Manifesto: The Case for 1.5° Celsius

When I see what needs to be said, it’s difficult to breathe. The scale of the unfolding tragedy takes my breath away.

Laid out before me is a wide plain, across which I see hundreds of millions of people – women, men, dusty children - making their hopeful journey… but towards hunger, thirst and destitution.

This is not a picture of the distant future. It is a picture of today and tomorrow. Billions of people, walking towards an untimely death.  

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No-one has ever experienced human-made calamity on this scale before. Nor could they, ever again. For by the time this climate-induced wave of catastrophes has soared to its full height and subsided, two-thirds of humankind is likely to be dead or dying.

No-one knows how to deal with a nightmare on this scale. The other nightmare moments in human history don’t come close, not even the worst.

The Holocaust rightly haunts our consciences. The deaths of some 25 million innocent people, and the suffering of countless millions more, should never be forgotten. 

When I was a girl, an old German friend walked with me through a deserted concentration camp. Grief and horror still clung to its walls. He told me stories about himself when he was my age, but famished: watching a dog being sick, and craving the vomit for its nutrients.

During the course of the transatlantic slave trade, another human-made nightmare, millions of enslaved Africans suffered and died. Nobody knows how many. Historians’ estimates vary from 6 million to 60 million. If this many people died, how many suffered?
 
To work out their numbers, historians take the number of Africans they think perished while being captured and “stored” (as if humans were lumber) while still in Africa and add to it the number they think died on the ocean crossing, as well as the number who died in “the seasoning” (that lumber metaphor again). The “seasoning” was the period that captured Africans spent in torture camps in the Caribbean. They were “broken in” so they could withstand the hard labour soon to be inflicted on them by their plantation owners. The frailer slaves failed the torture test.

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I’m sorry if reading these examples of mass human cruelty have sickened you.  But please keep reading. They make an important, if simple, point.

Just a small number of powerful people made the terrible decisions that set these atrocities in motion. Yet they would have remained nothing more than psychotic fantasies if it were not for the collusion of a multitude of others.

A multitude accepted the atrocities as reasonable, or turned a blind eye. Denial is a great comforter, but does not make one innocent.

I doubt if you would consider yourself a person who could ever push a child into a gas chamber. I doubt you would ever torture a terrified slave. But could you or I collude passively with decisions by politicians that lead to extreme suffering?

We can’t convincingly say ‘No’ since we already do it every day:
•    We allow politicians to let half a million mothers die unnecessarily in childbirth every year, when we could easily halt this devastating loss to families.
•    We allow politicians to let a child die of an easily preventable disease every other second.
•    We allow politicians to do almost nothing to stop climate change – the biggest creator of poverty and suffering the world has ever seen.

Soon climate change will wipe away virtually all the gains in universal human rights that international development workers have made over the past 40 years, while brewing up its own preferred menu of catastrophes: famine, disease, storms and hurricanes at sea, droughts and floods on land…

Five or ten years ago, many of us had no idea we were triggering such unimaginable suffering through our extravagant use of fossil fuels. But now we know it. And we still resist politicians who want to make serious changes, and we vote for politicians who do not.  In the UK, we have just voted in a government packed with climate-deniers.

How can we, as people who claim to have some moral sense, collude with our politicians to leave catastrophic climate change as our legacy to future generations?  We were the creatures that proudly named ourselves ‘human’, meaning ‘humane’ (the words were once interchangeable). And yet we are not humane enough to change our ways when they cause billions of our fellow humans to die.

Not even when those humans are our own grandchildren.

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If we do want to stop the nightmare, what should we do?  In a word:

We should stop the average global temperature rising to no more than 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

I would prefer to say, ‘Let’s stop the rise at no more than 1°C.’ But I fear that it may be too late to aim for 1° now. The global average temperature has already risen 0.7°C above pre-industrial levels, and we are on course to soar above 2°C – even if we slammed the brakes on right now.

If we were really determined, we could row back from 2°C. It would mean abandoning calls for ‘low-carbon’ lifestyles, or even ‘carbon-neutral’ lifestyles: we would have to go for ‘carbon-negative’ lifestyles.

We still have a chance: a brief interval when we could slow the temperature rise down so it reaches no higher than 1.5C.  And we must.

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What is so special about 1.5°C?

Because an average global temperature rise that is higher than 1.5°C will mean:

•    Colluding with politicians to sacrifice of all the people living on low-lying islands - like the Maldives.  ‘A few of us may get away on a boat,’ said Mohamed Nasheed , President of the Maldives. ‘But the rest of us will simply drown.’

•    Colluding with politicians to sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas, like the Netherlands or Bangladesh. It is possible that some of these people - from the richer states - will find new homes in other states (though we should remember that refugees are rarely welcome anywhere, and certainly not when they arrive by the million).

•    Colluding with politicians to sacrifice tens of millions of people living in the hotter parts of the tropics, where the temperatures often soar half as high again as the global average. A 3°C average global rise could mean a torrid 4.5°C rise in the heart of Africa.

In Ethiopia, herds have been dying of thirst, leaving the herders with no income to buy replacement animals, or to feed their families. In India, farmers have been facing ruin as their crops wither. Many thousands have been committing suicide – after they have killed their wives and children. 

Are you shocked? It is shocking thought. But what would you prefer: to see your children dying quickly - or dying lingeringly, in the slow agony of hunger?

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Most of us have no idea what real hunger feels like. For most of us it means that mild twinge in our middle region that reminds us it’s nearly time for dinner  - a rather pleasurable twinge, because it heralds pleasures to come.

I saw real hunger for the first time when I was a child in Sri Lanka, looking out of the window of our bungalow. An emaciated man, tall and thin as a ribbed stick, came into view in the lane beyond our garden. He uttered loud, wild cries, beyond dignity now: ‘Hungry! Hungry!’ He staggered from side to side before he collapsed on the tarmac, writhing in pain.  It was the most frightening sight I had ever seen.

Hunger like this is stalking people again. A billion people suffer the agony of hunger with no certainty of relief every night.

And this is in a world that still grows enough food to feed everyone - if those who grew the food could afford to eat enough of it before they sold the rest to those of us who eat too much. 

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So it is really a simple question that we face:

Are we prepared, hand on heart, to say that we are willing to allow the sacrifice of all these millions, or even billions, of people – knowingly – or will we move heaven and earth to slow down the average global temperature rise?

We could be the generation that knowingly colluded with causing the unnecessary deaths of more human beings than died in the transatlantic slave trade – a hundred times as many. 

Each of these will be a person with a mind and a heart; a person who has had parents, and perhaps has brothers and sisters, lovers, friends, children... 

These are the people we would be allowing the politicians to sacrifice. Is that a thought your mind can justify, or your heart can bear?

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And we would not even be sacrificing them for any good reason. We would be sacrificing them because we wanted to eat strawberries in winter.

Or because we wanted to fly whenever we felt we ‘deserved’ a change of scenery. We would be sacrificing them for reasons of the utmost triviality.

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So you would expect that, when the largest gathering of presidents and prime ministers in the history of the world met in December 2009 in Copenhagen for the UN Climate Summit, the most important conference in the history of the world, they must surely have been meeting there to right this crazy wrong.

To work out how to stop these mindless sacrifice of innocent human beings, by keeping the global average temperature from rising above 1.5°C.  

These political leaders were the most powerful group of people in the world. They are the people who call the shots about our present and our future.

They are the world’s most powerful minority. Their employees, the civil servants, a slightly larger minority, carry out their decisions. And their voters, the rest of us, the vast majority, support their decisions. But it all begins, and ends, with the minority’s decisions.

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So what did this powerful minority in fact propose? A goal of 2°C.

Sometimes this was phrased as ‘under 2°C’ or even ‘well under 2°C’, but 2°C was the number that stuck like a needle on a scratched record. We were mesmerised by repetition into believing that 2° C was the right goal to have.

But 2°C won’t do.  It has to be 1.5°C.  Or less: 1°C would be better still. But it cannot be more than 1.5°C.

But the worse news is that the decisions made by the leaders in Copenhagen will not result in keeping the average global temperature rise at 2°C. As it stands now, as I write in spring 2010, the combined commitment of the countries that have sent in pledges so far would take the average rise to 3°C, which means 4.5°C or even higher in some parts of the world.

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And who will make sure that even these inadequate pledges are kept?

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So the upshot is that the political leaders at Copenhagen have knowingly sentenced hundreds of millions of people living in vulnerable parts of Africa and the low-lying regions and islands of our world to homelessness, destitution or death.

Put so nakedly, it may come as a nasty shock. But that is what it amounts to. 

That was the true failure of the Copenhagen Summit: the inability of governments to move out of their rigid positions, which served their short-term national self-interest, to connect instead with the human reality of what they were proposing.

When a small, powerful group of people knowingly create the conditions that will result in the lingering and painful deaths of a large group of vulnerable, innocent people, by what word can we describe this act?

Is it murder? Mass murder? Genocide? These seem such melodramatic words, I hesitate to use them. I am groping to find another – but what other words are there? How else can one define their actions?

This powerful group of people have decided to pursue this course of action for the sake of gain, mainly financial gain. They have repeatedly been advised that this action will result in the certain death of others who are in no position to resist. They have immunity from prosecution for their decisions.

They are safe… to put others at grave risk.

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Our political leaders in Copenhagen promised a miserable $10 billion a year for three years to help eradicate climate poverty, with £100 billion coming later, in a decade’s time. From whom? Nobody knows. Nobody rushed in with big offers.

The German government were reported to be toying with 2.3 billion euros. Within months this had slipped to around 200 million: less than that 0.3 billion – with the 2 billion gone into hiding. So from whom?

It’s all horribly vague.

Where have all the pledges gone, long time passing? The rich world’s 40-year-old promise to give 0.7 of its GDP in aid to the poor world has never been kept. The G8’s promise at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005 to find funds to slash poverty in Africa has been betrayed.

Yet these same political leaders of rich countries, who are apparently struggling to find $100 billion in ten years to help people suffering acutely from climate poverty – caused, thus far, almost entirely by their own decisions over the past century - could find trillions in their back pockets to prop up the banking and the automobile industries, and pretty well overnight.

One would hope these bankers would be appreciative and remorseful. They are not.  They have already reverted to demanding bigger bonuses, while their crocodile tears are still damp on their cheeks: ‘I’m sorry… er, I mean, I’m sorry but I want more.’

Instead of grumbling about the bankers’ bonuses, as if we were a bit annoyed, or making ironic jokes about them, shouldn’t we be blazing with fury?

Should we be demanding why billions or trillions can’t be spent on climate poverty instead, and at once, so that the global temperature rise can be slowed down? So that famine can be warded off? So that food can be for people first, and for profit later? So that people can stay in their own homes instead of becoming climate refugees?

We could do all these things and more. Instead, we complain a bit – as if that will make any difference - and then get back to business as usual.

‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph,’ Edmund Burke is reported to have said, ‘is for good men to do nothing.’ 

No wonder evil has such an easy ride.

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Some people say, let’s give up on governments and do it all ourselves. Let’s stop the politicians doing their work, and just live less fossil-fuel intensively...

These moves toward voluntary simplicity are necessary – but insufficient. We simply can’t do enough, or fast enough, on our own. Our political leaders could pass laws or offer incentives that would make it so much easier for us to lead carbon-negative lives, and for businesses to operate carbon-negatively. Conversely, everything that we do to lead carbon-negative lives could be undermined at a stroke by their bad decisions.

So we have to work with the politicians:
•    Praising the governments - the very few - that are working in tandem with their citizens in every area of life to halt the rise in global temperature.
•    Pointing out the governments that do too little, or nothing, or actively place obstacles in the way to stop you tackling climate change
•    Letting them know that we will vote for them only if they take strong and urgent measures to keep the average global temperature down to 1.5°C.  And that we will not vote for them if they won’t.

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As I write, a plume of ash that erupted from a volcano in Iceland hundreds of miles away is hanging invisibly over these blue spring skies.

I can’t see the plume, or the tiny chunks of silica that (I am told) is now peppering the air
- any more than I can see any greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide or methane. Yet these particles can wreck an airplane engine in seconds, and the airline industry is taking no chances and grounding all flights.

This precautionary measure is already causing economic and social problems in the UK, according to a speaker on the radio. After only 48 hours!  Medical supplies are running short, said another speaker. Supermarkets were running out of imported vegetables – which, a third speaker said, are probably rotting somewhere faraway, Kenya perhaps, worsening the poverty of the already-poor farmers there.

And all this from one small shrug of Mother Nature’s shoulders, one crook of her little finger. How will we cope when she rises, enraged, and shakes her fists?

How will we protect life on earth, and create a fairer and more resilient future?

We lend politicians our power to make good decisions on our behalf and we have to resist their bad decisions as if we mean it. Not tepidly, comfortably, nibbling away at the hems of their garments as if we had decades to spare, or that we were enslaved.  Our politicians are supposed to serve us, not be our masters.

We have to resist as fiercely as we would if they were pushing our children into planes that are sucking silica chunks into their engines.

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Update: Since writing this, a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been rousing millions of Americans to rage, as they recoil from TV pictures of the dull grey-black ooze flooding the sea and smothering seabirds with its gooey, lethal mess. It’s the biggest environmental disaster that US citizens have ever experienced, they believe, and they are furious with BP, the oil giant that caused the spill.

And they are furious too with the US government for not fixing the problem sooner. They want their politicians to act, and act rapidly and effectively. If only they wanted their politicians to act as fast and as effectively about climate change!

Because we should ask ourselves: is this oil spill really the US’s biggest environmental disaster. Would they still think that if the fossil fuels that are now visibly painting the sea were as visibly painting the skies?

Daily, the US oil giants, aided and abetted by its citizens and politicians, paint the global atmosphere with enormous ‘oil spills’ - as does the rest of the world’s fossil fuel industry, aided and abetted by all of us, the rest of the world’s citizens who drive cars, catch flights, burn coal, waste energy… These daily disasters, because they are invisible, are ignored by media and citizens alike.

But it’s time to go beyond seeing only the visible and short-term. It’s time to see what’s invisible and long-term.

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If I were to set out the heart of the matter in five simple sentences, as a manifesto for a 1.5°C world, perhaps it would look something like this:


Acts of inhumanity come about as a result of bad decisions made by a small number of political leaders, carried out by their employees and followers, and accepted without challenge by millions of people at large.

To avoid the greatest act of inhumanity ever, we, the world’s people, can no longer be passive in the face of climate change.

We must make good decisions in our daily lives – and, crucially, do all we can to put pressure on our political leaders to make good decisions. 

A ‘good decision’ is one that will work fast, long-term and humanely to hold the global average temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably to less.

Civil servants must then implement the political leaders’ good decisions, which citizens can support with clear consciences.

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