Insider: Professor Paul Ekins OBE

The race to net real zero

As an environmental economist, Professor Paul Ekins (Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources) looks at the defining challenge of our age through a different lens. But with our planet in peril, can we correct “the greatest market failure in history”? 

When I sat down to write my most recent book, I did not know if it would be possible to stop climate change.

It has been more than half a century since the first international environmental conference in Stockholm, and over three decades since the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many of those years have been lost to dither and denial, just at the point we should have been gearing up for a committed response. 

Work on my book has persuaded me that we can still avert catastrophe. But because we have left it so late, it will require a level of focus, commitment, and determination to refashion our lifestyles and our economies in a way that has never been achieved outside of wartime.

A new kind of economics

When that first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment convened in 1972, its global impact was limited, but it nevertheless produced the Stockholm Declaration, a significant text which reflected growing unease about humanity's effect on the planet. 

Over the ensuing decade it became increasingly obvious to many of us that the way in which we were treating our one and only home was not sustainable. Sooner or later, the wheels were going to come off the bus. 

We were then experiencing a series of oil shocks, and I became more active on the environmental front. In the early 1980s, I served as general secretary of what is now the Green Party. 

That led me to discover both that I was a rotten politician, and that the core of the problem lay in the operation of the economic system. So, I went back to university for my Master’s degree and PhD in economics, and went on to become the sort of academic that I am today. That is, an environmental economist. 

What I learned back at university confirmed my intuition that climate change and a wide range of other environmental problems have their roots in how we organise our economies. In short, our current patterns of production and consumption are inflicting real and lasting damage on the environment and on an ever-larger number of our fellow humans. The costs of these actions are enormous, but our accounting ensures they do not appear on  corporate or national balance sheets.

This is not ideology. It’s just bad economics.

The greatest market failure

Professor Nick Stern labelled climate change "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".  

Why? Because powerful economic actors who have no intention of cleaning up after themselves are being allowed to leave their bills on the table for the next people in the queue.

Back in the 1990s, I thought that would be my children and grandchildren. Now, we know that climate change is worsening faster than we had dared to predict. So, some pretty big bills are having to be paid now, in the form of floods, droughts, heat stress and wildfires that appear almost daily on our TV screens.

The models that project these impacts into the future can tell us that food security will be challenged, that crops will fail on a global scale, leading to a rising price of food. But they do not go on to detail the full economic and social reality that when rampant food inflation occurs – particularly in low and middle-income countries – the situation can become unstable.

In a worst-case scenario, these are the sorts of pressures which see states fail. Before that occurs, people will abandon areas which have become uninhabitable or do not enable them to feed their families. They will understandably move in their millions to places where those conditions do not apply.  As the situation continues to worsen, resources become harder to find and fewer to share.

This is just one example, but one that has started to turn from forecast to fact in several regions of the world as we continue to burn fossil fuels with reckless abandon. 

Breaking a vicious circle

By this point, you might be looking for reasons for hope. They do exist, but to take the required action we first need to recognise that we are in deep trouble. 

For their part, those who profit from oil and gas have almost criminally failed to support the development of alternatives. In fact, they continue to invest in infrastructure to produce more fossil fuels, even though their current capabilities would lead us to spend the 1.5 degree 'carbon budget' several times over.

They are allowed to run amok by a political class much of which is in thrall to them, and that is not being pressured by us, the electorate, to break those chains. In turn, we voters have not fully grasped the urgency of the problem, in large part because our political leaders do not want to talk about it in terms of the emergency it represents, or present us with policies which they fear (rightly) will damage their electoral chances.

In a year in which we will see UK, EU, and US elections, that vicious circle must be broken. 

 A moment for change

The fact is that we have not yet reached the peak of global carbon emissions. So, what can we do to avoid the very worst effects of the climate crisis? 

A not-so-subtle clue is in the title of my book: Stopping Climate Change: Policies for Real Zero. The oft-cited UK government ambition of ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050 will not do the trick. We need to reduce them to real zero, and we need to be quick about it. 

To enable this, we must push as hard as we can to abandon fossil fuels. We will need to rapidly build out our infrastructure for renewable energy sources, which were once considered too expensive to compete but – remarkably – are now the cheapest form of energy in many countries. 

The UK has a fabulous offshore wind resource that will be the major electricity source for us in the future. As we transition, zero carbon sources like nuclear may also have an important role to play it it can get its costs down.

We also need to address the problem of methane, which is twenty times more damaging than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. Fossil fuel companies continue to leak vast quantities into the atmosphere, and the digestive systems of livestock (particularly cattle and sheep) add hugely to the problem.

In countries where we eat too much meat, we will therefore have to radically reduce meat consumption. 

And we cannot focus only on the emissions that we're yet to create. We need to develop technologies that take very large quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere through a process known as carbon dioxide removal, which will be an important complement to our efforts to stop producing it in the first place. 

The scale of these three steps is not easy to countenance. But if we can accelerate such processes to not-quite impossible speeds, we can contain climate change within the kinds of boundaries that were recognised as necessary in the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

The unique role of universities

The mission of any university is to generate and distribute knowledge. In this context we come into our own, because the range of necessary climate knowledge is enormous. 

The starting point is the basic science of climate change, why it is happening and its projected impacts. When we get to how to reduce the emissions that cause climate change, you depart from natural sciences and start talking about policy and other aspects of the social sciences.

If we are to equip this generation to combat climate change, we need to engage with policy makers, businesses and the public to generate and transmit a broad range of knowledge in an appropriate form for people to use it.

UCL is particularly well-suited to this responsibility because it has always seen itself as interdisciplinary. Not just in the sense that it has lots of world-class departments, but in its ethos of collaboration. Exploring how to address climate change needs to involve people from every corner of academia and beyond, and UCL is set up for exactly that.

We’re also unique in that we’ve always tried to foster a radical outlook. It is part of our DNA. As a large and successful university, it is not always easy to maintain that radical edge. But we continue to pursue it. In fact, the reason that I came here 15 years ago was to set up the UCL Energy Institute, to do inter-disciplinary, outward-facing and impactful work, which at that time was quite a novel approach.

In the face of an existential problem, we need institutions like UCL to establish the facts, influence decision makers, and the public, and stimulate social and political change that pulls us back from the precipice of climate chaos.

After 45 years at the frontiers of environmentalism, I have not lost hope that we might still do so. 

Paul Ekins is Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. he has consulted at a high level for business, the UK government, the European Commission and the UN Environment Programme. In 2015, he was awarded an OBE for services to environmental policy.

Paul's new book, 'Stopping Climate Change: Policies for Real Zero' (Routledge), is now available to buy.

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