Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Welcome to the future.
I'm Matt Hoffmann.
I've been researching, writing, and studying about climate change
for the last 20 years,
and I'm terrified.
So what I want you to do first today for me
is imagine that you're a GO train commuter
in November of 2018,
and you pull into the parking lot at the GO train station.
You're on time this time,
so, you know, you're not worried about catching your train.
You notice out of the corner of your eye
some activity over at the electrical charging stations.
You notice there's some Metrolinx workers there,
and this sparks your memory.
You say, "Man, last month, back in October,
I heard about this UN report.
It said something like we have 12 years to fix climate change or something.
And now look, they're working on the electric charging stations.
Metrolinx is really on it.
They're really not usually fast about anything.
And maybe I'll get an electric vehicle.
Things seem to be moving in that direction."
You get on your train. You go about your daily business.
And later on in the day, you're reading the CBC news.
That's when it hits you.
Those workers weren't there installing electrical charging stations;
they were actually there removing them.
You dig a little further,
and you realize that this unwinding was not alone,
that the current provincial government
has actually unwound a number of climate policies
that were put in place previously.
The current provincial government
has removed subsidies for electric vehicles,
it has canceled up to 750 renewable energy programs,
and it has canceled the cap and trade program
that we had in Ontario.
Now, this kind of unwinding, this kind of backsliding
could be viewed through the view - or the lens of partisan politics.
That's missing something.
This is not just a story about partisan politics or polarization,
one government replacing what the previous government had done.
In research that I've done with a colleague of mine,
Steven Bernstein,
on political pathways to decarbonization,
we've studied dozens of attempts
at generating climate action from the neighborhood level,
through cities, through nation-states, through the global level,
and unfortunately,
what we found in this study is this pattern that we see in Ontario,
where we make a little bit of progress, we get some climate action started,
but then it gets stuck.
It stalls and sometimes is even reversed.
What we found across our studies is this is a very familiar pattern.
We get stuck.
We get started on climate action, but then we get stuck.
And if we're going to have the kind of transformation that we need -
and let me tell you we need some significant transformation
to deal with, navigate, and address climate change -
if we're going to have the kind of transformation that we need,
we have to get unstuck, and we have to do so relatively quickly.
And so what I want to talk to you about today
is why we get stuck.
Because I think it's really important
to understand the dynamics that get us stuck
if we want to have any hope of pursuing that low-carbon future
and getting our climate actions unstuck.
So I'm going to talk about three reasons why we get stuck,
and then the mirror of those, of how we get unstuck.
First,
we get stuck because climate change is a very hard problem.
It is perhaps the most difficult problem that humanity has ever faced.
And the problem is, is that we have overlapping technological forces,
political dynamics,
economic interests,
social norms,
all reinforcing the natural use of fossil energy.
Our economies,
our transportation systems,
our energy systems,
all run on fossil energy,
and it's reinforced.
And this reinforcement,
this lock-in, or entanglement, with fossil energy
spans from the city level.
This is a pretty common picture in Toronto of a traffic jam.
We're entangled in fossil energy at the city level
because of how cities are planned,
because of people's transportation choices,
because of energy policy at the municipal level,
because of the range of technologies available to citizens,
and it goes up to the national level.
We're locked into - or entangled in the use of fossil energy
at the Canadian level
because of economic policy,
because of economic interests,
because of the way that provincial politics works.
And what makes it even more difficult
is that the lock-in that we see at the national level
reinforces how entangled Toronto is with the use of fossil energy,
and vice versa.
So it's a very difficult problem,
and that's one of the reasons we get stuck.
But it's also connected to the second reason,
and that's that everything is connected.
Now you might be wondering
why I have a picture of relatively prosaic LED light bulbs here.
What I want to tell you a story about here is how individual actions get stuck.
Because individual attempts to act on climate change,
whether they be individuals changing their light bulbs
or individual policies,
often run into that inertia of the larger system,
and so when you can take action, it gets pushed back down by this inertia,
and this happens with things like changing your light bulbs.
So you're a good environmentalist.
You've heard that LED light bulbs save energy,
and not only do they save energy, they save money as well,
and so you change all of your light bulbs in your house.
Unfortunately, or fortunately,
you save 100 dollars, right?
over a year, let's say, for round numbers.
You're also a good environmentalist,
so you don't take that 100 dollars and spend it on a big screen TV;
you put it in the bank.
Well, here's where things get complicated.
As a couple of economists and political scientists
Walker and Willoughby have shown,
the problem is
the bank takes your 100 dollars
and turns it into a 1000-dollar investment.
This is called leveraged lending.
You see where I'm going?
Your 100 dollars,
saving money and saving the environment by switching to LED light bulbs,
just turned into a 1000-dollar investment
in the tar sands.
Individual actions, individual policies,
when they're done alone, out of context,
can be pushed back by the inertia of the system.
That's the second reason we get stuck.
Some of our solutions, some of our climate actions
are not actually solutions.
And so what we see here
is the carbon footprint of various fuels for producing energy.
What you see here is coal is towards the bottom -
coal has relatively high carbon footprint -
and up at the top is natural gas.
And so what we see here
is that switching from coal to natural gas to producing electricity
will generate emissions reductions,
and emissions reductions is a good thing
because it's emissions that are causing global warming.
But this is only getting at the symptoms of those problems.
This is only getting at the symptoms
rather than the underlying dependence
on fossil energy.
And the problem with bridge fuels like this -
so-called bridge fuels -
is that there are interests involved in producing natural gas.
Economic interest, political interest, infrastructure
is all going to be developed around natural gas,
and they won't necessarily want to change.
They won't want to be a bridge to somewhere else.
They want to be the end.
And this is actually what people have seen in places like Colorado,
where colleagues of mine, Betzel and Stevis,
did a really fascinating study
looking at how politicians and policy makers in Colorado
tried to develop the new energy economy.
They really wanted to get coal out of their energy systems
and really wanted to promote renewable energy,
but the fracking revolution really dropped the price of natural gas,
and they ended up redefining what counted as the new energy economy
to include significant dependence on natural gas.
They haven't transformed away from dependence on fossil energy,
because they chose a solution that got at the symptoms,
got at emissions,
but did not get at the underlying cause of climate change:
dependence on fossil energy.
So, those seem like three relatively large problems.
And so I'm going to ask you
as I often do my students at this point in a class or a semester:
Should we just give up?
Should we just go to the beach and enjoy our last days of global warming?
And it's a tempting option, but the answer is obviously no,
or else I wouldn't be here giving a talk,
for one thing.
And so one of the things that we have to do
is now do that mirror image.
If those are the reasons we get stuck, how do we get unstuck?
And how do we use our knowledge of why we get stuck to undo some of that?
Essentially, we're really good at getting here,
at getting started,
at putting something in place
and having a pilot project
and having a new policy
and changing our behavior,
but the politics and the energy involved in getting to here
is different than moving this up,
than scaling up,
than getting to broader transformation.
And understanding why we get stuck
leads us to some lessons about how we might get unstuck.
And really, it's the mirror image.
So if it's a really hard problem and everything's connected,
well, one of the things that you have to do
with your solutions and your climate actions
is think in terms of ecosystems of action,
think in terms of multiple policies.
So here what we have is coming back to that electrical vehicle.
Example:
To really decarbonize our transportation system, right?
we need to have a whole suite of policies in place -
we have to have charging stations so people don't have range anxiety,
we have to have finance
that brings the cost of electric vehicles and gas vehicles into relative parity,
we have to have marketing
so that people feel like driving an electric vehicle
is something they really want to do.
All of these are have to do to drive up demand for electric vehicles
so that voters and auto companies
don't think that they're just a niche market
that we're spending a bunch of resources on.
This sounds hard, but it's not impossible.
In fact,
56 percent of Norway's new cars last year
were electric,
and Norway is on a path to developing a decarbonized auto sector
precisely because they take an ecosystem approach.
They're not thinking about single policies
that can be pushed back by the inertia of the system;
they're thinking about how all of that system needs to change.
Second, you have to think about disruption and transformation,
not just emissions reduction.
What we see here is just a simple graph
that basically says we have to entirely change our energy production system
within the next 30 years.
It's a simple graph with a scary result.
But what this means
is that simply focusing on emissions reduction
rather than thinking about how your climate actions,
your climate policies
can disrupt the dependence on fossil energy,
how it can disrupt our lock-in around fossil energy,
means that you're likely to get stuck.
You have to think about transformation, not just emissions reduction.
And finally -
and this is my absolute favorite picture from the recent climate strikes,
the idea of babies for climate justice
just brings a smile to my face every time -
we have to think about what kind of broad support we need
to go from those initial policies to broad transformation.
Because make no mistake,
we are talking about broad transformation
of our societies, of our economies, of our energy systems.
This will take support.
This is going to take political support.
And what that means
is that people have to see themselves
living the good life in the low-carbon future.
They have to see themselves living in a society that's better,
not just trying to avoid one that's catastrophic.
And this means that climate actions cannot just be about technology.
Climate actions cannot just be about shifting emissions around
and changing energy sources.
They have to have a place for justice.
They have to have a place for equity.
Because it's only when we build justice and equity into our climate actions
that we can build the kind of broad-based support that we need
to really move forward on transformation.
And so thinking about Vision 2020,
one of the things that I like to think about
and want to leave you with
is the notion that we can't achieve a more just society,
a more equitable society
without dealing with climate change,
because climate change is our reality right now,
and it is going to have impacts
that are going to affect justice and equity.
But we also can't address climate change in any sort of politically feasible way
without dealing and without incorporating justice and equity
so that we can have a low-carbon world that's good for all of us.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) (Cheers)