AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Anderson, you say we need "radical and immediate de-growth strategies." What exactly does that mean?
KEVIN ANDERSON: In the short term, the only way we can get our emissions down is to actually reduce the level of energy we consume. Now, we can also put low-carbon energy supply in place, you know, power stations that are renewable—wind, even nuclear, as well. These are all very low-carbon power stations and other energy sources. But they take a long time to put in place. And we now—we’ve squandered the opportunity we had to make those changes. So, we still need to do that, but it’s going to take us 20, 30 years to do that. So what we need to do in the interim is to reduce the amount of energy we consume, and therefore reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that we emit.
And the levels of reduction we now need in carbon dioxide, and therefore energy consumption, are such that for many of us—for the wealthy of us, certainly—we can’t carry on as we’re going now. So we’ll have to consume less. And there’s absolutely no way out of that. The maths are absolutely clear. But it’s worth bearing in mind this is an equity issue, not just between the poorer south and richer north, but actually within our own countries, within the U.S. There will be many people in the U.S., probably the majority of people in the U.S., actually are relatively low carbon emitters, but there will be a small group of us, maybe 20 or 30 people in the U.S. or in the U.K. and in the EU, and our emissions are probably several fold, sometimes maybe even tenfold, the emissions of the average person that are there. So I think that this is not an issue where we all have to see less consumption. It’s those of us that consume well above the average that will have to see significant reductions in the short to medium term, once you put the low-carbon power stations in place.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk specifically, I mean, about what people use—for example, refrigerators, for example.
KEVIN ANDERSON: Well, refrigerator is a good example. Refrigerators are a major energy consumer in our homes. But you look at the size of the refrigerators you have in the U.S. They’re much, much bigger than the ones that we traditionally would use in Europe and the U.K. There’s no real need for that. If the refrigerator is that much bigger, that means it uses that much more energy. So, in that very simple case, you can imagine a quite rapid phase-out of the existing refrigerators for much smaller designs, but also much more efficient designs.
We will have to fly much less often than we do now. We’ll have to think about even some of the issues to do—difficult ones to accept, maybe things like hygiene, where we’ve now normalized showering every day, sometimes twice a day. That means we have to wash—change our clothes every day, and then we have to use more washing machines. So you see this sort of build up, one thing after another, that over the last 10 or 15 years we’ve moved from what were quite high carbon lifestyles to these completely profligate, extraordinarily high carbon lifestyles, and we’ve made them normal, that, actually, what we did 10 or 15 years ago, if we did that now, we’d think we were strange. But, you know, in that time, the emissions have gone up. We have squandered the chance now pretty much to make a gradual, evolutionary change to how we do what we do, and now we’ve left it to the point where we need, you know, radical, almost overnight change, particularly amongst those of us that are actually the major consumers.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bows-Larkin, you said something interesting yesterday at your presentation, that if we don’t do something right now at a global level, that’s when lifestyle changes will be even—will have to further be changed in the future. If people are concerned about changing their lifestyle, if we don’t do it now, it will be more drastic in the future.
ALICE BOWS-LARKIN: Well, one of the problems is that the emissions, they gradually accumulate in the atmosphere. So, you know, if we come up with great new technologies to get where we want to get to in, say, 2050, then we’ll have built up lots of emissions, lots of carbon dioxide emissions, in the meantime. So, that means that the earlier you can actually cut those emissions, the easier it will be to achieve change overall and the more likely it is that we’ll be able to achieve these grand climate goals. But that points to doing things that you can do in the short term. So you can address consumption and behavior and demand-side measures. That’s not saying it’s easy. It’s going to be incredibly challenging. But we don’t have much debate about consumption and about demand. When I go to energy meetings, we talk primarily about energy supply, particularly electricity supply. But to change that takes a long time. You know, we need to be changing it, but it’s going to take a long time. […]
ALICE BOWS-LARKIN: Yeah, the impacts of climate change are being much more widely felt in places like Africa than in a place like the U.K., for instance, where we have very variable weather, we have high levels of good-quality lifestyles, and so we are less affected by climate change. Unfortunately, many of the parts of the world that are going to see the impacts first are going to be those that are most vulnerable, where people don’t have the wherewithal to be able to adapt to change. And that’s the kind of thing that’s being seen already in Africa and that we will see more and more frequently in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: This issue of loss and damage, what industrialized countries, the traditional polluters, owe to other countries?
KEVIN ANDERSON: Well, that’s certainly how I see it. I see it as reparation, that we have basically said to these parts of the world, "You can’t develop and be successful, as we have—on the same mechanisms that we have in the West." We’ve used fossil fuels to bring us this wonderful quality of life that we have today, and we’re basically saying that because of climate change, these poor parts of the world can no longer go down that same route. So it’s incumbent on those of us that actually enjoy the benefits of—or have enjoyed significantly the benefits of fossil fuels, now try to help those poor parts of the world. So I say it simply is reparation. It is what we owe them, rightly owe them, to help them develop using slightly more expensive renewable, low-carbon energy systems, so they, too, can live qualities of lives like us. But at the moment, in the West, we are very reluctant to really help them, other than lip service. […]
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