![\"Measured](\"https:\/\/www.buildingsandcities.org\/media\/images\/articles2\/atmosphericCO2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Measured atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory. Note: red = the monthly mean values; black = the same, after correction for the average seasonal cycle.<\/em><\/p>\n Do not expect significant progress from COP-26 on climate change mitigation.\u00a0 There are fundamental barriers that prevent the deep and rapid changes that scientists advocate.\u00a0 Most countries adhere to economic growth policies – which create ecological overshoot.\u00a0 Unless and until we accept that we must live within ecological limits, then climate change will not be adequately tackled. Energy and resource consumption must be addressed through controlled economic contraction.<\/em><\/p>\n The world in 2021 was buffeted by an unprecedented barrage of extreme weather events. This is the leading edge of the climate catastrophe that lies ahead should world governments remain fixed on our present global \u2018development\u2019 trajectory.<\/p>\n The good news is that the recent uptick in violent weather has increased pressure on participants in COP-26 finally to implement the kind of determined measures that will dramatically lower GHG emissions and put global heating on hold; the bad news is that whatever is agreed to at COP-26 is unlikely to make any positive difference.<\/p>\n There have been 25 COP meetings on climate change since 1995 and several international agreements to reduce carbon emissions, including the \u2018legally binding\u2019 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement of 2015. Nevertheless, atmospheric GHG concentrations have\u00a0\u00a0increased unabated during this entire 25 year period \u2014 CO2<\/sub>, the principal anthropogenic GHG, has ballooned exponentially from ~360ppm in 1995 to almost 420 ppm in 2020 \u2014 and mean global temperature has risen by ~1\u00a0o<\/sup>C.\u00a0\u00a0History suggests that\u00a0what should emerge<\/i>\u00a0from COP26\u00a0cannot emerge<\/i>\u00a0from COP26.<\/p>\n There are two fundamental barriers. First, participants in the COP meetings \u2014 government negotiators, political and scientific advisors, etc. \u2014 constitute a self-referencing cabal whose \u2018solutions\u2019 to climate change draw on the same set of beliefs, values, assumptions and facts that created the problem in the first place. In particular, they are dedicated to unconstrained economic growth propelled by continuous technological development, the beating heart and lungs of capitalism and neoliberal economics. Acceptable approaches to emissions reductions therefore include wind turbines, solar photovoltaic panels, hydrogen technologies, electric vehicles and as yet unproved carbon capture and storage technologies \u2014 i.e., any\u00a0solution that involves the massive capital investment and profit-making potential necessary to sustain growth and the current socio-economic system.<\/p>\n My expectation is that COP26 will maintain the tradition.\u00a0The latest emissions reduction strategy advanced by many COP participants is Net Zero 2050.\u00a0NZ2050 implies achieving a balance between carbon emissions and extractions from the atmosphere by mid-century. Indeed, climate models\u00a0already<\/i>\u00a0depend on so-called negative emissions technologies, particularly \u2018bio-energy with carbon capture and storage\u2019 (BECCS), to achieve the Paris target of limiting global heating to under 1.5\u00a0o<\/sup>C.<\/p>\n BECCS assumes we can gradually displace fossil fuels by growing biofuel crops to extract large quantities of CO2<\/sub>\u00a0from the atmosphere, and then capture and sequester the CO2<\/sub>\u00a0emitted when the biomass is burned. The problem is that BECCS is as yet unproved at scale and highly controversial. For one thing, the massive cropland requirement would generate crisis-level conflict with both food production and biodiversity conservation. Some\u00a0climate scientists\u00a0see NZ2050 as yet another in a series of \u201cmagical yet unworkable\u201d technical (non)solutions to the climate conundrum (Dyke et al.,\u00a02021). They argue that the idea of net zero simply continues what has proved to be a \u201crecklessly cavalier \u2018burn now, pay later\u2019 approach\u201d which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar.\u00a0\u00a0Spratt and Dunlop\u00a0(2021) characterize NZ2050 as \u201cnot just a goal, but a strategy for COP-26 to lock in many decades of unnecessary fossil fuels use well past 2050… [and creating] unacceptable risks of unstoppable climate warming.\u201d\u00a0 These characterizations depict a world in desperation, willing to risk catastrophic climate change in service of a perceived need to maintain growth-oriented\u00a0business-as-usual-by-alternative-means<\/i>.\u00a0Perversely, then, mainstream climate disaster policy seems designed to serve modern techno-industrial\u00a0\u00a0society and the capitalist growth economy so the latter appears to be \u201cthe solution to (not the cause of) the [problem]\u201d (Spash, 2016, p. 931).<\/p>\n Second, climate change is not even the real problem; ecological overshoot is (Rees, 2020).\u00a0\u00a0\u2018Overshoot\u2019 occurs when humanity consumes bio-resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and waste production exceeds nature\u2019s assimilative capacity (see GFN, 2021). In effect, the growing human enterprise is literally consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of its own existence.<\/p>\n [slide-anything id=’3472166′]<\/p>\n Overshoot is a meta-problem: climate change; plunging biodiversity; pollution of land, air and waters; tropical deforestation; soil\/land degradation etc., etc., are all co-symptoms of overshoot. Climate change is an excess waste problem \u2014 CO2<\/sub>\u00a0is the greatest waste by weight of modern techno-industrial (MTI) economies. We cannot solve any major symptom of overshoot in isolation. Indeed, the mainstream approach to emissions reductions will not only fail to subdue climate change but, by promoting material growth, will\u00a0exacerbate<\/i>\u00a0overshoot (Seibert and Rees, 2021). On the other hand, if we eliminate overshoot we simultaneously relieve its various symptoms. The problem is, the only way to eliminate overshoot is, by definition, through some combination of absolute reductions in energy and material consumption and smaller populations, i.e., through\u00a0controlled economic contraction<\/i>.<\/p>\n This is why we cannot expect COP-26 to address the human eco-predicament.<\/p>\n Dyke, J., Watson, R. & Knorr, W. (2021). Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap.\u00a0The Conversation<\/i>\u00a0(22 April 2021),\u00a0https:\/\/theconversation.com\/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap-157368<\/a><\/p>\n GFN. (2021).\u00a0Media Backgrounder: Earth Overshoot Day.<\/em>\u00a0Global Footprint Network,\u00a0https:\/\/www.overshootday.org\/newsroom\/media-backgrounder\/<\/a><\/p>\n Rees, W.E. (2020).\u00a0Ecological economics for humanity\u2019s plague phase.\u00a0Ecological Economics,<\/em>\u00a0169 (March 2020),\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.ecolecon.2019.106519<\/a><\/p>\n Seibert, M.K. and Rees,\u00a0W.E. (2021). Through the eye of a needle: an eco-heterodox perspective on the renewable energy transition.\u00a0Energies\u00a0<\/i>14(15): 4508,\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/en14154508<\/a><\/p>\n Spash, C. (2016). This changes nothing: the Paris Agreement to ignore reality.\u00a0Globalizations<\/i>,\u00a013<\/b>(6), 928\u201333.<\/p>\n Spratt, D. and Dunlop, I. (2021). “Net zero 2050\u201d: a dangerous illusion.\u00a0Breakthrough Briefing Note\u00a0<\/i>(July 2021),\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/52a87f3e-7945-4bb1-abbf-9aa66cd4e93e.filesusr.com\/ugd\/148cb0_714730d82bb84659a56c7da03fdca496.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Teaser photo credit: Greater Los Angeles<\/a>\u00a0lies on a coastal mediterranean\u00a0savannah<\/a>\u00a0with a small\u00a0watershed<\/a>\u00a0that is able to support at most one million people on\u00a0its own water<\/a>; as of 2015, the area has a population of over 18 million. Researchers predict that similar cases of resource scarcity will grow more common as the world population increases.[20] <\/a><\/sup>By Tuxyso – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=28845100<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unless and until we accept that we must live within ecological limits, then climate change will not be adequately tackled. Energy and resource consumption must be addressed through controlled economic contraction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3489238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79717,79716,79718],"tags":[144770,250848,101349,94173],"class_list":["post-3489233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-energy","category-environment","tag-climatechangeresponses","tag-cop26","tag-ecologicalovershoot","tag-economiccontraction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3489233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3489238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3489233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3489233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3489233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}References<\/h3>\n