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Imagine lounging by a pool on a hot summer day and slowly falling asleep when suddenly someone throws a bucket of ice water in your face. Then another. And another, until you’re soaked, cold and wide awake.
This captures well how I felt over the New Year holidays as I read a recently translated book on a central question of our time: why, even as the dangers of a warming world become increasingly visible and alarming and even if we know what to do? for decades, the response to the growing climate threat has remained so inadequate?
The answer, according to German sociologist Jens Beckert, is that the fundamental features of contemporary life – modern capitalism, liberal democracy and our attachment to consumption – make it virtually impossible to achieve what the future health of the planet requires. .
For those who have been lulled like sleepy bathers and think otherwise, Beckert, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, has a mixed message.
“The necessary measures are not being taken and will not be taken,” he wrote in How we sold our future: the failure to fight climate changereleased last year in Germany and which has just been published in English.
Beckert’s argument is hard to ignore. Yes, as we are told daily, many politicians, investors and business leaders want reduced emissions, more green energy and a safer climate for their children. And yes, as we see at each annual climate COP, progress is being made. But progress at the speed needed is blocked by central forces in the way modern life is organized.
Incentives for companies to make profits may make it “entirely rational” for managers to ignore future climate damage. Governments, in turn, depend on successful businesses to generate the tax revenue needed to fund schools and hospitals – as well as the broader economic growth needed for re-election. Green growth may be possible, but probably not at the pace needed. Degrowth, or any policy deliberately aimed at lowering living standards, is “illusory”. Green consumers exist, but their influence is minimal. And so on.
I was still digesting Beckert’s book on New Year’s Eve, when two Wall Street banks supported his cause. Citigroup and Bank of America announced they were abandoning the industry group Net Zero Banking Alliance that Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo had already left earlier in December. Other exits followed and by Tuesday this week, the six largest US banks had all, within a month, left the climate. alliance. They could still be, in Citi’s words, “committed to reaching net zero.” But they and their shareholders are undoubtedly also determined to remain financially competitive in a country whose new president has no interest in climate progress and whose Republican allies say net-zero emissions alliances could violate antitrust rules.
Beckert could of course be wrong. His book was published just as the FT reported Electric vehicles are expected to outsell internal combustion cars in China this year for the first time, surpassing international forecasts and potentially dent demand for oil.
This is a sign that the long-awaited green energy transition could start much faster than expected. However, the key word is “could”.
Beckert is not a climate denier and does not want his book to be read as advice for despair.
He hopes arguments like his will make clear how more urgently we need to think about adapting to life on a warmer planet, an argument that gained strength last week as fires raged across the Los Angeles area.
There is also, he says, a rational argument and even a “moral duty” for citizens to continue fighting for a meaningful response to climate change that could mitigate the consequences of warming.
Businesses have an essential role to play here. But as he told me on the phone this week, there’s no point expecting companies to unilaterally reduce their emissions and those of their suppliers, whatever the cost.
“The business world will only change,” he says, “if there are economic models that make this activity lucrative for them. »
Companies and their advertising agencies often like to pretend that this is not the case and act because they care. But the sooner the truth is recognized, the easier it will be to deal with what the climate future holds.