In this ClimateGenn episode, I am speaking with professor Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University.
This is a longer interview with many, I believe, crucial points for consideration.
We discuss our current usage of the available carbon budget for 1.5ºCelsius at just under 1% per month.
Also the dangerous and foolish behaviour of UK Secretary of State for Energy, Kwasi Kwarteng, in trying to reclassify natural gas (methane), as a green gas in order to increase investment.
Download the Phase-Out Paper being discussed: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/213256008/Tyndall_Production_Phaseout_Report_final_text_3_.pdf
Kevin Anderson Quotes:
“Practically and morally, we are obliged to help [poorer nations] leapfrog over their fossil fuel period.”
“Every month we are using just under 1% of the carbon budget.”
“Senior academics are the new climate skeptics in my view!”
“Natural gas – Methane is a transition fuel… to 4ºC”
“We all paint a picture that fits with our world view but as we reassess that world view repeatedly, eventually it doesn’t sit with our world view.”
“It is disturbing and interesting in the law that we will protect things that are causing incredible damage and we will prosecute things that are trying to stop that incredible damage being caused.”
“Particularly academics, we are paid to be honest and direct about our research and we will sweeten the pill, hugely sweeten the pill in public and I think that is deeply arrogant, of often very decent people, fast we think the public can’t deal with it”
“The policymakers are simply not up to the job.”
In March, Kevin and colleagues at the Tyndall Centre released a research paper titled: Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production within Paris-compliant Carbon Budgets. I begin by asking Kevin to clarify the critical points of this paper as he can do this much more clearly than I can!
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Very informative. Thank you both. Glad the UK has chosen a minister with the right background for the job of Secretary of State for Energy 😉 Perhaps Kwasi Kwarteng, having read The Classics at Cambridge, is struggling to understand that burning methane is not green. Sadly though, I suspect he does understand yet is choosing to ‘look the other way’, which is kind of the point you make in this interview.
I m o, without a hard, all GHGs encompassing decreasing-cap system (including good social compensation to a better sharing of load) we won’t make it. This seems absolutely clear to me.
It is by far not sufficient, but without it, there are always these loopholes, both real an psychological, to avoid what has to be done.
We have to go through what’s called a paradigm shift: change collective and individual routines of acting and seeing the world.
If it is true, that a paradigm dies only when its last proponents die, as has been said about paradigms in science theory, we have a bleak outlook…