We're seeing transformation, whether we want it or not.
I think that the evidence of climate impacts is just ever-growing and the speed
at which we're facing transformation of our world is becoming ever more clear.
I mean, in the before pandemic times, everybody was worried about the burning of
the Amazon and the burning of Australia.
And so this transformation is happening.
And the question is what are we going to do to change the way that humanity
functions to maintain some version of climate stability and safety,
Welcome to the Ecopolitics Podcast.
This podcast series tackle some of the big questions in the field
of environmental politics for university students in Canada.
I'm Ryan Katz-Rosene from the University of Ottawa.
And my co-host for the show is Dr Peter Andrée from Carleton University, although
he's not joining us for this episode.
In this episode, I'll be talking with Dr Matthew Hoffmann, professor of Political
Pcience at the University of Toronto, and Dr Steven Bernstein, distinguished
professor of Global Environmental and Sustainability Governance at the
University of Toronto, and both co-direct the Environmental Governance Lab at the
Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, along with Dr Teresa Kramarz.
We will be talking about a couple of key concepts today in this episode
about the study of environmental politics and climate change governance
in particular, including ideas like the global commons, decarbonisation, and
the idea of lock-in or carbon lock-in.
Matt and Steven recently co-authored an article in the journal Nature Climate
Change called "Climate politics, metaphors, and the fractal carbon trap",
which offers a really good foundation for our discussion today and which we
will be sure to link to on the website.
So before we get into the meaty stuff, Matt, Steven, how are you guys doing?
Steven, how's your pandemic summer, the great pandemic summer of 2020 going?
Well, it's pretty isolating, I think like a lot of people.
It's you know, I think puts things in perspective, but like
everyone, trying to make the best of it, enjoy the warm weather.
And uh, you know, not think too much about about what the fall's gonna look like.
Great.
And how about you, Matt?
So I use the term 'COVID okay' for how I'm doing these days - you know, I'm,
I'm fine given the circumstances and I'm certainly privileged and lucky in
comparison to people that are really suffering through the pandemic summer.
but like Steven, it's isolating, you sort of take things day by day and
Yeah, try not to think too much about how different things are going to
be for the upcoming fall semester.
Indeed.
Yes.
This is something we've been thinking about a lot, especially
as you know, we're intending to use this podcast episode for teaching
materials for the upcoming semester.
Okay.
So I'm going to dive right in here, guys.
And ask you a question about a term we hear a lot about in the study
of environmental politics and that is the commons, or in some cases we
hear about 'common pool resources' and some of the listeners on this
show might be familiar with the idea of the tragedy of the commons, or
perhaps they've heard of that term.
So I want to take a step back and ask one of you, maybe Matt, if you
don't mind to help us kind of define what a commons is in the first place
and how that idea relates to the study of environmental politics.
So the commons is the idea that you have shared resources.
And whether we're talking about common-pool resources or public goods,
essentially you have a group of people that are sharing resources and there's
technical definitions about who can use the resources, and if someone uses the
resources, does that deplete them or not.
But I think the general idea is that you have something that's shared in
common and when it's applied to climate change, What people are really talking
about there if they say, you know, climate change is a problem of the global
commons or is a common pool resource, it's this notion that in order to have
a stable climate, everybody has to contribute action to making that possible.
And one of the best ways to, I think, illustrate that is this
notion of the carbon budget that people might've seen in the news.
So with the carbon budget, scientists have essentially calculated how
much carbon dioxide humanity can pump into the atmosphere.
And maintain a stable climate and sort of stay within relatively safe levels
- although what we're seeing these days with climate impacts is that we might already
be exceeding some of those safe levels.
But essentially that carbon budget, therefore is the collective or
common resource for all of humanity.
And so this is what they're really referring to is that this
is something that we share as a community and as a global community.
And in your article, if I can get you to continue, Matt, you both refer
to the global commons as a metaphor for, I suppose, the current dominant
thinking and in the governance of climate change, and you emphasize
that it hasn't really worked or that this metaphor is maybe problematic.
So why isn't the global commons metaphor working when it comes
to climate change governance?
So one of the big issues is if you treat climate change as a problem of
the global commons, it creates what we call a collective action problem.
And the essential features of that are that everybody has to contribute, and
that my contribution to the problem to solving the problem is essentially
dependent on your contribution.
So if you aren't going to pay the price to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, then
I'm going to feel like I shouldn't either.
And so everybody therefore is looking at what everybody else is doing.
And one of the key features of a collective action problem is that
everybody has an incentive to free ride, or to essentially let someone else pay
the costs of producing the public good in this case, or producing a stable climate
of paying for the emissions reductions.
And so what you have, if it's a global commons, if climate change, if solving
climate change is seen as a global commons, is that everybody is expected
to contribute to solve the problem.
Everybody has an incentive to free ride to let someone else pay for
fixing or keeping a stable climate.
And in this case, in this particular kind of global commons problem of climate
change, you have a lot of major players - the United States, China, India - not
really wanting to act, or having very different ideas about what to do.
And so you have a structure of a problem where everybody has incentive to free
ride and you have to overcome that.
And you have major players that don't really want to take significant action
or have very different ideas about what counts as significant action.
And so what we've seen over the last 25 years is this creates an
insoluble collective right problem.
Interesting.
And tell us a little bit more about that in reference, or maybe I'll ask
Steven to jump in there - and we'll talk about some of the metaphors that
you propose or the metaphor that you propose as a potential solution in a
second - but you also raise this idea of carbon lock-in in your article.
And I'm wondering maybe Steven, if you can tell us a little bit about what that
really means, what are some examples of carbon lock-in in different countries?
Sure.
I'd be happy to do that, but maybe I can just step back for just a little
bit and add to some things Matt said.
I think that he really nicely laid out thit thinking about a stable climate
as a kind of global commons problem.
And I think that one of the things that, you know, we discuss in the article is
that this metaphor of a commons is a very powerful metaphor that is quite useful for
lots of different international problems.
And we talk about, in a very specific way, say something like you know, fish stocks
that have this attribute of commons.
You know, people have access to them, but you know, you can deplete them.
And we think about it even in areas like international trade, about this
problem of free riding and, you know, one country doesn't lower their tariffs
then another country or other countries will not want to do it and so on.
And what Matt laid out is the political difficulties with climate change in
particular of thinking about the problem in this way in getting countries to
solve it, because there's all these questions about who is responsible, who
is to blame, what's the just solution.
Countries are worried that they contribute and other countries won't and they'll
be taken advantage of and so on.
But moving now to your question about lock-in.
One of the big things that motivated us was that not only is it really difficult
if we think about the problem like a commons, whereas other problems, it's
kind of good to think about them that way and think about how to get cooperation.
but the very nature of climate change, of human-induced climate change,
is that the commons doesn't help us very much in thinking about a
productive way in which to actually address the underlying problem.
And that leads to your question about lock-in.
If we think about what causes carbon lock-in, it's not that states sort
of, at some point in history, decided that they were going to be, you
know, locked into the use of fossil fuels or of this kind of energy.
It's something that occurred because of the internal combustion engine, and
discovering lots of oil reserves and different ways to produce energy, and coal
and so on that were very carbon intensive.
And economies were built around these things, cultural practices, you know,
the sort of power and development of states are built around them and our
own behaviours and our attachment to things like cars and so on and so forth.
So there are multiple systems and behaviors that are locked
into the use of carbon.
And so when we think about ways to address climate change, as opposed
to thinking, States are just going to decide to cooperate or not to deal with
it, what we're actually talking about is how to overcome carbon lock-in or
transform away from carbon lock-in.
And that requires Lots of different things to happen, not just states deciding
that that's what they're going to do.
Hmm.
I think if I understand correctly, you suggest that the commons metaphor
kind of leads to a particular focus on emissions reductions as opposed
to decarbonisation, which in contrast gets at that issue of carbon lock-in.
Is that a fair analysis?
Is that a fair comparison?
Yes, I think that's a good way to put it.
And I think, and actually I will attribute this to Matt, because it's
his way of thinking about it, which I think makes a lot of sense, which
is, Emission reductions are a symptom and decarbonisation is sort of the
underlying problem, and gets much more at like, Yes, obviously emissions are
a direct - emissions of greenhouse gases are a direct cause of climate
change, but the changes we need aren't simply reducing those emissions, it's
changing the systems and practices that are leading to those emissions.
So then you turn to in your article and you introduced this idea of the
global fractal as a new metaphor.
And I think you position this as a different metaphor, a different way
of thinking about this challenge, thinking about the challenge of
de-carbonization, rather than just sort of this, you know, collective action
dilemma about who's going to reduce emissions, and why should I reduce
emissions if that other country X, Y, and Z aren't reducing their emissions?
I mean, that's an interesting concept, this idea of the fractal, where
did, where did this idea come from and what does that really get at,
this metaphor of the global fractal?
And I'll turn that back to you, Matt.
Yeah.
And so if you start, if you change your focus from thinking about
emissions reductions to thinking about de-carbonization, one of the things
that you immediately recognize is that lock-in, carbon lock-in, which by the
way, it was developed by a sociologist named Gregory Unruh, this concept.
But you notice that this lock-in, this dependence on fossil energy,
happens at multiple scales.
Families, you know, sort of households are locked into the use of carbon.
Cities are locked into the use of fossil energy.
Provinces, countries.
And what you can also notice is that they're locked in in similar ways.
That at every level, there are overlapping dynamics that are making
the use of fossil energy so natural.
It's about cultural dynamics.
It's about political, social, technological, economic.
All of these different forces are overlapping and reinforcing
the use of fossil energy.
And this is actually quite a clear characteristic of fractal systems.
If you look at fractal systems in nature, whether it's the spiral of a nautilus
shell or a river delta, one of the key characteristics of fractal systems
is something called self similarity.
And that's the notion that no matter what scale you look at a fractal pattern, it
looks the same, or it looks very similar.
And so we noticed that when we started thinking about carbon lock-in as the
core challenge, that lock-in at multiple levels kind of follow similar patterns.
And a second piece of a fractal system that's really important, is that if
you look at fractal patterns, they are interdependent across scales.
And so micro level patterns reinforce macro level patterns,
and the reverse is true as well.
Macro patterns reinforce micro level patterns.
And this is certainly the case when it comes to carbon lock-in.
So a city like Toronto or Ottawa will be locked into the use of fossil energy
because of urban design, available technology- or available transportation
technologies, how citizens choose to move around the city, building codes,
utility infrastructure, all of these sort of overlapping, social, economic,
technological, and political factors.
But of course, Canada is locked into the use of fossil energy as well because
of industrial policy, histories of resource use, transportation policy,
choices made by Canadian consumers.
And so you see this sort of similar overlapping dynamics, but of course,
the fact that Toronto is locked into carbon reinforces the fact that Canada is
locked into carbon and vice-versa right.
And so we saw that this, this notion of a fractal system really seemed to
characterize the kind of challenge and the kind of problem that we're facing when it
comes to trying to disrupt carbon lock-in.
And when it comes to ultimately therefore trying to move progressively
forward on climate change.
Hmm.
So just to kind of ground this a little bit, I mean, that really makes sense.
And I really liked that imagery of the spiral, these multi scalar, you
know, dynamics here where you can have something like an individual, myself,
for instance, you know, feeling compelled that I really need that combustion
engine vehicle to get to work because there's no viable public transit systems.
And then you go a couple of scales up and all of a sudden you have a provincial or
federal government advocating, you know, saying that we need to continue to produce
oil, because people are still buying internal combustion engine vehicles.
Right.
So, I think that really helps to explain this idea of lock-in, but is it so
simple to try, and don't mean to use that term, but how do we then talk
about the solution side of things?
Because is the suggestion of the global fractal that the same dynamics that kind
of lock us into carbon or the same type of multi-scalar relationships that we'll
see in the process of decarbonization?
So another way of asking that question is, are you proposing that we will see, you
know, the opposite of, of carbon lock-in.
So I suppose we could call that decarbonization, is that gonna
also be a dynamic that we see shared and mutually reinforcing
between these different scales?
And I'll throw that to you, Steven.
So that's the big question or one big question that Matt and I, and others are
really try to get at in our research.
And I guess, the short answer or a short-ish answer is that it is
precisely those dynamics that we are looking for in multiple sets of
initiatives that are being undertaken in order to try to decarbonize.
So in the same way that as you say, carbon lock-in occurs and is
overlapping and reinforcing and so on.
We're looking, when we look at an initiative, a city with a
decarbonisation plan or a particular policy like building codes or
carbon labeling or carbon markets.
When we look, we don't just look at what is the potential of that particular
initiative to lead to emission reductions, to kind of get back to it, this difference
between reductions and decarbonisation.
We look at whether or not it then can produce dynamics that will have effects
that create support for other kinds of policies or will build capacity or
incentives or knowledge that can then be used to, say, to scale up that initiative
or to lead to other kinds of changes that might be supportive of de-carbonization.
So we in fact are looking at those patterns and I guess the broader point
is that our research and others has shown that it's very unlikely that there's
going to be a kind of magic bullet.
I mean, what the fractal does imply and we think is accurate is that it's
going to take action and initiatives at multiple scales at multiple levels.
And what's important is whether or not these particular initiatives have
these, you know, recursive and kick in these various kinds of dynamics
that will then lead to the scaling and what we call entrenchment, that
they'll be sort of durable over time that can help undermine or disrupt
decarbonize- or disrupt carbon lock-in.
Yeah.
So it's definitely a more complicated set of solutions than you know a single
treaty, like a Kyoto protocol or a Paris agreement, that we think is
implied by looking at carbon lock-in and decarbonisation as the problem.
But this is also where the global fractal is a, we think, useful metaphor,
if those dynamics are right, if these levels are also interdependent, it's not
just the lock-in that's interdependent, sort of reinforcing - we sort of
hypothesize or have a conjecture that the interdependence that is locking us into
fossil energy can actually be used to work for us, to work for decarbonization.
So, in other words, if you decarbonize Toronto, if you're able to put in
place the kind of initiatives that Steven was talking about to seriously
reduce the dependence on fossil energy in Toronto or Ottawa, that is going
to alter what carbon lock-in looks like for the whole country of Canada.
And so that interdependence, it can be used not just to lock systems
in, but it also could potentially be used to spread disruption.
What Steven was talking about there in terms of scaling and an entrenchment, is
the disruption to carbon lock-in could spread through a global fractal as well.
Right.
That's a really interesting idea.
And one other way of referring to that challenge, or I've seen this on
social media, but the idea that, you know, exponential growth in consumption
of fossil fuels in particular has kind of gotten us into this mess.
But perhaps a more hopeful way of thinking about getting out of the mess
is that we will hopefully see exponential growth in the kinds of solutions and
ways of dealing with carbon lock-in.
I do want to shift directions a little bit here to, well, to get back to this
issue of the interlocking scales and, and maybe you don't - well, I'm curious to
hear your answer on this in particular, Matt, and I know you've written about
this a little bit on social media, but we have discussed with some of
the other guests on this podcast, the relationship between individual forms of
action on climate change and collective scale action or regulatory action.
And I know that's not exactly what you're getting at with the, with this different
scales of action in terms of the fractal.
But does that debate relate at all to the fractal lens of decarbonisation?
Are we, is there, is there a role for the individual?
Are they, you know, is the individual a scalar sort of level
involved in the global fractal?
I think it certainly can be.
But I think that one thing that the fractal lens kind of reveals is really
the connectedness and that we need to get beyond the sort of either or, and
really think about the connectedness of individual and structural action.
So if you decide to take individual action, Is it disrupting the carbon
lock-in in your own life in any sort of way, is it reducing the dependence
of your household on fossil energy?
Sometimes yes.
Sometimes marginally.
And, but even more important, is it possible to see how it can catalyze
even in a small way, disruption of carbon lock-in in broader systems?
And even sometimes, and this is where some of these debates can
get problematic, cause they sort of sometimes veer towards purity debates.
[Ryan] Yeah.
But
they also, I think, unless you start to think about connections, you also
don't realize that sometimes action-- and this is something that our research
reveals-- that sometimes actions taken with the best of intentions to
decarbonize or reduce emissions in one place can actually end up reinforcing
carbon lock-in in other levels.
And so you want to be the-- the fractal forces you to think about
those kinds of connections, right?
And so, I mean, natural gas, this isn't about individuals, but natural
gas is a great example of this.
If we got rid of all coal fired power plants in North America and switched
everything to natural gas, we would reduce emissions, but that actually might
end up reinforcing and strengthening the broader carbon lock-in in our
continental energy systems, which might make it even more difficult to
decarbonize and act on climate change.
And I think people need to think about this at the individual level as well,
to be thinking about connections.
What does it, what is it disrupting and what is it reinforcing?
If I take action to insulate my home more, or if I change
my light bulbs, or fly less.
Right.
And you know, most of those things are good but marginal actions to take.
But I think that thinking about the connections is a way to get beyond
the sort of, It's all about individual action and consumer behavior, and,
We can't do anything so everybody should just do whatever they want.
My reading certainly was that this offers a nice window into the idea
of, you know, mutually enforcing behaviors at different scales.
And that, you know, we can't just pin all our hopes on changes at the level
of individual consumption, but that we need to talk about the interconnectedness
between these different scales.
And, you know, it's a good way to put it in terms of making sure that
it's not just about one scale or one level of action, but bringing
these forms of action to up other scales, upscaling action, if you will.
Okay.
So, so I want to also get to another question that popped up when I was reading
your article, which is about the, you know, how specific we're, we're going
to be about the idea of decarbonization.
And I I raised this because I've recently read a book by Mark
Jaccard, who's a colleague of ours at Simon Fraser University who I'm
sure you're both familiar with.
And he has, he has sort of claimed that fossil fuels- that it's a bit of a myth.
And maybe he's being a little provocative, but he does have a book titled Sustainable
Fossil Fuels, so maybe not so much.
But he's saying it's a myth that we need to entirely get rid of fossil fuels,
that we need to keep every last drop of fossil fuel within the Earth's crust
to, you know, have a stable climate.
And he's essentially saying-- he's not, you know, in favor of fossil fuels,
you know, wanton burning of them.
But he's suggesting that the real issue is about how they relate within the
broader techno technological sphere.
So if you have a technology like coal, a coal fired power plant that is paired with
carbon capture and sequestration, that if the system works as it's supposed to, and
you have the carbon being scrubbed out of this coal and being buried, that the
net impact is essentially carbon neutral.
So I think he's talking about the need to focus on, to include a, you know, a suite
of energy technologies, including fossil fuels is so long as they're paired with
these sort of techno fixes, which can allow us to maintain carbon neutrality.
So that's a long way of asking, Steven, I'll turn this to you do we, you
know-- is there, is there a role for fossil fuels, some limited amount of
fossil fuels in a decarbonized world?
Or do we really need to start thinking about how we're literally going to
keep every last drop of fossil fuels, maybe not today, or maybe not in the
next five, 10 years, but eventually see a world where we are not digging
any of this stuff up and burning it?
So thank you, Ryan, for turning to me for the very simple question and you
know, Mark Jaccard is a very smart guy, and these are challenging arguments.
So I guess - I feel like, this might be a bit of sidestepping, but it's maybe a
slightly different way of looking at it.
So I think there's a couple of things to keep in mind.
One is that I think, as in Matt's answer to a previous question,
it may not be productive to have these kinds of either/or debates.
I don't think anyone would imagine that we can just, you know, tomorrow say that
we're no longer gonna use fossil energy.
So I think that there is an acknowledgement that even as we build,
even as we go through a transformation, which I hope that we do, and there's
some evidence that we're at least starting to, that there will be, you
know, fossil fuels will hopefully be a diminishing part of our sort of our
infrastructure and energy use and so on.
But that there's going to be, you know, a various amount of time
when they'll be part of the mix.
But to kind of switch the discussion just a little bit, there's a
couple of important things to take in mind, which is where maybe I
don't quite agree with Jaccard.
So the first is that time is running out.
And I think that there is a danger in framing the discussion in the way
that he does, to sort of say, well, Then, you know, the policy response
is, Oh, well, okay, they're always going to be here, so you know, let's
not panic, let's not sort of have these sort of radical solutions, everything
in the ground, that's misplaced.
When I think that the science tells us that indeed, quick, very, very rapid
in historical terms transformation is needed and we're just naive.
It doesn't matter what we think and whether we have these debates
or not, the science tells us climate change will occur and it's
occurring at a very, very rapid pace.
The second thing that I think is important to keep in mind, is that these
kinds of discussions then tend to lead to, Well, what do we have to do then?
And I think that's one of the areas in which Matt, the work that Matt and I are
doing tries to change that discussion from here's a suite of policies: that you know,
We have to have a carbon price, We have to reduce emissions by this much, Companies
should do this, you know, Countries should do that, and laying out, And here's
the carbon budget, and So by 2050, we need to do this and so on and so forth.
It's not that that stuff isn't helpful or accurate in terms of,
if we did that, it would lead to the kinds of world that we want.
Our work goes from the opposite perspective.
So whether or not Mark is right or not, that carbon sequestration would work.
Which, you know, the evidence so far is that certainly not of the scales
that he's talking about, doesn't work.
It switches it to say, what do we need to do to intervene in the system
in order to get the transformation going that needs to happen?
And what are the politics around that, in particular?
What are the changes?
What kinds of things are leading to the kinds of changes that are necessary?
So rather than having an abstract debate about whether carbon sequestration is
going to work, we would say, What do we need to do to start transitioning away
from fossil energy, and to get support for - if there's still going to be
need for coal, well to get the kind of support and money and investment that
would either, that would be required in order to do the kinds of things that Mark
thinks might be necessary in terms of, if fossil energy remains part of the mix.
And that's why we look at the politics, you know, of coalitions,
of kind of formalizing how you gain support, how you gain capacity
in all kinds of different areas.
And we think the fractal is useful for that.
Yeah, I won't leave Steven hanging on this one because I agree with him.
I'm really - I mean, preface this by saying I'm not a sort of expert on
the economics of CCS - but I'm wary of quote unquote "solutions" that promise
will be okay without transformation.
Because if global scientists, climate scientists are correct and we really
need 80% reductions in emissions and essentially to be fully decarbonized
by mid century, I worry what these kind of bridge-type solutions that
say, We can keep doing what we're doing if we do this other technological
thing, or We're going to do this, We're going to keep doing what we're
doing, but we'll do it with a slightly lower emissions fossil fuel energy.
My worry is always do those - or the litmus test I think of
is - do taking those solutions or following those solutions, do
they make it easier or harder to generate and pursue transformation?
The kind of transformation we need in our energy systems, transportation
systems, societies, really.
Because we do need some fairly significant transformation.
And the second point I'll make is that a lot of these are solutions that are
essentially maintaining the status quo or supporting the status quo.
And there's a lot of reasons to not support the status quo along these, some
of these, for some of these technologies, regardless of climate change.
[Ryan] Hmm.
Yeah.
The coal industry is not great for labour, for other environmental
issues, for other health issues.
Similarly, a lot of the fossil fuel industry is not great for societal
equity, for justice, for issues of race, and damage to Indigenous communities.
And so I look at the necessity of having transformation that's not
just about climate change, but it's about justice and equity as well.
And so I'm wary of solutions that promise that the status quo is
going to continue and that that will help us get to transformation.
Hm.
Yeah.
I mean it's certainly an interesting debate.
And I think one of the motivations, I don't want to be putting words in his,
or sentiments into his mouth, but you know, I think one of the thing, the
concerns is that sometimes a politics of transformation, and that is a loaded
term that I suppose we could define in different ways, but I think sometimes
it scares people and it's the idea of having to change our lives, you know,
drastically change our behavior and change the way we go about doing everything
that, you know, our regular life, is something that, you know, as a counter
argument is sometimes leveled is one of these reasons why we need to, you know,
maybe be a bit careful about the way that we're framing transformation or the
idea of the scale of change that we need.
But it sounds to me like you're both unequivocal that, you know,
we really do need to be open to the idea of transformation, you know,
revolutionary scale transformation.
Is that a fair claim, Matt?
Yeah, I would say, and I would add two things to it.
I think you summed that up well, but I would add two things to this.
First is that we're seeing transformation whether we want it or not.
I think that the evidence of climate impacts is just ever-growing and the speed
at which we're facing transformation of our world is becoming ever more clear.
And the second thing I would say, and this is I sort of unapologetically, but
with credit, steal from a colleague of ours, Simon Dalby at Wilfrid Laurier
university, he's fond of asking about this very kind of question.
Well, what's really the radical position?
Is the radical position we continue a status quo that is essentially
doing vast amounts of damage to the planet and to many communities?
Or is the radical position to stop doing that?
And I'm with him.
I think the radical position is actually to continue doing, to continue
pursuing the status quo when we know that the status quo is damaging.
Well truth be told that I'm with him too.
He was actually my PhD supervisor.
Okay.
I have a final question for both of you.
And we try to end these episodes by asking about you know, your hopes about the
future and, you know, we don't want to, you don't have to be - you know, be honest
here, but we were kind of wondering about ways that you remain hopeful or, or maybe
techniques or things that you think about that make you hopeful about the future.
In particular, around the idea of, you know, confronting climate change.
And maybe one way to introduce this question is to go back to this idea of the
metaphor that you invoked in your article.
So you guys, you know, the stated purpose or one of the stated purposes of your
article is to provide new metaphors for international climate governance
in part, because some of the previous metaphors and lenses haven't worked.
So starting with you, Steven, are you hopeful that new ways of confronting
the challenge of climate change will help us get out of this mess?
So I should preface this by say, I don't like the word hope.
Or despair, for that matter.
Because I think that one of the things that has motivated me in the research
is to try to think very practically.
I don't know what what's going to happen.
And I sort of go back and forth.
And I think that, as I was saying before, I react very much against
sort of this, you know, predicting, Here's a solution, we can do that or
we can't do that, so we should either go full force into it or just give up.
And I worry about that that mentality.
I think what gives me motivation to continue to do this research
and to think that, you know, human societies are quite innovative,
can be quite innovative and adapt.
And even in very tough times when things look very bleak, you know, find ways out
of things or at least to move forward, is precisely in the research that we do.
One of the reasons that I liked the goal, the idea of the global fractal is that
in my view, it is actually describing how, at least in the last 10 years if not
in the earliest days of climate change concern, how we as a species I guess
are indeed responding to this crisis.
We are seeing hundreds, thousands, of initiatives all over the
world, attempts to deal with it.
Some quite on a large scale, some on a small scale.
Those alone are not going to do very much necessarily.
There's not a magic bullet, but seeing that there is a widening recognition
and efforts and investment and concern and individuals and the mobilization
of young people and concerns about how this affects different communities who
are suffering now because of climate change, as Matt was talking about, these
things moving together, and again, kind of thinking of thinking through how the
politics of that can lead to a scaling of action and learning from each other
and entrenching new ways of doing things.
That to me is where I look for in terms of continuing to work
on this problem and finding ways to move forward to address it.
Yeah, I guess I'm a little less allergic to the word hope, but mostly
because I take my understanding of hope from from Rebecca Solnit, a
historian and public intellectual has written a lot about hope and despair.
Because what she talks about hope is the uncertainty of what's going to
happen, of sort of embracing uncertainty.
That despair is knowing things are going to be bad and optimism
is knowing things are going to be good and hope is found in this, the
uncertainty that you're not exactly sure what the future is going to hold.
And that's that space of uncertainty that provides the opportunity for action.
And like Steven, I find that uncertainty and motivation to keep working on
this precisely the same place he does.
That there are thousands of initiatives, thousands, and millions of people
working on transformation, and that this has become a truly global response
to climate change in ways that have gone so far beyond the sort of classic
multilateral negotiations that really characterized climate politics for
the first, from, you know, the early, late 1980s through the early 2000s.
And so this is - I don't know if it's all going to work, but at least I think that
the response is starting to match the nature and magnitude of the challenge.
And we've got a long way to go, to be sure.
But I at least see some uncertainty there, that gives me some hope.
Okay.
Well, Maybe we will leave it there and end on that note.
Thank you guys so much for joining in on this episode and serving as
guests for the Ecopolitics Podcast.
I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts and just kind of working through your article,
which I really enjoyed reading last fall when it came out, and to just kind of talk
about the ins and outs of de-carbonization and carbon lock-in in a deeper way than
I think we usually do on a daily basis.
So thank you guys so much, really appreciate your time and for sharing
your thoughts and wisdom with us.
So I will wrap it up there.
that concludes this episode of the Ecopolitics Podcast.
Don't forget to check out other episodes in the series at ecopoliticspodcast.ca
and Matt, Steven, thank you once again.
Thanks so much for having us.
Thank you very much.