Shed A Light: Rupert Read – This civilisation is finished: so what is to be done?

you [Applause] Thank You Cornelia for that kind introduction so I want to start out by addressing the younger people in the room which is the majority of you younger than me and what I want to say to you is slightly stuck is this that your leaders have failed you your governments have failed you your parents and their generation have failed you your teachers have failed you and I failed you and what I mean by that is that we have all failed to warn adequately and to prevent the dangerous climate change that is now here and that is coming and that is definitely going to get a lot worse definitely and because of that failure I'm afraid for you I have fear for you I fear that some of you are unlikely to grow old and there is nothing really worse for human beings they're not being able to take adequate care of the next generation I'm really sorry to have to be the one to say this to you though I suspect that many of you already know that something like this is true and I'll come back to that point so why do I say this where do I come with such a negative message well let's talk about the Paris agreement because that's what it's supposed to be giving us all hope around dangerous climate change yeah and it was a remarkable achievement it was hard to expect anything better than Paris every country in the world had to agree and incredibly they did and they came up with reasonably bold proposals for reining in climate dangerous emissions so let's talk about why that's extraordinary achievement very hard to see how one could have hoped for more than Paris was absolutely not enough so the first thing to say about Paris is that of course Paris was now a few years ago and things have got quite a bit worse since then the world's weather systems appear to be spinning out of control just in the last three years basically since around the time of Paris and we could talk about that in detail if you want to other bad things that have happened since then with all the most recent was you may have heard that there is new scientific evidence about the extent to which heat has been stored in the oceans a lot more than was previously recognized and that's a kind of ticking time bomb part of the global overheating problem which is not going to go away so things have got worse since Paris and meanwhile the initial signs of compliance with Paris are not good I'll come back to that point next problem with Paris of course is that as we all know the most powerful man in the world from what is in practice really still the most polluting nation in the world the United States face they say that China is but of course that's false really that's only it only looks like China is because you ascribe all the emissions to China for all the products that China exports to us and to the Americans and so on the most powerful men the world's most powerful country in the world has pulled out of the Paris agreement which is a pretty devastating hammer blow against Paris but it's much worse than that if we talk about the two-degree target for Paris I'll come to 1.5 degrees a bit later in my talk 1.5 degrees is unbelievably optimistic to think that we could possibly manage that I'll come back to that we talked about the two-degree target in Paris well most scientists agree that actually if all of the commitments that are supposed to be made in order for the if treaty to work were made the actual dangerous climate change that would results would raise global temperatures by quite a lot more than two degrees it would probably be two point seven three three point four something like that in other words the science on which the Paris agreement is based is itself overly conservative overly optimistic and that's not too surprising when you consider that the IPCC is actually not a properly scientific process it's a scientific process that has built into it also a political process but it's worse than that because actually the commitments that countries have made towards those Paris targets are well short of what would be required in order to meet those targets right countries voluntarily commit under Paris to say what are they going to do to meet their Paris obligations and if you add all those up and people have added them all up they come to considerably less than what Paris requires in order to work but it's worse than that you see if there's a pattern emerging here because actually the commitments that countries have made the commitments that governments have made to reach those Paris targets are actually in stark contradiction to what virtually every single one of those governments would possibly the exception of Boonton are planning to do over the next ten years or so so virtually every country in the world has plans to encourage further economic growth as plans to encourage the building of or simply to build a lot more infrastructure transport infrastructure industrial infrastructure etc most of those plans not all but most of those plans stand in opposition to the possibility of achieving those Paris commitments and will you tell me which one is likely to win out right classic dilemma if you have the business ministry against the environment ministry or the Chancellor against the climate change Minister for which one wins I'll leave it to you to guess but it's worse than that because the ipcc the worst thing arguably about the IPCC process is that it seriously underestimates the possibility of feedbacks which could spiral the climate system out of control and which may already be kicking in potentially explaining the disastrous weather chaos of the last few years among those feedbacks are the albedo loss feedback so that's the loss of ice for instance in the Arctic and you know the less ice you have the less heat and light gets reflected more gets absorbed and there are scientists who suspect that the albedo loss situation is a lot worse than the IPCC have taken to account and most scarily of all is the situation visa vie methane which we know now is starting to be released in significant quantities again mostly from the Arctic from the permafrost etc and they call it the methane dragon are those who are in the know about this and they call it them you think a gun for a reason I mean dragons are our sort of icon of something kind of terrifying overwhelming out of control if that methane release starts to accelerate which might already be happening and may well happen in a big way over the next five 10 15 years well that locks us into catastrophic climate change probably runaway climate change because you then start getting a further vicious circle of more ice being melted more methane being released etc and the crucial thing to remember about methane is that methane is a is a greenhouse gas approximately 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide and the final thing to know about the Paris agreement is that the Paris agreement for its targets later this century to be achieved depends on climate engineering technologies geoengineering technologies the idea being you can engineer the climate of the entire earth there are only two problems with this dependence of the Paris agreement on those technologies they are firstly that the technologies did not exist and I mean that pretty much literally most of them are simply fantasies that scientists technologists and engineers have the ones that do exist have not been tried at scale and we don't know that they'll work at scale if they were tried at scale and the second problem is that even if they do exist or did exist it would in most cases be profoundly reckless radically unproportioned to action to bring them in at scale it would be an experiment with the entire globe with enormous deleterious possible and actual side-effects the one which they talk about the most Beck's which is basically growing lots of biomass that you then burn you allegedly sequester the carbon you allegedly keep the carbon safer for hundreds of years under the surface of the earth if that process works at which there's serious reason to doubt that you can do all of those things at scale if you did it at scale it would be devastating to the Earth's ecosystems you would be basically creating huge amounts of monoculture and replacing the bio diverse ecosystems which need restoring rather than replacing so do you Engineering is built into virtually all the Paris scenarios we've got no reason to believe it works and if it does work it probably still shouldn't be used and I'll come back to exactly why it shouldn't be used in a bit more detail later in my talk the conclusion it seems to me one is bound to draw from this and look I would love to be wrong so please correct me if I can be corrected in the question answer session on this point but I've given a spoken number of times and I haven't heard any Corrections yet the conclusion I think one has to draw from this is that well to put it in a slightly crude sort of modern way Paris is toast we know if we're prepared to actually look at the facts that the aims of the Paris agreement will not be achieved and they'll almost certainly be missed by a long way that means that dangerous climate change is coming and it is going to get a lot worse for a lot for a long time to come and well that's a key part of the context in which I say that we failed you and that we failed it seems me there's only one possibility and I'll come back to this in a second there's only one possibility for how what I've just said could prove to be wrong which is if people came to realize the kind of points that I've just been making and that a few others are starting to make and came to realize just how desperate the situation was then they might decide to do something completely unprecedented to change it but it would have to be completely unprecedented you get a sense of the scale of what I'm talking about we're talking about turning around the entire supertanker of the world's economy the entire supertanker of the world's civilization it seems to me in fact and I'll turn to the visualizer now please that there are three possibilities before us in this context so possibility number one is that we do what I just described we transform civilization a transformed civilization we absolutely radical alter the radically alter the entire basis of pretty much everything that we do the kind of transformation we're talking about is a lot bigger than for example just a large-scale conversion to renewable energy we're also we're also have to be talking about radically reducing the amount of transportation of goods and people around the world radically real oka lysing radically changing our farming practices and the entire nature of our agriculture radically reducing the amount of viously of meat that we eat in countries like this etc it would be a total transformation the likes of which we have never known certainly not since history began well look I hope that happens and probably like many of you I'm working to make it happen but what I want to put to you this evening among other things is the thought that it would be a bold person who was prepared to commit to the thought that that is gonna happen that we're going to make it happen that we're gonna make it happen quickly enough it would be a very risky bet to bet everything upon that kind of completely unprecedented transformation and overcoming all the vast vested interests and ignorances and stupidities and so on and so forth which stand in the way of it so that is why I think we have to consider further possibilities so possibility number two a successor civilization after some kind of collapse and that it seems to me now is what we have to start to think is very likely to happen or put it this way actually very likely to be the best scenario we can realistically hope for or plan towards if the sketch that I gave you about Paris is right then we are facing a burden almost certainly unless we are incredibly lucky or incredibly determined and brilliant we are facing almost certainly changes around the world which are going to bring an end to this civilization with extreme prejudice and so we need to think about what comes after it considering the possibility seriously that that is what will happen that this civilization will collapse and I'm going to talk more about that in a minute the third possibility of course is simply total collapse and in a way there's not much that needs to be said about that it's obviously highly highly undesirable I'll just say a tiny bit about it there are various different forms that it could take when I talk about total collapse that could mean simply there is no more civilization but there are a few people hanging on here and there Lovelock talks about a few thousand breeding pairs in the Antarctic or it could be worse than that it could mean complete human extinction and extinction of most other mammalian life on Earth or it could be worse than that it could be the elimination of virtually all complex life why could it be as bad as that because if something like the methane dragon really does start to fly and causes a runaway effect there is no knowing how how much it will go on there isn't very good reliable science on this but some scientists think that it could push up global temperatures by at something like 12 degrees it might not stop at all James Henson talks about the possibility of the same kind of thing happening on earth has happened on Venus you may be aware that Venus's atmosphere is made up quite largely of carbon dioxide from extreme greenhouse effect that's why Venus is a lot hotter than mercury even though Venus is a lot further from the Sun than than mercury the extreme possibility and it is possible is that the oceans would start to boil off on earth and that would be the end of all complex life possibly even of all life now I'm not going to talk much more about that I think it's obvious that total collapse has to be avoided and it doesn't hugely matter when you get when you drill down within it which version of it you have although it still does matter a bit I'm more interested in talking about this a success of civilization after the collapse because it seems to me that what we've actually done mostly up to this point is assume that we can transform our civilization or actually more properly what we've mostly done is assume that we can just kind of tinker with it and reform it and that that will be enough the most we've tended to assume is that we need a civilizational transformation and suggesting that's the least that we need to aim at but that it's not enough to just aim at it we have to take seriously the possibility that given how bad things are given home how much we've let them go that this is now going to be very hard to attain and something like this maybe the best we can hope for any which way you look at these three possibilities they justify my title the title of my talk this civilization is finished because the best outcome that could happen is that we transform this civilization out of all recognition it will not look the same at all it will be a transformation more radical than the change between the era of the 16th 17th century in the Industrial Revolution it will be more radical even than the Agricultural Revolution I would suggest it will be a total transformation this civilization business as we know it is finished it has a sell-by date on it we just don't know how far past that sell by date we're going to be able to keep the balls in the air this civilization has finished the question now is what comes after it is it going to be a transformed civilization is it going to be some kind of successor civilization or is it going to be nothing at all ok so what is to be done the second half of my title if I'm right what is should be done and I've got a series of ideas on that that I want to share with you another list number one wake up we need to wake up we need to wake up to this reality the think tank that I chair that Cornelia Kandra kindly referred to is called greenhouse and our previous project was called the post growth project talking about why we had to give up the fetish for a growth our new project is called they're facing up to climate reality project and it does I hope what it says on the tin what we think is that people need to face up to these very harsh realities that I'm sketching for you here and not pretend any longer that we can get away with just focusing on say you know changing our energy infrastructure to renewable energy or even get away with assuming that we can and will succeed in transforming our civilization in the way that I very much hope we still might this waking up process is not necessarily particularly Pleasant or easy it may involve you for example if you're willing to go through it experiencing some despair it certainly should involve you experiencing some fear and some well a lot of sadness if you're not sad about what's happening if you're not afraid in the context of the kind of thing I'm saying then you're not paying attention and in fact we can go further than that I think there's a wonderful new branch of psychology called eco psychology and what the Eco psychologists argue is that the despair the fear the sadness the rage that we feel in this kind of context is rational and could even be described as a kind of consciousness arising from the earth itself in the sense that we are feeling what we are doing to our beautiful planetary home and those kind of feelings are appropriate if you're not as I say if you're not feeling suddenly of some of those feelings you're not feeling some of them right now well then one suspects there might be something wrong with you so what the Eco psychologists say is you know don't don't as conventional psychology does focus on the individuals say or this individual is feeling sad they need to be fixed right look at that individual and say this individual is feeling sad well that tells us something reliable that is an expression of something reliable in relation to what's actually happening at this point in history and what's happening to the earth so if you're experiencing bad feelings around this building you're not alone and you may be more rational than the people who are not experiencing those bad feelings also just briefly mention in passing that if you're experiencing them in a really really bad way well then you should actively seek support from someone who can actually give it for example an eco psychologist or come and talk to me and I can potentially put you in touch with the growing number of therapists and psychiatrists who are actually seriously interested in helping people who are suffering from what we're doing to the than from the likely consequences in our lifetimes of that I'm just going to mention one person who's also very worth reading in this connection who is the the deep ecologist Joanna Macy for example her book the work that reconnects and that book is sort of like a guide for the person who is involved in this kind of difficult journey she used to call the work that she does along these lines despair work which i think is quite a useful phrase for it so firstly let's wake up let's wake everyone else up too it's not just us in this room secondly we need to talk about this and that's why it's really important that in about another 10 minutes or so I'm going to stop and we're gonna have a question-and-answer it's really unhealthy to keep all this in the confines of your own mind let me tell you a very quick story about how the green house facing up to climate reality project started we decided we needed to have a conversation among ourselves in the core team at green house of what was happening in relation to climate was it enough etc and we started off and go around and what we had to say in the go-round was what do you think is going to happen and what are your feelings about it and I find member rightly I was the first person to go and I said something like well what I think is gonna happen is that very probably there is going to be a collapse and all of my feelings about it I'm terrified for myself let alone for people who are younger than me and I feel very lonely in it if you're very alone in it because I think that no one else is really thinking this and the next person went and they said pretty much the same and then that expressin said pretty much the same and what was interesting about that was that by the time we've gone around two things had emerged firstly that the feeling that some of us had had certainly that I had had that maybe I could have sort of hold on to some hope that maybe I was wrong because maybe it was only me who was thinking this well that was gone right no it turned out that everyone else that's been secretly thinking it as well but then the second thing was more encouraging and more liberating which was ah so actually we can talk about it it's not just me we can talk about it in a group perhaps if we're having this conversation starting to realize that we've all really got this fear perhaps with lots of other people out there who have it too which is why I decided to start giving these kind of talks thirdly we need to think about my option number two the successor civilization idea we need to think civilizational succession we need to think about what that actually means so what it means it's very very challenging we need to think for example about how if there's going to be some kind of partial collapse at least we preserve the values of civilization through that very very difficult a role it seems to me here for writers for academics of all kind kind certainly for philosophers like myself I think very little if this work has been done seriously yet but I think this kind of building of a new kind of imaginary which can cope with the kind of scenarios I'm talking about well it's hard to think of of intellectual work that could be more important at this time falsely following on from that point we need as I describe it to build lifeboats through the storms that are coming what kind of things do I mean by that well I mean a whole load of things and I can only sketch a few examples of them here so we could start out with a little bit of individual prepping preparing for potential collapse so I would recommend to you for example to not keep all your money in the in the bank but to keep some under your mattress because it may well be that that the banking system the financial system is not with us for very much longer I would recommend you to just store some food as as I'm doing by the way I have got the money but it's not for anyone watching online it's not actually under my mattress so don't go looking there you'd have to like tear up the whole house to find it and you still might not with the build community the the relations we have with each other it should be very fragmented by the kind of society that we live in an individualistic new liberal etc society those relations going to be absolutely vital if there is some kind of partial collapse as I'm suggesting there is very very likely to be the transition town movement is a good model here and has already achieved a certain amount that needs to be built on expanded we need to work on how to preserve things which will be useful to future people through a potential collapse for example seed banks seed banks is a great example quite challenging though in the context of climatic change the great seed bank at Svalbard and if many of you heard this worrying story was seriously disturbed recently by the massive increase of temperatures in the Arctic it was thought to be pretty much invulnerable that's a it's a seed bank basically in the ice but it started melting we have to think about how to preserve seeds through climatic change and we also have to think about the kind of seeds which are going to be useful basically being geographically distributed from where they originated right in relation to a temperature rise and therefore changes of ranges of plants so we should be for example in this country planting native species of course but we should also be planting some non-native species which will cope with higher temperatures which are like very likely to be coming our way in greenhouse we call this kind of work under my item for here we call it transformational adaptation we need to adapt to the climate change that is coming and it needs to be in ambition it needs to be transformational it needs to be mitigator at the same time as its adaptive and it needs to be taking into account the serious changes that would like to be coming there's another phrase which has started to be used in this connection which i think is also very useful people are talking about deep adaptation and deep adaptation means adaptation which is actually specifically premise on the thought that collapse is likely deep addict ation considers the thought what if we fail what if we really do fail and things start to collapse we need to be for example preparing for sea-level rise and not doing completely absurd things such as building nuclear power stations by the sea side which is where virtually all nuclear power stations are and are built own an absolute definition of insanity at this moment in history to build these things which are toxic for hundreds of years highly toxic for hundreds of years in places where they are vulnerable to something which we know is extremely likely to be coming and if civilization does partially even collapse how confident are you that all the kind of resources that are needed to keep those nuclear power plants safe are going to remain intact we've already seen at Fukushima a little bit of what can happen even in the middle of an intact civilization when something hits a nuclear power station remember that there are going to definitely be more and more natural disasters of course we cannot reuse that word natural disasters anymore because they're partly man-made both of them now there are definitely going to be more natural disasters there are definitely gonna be climate disasters coming in the next generation there's a slight chance that we might be transformed to stop climate catastrophe but there will definitely be more climate disasters as we're seeing right now building nuclear power stations in the context of that it's is it is absolutely absurd the deep adaptation agenda also is another reason for thinking that there's something very wrong about the ambition of geoengineering because the Geoengineer to have this incredibly hubristic idea of we are going to control humanity is going to control the climate of the whole earth you have to have a technological infrastructure which you are confident you can support for the long run all right so imagine for example we put a load of mirrors in space which is what some of the some of the fantasies want to do to deflect away sunlight so that we can beat some of the effects of global overheating we have to be able to be confident that those mirrors will be able to stay up there for a very very long time and in fact actually many of the proposals for mirrors in space are not literally mirrors they have lots of very very small particle that you put up there and then they start to fall down again then you put more up there well what would happen if you had a project like that and then suddenly you weren't able to put them up there anymore because the country that's supposed to do that has collapsed then you get a sudden spiking in temperature which is far worse than a gradual increase in temperature or think of some of the other potential side effects from from geoengineering people want to see the oceans with with iron and other stuff to create plankton blooms that will then sink to the bottom and can be sequestered and that kind of thing we don't know what the effects of that are going to be if we are on top of our game you know maybe we can monitor those and then do interventions to counter then the horrible negative side effects quite like to happen from a from an intervention like that but we can't do any of that if the civilization in question has collapsed and you might then get some kind of vast oceanic dead zone opening up and nothing human beings can do about it one of the morals here is that there are worse things that could happen than civilizational collapse I think humans were quite bad at thinking that thought but what could be worse than our civilization collapsing well here's something could be worse if our civilization civilization collapses in a really horrific uncontrolled way and poisons the remaining ecosystems at the same time all right so be very careful what you wish for the deep adaptation agenda says we need to be thinking and acting now in ways that take seriously into account the possibility that we will not be able to do the kinds of interventions in future that we can do now v holding actions this is a term from Joanna Macy what does she mean by this Jimi's actions to hold the damage at bay and slow it down by ourselves more time what kind of things come under this heading well again a wide variety of things everything from consumer boycotts to divestment campaigns obviously Cambridge University must divest from fossil fuels to political action lobbying getting involved in electoral politics don't make the mistake of thinking that because I'm saying that civilizational collapse in some form or another is likely to happen that we should give up on these conventional methods not at all they're absolutely vital right now it's just that they're not enough by themselves anymore we should think of them primarily as holding actions as holding back the the potential catastrophe rather than actually either being able to stop it completely or being able to genuinely ameliorate its its consequences I would also throw in here obviously given my perspective that I would urge you all to not just vote green but to join the Green Party you know it's great if you're if you're in labor or if you're a supporter of Julian Harper to whatever and you're trying to do the right thing in those contexts but there is only one party which is even remotely serious about the kind of agenda that we're talking about here this evening the agenda which will determine our futures even though the popular press most of the time is preoccupied with brexit and Strictly Come Dancing and what-have-you ie the the climate crisis and that is the Green Party so holding actions are a vital part of what we need to do six-point holding actions are not enough we should rebel that's why I've distributed these extinction rebellion leaflets around the room these guys who I've just joined with recently very very impressive they're saying look this is an emergency it is incredibly urgent it is going to determine our futures the government's have completely failed us we should not any longer accept their authority it's not enough to do consumer boycotts and vote and so on we should do non-violent direct action as well and I think they're exactly right [Music] the next big extinction rebellion action is on the 17th of of November in London I was there at the launch which you can watch that on the on the extension rebellion website it was an inspiring event the event on the 17th floor I think be quite a lot bigger and well if you're impressed by anything that I'm saying this evening I was urge any of you to seriously consider going down there and taking part in that and more generally joining in with all the extension rebelling and are doing I think this is an idea whose time has very much come and reminded a little bit of the marvelous film series that some of you will be familiar with the Hunger Games trilogy the second of those of those films was called Catching Fire and the idea there was that that some small gestures of disobedience and defiance can can create a spark that catches light and can ignite a much much larger rebellion now I'm not talking about us doing the kind of things that people did in The Hunger Games films thankfully our scenario is not quite as horrific as a scenario those fictional characters were living under but the potential future that we're facing is pretty much as horrific as theirs and so it seems to me that the least we can do is rebel through non-violent direct action as the extinction rebellion marvelously are doing one little side note on that people sometimes say to me Oh Rupert you two you talk too much in terms that are kind of fearful and you make people sad and scared and you don't give them enough hope and my reply is well I don't think that this is this is really a time where hope is the most appropriate emotion to feel what we need right now is courage what we need right now is courage to face the reality and to try to do the right thing in the face of it and that is what the extinction rebellion people are showing they're showing a real courage a willingness to put their bodies on the line etc and if enough of us managed to do that we could change the course of history and we could bring about conceivably this transformed civilization which I mentioned earlier in which of course must be a much more hopeful idea than the success of civilization after collapse do I think it's likely to succeed the extinction rebellion No I think it might succeed yes and that's the wonderful thing about human action in the future one can never know what's going to work on what isn't I wouldn't bet on it succeeding but I would like to throw myself into trying to make it succeed and the more of us who are brave enough to do that the more chance that it might just succeed and even if it doesn't succeed it will at least have shown some courage and some willingness to look what's coming in the face and that brings me to the seventh and final thing on my list we need to stop what I mean by that so I'm encouraging you to do all these things join the Green Party rebel wake up talk about this and so on but there's something else as well we need to stop we need to slow write down and actually give ourselves a chance to really take all of this in and really think about it and really feel it if we don't do that then we won't wake up properly and we won't be in a good position to wake everyone else up we need to stop and give ourselves time to talk about this and work through issues in relation to it and only if we stop will we actually be in a good position to do the dramatic courageous things that we're going to need to do under these headings if there is to be hope emerging from all of this Paul Kings North who saw a lot of the way things were going some years ago and was one of the founders of their dark mountain group said the following he said there is an abyss opening up before us we need to be brave enough to look into it and only if we do that will we then know what to do next and that's what I mean by stopping so I urge you to do these various things use your abilities use your intelligence and your potential in the way that the best fits you to them I would say don't restrict yourself to just one of them though that we need to be giving ourselves multiple options we've Gamble's too much to date on being able to stop the juggernaut from destroying us we need to think very seriously about what will happen if we fail and that's why these are important but the third thing I want to suggest you that we need to do is to stop give ourselves a chance to reflect our on all of this and only if we do that will we be actually well placed to make the next moves forward and now I'm going to stop and we'll throw it open to you for questions and discussion which means that we're going to start to talk about this which i think is deeply necessary thank you so much for coming here and thank you for your attention so much debate I'm just gonna ask one question before we get soft on the Q&A so if everyone else starts thinking of their questions as well I just wanted to offer you put whether you could expand a bit more on what you meant by the term civilization collapse and how you actually envisage that playing out obviously I appreciate their probably gonna be multiple ways that that could happen yeah but whether you could yeah so yeah obviously that's a huge question but very important one will it be fast will it be slow we don't know it could be either do we have any signs of what it looks like already visible to us in the world well I think I'm afraid we do I think you could argue that there are some morbid symptoms in this country and certainly in the United States states that point to a kind of societal the beginnings of a kind of societal disintegration much more to the point look at what's happening in places like the Congo or the Yemen and bear in mind that of course one of the reasons why the conflicts in the in the Middle East and North Africa and parts of Africa have been as severe as they have been in the last few years is already climate change and that's only gonna get worse the projections for Africa are frankly you know incredibly sad and and scary it's very very hard to see a good future coming for Africa and and the Middle East and yeah I think we see some of the early signs of what collapse could look like for example right now in in Yemen but you know there really isn't it would be great for people to do some imaginative work and empirical work around this there's very little at the moment there are also limits as to the extent to which it can be done and I don't think we should try to do too much modeling of it or too much worrying about it I think the more important things that we need to do are firstly obviously to try to prevent it from happening and secondly to act in ways that we could have some reasonable basis for thinking will be helpful to us in the context of any kind of collapse so what are some of the basic things that one needs and you know we go back to very basic points here like food and water right and in that context I want to make a controversial remark you know nothing I've said so far so far should be too controversial but it really isn't mostly it's just it's just being willing to no longer be an ostrich but the controversial remark is this that I imagine this being Cambridge that the the great majority of you in the room are afraid and favor of freedom of movement and I do think that that is a shift that needs to be re-examined in the context of what I'm talking about here so consider for example the the fact which i think is a fact that should disturb us in the context which i've been describing that this country cannot feed itself yeah we're way way short of being able to feed ourselves we depend upon other countries being able to buy food from other countries so we don't have the food sovereignty and I would argue we don't have food security in the kind of world that we're moving into and if you think something like well but what we should try to do is create a world where we can continue where we can gradually kind of move ourselves a bit closer to being able to feed ourselves by doing things like changing our diets eating a lot less meat in this country and so on and never let's continue to have kind of interdependence with other countries such that we can call upon them to to to give us some of the food that we need well if you start getting kind of mega famines occurring say in Africa or the Middle East does that situation continue to be viable you know I mean in both in practical terms but also in moral terms right what sense does it make to think that we could continue to justify morally importing food from other countries when millions and millions of people in other countries are starving so it seems to me we have to start to take more seriously as a real priority being able to feed ourselves in this country and if and the more you carry on increasing the population of this country the more impossible that becomes as a goal so there's my one controversial remark for the evening with what I've said is right then it may need to mean we have to start to rethink our commitment which I'm sure many of us have on an instinctive basis to freedom of movement thank you so Steve oh I love Levi crawlers do you want to come down and grab the mics and so does anyone have any questions for Rupert please don't be shy put your hand up if you have any questions yeah there's a question there then what the mic is on shoot if you just I was wondering how you recommend going about talking to people about this because I've been trying to talk to my family and friends about this for the past few weeks and I think they're ready to get me sectioned yeah okay so I've tried to model some of it so one thing I think is quite important is creating some kind of emotional resonance and that's one of the reasons why I always say something like I'm afraid for you and that brings something real into the room which is not there in most talks around this when climate scientists talk about this they hardly ever say anything like that they feel it's kind of not their role it's kind of too touchy-feely or something it's not their expertise so that's one quite important a important point I would make you've got to try to establish some kind of emotional resonance you've got to also provide an opportunity for a discussion it's completely it's it's really dangerous on this one to do what happens for example at some academic conferences where you have someone give a long lecture and then there's like five minutes for questions or something no there's got to be a possibility for for actually thinking about it and feeling about it kind of together for a while and I think it's also useful to help people to understand that they're not alone in the way I described so let me let me actually ask for a little show of hands at this point can I ask you please put your hand up if you've heard someone give a talk or read a paper or something which has been quite as well I would use the term climate realist others would use the term pessimistic or negative or something put your hands up if you've ever heard a talk or read a paper which is as climate realist as this one before okay so if a reasonable number of you and now now let me ask you to put your hands up if you've ever kind of thought the kinds of thoughts that are in this talk before if you've ever thought something like it seems to me that probably we're going to collapse okay and that's what I thought happen at least twice as many people put their hands up and that sells tells me and I hope tells you that what I'm saying is right that we've been refusing to talk about this we've been kind of keeping it a secret and worrying about it by ourselves and I think that attitude is no longer sustainable literally and we need to share it so to do things like that and to enable people to understand that they're not alone in these fears I think that's really really important I think it's really really harmful if people are thinking is it just me am I going crazy thank you thanks Rupert I don't if I am thanking you actually it was terrifying all I would say is I think what you said was brilliant and I think that I think for most of us though there's a strange cognitive dissonance because the way you're talking feels both realistic and utterly incomprehensible simultaneous in terms of the sort of lies that we're all leading and one of the things that I'm sort of worried about is that you talk about civilization collapsing as if it was one thing it seems to me that civilization as you say if it is one thing is it's in serious trouble right now but the point is that there are a lot of people who trying to create an impression that there is a version of civilization that will sister will if you like write out all of the changes that you're talking about and that will be very differentially experienced and some people might be sitting in this hole in a hundred years time you know if you like in that lifeboat of the luxury and the sort of relative level of privilege of this society while civilization has completely disappeared elsewhere so that that's where I guess we what you're talking about gets very political and trying to understand the practical politics of that yeah when you've essentially got a series of regimes now that could honestly be described as enemies of the planet and they are proliferated yes so I mean is partly what you're talking about an extinction rebellion and so forth is that the right response to that I'm not entirely sure well look it has an extension rebellion in terms of this leaflet and so on it's a kind of experiment I'm quite impressed with it so far it's early days I think that something like that what the extinction rebellion are both talking about and trying to do I mean in terms of their objectives and in terms of the methods for trying to achieve it are on the right track if we're going to have any chance of achieving the 1.5 degree ambition you know that requires total civilizational transformation very rapidly going up against huge vested interest not going not only going through conventional political and democratic processes so that's what I would say about that in terms of the your points about sort of the politics of lifeboats and so on you're absolutely right I mean there are very awkward and difficult questions to think about here I've touched on one of them by talking about does it really make sense to to carry on talking about freedom of movement we should be willing to take some climate refugees potentially in this country it seems to me after all we're the cause of a lot of the trouble we had the Industrial Revolution first but we literally don't have much capacity to take very many if it starts to get to the point that I'm afraid it is likely to to get to and at the end of the day it seems to me there ought to be lifeboats it'll be better for some civilization to to survive and for no civilization to survive but what you need to do and this is why I'm talking about the importance of thinking civilizational succession what you need to do is to try to ensure that any way in which you go about creating such lifeboats isn't so repellent and aggressive and immoral and so on as to be as to be kind of self undermining or better that it hadn't happened at all and that's a real that's a real challenge coming back to your first point about how this is simultaneously kind of climate realism and feels it's very hard for us to for it to feel kind of fully real to us you know comfortably in this hall and with our lifestyles etc etc yeah I think that's absolutely right and on that front one of the things that we badly need is really good art that starts to make real now I'm happy to be able to announce only when the room who doesn't know that you as someone who's been making some of that art this is Steve Waters the the playwright has done some very interesting stuff around climate change through drama we need a lot more of that we need it to to look unabashedly at what's likely to happen we needed across all media including mass media we need that means we very badly needed in film and television where we've had virtually none of it to date you know we there are examples that I've worked on myself which are kind can kind of be talked about here there's the road but across the road you know it doesn't offer much by way of a success of civilization there's avatar which is I think immensely inspiring but but deliberately I think completely unrealistic if we're trying to think about kind of realistic ways in which we can imagine what's likely becoming I think that so far the arts have not done well on this front and a particular television has has almost completely failed I think that's probably a lot for political reasons as well as a sort of lack of imagination perhaps so yeah we we need to find ways of being able to do things that we're not very good at you doing as humans especially in this culture thinking long term imagining profound change Tolstoy said somewhere or is it Machiavelli Machiavelli says somewhere that human beings can never really understand anything until they've experienced it well if that's true then we're in a hell of a lot of trouble and there seems to be a fair amount of truth to it because we have to anticipate this ahead of time partly because of one of the the one of the awful aspects of the challenge of dangerous climate change is the time lags that have systematically built into it you know if we were going to tackle this if we were going to actually get a grip on it we would have done so a generation ago you know roughly speaking we would have elected green government's everywhere in the world generation ago and they would have done things that were quite unpalatable to a lot of us and we didn't right so now we're in a kind of real last chance saloon arguably quite a lot more last Nanci than the one point five degree IPCC report lets on and we have to find ways of making that real to ourselves again somebody who can help here is Joanna Macy some of the exercises in the work that reconnects are very much about projecting yourself into into into the future and which can be very powerful so I just have a quick question about if we're going to make the transformation yes that seems like the best possible solution yeah and I was just kind of wondering what sort of radical changes could we possibly make that might allow that to happen such as I've heard about really wide widespread rewilding or radically cutting and yeah population growth rates I just wanted to hear yeah good so I haven't said much about that partly because you know lots of other people have said lots about that so I'll briefly say a bit more and then I'll say a little bit more about why I haven't said more about it so yeah the examples you gave a good I think it's very clear that we need to find a humane ways of reducing the human population of course it's true that the populations in the richer countries are the ones which it's far more important to reduce so so traditionally advocates of population a reduction have focused on countries like Africa and India that's actually kind of the wrong end of the telescope the most important countries to reduce populations in our countries like this one and the United States and Australia and and Kuwait which is by the way another reason for thinking that freedom of movement if that means increased immigration to those countries is not very sensible from an ecological perspective but the larger the human population is there the more reckless essentially we're being the more embarking into a terror incognita which we know is likely to be dangerous I think that systemic rewilding done cleverly with an i it's a kind of mitigation sequestration is is absolutely clearly part of what we need to do we need to to restore genuine bio diverse ecosystems and opposed the culture of monoculture which is one of the reasons why the geoengineering solutions which are most popular are potentially catastrophic there would be a sort of massive expansion of the drive towards biofuels and palm oil and so on that we've already that we've already seen we need to have we need to have massive institutional change so as clearly I said at the start I've been writing a lot about the precautionary principle we should really adopt the precautionary principle because adopted around the world we should act on it really really seriously that would be transformational I think and I've also argued and actually you can see some of this on some of the publications on the the table in the when we have the drinks afterwards I've also argued that we need to change our democratic systems to include to building long term ism into them and to build in care future generations into them and I mentioned earlier also another important thing which is a massive reduction in the amount of animal flesh that we consume in particular basically we need to abolish factory farming of animals and actually we need to abolish factory farming in total the real underlying problem is not animal agriculture it's industrial agriculture and industrial agriculture includes animal cut agriculture as its most cruel and horrible and destructive element but if you just if you just switch from eating beef raised on soya to eating the soy beans directly you're still not doing much for the planet if the soy beans you're eating directly were grown where there was previously Amazon rainforest so these are some of the big things that we need to do I really hope you do them let's try and do them we should be doing them right now and some of them we are and some people in this room probably are involved in some of these some of these things but now a brief word about why I didn't say more about these things it's not just that everyone else has been saying loads about them or lots of other people it's also that I think that the way that people have focused on these things so much has not enabled us to look clearly in the face enough what is coming you know I think if we spend all our time talking about these radical transformational solutions especially when we realized that you know yeah absolutely let's try make them happen and the wonderful thing about human beings is that our agency and our powers are never known to us before we've before we've tried you know there can be extraordinary tipping points in human culture and humans thinking and so much are completely unpredictable before and that's why it's premature anybody who says we are doomed we are all going to go extinct or something you know that's not it there are definitely going to be more animal extinctions and there is a possibility of human extinction but the idea of the extinction rebellion is to stop there's many extinctions as we possibly can and we don't know yet what the limits are to how successful we can be at that but if we spend all our time thinking about these radical transformations then we're not spending any of our time actually looking in the face the likelihood that we're going to fail or at least we're not spending any of our time preparing for the possibility of failure and we put it even though more strongly than that we have to prepare for the possibility of failure it is absolutely unacceptable that for example in the name of stopping dangerous climate change we're building nuclear power stations which are going to be the most terrible liabilities for future generations if civilization does collapse you know if you don't if you have the cooling pools and nuclear power stations that were the rods in them you have to keep them cool for four decades alright and if you don't they will very quickly the cool the pools will dry out the rods will catch the front catch fire and they will burn radioactive fire potentially for hundreds of years and just think about that as a legacy that we and the French and someone may be leaving to to the future to whatever animals or civil right or a successor civilization comes after us it's radically unacceptable so we have to think about these things as well it's not enough to think about the transformations we want to make got one question there and then we'll come to you in the Czech sir afterwards thank you I agree to entirely with what you said about the the Green Party as the crucial force talking about environmental concerns but the the currency of electoral politics is to offer solutions to the problems that we face and to at least present yourself as being in a position to bring about those solutions so how in the light of what you said our greens to fight elections okay that's a nice question so I guess there's two things that I would say firstly I would I would urge greens to do a bit more of what I'm doing and coming a little bit cleaner now this is very difficult for practicing politicians it's not a very kind of attractive message to a mass public the kind of thing that that I've been saying here and politicians are kind of expected as you say to provide solutions provide hope etc so I know that I know for a fact for example that Caroline Lucas is haunted by this by some of these fears but I also understand that she finds it difficult to find a context in which it's easy for her in public to be absolutely absolutely direct with people about just how worried terrified whatever she is but I think we can go further than we've gone I think we I think that we need to widen the what's to call the Overton Window we need to make it possible to start to talk about some of these things for example to talk about why most geoengineering schemes are profoundly reckless and unacceptable in this context why this is a whole new argument against nuclear power and so on and so forth and the second thing I would say is that I think that greens need to be ready for the possibility of some kind of electoral political revolution so do I think it's likely to happen again no do I think it could happen yes and the human power to make these kinds of things happen we have seen it before you know a fascinating example is in Latvia a few years ago the peasants and greens party they had one seat they went into an election they fought the election on an anti-immigration platform because they're suffering huge brain drain to countries like ours this was hugely successful and they went from one seat to being the largest party in Parliament in one election remember when the Labour Party was founded people in the early day said well you'll never even get anywhere everyone should just vote liberal you know it's never gonna change but it did even on the first-past-the-post greens should be ready for the possibility I'm not saying it's likely but I'm saying it's possible Green should be ready for the possibility that there will be a huge consciousness shift possibly prompted by coming climate disasters which will suddenly make the green prospects much more credible in this country so that's something to hope for hi I was very interested by what he said about the kind of psychological element of the young the whole issue I think that's maybe at the heart of individual decisions about whether to engage or not in environmental politics on a personal level I think in particular one thing that a lot of people find difficult about the kind of perceptions of the environmental movement is a kind of purist and quite kind of morally pure like views of how to engage in it and the accusation of hypocrisy is I think quite a common one you know you've woken up to the environmental realities yet you still go to these shops you still and eat this food you know so I think how what do you say to someone who accuses being a hypocrite yeah so the first thing to say to such a person is well do you do this right thing that you are saying everyone should do all you're saying I'm saying everyone should do and the answer of course is almost always no so then I say well then you are no position to lecture me about it right if you want to lecture me about not flying or something then first don't fly right the second thing I say to such people is actually it's really important to be clear here that what we do politically what we do collectively is more important than what we do individually right we've been taught otherwise because we've been taught in a liberal individualistic way which works well for the normals of this culture works well for corporations etc right no what really matters is what we decide to do politically so for example if I am trying to create a future in which there's a lot less flying then it's far more important that I spend a lot of time and energy doing that and for example give large amounts of money to it or whatever it is then that I make my my own decisions either way on whether it should fly or not you know that makes very very little difference what I do whether I fly or not but I could make a huge difference if I for example get a law changed right but the third point to make is and this is the this is the point where we're what these people say has some validity to it is that we should try as much as we can to practice what we preach as soon as we can and to show leadership and in particular I think that in this country we really need to show leadership you know if we're gonna get if we're gonna be serious and saying to so-called developing countries look don't go down the route that we've gone down it results in huge amounts of mental ill-health and blah and most importantly of all it is destroying our common future that has no credibility unless we can actually show them that we are serious about pursuing a different path and that works on the national level but it also works on me on the individual level as well so I think that it's much more important that that I for example give large amounts of money to the Green Party as I do than whether or not I fly but I actually felt fluoride very very little and I think that's important too that I try for example to do as much as I can including in my job via videoconferencing where that's not possible I try to go by train so I've gone on two huge train journeys giving talks around Europe this year rather than rather than flying and I think in that way we we model what is possible we show some leadership we try to show some some congruence it's not the most important thing but you should do it anyway if you will you can ask a question in the drinks reception so I'll take your question and then this Jen's here I think yeah you pass it along maybe all right if you can well I don't think it's the pressure point but I think you're absolutely right it's a pressure point it's a very important pressure point so I have one or two colleagues who are trying to work in this area I'm trying to reach those extremely rich people and influencing them there are one or two difficulties one quite important difficulty is that some of these people I think fantasize that that they can survive a civilizational collapse and that's why for example some of the super-rich are buying up property in New Zealand and they're probably right in the short to medium term you know they may be able to buy themselves an extra 10 years 15 years something like that and you know maybe if they're 50 years old or something that's all they care about if that's all they care about they are incredibly horrendously selfish they should care for example the very least about their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren and there is no way you can safeguard their future by buying up some fancy property in New Zealand right if you actually want to take care of your own descendants let alone everybody else in the world and all the other animals if you actually want to take care of your own descendants the only way you can do it is by saving the collective future in that sense we really are all in this together and that seems to me a very powerful argument which is a key argument that I'm now trying to make and I will do my best to get some of those people to read it although I'm not incredibly well-connected in those circles if anyone in the room is maybe you could give me your address book so yeah I think it's a really good and important question but I don't think it should be occupy us to the exclusion of everything else what we do as well in the broad or narrow senses of we is of importance thank you so much um so please do make your way through to the main concourse and have a glass of wine and come and pick up some of the materials that Rupert has brought with him and ask more questions as well and then before we go we please all just join me in raising a final hand you

Channel: Churchill College, University of Cambridge

Views: 184,382

Rating: 4.6742129 out of 5

Keywords: Churchill College, Green Action, Sustainability, Environmentalism, Environment, Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Green Party

Id: uzCxFPzdO0Y

Length: 71min 56sec (4316 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/PM-me-in-100-years]

It's just one of many apocalyptic factors that lead to human extinction, but any scenario that involves large amounts of radioactive waste or fallout causes cumulative genetic damage through generations (for humans as well as other species).

This is already happening in areas of Iraq due to heavy use of depleted uranium ammunition by US forces. Women are afraid to give birth due to skyrocketing rates of gruesome birth defects.

The radioactive waste sticks around a lot longer than we will. Half lives average around 10,000 years.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/11/27/toxic-legacy-depleted-uranium-weapons

Guardian video, NSFL I suppose. NSFHumanity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9wza2LYyj0

The ultimate end is that even babies born with minor defects, will then grow up and have kids with even more damage, until we're essentially sterile as a species.

[u/SerraraFluttershy]

Summary of points?

[u/spiral_ly]

The speaker has put this talk into a paper here.

[u/moon-worshiper]

Wrong title. Should be "This species of human ape is finished", along with thousands of other species. The fastest growing number of species now is cats, dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, animals to entertain and feed the human ape animal. The distant cousins, the Great African Apes, will probably be going extinct by the 2080's. The human ape follows, not long after, and probably extinct by 2200 CE.

[u/k3surfacer]

I think if the collapse doesn't lead to complete extinction of humanity, people of Africa may have the best chance to survive.

[u/aronbluearonblue]

Barely 10,000 views ... I got more than that on one of my own music videos ... I forget sometimes how much nooobody cares.

[u/Dadlayz]

He looks super happy about it.

[u/cr0ft]

I'm hoping for a successor civilization, built on a sane cooperation basis. I may not be around to see it though, it will take a while longer to get there. But something like what is suggested by the Zeitgeist Movement.

[u/xrm67]

Great lecture. Thanks for posting.