Against the Cases against Climate Action

By Tobias Laimer

Supervisor: Dr. Gesa Lüdecke

Early 2022 saw the release of two thirds of the Sixth Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the second part, focused on Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability (released in late February), and the third part on Mitigation (presented in early April). UN Secretary-General António Guterres didn’t mince words when discussing either, calling the former "an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership" and the latter a "litany of broken climate promises,", going on to remark that "[c]limate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But, the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels."

Although my submission was already completed in early February as mandated by ESCP regulations, this serves as an excellent introduction to the topic of my Final Project. Advised by our wonderful director Prof. Christof Mauch, I embarked on a journey into climate action, its history and shortcomings, focusing on ten especially misleading notions still dominating current discourse, and finally exploring its opportunities and co-benefits. The considered misleading notions have been chosen not only to showcase the current status of the climate crisis from a multitude of disciplinary lenses and thematic viewpoints, but also to provide actionable intelligence on the majority of so-called "discourses of delay" (cf. Figure 1), still creeping around contemporary discussions to justify inaction on climate change, from technological and scientific through social and societal to economic and political misconceptions.

Since our goal was to not only have the project be interdisciplinary, but also accessible from a variety of different backgrounds, the format we settled on is structured as follows: An introductory booklet targeted at audiences new to the topic contains illustrations and brief summaries on each of the considered subtopics. An essay accessible to those who have had previous exposure to the topic of climate action discusses the considered subtopics in about one page each, including more than 200 references targeted at subject matter experts or those curious for further exploration.

It was especially important to me to not only paint a bleak picture of the horrors of the climate crisis, since they can already be experienced around the world on every day more than the last – as I am writing this, the ongoing heatwave in India and Pakistan reminds one painfully of the first chapter of K.S. Robinson's "Ministry for the Future." Instead, I aimed to point out the almost uncountable benefits of immediate and just climate action (cf. Figure 2 for a very brief overview), and especially that the ecological and climate crises must be addressed collectively with solutions that are as entwined as they themselves are.

I conclude with UN AG Guterres’ closing from a speech quoted earlier:
"Every fraction of a degree matters. Every voice can make a difference. And every second counts."