel, Matthew, ‘US bomb blunder kills 30 at Afghan wedding’, The Guardian (2 July 2002). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/02/afghanistan.lukeharding and twice in 2008 In Wech Baghtu, leading to 40 civilian deaths: ‘Karzai says air strike kills 40 in Afghanistan’, Reuters (5 November 2008). https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4A44EW20081105; and Haska Menya, leading to 47: ‘Afghan official: U.S. strike hit wedding party’, NBC News (11 July 2008). https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25635571 for an entire year Rajaeifar, Mohammad Ali; Belcher, Oliver; Parkinson, Stuart; Neimark, Benjamin; Weir, Doug; Ashworth, Kirsti; Larbi, Reuben; and Heidrich, Oliver, ‘Decarbonize the military — mandate emissions reporting’, Nature (2 November 2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03444-7#ref-CR2. It produces the same emissions as the average UK passenger car when it flies 100 nautical miles; flown at the supersonic speed of 1,200mph, this would take five minutes.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Labour was on course to meet its target of achieving 12 per cent growth in bus and light rail use in England by 2010, but only because the number of bus journeys was increasing in London (which accounted for 44 per cent of bus use in England). Elsewhere, bus use kept falling. A ‘carbon-conscious’ government would have joined buses, cars and trains to land use, planning and housing, both the existing stock and homes yet to be built. Instead, Labour made only desultory efforts to decarbonize new housing. From 2007 stamp duty would not be payable on new dwellings worth up to half a million that had a zero carbon rating – a standard for the building materials and use of solar panels. Two years later only twenty-four homes hitting that target were sold. On what households threw out, Labour made some progress.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

To thrive in a field of twenty-first-century leviathans, America will have to formulate a more coherent national mission; we will have to renew and reengineer the building blocks of our economy and politics; we will have to evolve into a new industrial species; but we will also have to trade, cooperate, and work with others. The world is on the cusp of a physical revolution that could make our roads safe, clean, fast, and efficient—and could free our society from the shackles of oil. We simply need to reach out and grasp it. These changes are part of a broader transformation and decarbonization of the global economy in the twenty-first century that is in fact quite urgent. In this sense, victory in the Great Race, and in the $70 trillion global economy, is not a zero-sum game—at least not necessarily. At the end of the day, this sprint to build the car of the future is a race we all run together.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

Differences between projections and the truth wouldn’t have been quite so great if foreign telecommuters had been included in domestic counts. Advocates of virtual commuting overlooked the impact of globalization on their dream, and its unintended consequence of outsourcing, in the sense of sending jobs overseas. Employers in both the EU and the USA, obedient to the letter if not the spirit of pro-telework legislation, decarbonized (and gave their ex-workers more social time) by Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), i.e. relocating their call centres and sundry other corporate functions to Asia. In consequence, a Westerner looking to telecommute in their own country would be best advised to emigrate to India, Mexico, Bangladesh or some other developing nation, where literacy is high and talk is cheap.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

But trade, another aspect of the global economy that had come under scrutiny, did fit within the company's goals. In fact, it was core to it. So Mærsk chose to defend trade and expand its efforts to connect the world. To ensure that goal did not clash with care for the environment, Mærsk set aggressive goals on trade emissions: it aimed to “to decarbonize its own operations, and decouple growth in its business from CO2 emissions,” and it committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. From a 2008 baseline, it achieved 41 percent like-for-like reduction in transportation by 2018, and more aggressive goals followed. “It's not our core business,” Snabe said, “but it is a good business.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Retrieved from https://news.bitcoin.com/central-asias-cheap-electricity-chinese-bitcoin-miners/ Estimates put electric energy consumption associated with Bitcoin mining at around 83.67 terawatt-hours per year: Digiconomist. (n.d.). Bitcoin energy consumption index. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption; De Vries, A. (2018). Bitcoin’s growing energy problem. Joule, 2(5), 801-805; Truby, J. (2018). Decarbonizing Bitcoin: Law and policy choices for reducing the energy consumption of Blockchain technologies and digital currencies. Energy research & social science, 44, 399-410. The electricity consumed by the Bitcoin network in one year could power all the teakettles used to boil water in the entire United Kingdom for nineteen years: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball
Published 18 Dec 2018

Life cycle analysis studies [7] indicate that photovoltaics release nearly three times as much carbon as nuclear fission and four times as much as wind (though it is still about ten times better than natural gas). Fortunately, this largely results from the energy required for their manufacture. Hence, the carbon footprint of photovoltaics can be expected to shrink as electricity generation is decarbonized. 2.3.5Wind Because the Earth is spherical, the equator receives much more solar energy than the North and South poles. This creates a temperature difference that is the dominant force driving the wind. Interestingly, this process has close parallels to fusion, so understanding the wind will help us prepare for discussions of turbulence in fusion devices.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

But trade, another aspect of the global economy that had come under scrutiny, did fit within the company's goals. In fact, it was core to it. So Mærsk chose to defend trade and expand its efforts to connect the world. To ensure that goal did not clash with care for the environment, Mærsk set aggressive goals on trade emissions: it aimed to “to decarbonize its own operations, and decouple growth in its business from CO2 emissions,” and it committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. From a 2008 baseline, it achieved 41 percent like-for-like reduction in transportation by 2018, and more aggressive goals followed. “It's not our core business,” Snabe said, “but it is a good business.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
Published 10 Jul 2023

“Humanity retains an enormous amount of control over just how hot it will get and how much we will do to protect one another through [the coming] assaults and disruptions,” argues David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. The good news, Wallace-Wells points out, is that the world is decarbonizing faster than anyone anticipated a decade ago. And thanks to decades of innovation, clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world. That means we now have the means to lift hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty without relying on coal, gas, or oil. Right now, our dependence on fossil fuels is all about inertia, political will, and big oil and gas companies wanting to milk their investments as long as they can.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Basic consumer goods were rationed. And yet the US economy soared during the war, leaving its citizens 25% richer by 1945.11 Compared to this, the sacrifice that would be experienced if something like a Green New Deal were implemented would be minimal. There are also some critiques from the left on how decarbonization in the West will fuel resource extraction in the developing world, a kind of “green colonialism” that can only be averted insofar as the climate crisis is addressed internationally. Not through our current undemocratic institutions of global governance but under a proper framework that promotes global justice, Sadly, although the beauty of globalization means that borders can be erased to push problems around, the tragedy of globalization is that environmental policies are very much stuck inside their own national jurisdictions even when they have global consequences, as the recent outrage over Bolsonaro’s Amazon deforestation policies (undertaken purely for profit) has shown.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

In a reversal of previous policy, the government is planning ten new reactors to replace and add to the nineteen reactors that currently provide 20 percent of England’s electricity. Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, convened a pioneering conference on climate change back in 1979. He originated the idea of decarbonization, noting the two-hundred-year trend of humans using fuels with ever fewer carbon atoms—wood to coal to oil to gas, down to zero carbon with hydrogen and nuclear. In 2007 he published a paper in the International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology in which he declared, “Nuclear energy is green.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Challinor et al., ‘A Meta-Analysis of Crop Yield under Climate Change and Adaptation’, Nature Climate Change 4 (2014), 287–91; Elisabeth Lingren et al., ‘Monitoring EU Emerging Infectious Disease Risk Due to Climate Change’, Science 336:6080 (2012), 418–19; Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas, ‘Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Change’, Global Environmental Politics 10:1 (2010), 60–88; Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017); Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington: National Geographic, 2008); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, op. cit. 10 Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Roadmap for Rapid Decarbonization’, Science 355:6331, 23 March 2017. 11 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not (London: Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 2013), 12. 12 Paul Shapiro, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World (New York: Gallery Books, 2018). 13 ‘Russia’s Putin Says Climate Change in Arctic Good for Economy’, CBS News, 30 March 2017; Neela Banerjee, ‘Russia and the US Could be Partners in Climate Change Inaction,’ Inside Climate News, 7 February 2017; Noah Smith, ‘Russia Wins in a Retreat on Climate Change’, Bloomberg View, 15 December 2016; Gregg Easterbrook, ‘Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?’

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

This litany of false solutions stems from environmental liberals’ blind spots to militarism, capitalism, and environmental racism—from ignoring the disproportionate impact of climate catastrophe on racialized communities around the world to land-grabbing conservation efforts erasing Indigenous jurisdiction and perpetuating colonial terra nullius. Instead of individualist, incrementalist, and imperialist liberalism, we must tackle climate catastrophe and the impending extinction of one million species as emerging from extractivist colonialism and capitalism.44 Decarbonizing would necessarily require demilitarization, decarceration, and decolonization because the climate crisis is a symptom and not the cause of our existential crisis. Importantly, the escalation of eco-fascism and the far right cannot be overcome by or through the settler-colonial nation-state, because eco-fascism is not a racist aberration of an otherwise-humane system.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

They include moratoriums on biological and chemical weapons; the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which phased out substances damaging the atmosphere’s ozone layer, particularly CFCs; the EU’s ban on genetically modified organisms in foodstuffs; and a self-organized moratorium on human gene editing. Perhaps the most ambitious containment agenda is decarbonization, measures like the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. In essence, it represents a worldwide attempt to say no to a suite of foundational technologies. We’ll take a closer look at these modern examples of containment in part 4. For now, though, it’s important to note that, while instructive, none of these achievements are particularly robust.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

Those forms could be in the shape of the final iron object, and quite a few useful items could be made from the cast iron so produced. They could also, and even more usefully, be converted into wrought iron by blowing air over heated charcoal and pig iron, which, counterintuitively, simultaneously consumed the carbon in both fuel and iron, “decarbonizing” it to the <1 percent level that permitted shaping as wrought iron (this is known as the “indirect method” for producing wrought iron). The Cistercians had been doing so from about 1300, but they were, in global terms, latecomers; Chinese iron foundries had been using these techniques two thousand years earlier.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

Beginning in the spring of 2007, he buried himself in his pro-technology vision of environmentalism—committed to countering the deleterious impact that humans were having on the Earth by embracing technology rather than rejecting it. He centered his argument around four themes meant to redefine Green: massive urbanization, globalization, biotechnology, and decarbonized energy, based on his conviction that conservation and renewables would be grossly insufficient. Initially, he titled the book Think Globally, ACT Globally, but after discussion, he settled on Whole Earth Discipline. Brockman came up with the subtitle An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, which Brand would come to regret.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

Since 2018, it has funded half a million dollars’ worth of SRM research in eight countries: Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Indonesia, Iran, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, and South Africa.7 Meanwhile, Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s largest incubator, is requesting proposals from geoengineering-focused start-ups.8 And in the summer of 2021, IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences, published an article under the headline: “Engineers: You Can Disrupt Climate Change; Decarbonization, Carbon Capture, and Solar-Radiation Management Will Provide Work for Decades to Come.” It’s another clear signal that SRM is no longer a radical idea but rather a respectable one with career-building potential.9 That said, governments are just barely beginning to try to figure out how to regulate and coordinate geoengineering efforts.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

Projected Costs of Generating Electricity, 2015 Edition, International Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2015, https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2015/7057-proj-costs-electricity-2015.pdf. The cost of generating electricity is designated as the sum of operations and maintenance, fuel, waste, and carbon costs. 29. Mark Nelson et al., “Power to Decarbonize,” Environmental Progress, 2017, last updated 2019, accessed October 24, 2019, http://environmentalprogress.org/the-complete-case-for-nuclear. Updated in 2019, in both cases using BP Energy Data for electricity production and Bloomberg New Energy Finance data for wind and solar investment volume. 30.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

In this way, we would all pay for the damage we are doing, and we all get an incentive to steer our consumption to goods and services that make less use of carbon sources. The genius of this system is that it would free us of the need for a crystal ball. We would not have to predict what the best way of reducing greenhouse gases is, and we would not second-guess scientists, innovators, companies and consumers. It wouldn’t tell people how to decarbonize, it would leave it to millions of innovators, consumers and businesses to find the most efficient and cheapest way to minimize CO2 emissions. It would remove the subsidies and regulatory help rewarded to particular companies. It would relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the impossible task of evaluating technologies, and remove their opportunity to benefit companies they know privately, believe in personally, like for ideological reasons, reflect well on them, create jobs in their districts, or whom they depend upon for campaign funds.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

But electricity in India is mostly coal-​based and thus highly carbon-​intensive. How should this circle be squared? A detailed discussion of the policies that India should follow would require a whole book on its own but the essential elements are clear enough. The crux of the matter is that growth has to be decarbonized, for which the critical policy requirement is to raise the price of carbon. The ideal policy would be a carbon tax that rises over time (coal as the dirtiest fuel would pay the highest tax).45 Raising the price of carbon would signal to every consumer and producer that carbon-​intensive goods and services should be used more sparingly.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

Or that they will make a catastrophically large contribution. More research on these two feedbacks would be extremely valuable. Feedbacks aren’t the only way to get much more warming than we expect. We may simply burn more fossil fuels. The IPCC models four main emissions pathways, representing scenarios that range from rapid decarbonization of the economy, through to what might happen in the absence of any concern about the environmental impact of our emissions. The amount we will emit based on current policies has been estimated at between 1,000 and 1,700 Gt C (gigatons of carbon) by the year 2100: around twice what we have emitted so far.69 I hope we refrain from coming anywhere close to this, but it is certainly conceivable that we reach this point—or that we emit even more.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

The Stern Review16 optimistically concludes: Yet despite the historical pattern and the business as usual projections, the world does not need to choose between averting climate change and promoting growth and development. Changes in energy technologies and the structure of economies have reduced the responsiveness of emissions to income growth, particularly in some of the richest countries. With strong, deliberate policy choices, it is possible to “decarbonize” both developed and developing economies on the scale required for climate stabilization, while maintaining economic growth in both. Amen to this. Still, it would not quite be free. The Stern report concludes that, assuming a rate of technological progress in the “green sector” based on extrapolating from recent history, it would cost about 1 percent of world GDP annually to stabilize emissions at the level necessary to stave off global warming.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

Here’s a reputable one: James A. Parrott and Michael Reich, “A Minimum Compensation Standard for Seattle TNC Drivers,” Report for the City of Seattle, July 2020, carried out in part by UC Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. The New Luddites 1. “We need a Luddite revolution” Ben Tarnoff, “To Decarbonize We Must Decomputerize: Why We Need a Luddite Revolution,” Guardian, September 18, 2019. 2. The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow, “Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature,” Locus, January 3, 2022; also mentioned in a post on Medium, November 15, 2021, https://doctorow.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-e454bf5a5076. 3.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

Early in 2011, the research group Climate Central, working from BP forecasts about future energy demand, calculated that stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations by 2050 at five hundred parts per million (about a quarter higher than current levels) would require reducing average emissions per unit of energy used in the world by 4.2 percent per year. The analysts noted, “The highest previously recorded rate of decarbonization in a country probably took place in France between 1975 and 1990, when that country’s nuclear power system expanded very rapidly,” and yet even in that extreme instance, France’s emissions fell by only 2.6 percent annually.29 The numbers argue that global warming on a scale scientists describe today as dangerous will occur.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

Over 80 percent of world energy continues to be supplied by what Carnot called the “combustibles”—carbon-based fuels. About 75 to 80 percent of world energy is expected to be carbon based two decades from now. The growing importance of the climate change question ensures that this ratio will be strongly challenged both politically and technologically as people strive to decarbonize energy. While climate is the mega-issue, many other environmental questions will affect supply. Coal—the source of 40 percent of world electricity—is challenged about other emissions. Two of the most important innovations that are particularly important to energy security—oil sands, and shale gas, and tight oil—encounter determined opposition.