The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

The transformation we need in order to stay below 1.5 C or even 2 C of warming may not be politically possible today. But we are the ones who determine what will be politically possible tomorrow.

Every single mass extinction in Earth history is similarly marked by massive disruptions of the global carbon cycle, the signals of which have been teased out of the rocks by geochemists.

In our everyday lives, what most of us experience isn’t so much global warming as global weirding.

In today’s situation, it is not OK to make a living persuading people to think a certain way or to buy things regardless of whether it is in their best interests or in the interests of the planet. Ask yourself carefully whether that is the nature of your work. If so, it has to change. If your company expects it of you, change the company urgently or leave. All those in advertising need to rise to the challenge of entirely reframing this profession.

When it comes to climate justice, democracy knows no borders.

So when we say that our leaders have not been taking any climate action during the last thirty years, we could not be more wrong. In fact, they have been very busy. But not in the way that you might think - or hope. They have spent this time actively delaying action, creating frameworks full of loopholes that will benefit their own, national short-term economic policies - and their own popularity. And as long as the level of awareness is as low as it is today, they will continue to get away with it.

The richest 1 percent of the world's population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of humanity.

The richest 1 per cent of the world's population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of humanity.

We can still do this,’ the powerful voices of the Global North say in their tremendous struggle to maintain a system that has been proved flawed, incapable and doomed in more ways than we can possibly imagine. ‘We pledge to be climate neutral by 2050,’ they say, sending everyone back to sleep. If they were honest about hope being something we need, then they would immediately reduce their emissions for the benefit of the billions of people who are already being affected, and for their own children. But they are not being honest. Instead they use hope as a powerful weapon to delay all necessary changes and prolong their business as usual.

A recent, hugely successful one states that a hundred companies are responsible for 70 per cent of the world’s emissions.

Recently these words were joined by flygskam, or ‘flight shame’. It is linked to the international climate movement and the growing number of people who have given up flying, because frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in – unless you count billionaire-style space travel or owning a large private yacht.

In terms of resource use and emissions, buying nothing beats buying something virtually all the time: better to keep driving the car you own than shelling out for a brand-new Tesla, or wearing out what is in your wardrobe rather than buying a new capsule wardrobe in the name of ethical fashion. A particularly telling statistic: a person would have to use an organic cotton tote every single day for half a century to offset the impact of its production, the Danish government has estimated.

In the world of glossy climate plans in PDFs and stock photography, CCS is a shining saviour. In the grimy real world, CCS is a failure. This disconnect persists because CCS serves an emotional purpose rather than a technological one. It coats the fantasy of continued, unchanged fossil fuel use with a protective rhetorical magic. It remains persistently ‘around the corner’, while serving as a justification for the ever-worsening expansion of fossil fuel projects and the cause of delay of real action.

The environmental impact of individual foods varies considerably. Broadly speaking, there are three sets of food that range from low impact to high impact per calorie of food produced: plant-based foods have the lowest impact; dairy, eggs, poultry, pork and most fish have five to twenty times the impact of plant-based foods; and some fish, as well as meat that comes from cattle, goats and sheep have upwards of twenty to a hundred times the impact of plant-based foods.