It's great to welcome to the program today, Tom rivet Karnak who is coauthor of the book
future.
We choose surviving the climate crisis.
Tom's also a leader in the fields of international diplomacy, energy policy and climate change.
Three areas, Tom, that are relevant.
If you're going to be involved in the negotiation of the Paris climate Accords, which you you
ended up participating in.
How did that even come about?
I did.
Well, it was, it was a great privilege to be so closely involved in the Paris climate
Accords.
I was actually working in New York where I am right now when I was working at an NGO
called CDP, where I was helping companies identify the types of strategies that would
make them more effective, um, to deal with the climate crisis.
And in that position, uh, through a friend, I got to meet Christiana Figueres, who's my
co author on this book and at the time was the executive secretary of the UN climate
convention.
And we spent a day together in New York around, and what was clear was that she was obviously
surrounded by many brilliant people inside the UN, but there tends to be the emergence
of not group think might be a little unfair, but sort of the same solutions to the same
problems that you've been struggling with for a long time.
And she knew that she wanted somebody in there who could think about the political challenges
in a new way.
And so that's why she hired me to come and run the political strategy a few years before
Paris.
So one of the common, I guess, refrains that I hear from people who take as seriously as
we should be, the, the issue of climate change about the Paris, uh, um, uh, accord is that
the final result feels sort of underwhelming.
In other words, all of this negotiation just to say, well, we'll commit to limit the increase
of temperature above pre-industrial levels.
Can you talk a little bit about what the negotiation is actually like and, and why?
Just looking at the outcome ignores a lot of what goes into even doing this in the first
place.
Sure.
No, I can definitely talk about that.
And, and but one contextualize in comment because you're absolutely right.
And what you said is, is negotiations and outcomes are pathways and that only meaningful
if they're followed.
That's where, that's interesting.
So for many years the negotiations had been mired in this issue of fairness, right?
So developing countries said to develop countries, you caused this problem.
And what's more, you said you'd sought it out in 1991 when the UN first started thinking
about this.
So go away and do something meaningful about it.
And then come back and we'll talk about a global agreement.
Whereas the developed countries would say, well, the world is different now.
Many of the emissions actually come from developing countries, India, China, many other places
are developing very rapidly.
This now needs to be an everyone everywhere type of an endeavor.
And the challenges that both of those perspectives were correct.
Right?
And both of them were justified and very defensible.
So for a long time, the discussion in the climate negotiations was about, well, whose
responsibility is this?
And it became mired in this sort of zero sum mentality of this was a burden that nobody
wanted to take on.
And everybody was trying to pass around between each other.
One of the things I think we did in Paris, or at least we took serious steps towards
doing, although it's unfinished business, is we flipped that, you know, dealing with
the climate crisis is of course an urgent challenge.
It is also the biggest economic opportunity.
It's the biggest opportunity to improve the quality of our lives.
It's the biggest opportunity to improve our biodiversity, our, our, our quality of air,
et cetera, et cetera.
And we started to think about it more around less as a burden to be shared and more of
an opportunity to be captured.
So that changed the nature of the negotiations to a degree where every country would agree
collectively we need to solve this in the long term and for the next few years I'll
put down my, as to what I'll do for the next few years.
That's consistent with my politics that is of benefit to me as a country.
And that enabled the spirit to begin to change, which was the real breakthrough we needed.
So there's a whole range of estimates that are made about what might the planet look
like in five 10 30 et cetera, years.
There's not wholesale agreement, although there are straight out bad faith actors and
then there are just sort of like reasonable disagreements within the the the communities
that are appropriately dealing with this in good faith.
In the book you outline, you know, a possible scenario where we just fail to deal with this
issue and what 2050 might look like in that scenario.
And then you also talk about moving in the direction by 2050 of carbon neutrality, regenerated
economies and Regina, you know, moving in the right direction so to speak, is part of
the problem on this that even for people who believe the science, it's sort of difficult
to really believe that nightmare scenario because it seems so horrifying and that may
cause some sort of paralysis and actually getting going on it.
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
And I think that there has been this massive discrepancy between the world we see around
us, which until recently has largely carried on as we've more or less known it.
And these sort of very challenging, very alarming predictions of periods of time that are just
a few decades in the future.
And I think for many people it can be difficult to bring those two things together, particularly
when the solutions that are proposed seem small, right?
They seem like small iterations on your life.
Sadly, it's becoming more and more possible to imagine what that negative future might
look like.
Right?
I mean just in the last few months, if we look at the terrible devastation of the wildfires
in Australia and the unbelievable loss of life and property and the heartbreaking loss
of biodiversity, we look at the, you know, the disappearance of coral reefs around the
world.
We look at the warming of the oceans and the hotspots.
We look at the burning of the Amazon and of Siberia and of California, the floods in England,
the melting of Antarctica.
Unfortunately we are getting sharper relief of what it could be like.
And these early signs should wake us up because science tells us we still have time, right?
This decade I would argue, will end up being the most consequential decade in the history
of humanity.
Now, that's a lot for us to take on board, but we have to face that and we have to face
it now if we're going to have the kind of impact that we need to have to improve the
world in the way that we still can.
So on the personal versus structural, we've talked before about how, you know, putting
a disproportionate focus on plastic straws distorts the reality that a vast majority,
what we have to deal with is actually the output in waste from large corporations, particularly
in certain industries that are the, the, the disproportionate contributors.
So if you talk about plastic straws and making sure that you're sorting your cardboard boxes
the right way, that it unfairly puts the burden on individuals when in reality that's not
where, where the burden is.
Can you talk a little bit about that, because it seems, I mean from the book it seems as
though you say that there needs to be structural action, but individual action is also important.
Sure.
So, um, so in the book we, you know, we set out what needs to happen in order to get us
on this trajectory to create a future that we still can.
Right.
And as you say, that's a variety of actions that we can all participate in.
Now there's three types of actions we talk about.
One of those is actually who we are as human beings.
Living through this fundamental transformation is not easy for us to embrace that.
And we talk about how we can dig into some of the deeper elements of the human psychology
to prepare ourselves for that and to be positive actors for a great future.
The second thing we talk about is our own activities.
So it is true that we are economic actors, where political actors are, we're citizens,
we're consumers, we're parents, we're employees, we're teachers, whatever we are.
And in all of those roles, there's a huge amount that we can do to create a positive
future.
And it's very meaningful, right?
Everyday counts.
Now whether that changing your diet, whether it's changing the way you move, change and
the way you heat your home, et cetera, or re-imagining your role in the world so that
you can actually do something that has a more positive impact or less of a negative impact.
And that's really important right here.
Individuals have a major role in pushing systems to actually reach tipping points.
But we also say, and this is the third category of action that we outlined in the book, you
know, we need to use the power that we have in relation to national governments in relation
to corporations, in relation to regional governments and state governments to push them to participate
in civil disobedience, vote in a way that is consistent with the kind of future we want
to create this.
We've left this so late that we can no longer say it's the responsibility of business or
investors or governments or individuals.
This has to be an everyone everywhere type of initiative.
And I think the problem with that dialogue of where does responsibility lie is it can
be cyclical, right?
You know, one time it's fashionable to say it's individuals, another time it's fashionable
to say it's governments.
The truth is it's everyone and it's urgent and we need to be on this now.
Yeah, I mean it seems that in a way it's sure it can be about recycling and plastic straws
and maybe looking at an electric car or something like that.
But at the same time, it's about the ability of a population to at a certain point say,
unless you're seriously going to deal with this, we don't vote you into office.
Right, exactly.
Or more than that.
You know, we go out on the streets and we shut down operations until, you know, the
first duty of a democratic government is to its population.
By that metric, most governments in the West are failing their most fundamental responsibility.
Some are failing reasonably badly, some are failing really badly.
Um, and some are doing a reasonably good job.
We've been speaking with Tom rivet Karnak who is co author of the book the future.
We choose surviving the climate crisis.
Also the podcast outrage
and optimism, which you should absolutely check out.
Tom, thanks again for your time.
I so appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Great to be here.