The Global South in the Imagining of Climate Futures

well hi everybody let me start introductions as folks tricolin my name is simon nicholson i'm co-director of the institute for cabin removal law and policy at american university in dc it's my very great pleasure to welcome you to this event today the event is titled the global south and the imagining of climate futures the event is part of a series of webinars which we post occasionally through the institute you can find additional recorded webinars and other materials at our website carbonremoval.info the other piece of housekeeping is that the q a function is available to us today if you have questions during the event uh moderator is professor kate o'neill from uc berkeley where she's in the department of environmental science policy and management kate let me pass to you all right thank you simon and welcome everybody we're really thrilled to be uh here at today's event my job is to introduce our two guests and to kick off with some questions and then uh join um let the conversation run uh so we're very pleased to have kim stanley robinson with us he's an american writer of science fiction he's published 19 novels and numerous short stories but is best known for his miles trilogy which i read a couple of decades ago and has been very influential for what i think about um he has won numerous awards including the hugo award for best novel the nebula award for best novel and the world fantasy award uh his work has been labeled by the atlantic as the gold standard of realistic and highly literary science fiction writing and according to an article in the new yorker he is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science fiction writers his most recent book which is um what we're talking about today is the ministry for the future came out last year uh the book is dedicated to frederick jameson so i'm going to quote jameson here to say that science fiction's function is not to give us images of the future but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present and that is very much something that that stan does in this book which is um very much starting in our own time very close to and moving on through a few decades it tells the story of an organization in the near future tasked with addressing the threat of climate change and advocating for a livable world for future generations the novel includes fictional eyewitness accounts featuring perspectives from the global south not just as climate change sufferers but as political players and drivers of the narrative and a whole combination of narrative critiques and styles speaking as someone who also thinks that discount rates are absolutely critical in understanding the future and how they how how they are manipulated i was pleased to read that section in particular of this book uh then our second guest is is o taiwo femi who is a um a research fellow with the institute for carbon removal law and policy and an assistant professor of political philosophy at georgetown university as a political philosopher who studies environmental justice taiwa thinks specifically about carbon removal and how to distribute responsibilities burdens and resources to address the climate crisis justice justly his research focuses on ethical theory and social political philosophy especially as these intersected topics in anti-colonial thought and the black radical tradition he is published widely he holds a phd from ucla and in an interview in the atlantic earlier this month he elaborated on why a political philosopher would think about carbon removal so again welcome to our two guests and i'm i'm just gonna jump in questions the first one is for stan and that is to tell us a bit about the book how you came to write it and what it means to you to center the global south specifically india in the narrative and what thoughts do you have on the role that it it's playing and you you hope it might play in social imagining of climate futures it's a big question but yeah well i'll try to um focus in on the main part of it um and thank you for this kate it's good to be with you and with femi um i i began to read in the scientific literature that when we get to temperatures that are um high in both heat and humidity that human beings will die of hypothermia and so if air conditioning fails there's a strong possibility of mass death occurring and so the so-called eco-modernists that we're saying humanity will just adapt to whatever we do and we have to get used to the idea of a 3c global temperature rise this this line of thought was wrong and needed to be that needed to be said so i i wanted to do a novel about coming to terms with climate change in a kind of best-case scenario way could we deal with it could we keep below the 1.5 degree rise and that brought in everything else to put into play um india came into play because the tropics are the most vulnerable to these heat waves and their electrical grids aren't as strong as some other places although i have to say immediately that we saw that the southeast united states and one of the highest wet bulb temperatures ever recorded was just outside of chicago in 1995 and so a lot of the world is vulnerable to these heat waves but certainly in the tropics even more so and all kinds of things are happening in india it's a billion people it's a dynamic world's largest democracy i was interested to try to keep them being more than just the place where the disaster happens but also the place where the solutions get pushed all across the board and then the paris agreement to me is crucial and we'll talk about that more later that was an enabling device it really exists i didn't have to make it up and the ministry for the future is just this kind of sub-agency of the paris agreement um u.n uh nexus and so those were all the ingredients and then as usual i just tried to see what happened when i um started cranking the plot engine fantastic and um how do you see it um in terms of thinking about the global south in um sort of re-centering the global south in narratives of environmental change but also of environmental politics and governance and how do you feel how would you like this to influence the way that the public or other sectors think and talk about climate futures well i'm interested to try to um shake up actually what you had jameson saying there is very right to recontextualize the present this notion of the global south if you begin to run the numbers of people you begin to realize that most of the people on earth live there that's interesting because often forgotten and then also we it takes us back into history uh colonialization it never ended it it went from imperial to economic so the the so-called washington consensus run out of washington out of the united states in in the 1990s these are what i would call neo-colonialist projects where the the global south having been hammered by the first wave of colonialism was then also seized economically like the precariat everywhere it isn't as if they are being picked on and people in the north are being given a pass but the historical double whammy of never having escaped um uh colonialism in its uh economic form means that there's a lot going on there that that needs to be brought into the picture of uh my readership i would is is well it's international but of course it's it's mainly american and english language readers and i i need to spread the news this is i think what science fiction writers are trying to do pretend to be messengers from the future and in the future um the the question of how we balance like most of the carbon's been burned into the atmosphere from the developed north um so most of the damage has been created by the global north but most of the damage will be suffered by the global south and here let's just use those as names for different proper populations so uh that's got to be addressed in our solution package so it's just part of the novel but i mean then that is to say it's part of our history now very much um i'm going before i i go on to uh sort of enabling the conversation i wanted to uh connect with the sponsor of this of this webinar um this is a series um an event in a series organized by the institute for carbon removal law and policy and it sounds maybe a bit esoteric for some people in the audience but um both of you in this book and in femi's work talk about carbon removal and i wanted you to kind of contextualize that a little bit and to think tell where where does the global south fit into your thinking about future roles for carbon removal because both of you are very very interesting on this topic in ways that depart from the normal technocratic discourse around it um well for me um carbon removal is uh is uh going to be a necessary thing there will be natural methods by which we do it biological methods of um allowing wild nature to flourish and then doing targeted things reforestation regenerative agriculture biochar coastline kelp beds there are ways of drawing carbon out of the atmosphere by re-adjusting our relationship to the land surfaces and the oceans then also there's director capture an industrial process that's just coming into being that would just draw the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then use it or dispose of it and so well all of these are available to everywhere on earth so i'm not so sure the the global south is is a very um fertile uh zone of the earth because of the influx of solar radiation so that things grow fast there and there's a lot of land but and a lot of people but um i think this is just a the it's the economic picture of who pays for this process and then a land use picture but in terms of making distinctions between global south and global north i think in that regard there may be differentiations in both ways but um and and indeed the paris agreement talks about shared but differentiated responsibilities for climate equity so these are political questions but also um economic questions or financial questions who's going to pay for it and how can we get it done fast enough uh femi would you like to um answer that question yeah um and thank you for the introduction earlier and for having me um but i think i you can contextualize carbon removal um in the north-south divide either with a long story or a short story the long story is that you know we often talk about the industrial revolution as the beginning of a new age of emissions which um is pushing the ecological crisis that we have and the earth system crisis that we have um but the political story of the industrial revolution is um indeed a revolution in technology and in energy use and demand but one that was in you know fairly naked ways connected to slavery and colonialism one of the industries that was pushing this revolution was the cotton industry so cotton was being grown largely in the u.s south by enslaved people of african descent manufactured in industrial england and sold on a colonially secured market including um south asia much of south asia right so the political story includes colonialism and racism from the first but even if you wanted to tell a story that was smaller and shorter we'd also be telling one that involved i think fairly naked north-south dynamics so after the commodity after the um sorry after the financial crisis in 2007 and eight there was a spike in commodity prices which sent capital um all around the globe that caused the large-scale land acquisitions and much of the global south um on the african continent in particular something like a quarter of the available of their arable land was bought up under these arrangements so you know i think stan is right to point to land use um and to point to the distribution of costs and burdens as kind of the essential politics here and when we tell when we put the status quo economic distribution of who owns what and who has taken what level of responsibility for climate crisis it tells the story quite um starkly of um where we're at politically in terms of justice yeah thank you thank you fami i what i want to do now is because um part of our our purpose of this this webinar was to listen to a conversation between femi and sam is i know that that stan had a couple of things to engage with femi on and vice versa so i think we'd enjoy hearing you talk for a little bit and then i will turn to questions i'm seeing questions come in but i'm going to encourage people to um enter them into the q a i'm looking at them as they come and i know we'll only get to a few but so far what's coming is pretty good okay um family i got two questions for you and the first one is kind of um practical and diplomatic and the second one um maybe a little bit more um political philosophy the first one so the paris agreement does talk about climate equity it's quite explicit about it and it and it splits the world and all the nations signed it and splits the world into developed nations and developing nations schedule a schedule b nations are listed and then this shared and differentiated responsibilities twice in the agreement it says the the developed nations and really this is a north-south rough distinction but let's call it that that the developed nations have to pay more because of the past burn of carbon i find this impressive but i'm interested to know do you find it impressive uh impressive isn't the word i would use but it is you know as as you said it involves a rough and ready distinction that to some extent correlates to first world third world or global north global south whatever division we'd like or however we'd like to address the division and it is the right kind of it's the right basic kind of framework so i wouldn't phrase the problem in terms of the you know as being a problem of principles the common but differentiated responsibilities framework is more or less the thing that i'm saying what we're actually what is actually more at issue is the kind of thorny or empirical questions as to what does the fair share actually mean so it's not is there a differentiation between north and south but how stark should that be and how stark is it in actuality um the most concrete example i can come up with is of course the green climate fund which is much talked about in climate justice spaces um there was something like 200 billion on the order of 200 billion identified as the target amount that the green climate fund should raise to allow developing countries to develop along a greener trajectory than they otherwise would be able to currently the fund has raised um at least an order of magnitude less i think it's actually below 10 billion and the target of 200 billion is by some estimates at least an order of magnitude too small to begin with right so so even the theoretical calculations of um what the developing world actually needs and i would argue normatively speaking is owed are greatly understates the actual um extent to which distribution of burdens and responsibility should be towards the global north and once we get all the way to enforcement the extent to which the global north's failure to take up its rightful share of responsibilities um is shown by the actual distributions of climate effort is pretty considerable yeah yeah i take your point the paris agreement is um we're going to run into this a lot as we go forward in this decade there is no sheriff there is no enforcement i you see this in the antarctic treaty where i have that's the only part of the global south where i've spent any time so it's a little bit irrelevant um but um these international treaties have no sheriff and so we're going to see what happens it won't just be the green climate fund it will also be the emissions targets where nations will fail and what i worry is i mean i quite love the paris agreement it was a major event in world history but so was the formation of the league of nations so okay the league of nations was formed it failed we got world war ii and the mess of the post-war um and the paris agreement is vulnerable to that same fate if we don't live it then it's just a gesture and the gestures mean nothing at this point because the situation's too desperate so i'm hoping that by bringing up the example of the league of nations and what its failure entailed that we will pay better attention to the paris agreement and one thing the paris agreement has that the league of nations didn't have going for it and this is a weak read but i have to bring it up is that all the nations signed including the united states so i mean we saw the the vulnerability there in the trump episode but that was kind of like a nightmare that let's regard it as past uh notionally and now we're back in and all the nations in every and every year they meet and every five years they take stock um what we have to hope that that process works and and all across the board including financially uh so um moving from that to philosophy family i'm fascinated by this and i hope that you will be too you're trying to make a distinction in terms of africa has to modernize and you make a distinction between modern modernization and westernization so to de-strand the two and say you can give modernization without westernization which and to my mind through my whole career i've been trying to make a distinction and de-strand science and capitalism and i wonder what you think if these two perhaps map onto each other um are we is is your modernization science is your westernization capitalism are they close enough that there could be a useful discussion about that i certainly think there can be a useful discussion about the relationship between these two but i i i tend to think they're actually quite distinct and understanding how and why they're distinct is crucial to developing any sensible way forward so you could see at the root of maybe both distinctions is a distinction between um technology considered as a sort of change to our possibility space or a change to the space of practically available options and technology as a description of how something is actually functioning so one particular path amongst the possible contingencies and i think a lot of the discussion about carbon removal actually um rests on the conflation between these two things so it is in fact true you know this is a this is a point that i always tell people it's when we discuss carbon removal and other forms of technology um and and even you know forms of inquiry people think this about philosophy too this is just something that serves the you know white western power structure carbon removal it's just something that serves oil and gas industries etc etc cetera and that's a description of the particular path we're on and the way that those things function right um so in fact the people that have been regarded as philosophers have been disproportionately white people from western traditions of thought in fact oil and gas industries do want to promote carbon removal so that they can maintain social license to operate so on so forth get good pr um but that fact is not a you know that fact is the result of political contest over which world of possibilities we're going to live in and there are some other worlds of possibilities where philosophy is the thing that anyone does right there are other worlds of possibilities where carbon removal serves a purpose other than protecting oil and gas industries and in general that's the attitude that we i think have to take towards political possibility if we don't want to just relate to politics as commentators if we are trying to win you know if we are trying to win the fight to save our planet to save our children um it behooves us i think to relate to not just how technologies are functioning now but how they could function and most importantly how they should function and the point is not diagnosing what other people's interests are but finding out what our interests are with respect to philosophy modernity carbon removal whatever and trying to adjust to the balance of the social balance of forces such that we get off from the path where those things are functioning in negative ways and on to paths where those things function in positive ways great thanks um very do you want to jump back in you i know you had uh sort of uh return questions for stan yeah i did want to ask um one thing um and this relates to actually the the setup to the question that you just asked so one thing that i really appreciated about the book um in connection to the paris agreement and international agreements as such is that i think when some people hear evaluations of international agreements they think oh these are issues of justice and issues of how nice the agreements are perceived and they perceive it as this sort of um aesthetic way of relating to justice wouldn't it be nice if we all agree but i think what's powerfully demonstrated in your book is that this is actually you know in consequential ways the legitimacy or lack thereof of international agreements is going to change how binding they are whether or not people continue to modify their behavior um by them so there's a um apologies a little bit of a spoiler not too much of one um there's a calamity that happens in the early parts of the book and as a result of that calamity parts of the world that felt ignored by previous international agreements no longer abided by that with respect to solar radiation management so i i i just wondered um to what extent you were um deliberately trying to show that or whether it was just that kind of consequence of some other thing that you wanted to build in the book for plot reasons well thanks for that no this was a major point i want to make there is a on the left and i'm an american leftist and i see a dislike a knee-jerk reaction against the idea of any kind of what people are calling geoengineering which is to say a planned intervention at the global scale in the climate one way or another and i wanted very much to say that um this is a um a prejudice that needs to be re-examined because we might quickly be in an emergency situation where it's a kind of an all hands on deck moment if we're getting mass deaths and then if they happen in the global south and say a nation like india where i placed it uh in my novel if they then unilaterally said we are going to reduce lower the temperatures here by a method that we know will work then no one has any moral standing to object to that particularly not the global north having caused it in the first place so um in terms of its carbon release so i wanted to make that point very powerfully and also make the point that you know geoengineering there's the fear factor around it is again like what you were talking about carbon removal that it's just the oil and gas companies trying to get away with business as usual and i want to say that that might have been true in the year 1995 but now where we are now um given how much the temperature has already risen we need to talk about all forms of carbon removal and all forms of what might be called geoengineering and one of the things that i've been trying to say is that if all women on this planet have their legal rights and are fully educated then the human population begins to stop rising begins to go down as a natural result of uh individual uh control of individuals lives this we've seen this around the world so i've been saying women's rights are a geo engineering technique and that kind of boggles the mind of the ordinary leftist reaction and also to one's conception of what geoengineering is it's not just throwing dust in the atmosphere or throwing iron firings in the ocean it's everything we do at scale so drawing switching to electrical cars is geoengineering women's rights is geo engineering a justice is a geoengineering technique and that's that's what i wanted my novel to say to to blow open the idea of geoengineering and and give it this larger um political context as a name for us taking our biosphere fate into our hands to the extent that we can because there's a lot of stuff we can't change we can't deactivate the oceans etc but there are some things that we can do by planning that might help and regenerative agriculture the various kinds of things you must be discussing in your institute for carbon removal that's got to be high on the list and all these methods must be being discussed and i think they all should be on the table okay um i am gonna after this i've got some amazing questions coming in that i think we'll continue this conversation so it's okay i'm going to turn to them um everyone these are going to be sort of out of order but i think i'll try and lead a conversation with them um first question uh that i have sorry they're being texted to me we already have a lot of the technology we need to reduce our emissions but not the political will to implement them and maybe the same is true with with cdr as well what are the big changes we need to make we need to make the global political system fairer does the un need more power what are the specific reforms to the global political systems we need to make them more able to respond to the global climate emergency femi why don't you take that one i know i'm interested to know what you say yeah i'm happy to so one other concept that i've been talking about um and thinking about these days is the concept of elite capture um so it's essentially a description of institutions and social systems as being steered by those at the top of them and increasingly unresponsive to those at the middle and bottom of them and i think that's true across a lot of domains and i think that's certainly true at the international level and so i think the the question is exactly right you know we have you know in a lot of aspects of um our problems ahead we have the technologies if we don't have the technologies now we have the researchers who could develop the technologies and so the relevant questions are political what i would like to see is a much more robust attention to governance you can think of it you can think of governed instructors as technologies if you want because they are reliable explanations of what things happen and what things do not happen um and i would like to see um a lot more distributed decision making in institutional forms as the kinds of guides of how climate action works especially at the local level so if you think about it privatization is a governance structure right it's a governance structure on which a few executives and shareholders decide what happens in a market or element of or a domain of human activity a better governance structure i think would be something more akin to community control and that's something we can implement in a variety of ways so so one way to give communities control over law making is um something that's been called um uh citizens assembly so you can convene people um perhaps selected randomly or by quote-unquote sortition and just and put experts in front of them to give them information and then let them decide what to do another closely related structure is something called participatory budgeting which was uh pioneered by pioneered by the brazilian workers party in the late 80s um and is a similar kind of structure people get in a room and decide you know what do we think public money should go towards that's another governance structure and it has i think reliably different effects from governance structures that just involve multinational corporations deciding what's going to get drilled and i think the more we the more aspects of climate policy fall under those decision-making procedures rather than the ones that we have which are captured by moneyed interests whether at the you know at the lobbying stage or at various other stages i think the better will be um i'd i'd like to add to that that um we do the question was asking we do have the technologies and they can be improved but they already exist so then implementation that in my novel that becomes a matter of uh paying ourselves to do the good work rather than people getting paid to actually extract and destroy the biosphere um how do we do that because capital goes to the rate of highest return and saving the biosphere is not the rate of highest return so it's a simple equation we're doomed and since we don't want to be doomed we have to direct capital in the right directions and this means governance indeed taking it away from the private sector which is the rate of highest return and going to the public sector so in my novel the central banks get together and invent a carbon coin um as sort of a return to the well not exactly the gold standard but uh money would depend on sequestering carbon and you would get paid for that at a rate per ton of carbon saved would create a carbon coin that would be paid to the person that did it from an individual up to a nation state and then you know there you have to let the financers and economists work out the details of it but um it it it puts on a basis of our entire economy paying ourselves to do to get to make because people need to get paid for the work they do if it if we have to depend on volunteer action to save the biosphere it gets fractionated and and um overwhelmed by the badness of capital itself so um seizing capital for good work this is what um keynesianism meant in the great depression and in world war ii the the british treasury just took over the bank of england said sorry we can't trust bankers to make decisions this important we have to decide and that's a we're at that moment again now so this is a a way of thinking about um deploying the technologies that we already have because they have to be played so much faster than the rate of highest return would allow for yes there's a there's a lot there so i'm gonna i'm i think i'm gonna just sort of maybe rip off that a little bit by pulling a couple of questions together one about the specifics and i think this is something i've i've also had to grapple with in some of my own work which is that these systems um of say market mechanisms developing in carbon coin work well to the extent that they are um implemented well in practice so i wanted to see how you would think if you were implementing this yourself like how would you um maintain the army of certifiers the way that that um that um accurate measurement monitoring and verification could be achieved within the system that you're working in so that's kind of like the on the ground like wait how would this work a question that might not be one that um that is in the middle of your thinking but to relate to that is just to zoom way up is capitalism and the extent to which a lot of the questions that i'm seeing are like isn't this reinforcing capitalism how do those of us who like want to move beyond that and see an environmental future existing a sustainable future only existing beyond capitalism how how how can we think about this how do you think about this in the context of this book and family you might want to chime in as well but is that do you see that tension and i mean i think a little bit of the way that the like red mars those the the your martian settlers moved beyond i think a capitalist system there issuing what um well um i i am a leftist and i keep it at that because i don't want to get into the more detailed descriptions of what that means but uh one thing it means for me personally right now is we're in an emergency situation and the the names don't matter the good things have to be done um we need to pay ourselves to do the right things and so let's not worry talking about capitalism socialism is it's like talking about liberty and love and wilderness these words let's get into the details here so um at this point the biden administration might pass a three trillion dollars works program bill that could mean much greater employment it could mean green work we don't know yet so that i focus on is the immediate task at hand we're in a capitalist economy we've got to use the the mechanism of governance that we have right now to change both itself and the biosphere very rapidly so i what i've been saying is take it in a timeline that in the immediate problem is anti-austerity and a return to keynesianism then you could talk about social democracy then you could talk about democratic socialism then you could i would say blow it up and just call it post capitalism and this is on a timeline that hopefully will be accelerated by successes but first things first we have to um arrange a system in a way in the already existing system to pay ourselves to do the necessary work in this coming decade if you say to the world well capitalism can't do this and therefore we need a completely new world system and you've got one decade to both design and implement that and save the world you're screwed again so i'm saying take the tools at hand and use them for the the the work in a good way and then later on uh hope for necessary changes in in governance that will lead to more justice and more sustainability now immediately you can say well he's a creepy and reformist he's a liberal he's not a he's not a radical well again i reject all these labels and just say let's do the necessary things to get out of the mass extinction event and then we can talk about the big labels the historians can sort it out i completely agree with that um there's a quote of fred hampton that was in the the movie that recently came out about his life where he said if you were in a burning building and someone asked you what your culture was you would say water and escape right and we're in a burning building right now and i think people are trying to answer practical questions with ideological commitments and it's a category mistake right whether or not we called the system we were in capitalism or communism or a jelly donut we would have to answer the question of how it is that we're going to make the concentration of particulate matter in our atmosphere go down from the number that it is to a different number while feeding people while providing health care while providing regular care those are all very specific things how do you organize a food system how do you organize how do you power these things with energy where do people have to live those are all specific questions and if you are you know if you're really a communist then you're a materialist right you're someone who believes that what's important is meeting material needs and those aren't questions that you answer with words or adjectives to describe systems those are questions that you answer with actions with plans that are actually implemented and with actual concrete changes to the built environment the built social environment and the literally physically built environment so if someone has you know a set of selections around you know a set of policy ideas around what bridges to build or what power things to build or how to provide housing i'm all ears um but i don't have you know and i say this like stan as a leftist i don't have much patience um myself for the you know aestheticization of the kind of problem that we're in or the solution gosh this could be like a five-hour session sorry we have so little time left but uh stan i think your discussion about women's rights being and justice being forms of geo engineering has sparked a bunch of questions in the feed so i'm going to throw out a couple that i see right in front of me and maybe you want to make some additional observations but first aren't women's rights and justice actually mitigation techniques and not geoengineering um indeed they are important but geoengineering is a set of proposed schemes directly to control climate and then your discussion about the broader understanding of geoengineering is fascinating and stimulating do you think there is a danger in considering justice objectives such as women's rights as methods combating climate change in other words while both climate change and women's rights are certainly priorities and obviously overlap do we risk losing the moral ground advocating for justice by arguing it is a technique for existential climate survival rather than arguing for women's rights for its own sake yes no this is an important question and i i'm very glad to have uh had it brought up because it allows for a discussion of uh paired goods uh and the uh both and rather than either or uh and so let's say that it's scandalous that we talk about women's rights at all how are these um how are these differentiated from human rights in general and aren't they an absolute uh that the an absolute good that we ought to already be there so then you if you bring up some kind of weird utilitarian argument like well if we if we uh if if women's rights existed in full then we would have saved the biosphere well why go to a secondary tangential uh and confusing argument like that i do it partly to blow up the concept of geoengineering that everything humanity does at scale at scale now is geoengineering to to make that definition to rattle the cage of that definition as such it's not just solar radiation management but everything we do and then secondly to talk more about paired goods um if you could do regenerative agriculture so that the way that we grew our food also stored carbon in the ground um that would be a paired good because we need food and we also need carbon drawn out of the atmosphere so um paired goods are things to look for and in this case although i i find it embarrassing and scandalous to talk about women's rights in such an instrumental way i just want to bring back up that the real technology is justice that if we had justice it would different it would determine which machineries we built etc and what we paid for so um if you if you put justice as the as the prime axiom and it'd be interesting especially with a philosopher to talk about how capitalist economics its axioms are lame and poor and factually wrong so that all the articulation up top the that that makes bond ratings etc etc um are sitting on on on invalid axioms that are creating a lot of our problem by way of greed and power relations of the few over the many which can be racialized or genderized uh in different ways to divide and conquer um we need to go back to those and so that's why both and this is why i bring these things up together to try to um [Music] break the categories and make us think from uh axiomatic basis yeah i would just add um you know i i i one of the things i find helpful about the kind of blowing up the geoengineering thing um is um well put by kyle white who is a colleague of mine a philosopher who does indigenous philosophy and describes how you know colonialism is already cataclysmic climate change from the perspective of indigenous people right is um in some cases you know permanent cross-generational changes to the built and social environment that you know have that they've had to adapt to and had to continue to adapt to as the generations go on and that's just to say that's just a setup that you know the world has already been shaped and is already shaped as stan said by the things that we do at scale and so it's not some special zone the special new zone that we're entering into um with solar radiation management that we somehow avoided when oil companies rebuilt the waterways of almost the entire coastal region of louisiana so they could get at oil right it's not a new thing that we're entering into now that's the literal physical weight of anthropogenic materials is greater than um non-anthropogenic materials right we have been geoengineering the question is are we going to design the world in ways that are good or in ways that are bad and what's helpful about the justice framing for those for that question i think is it gets us at the other side of you know what stan was referring to as paired goods right where you know our ability to do both and our ability to reach to support people with housing and generate food our ability to provide health care and provide political rights depends on the design decisions that we make about to the various aspects of our shared human society on this planet that's going to include resource distributions it's going to include distributions of political decision-making power and we have to do it on purpose and until we start thinking about all the things that are at stake in a holistic way and start making those decisions in ways that bind goods together that make goods um possible to reach at the same time on purpose we're going to continue to get a situation where a few people prey on a lot of people which is built into capitalism and which is um what the system will continue to do unless we challenge it great um i'm going to circle back now to a question i think that takes us back to the global south and um what is your opinion uh this could go for for both of you um about the role of china in the future in the novel it's india and other parts of the world that experience more democratic and distributed governance while china seems to play a powerful role while maintaining the one-party dictatorship it felt very realistic but is this okay um i i tried to i wrote a novel about china it it precedes the ministry for the future uh directly called red moon i have to confess that intense engagement as i could make with china which included visits to hong kong and beijing left me really confused as an american and when i confessed to chinese friends that i i was defeated and confused by china my chinese friends nodded and said that is the correct response um we ourselves are in a state of confusion but i'll say this their citizens when cold will express more satisfaction with their political representation than americans will so i don't to insist on the word democracy is perhaps a westernism perhaps what we need is good political representation now um definitions of that given some of the um ugly actions of the current chinese central committee it's a hard system to defend um wholeheartedly obviously but um on the other hand what the ordinary chinese citizen has intense relationships with a neighborhood board a street committee um a a a uh a town a province and then the representation goes up the line to a group that might be called social engineers quite small the party well um that's what they've got and they are a big actor in the world so in rather than saying oh well what a terrible system they really ought to be a democracy like ours how good is our democracy being bought as it is by fossil fuel industry and other lobbying powers such that our political representatives don't represent us either so um it's really a case of the pot calling the kettle black everywhere needs better political representation and um by the way they um i apologize immediately for the metaphor of the pot calling the petal kettle black i am uh uh uh embarrassed but you know what i mean um the we're in a bad system worldwide in various ways and china is going to be a big player they really are uh them india european union uh united states brazil russia the bric countries these um these are going to be monstrous important players and to demonize one and get into some kind of a pseudo cold war when we have shared interests on this globe this is one of our problems is we've got a global problem we've got a nation-state system and so accommodations are going to need to be made without demonization of the other one thing i'll add um is that i'm not a you know let me preface this just by saying i'm in no way shape or form and experts on chinese politics right um my perception is that they have some reckoning to do internally speaking but something i can say with confidence um or at least with more confidence is about their foreign policy in general um there are let's say different ways that uh china has asserted itself on the global stage than um many of the other countries and let me preface this by pointing out that um on the run up to the second world war um something like a quarter of the land mass and population of the world was under the control of the british empire alone much of the african continent was split between britain and france and portugal and a number of other empires and these people all took up you know these countries all took up the mantle of freedom after the second world war in opposition to the soviet union while maintaining colonial authoritarian domination over much of africa and asia so and that includes the united states which had colonial holds over um which maintains them over puerto rico and had them over guam and philippines et cetera so that is a few decades ago but more recently there were the wars in iraq and afghanistan after which some 37 million people were uh were displaced from where they lived and the collective american response to the faux pas of the iraq and afghanistan wars is something on the order of oops so whatever problems i have with china um and their decisions um i also have that picture of the decisions of other actors in world history on the geopolitical stage and so i think things could be worse where i see china going forward um is also where i see the u.s going forward which is an important hub of a kind of political um directment or direction of um investment capital right they're they're they're a large market and a large supplier so is the united states um so is germany and the eu taken together um and you know they've they've made a net zero pledge um india is also a place that will um be important in terms of directing flows of capital worldwide and i don't see any reason why either china or the united states or the eu for that matter couldn't have a positive role in those things going forward whatever the political contradictions of any of the places i just mentioned and as i've just told you there are plenty so um one final question as we're running out of time i guess this is mostly directed at stan but um knowing what you know now especially as it came from femi in the first place i believe uh knowing what you know now since you've finished the book and now that we've seen the covert response do you think we are now more or less likely and i guess in a post or during covert pandemic era depending on how things go to see major political shifts like the one you once your book dramatizes um well i'll be brief in that so that femi also gets the chance to talk about the pandemic i think maybe it will help the world has been shocked it's everyone now knows that things happen on a global scale that science can react really fast that politics is slower and more obstructive the different nation states were like a cruel experiment in um in disease control each nation state choosing a different method and getting different results that can now be studied and so if you really look at the evidence you're seeing um a civilization that is more um aware that we've got giant global problems that impact daily life for everybody and that also uh are addressable that we are not doomed but that we're in a struggle and so um many things that i put in ministry for the future as happening in the 2030s 2040s i wrote the book in 2019. i got it wrong these things will be actually happening in the 2020s and that's a good thing i guess um one thing we've learned from the covid response and i'm i'm not sure which way this cuts um but one thing we've learned from the covid response is how little policymakers have learned from it um the there was an article that came out recently i believe in the washington post that was describing um the fact that um us policy experts didn't push for a more egalitarian global distribution of the vaccine and the account they gave them themselves was that well we just didn't think about the rest of the world right we were just thinking about what happened to the us we didn't realize that doing that would have these sorts of consequences and in a way politically speaking that is just in a sentence or to the story of the climate crisis right people looking out for themselves looking out for their bottom line their shareholder value and occupying a position of power in global markets and global political systems such that the pursuit of self-interest had maximally negative consequences for almost everybody else right a study at northeastern um estimated that global death rates would be cut in half if the distribution of vaccines had been egalitarian versus the kind of first world-centric distribution scheme were on the rise for and so the question of whether things will go in the kind of um better direction that stan sketches um versus the direction that the oil and gas companies want them to go is is whether or not the rest of us have learned something from kovid and whether or not we are successful in gaining the power to make sure that people who have learned from the last 500 or so years of politics are deciding what security means are deciding who we're going to protect or deciding what kinds of built environment and social environment and legal environment changes are going to enshrine that widespread social protection for everyone and not just for a select few and unless and until we win those battles over who decides the shape of our social system um i don't see how we win any of the other ones so with that pessimistic note i'll leave it there wow okay well i have to to to bring this to a close what what a way to end and i will just say thank you uh to both of our guests we can't possibly move forward as a fair and just global society if we don't have these conversations and i cannot overstate the importance of speculative science fiction or however you want to call it in understanding what challenges we face in the near to far future thanks also to simon nicholson and the gang at the institute for carbon law removal and policy who um organized this event and um with that i'm going to close so thank the audience for all the questions and especially all the questions i did not get to i believe that all the panelists can read them as well so we really appreciate your engagement okay well thank you thank you

Channel: Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy

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Id: 7KT7l_tS3dI

Length: 61min 46sec (3706 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021