I've been browsing back numbers of The New Internationalist and an article on "What if...we reduced carbon emissions to zero by 2025?" caught my eye.
In this, NI co-editor Hazel Healy sketches out "a radical scenario of carbon cold-turkey". It is a pertinent question, after all, and one which groups who advocate this (such as XR) do not explain. This is an extract:
"By 2025, renewables – currently supplying 10 per cent of global energy consumption – won’t come close to meeting current demand. So, our zero-carbon scenario requires the global elite (the 20 per cent of global citizens who account for 70 per cent of emissions) to cut the quickest and deepest. Setting aside climate justice concerns, concentrating on US citizens who average 16.4 tonnes CO2 per person, would bring us closer to zero a lot quicker than the people of Niger, who clock up under 0.1 tonne.
In the rich world in particular, zero carbon would usher in a period of huge social change. Energy would be stringently rationed, dedicated to survival and essential activities; we’d go to bed early and rise with the sun. Expect massive disruption in the way food is grown, processed and distributed – more turnips, fewer mangoes on the menu in the UK for starters. Globally, there would be much-reduced private car use, virtually no aviation, haulage or shipping – spelling a dramatic end to material globalization as we know it.
But energy lock-down wouldn’t last forever. After a few turbulent decades, leading energy and climate scientist Kevin Anderson suggests, by 2040 renewables may be generating up to 50 per cent of present-day energy use. Reforestation and habitat restoration will steadily suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Regenerative economies powered by sunlight, as Oxford-University based researcher Kate Raworth puts it, will improve wellbeing for everyone – society will be localized, healthier and familiar."
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Reading this, which I take to be serious commentary rather than satire, you can see the reluctance of people who advocate such policies to talk openly about what they mean.
Roger Hallam is one who's not so reluctant. He is quoted in a Policy Exchange report on XR saying: "... we are not just sending out e-mails and asking for donations. We are going to force the governments to act. And if they don’t, we will bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose... and yes, some may die in the process.”
It's not clear these days whether Hallam's views entirely coincide with XR's or whether he's an outlier. One thing seems plausible, though, which is that it's unlikely that the young people who are exposed to XR through its education wing fully understand what his end game is.
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