11 Climate Change and Climate Justice: FAQ

1. Why is the climate changing?

Carbon and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere (especially from burning fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal). Some emissions are then safely removed again (e.g. absorbed by trees), but some hang around in the atmosphere. This traps the sun’s energy in the atmosphere, causing average planetary temperatures to rise (called global warming or global heating).

2. Why is it bad?

Consequences already include wildfire, storms, floods, drought, loss of soil moisture, famine, disease, heatwaves, loss of arctic ice and rising sea levels, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, wildlife extinction, and more. 

3. What are we doing about it?

Climate action is usually divided into adaptation and mitigation. Adaptation means doing things to prepare for a hotter climate, such as investing in resilient agriculture, relocating coastal communities, hardening infrastructure, building flood defences, etc. Reducing poverty and inequality has been shown to improve resilience to climate impacts. Mitigation is about doing things to slow and eventually halt global warming. Mitigation includes reducing carbon emissions (by reducing demand for energy, and also by switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind) as well as increasing the planet’s absorptive capacity (reforestation, wetland preservation, restorative agriculture, carbon removal technologies, etc.). 

4. What does climate justice mean?

There are many approaches to climate justice, but we can start by asking: Who is responsible for climate change? Who is affected by climate change? How might climate change reinforce existing injustices, or create opportunities to address them? Consider:

• Those who have contributed the least to climate change stand to lose the most from it.
  • The Global South has contributed very little toward greenhouse gas emissions in the past, but is more vulnerable to climate risks. This includes physical risks, such as extreme weather events. It also includes transition risks — environmentally progressive regulation tends to favour wealthy countries and companies, who have spare capacity to adjust how they do business.
• Climate impacts exacerbate existing inequalities, meaning marginalised communities are the most vulnerable. Across both the Global North and the Global South, it is women, ethnic minorities, Indigenous communities, and the poor who are most exposed to the impacts of climate change.
• Intergenerational justice is another aspect of climate justice. Younger people are at the frontline of problems caused by previous generations.
• Climate change means ‘the status quo’ is not an option. In this sense, climate justice is exciting. Climate change has often been associated with losses and blockages: the biodiversity we will lose, the carbon-intensive pleasures we will have to deny ourselves, the frustrations of climate activism in the face of greenwashing, delay or denial. But climate change also provides chances for creativity, imagination, disruption, transformation, revolution. Many of these positive energies are associated with climate justice. What we have learned about our planet is obliging us to build new kinds of society: this opens up new choices about what kinds of society they will be.

5. How much time do we have left to tackle climate change?

This gets asked a lot, but it’s probably best to reframe the question. Not long ago, conversations around climate change tended to revolve around, “When will we start to take serious action?” That has now changed. Questions are now about implementation (“How are we taking action?”) and justice (“Which ‘we’ is taking action, and for whom?”).

At the Paris Agreement in 2015, world leaders agreed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. To have a decent shot at this means we need to peak global carbon pollution immediately (2025 by the very latest), halve carbon pollution by 2030, and get to net zero by 2050. Climate action is already happening; but mitigation is not happening fast enough; there are significant benefits to doing things sooner rather than later, and doing them decisively rather than half-heartedly. We also need to accept that things are already changing and develop realistic climate adaptation plans.

6. What is net zero?

Net zero refers to a situation in which carbon emissions are balanced by carbon removals. According to the latest science, once the world as a whole achieves net zero, average global temperature will no longer rise (Matthews and Caldeira 2008). Net zero is also a target at other scales, e.g. country, city, institution, individual, event, product. There are worthwhile criticisms of the net zero paradigm (and other terms including real zero and net negative have been suggested as alternative rallying points); however, net zero is by far the dominant paradigm of current policymaking and strategy.

UK universities now have net zero targets. “SOS-UK, alongside the National Union of Students (NUS), the University and College Union (UCU) and People & Planet (P&P) are calling for all UK universities and colleges to publicly commit to being net zero emissions for scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2030 to tackle the climate emergency and ecological crisis” (SOS-UK, 2021). The University of Sussex’s own net zero target date is currently 2035. Keep in mind that the pathway to net zero can be as important as the target date itself: the important bit is cutting carbon pollution as rapidly as possible.

7. How should we talk to students, colleagues and other people about climate change?

Climate change communication is a huge field. Three quick insights are worth bearing in mind. (1) Mix in positivity and hope. Getting bombarded with the scale and complexity of the challenges can be disempowering and counterproductive. (2) Try to find models for action. In other words (even setting aside optimism vs. pessimism), effective communication identifies actual ways of being, thinking, talking and (especially!) doing. Don’t just focus on the constraints that climate action creates, also explore the possibilities it opens up. (3) It’s OK not to know everything. Climate change is a huge topic. We often need to make changes on the basis of knowledge that feels very fragmentary. 

8. What is the difference between carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions?

Often “carbon emissions” is really just shorthand for greenhouse gas emissions (if numbers are involved, the other gases may be translated into their carbon equivalents). A variety of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and others) contribute to global warming. Carbon is the biggest contributor (methane is in second place). “Carbon pollution” is another way of referring to the same thing.

9. Which sectors contribute the most to climate change?

It can also be illuminating to break down emissions by sector (see diagram). Keep in mind that some of these sectors are much easier to decarbonise than others. Some of the biggest contributors are:

• Energy use in industry
• Agriculture, forestry, and land use
• Energy use in buildings (commercial and residential)
• Transport (road, aviation, shipping)

Some of the figures might be surprising. Aviation is still a fairly substantial contributor (and symbolically important), but we talk about flying a lot more than we talk about, say, making cement (which is in roughly the same ballpark).

10. Which countries have contributed the most to climate change?

Carbon footprint can also often be broken down by country, and this is important for climate negotiations (the UN COPs etc.). But whenever looking at breakdowns by country, check four things.

• First, rankings typically don’t reflect historic emissions — some countries (like the UK) that may appear to be leading the charge on climate change are actually the ones who got us into this fix to begin with.
• Second, don’t forget about population sizes, and check on both absolute and per capita figures. China and India may be among the biggest emitters today, but on a per capita basis they drop way down the list.
• Third, carbon pollution is usually calculated on a production basis (aka territorial basis), i.e. how much carbon is emitted within national borders. So countries like the UK seem to be doing very well. But the UK consumes lots of goods produced overseas, whose carbon emissions go on other countries’ balance sheets. Why are they calculated like this? Well, emissions can instead be calculated on a consumption basis (aka trade-adjusted basis). Depending whether you use production vs. consumption accounting, you’ll get different results, although not as dramatically different as cumulative emissions vs. current emissions, or net emissions vs. per capita emissions.
• Finally, stats sometimes include fossil fuel emissions but don’t include land use emissions (deforestation etc.). If land use is left out, it disguises the carbon contribution of countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, India.

11. Is overpopulation causing climate change?

No. It may sound strange, but it’s true. As Kartha et al. (2020) point out, nearly half of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015 was attributable to the richest 10%, and the impact of the poorest 50% was ‘practically negligible’.

The idea that overpopulation is a major driver of climate change is not only inaccurate, but also has dubious ethical and political connections: “the intersection of population growth and climate change rhetoric has often adopted hegemonic discourses subtly laced with racist and sexist undertones—placing the burden of our climate crisis on the Global South and oftentimes pointing to birth control for women of color in the ‘third world’ as the solution to this problem” (Dyett and Thomas 2019).

Andreas Malm describes the environmental campaigning of movements like Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front: “Their campaigns of ‘monkeywrenching’ or ‘ecotage’ prospered in a certain subculture that reached its apogee in the 1990s, mingling punk and hardcore with dumpster diving and veganism, spiritual voyages and holistic medicine with squatting and guerrilla gardening, fanzines with herbs. The EF!, ALF and ELF drank from two ideological wells: deep ecology and animal liberation. Both have lost their street cred since then. Neither has much bearing on the climate crisis. Deep ecology is, as Northern environmentalism has come to realise with very few holdouts, a deeply reactionary type of ecology, which locates the source of the malaise in human civilisation as such, zooms in on overpopulation and prescribes the contraction of humanity to a fraction of its current size as the remedy”

12. What is geoengineering and will it save us?

Geoengineering is a catch-all term for all kinds of large-scale technical interventions in the climate. It is mostly highly speculative. Solar geoengineering (or solar radiation management) refers to a set of imaginary technologies that have been proposed as a means to increase the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. mass spraying aerosols in the stratosphere). Solar geoengineering proposals have attracted fierce criticism from a variety of scholars and environmental groups. Other geoengineering proposals include ideas for manually repairing arctic ice sheets. See also Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) below: sometimes NETs are also classified as a form of geoengineering, although it’s probably better to consider them a separate category of climate technology.

13. What are ‘nature based solutions’? What are Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs)?

Mitigating climate change requires reducing emissions, including (a) switching to renewable energy like solar power, wind power, etc. and (b) limiting the demand for energy in the first place. But it also requires (c) removing carbon from the atmosphere and safely storing it (‘sequestering’ it). That’s where nature-based solutions and NETs come in.

The bathtub metaphor is sometimes used. We have left this bath running for so long, we now need to simultaneously reduce emissions and increase net removals.

Planting trees removes carbon from the atmosphere. So does rewetting peatlands, restoring coastal ecosystems such as mangrove belts, salt marshes and seagrass meadows, etc. These are called nature-based solutions.

Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) are another way to remove carbon. These include as Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Direct Air Capture with Carbon Storage (DACCS), and enhanced weathering (spreading finely ground silicate rock over wide areas). Some of these technologies have been proven to work on a small scale, others are more speculative. Critiques of NETs often focus on feasibility, resource intensivity, unwanted side effects, uncertainties, governance, justice, and the role of anticipated techno-fixes in justifying continued extractivism and fossil fuel burning. NETs are however currently a major part of official decarbonisation policy globally, and criticisms of NETs often stop short of fully thinking through the implications of rejecting them. There are opportunities to engage students in humanistic study and debate around NETs, e.g. drawing on technofeminism and/or Science and Technology Studies.

14. When will we run out of oil, coal and gas?

Hold up! There is now a strong consensus that this is the wrong question to be asking. We cannot safely use up the reserves we have already discovered, let alone worry about discovering more. Hence the slogan, “Leave it in the ground.” To put it another way, the problem isn’t running out of fossil fuels, it’s running out of carbon budget (the amount of carbon we can still release and have a decent chance of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees).