Degrees of separation: The architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement on the two worlds of 2050

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis 
By Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Alfred A. Knopf; February 2020

The world is either going to meet the goals set forth in the United Nations' 2015 Paris Agreement, or it is not. Which way things go in the next 30 years—whether we're able to keep the planet's warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius or if we exceed that—will determine which of two drastically different worlds we'll be living on in 2050.

Laying out and detailing those two worlds is the premise of The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, co-authors who know the Paris Agreement inside and out. They should; after all, as the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and her senior policy advisor, they helped create it (or, as the cover refers to the pair, they're the "architects" of the agreement).

They label the two worlds as the "World We Are Creating" and the "World We Must Create," and devote a chapter to speculating about each.

The former, in which the world made no more progress on reducing emissions beyond what was achieved by 2015, is on a path to being more than three degrees warmer by 2100. In 2050, it's already an absolute nightmare, and it's hard to imagine a scarier dystopia in any depressing sci-fi or scary horror movie without resorting to fantasy elements involving, I don't know, zombies or the monsters of the Book of Revelation being added on top of the climate-driven hazards.

People will need to wear masks when they leave their homes, for protection from air pollution and surface ozone levels. Over 2 billion people will live in the hottest parts of the world, where temperatures can reach 140 degrees as many as 45 days of the year, which is the point at which the human body can't survive exposure for very long .

The world will be consumed by conflicts over resources, between the rich and everyone else within a country's borders, and between countries themselves, although most countries' armies will have become "highly militarized border patrols," attempting to keep out climate refugees. "Natural" disasters like hurricanes, torrential rain, forest fires and catastrophic flooding will be common place.

The future of humanity is so uncertain that suicide is common, and there are dark arguments being made about such things as whether what relatively few resources are left should be enjoyed now by the current generation, as it may be one of the last, or if attempts should still be made to conserve them for the future.

Here in the United States, it's the coasts, where rising sea levels swallow up cities, and the southwest, where it's becoming uninhabitably hot, which suffer first and the most, but the interior of the country will be subject to flooding, infrastructure collapse, food insecurity and disease. Conflict with Mexico will be at an all-time high, as thousands of people from South America try to migrate into the more livable U.S., away from the burning equator.

Those are just some highlights; they go on for bout a dozen pages.

The other world of 2050, the one we must create, is obviously a far better alternative. Having successfully halved emissions every decade since 2020, we'll be on a path towards a world that is no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

Cities will be getting greener and greener, with trees and plants everywhere, from rooftops to what used to be parking lots and parking garages. Cars will be rarer than ever, and those that are around will be electric—the only people who will ever get behind the wheel of one with an internal combustion engine will be hobbyist who pay for the privilege to do so at special tracks. Those who lost jobs in the fossil fuel industry have been retrained  and now have good paying jobs working on building a train system in the United States, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing newer, greener buildings. Vegetarianism is now common, and "most young children cannot believe we used to kill any animals for food. Thanks to greater connectivity, "more people work from home, allowing for more flexibility and more time to call their own."

This world won't be completely perfect. Sea levels will still rise, animal species will still be lost, the world will still be warmer than it should be. But the very worst damage will be mitigated. (Remember, even if we magically stopped using all fossil fuels and stopped factory farming overnight, the world would continue to warm because of all the emissions we've already pumped into the atmosphere. Metaphorically, the climate crisis isn't a light switch, that can be turned on or off, but more like a train, that must rather gradually slow before coming to a stop.)

I'm not going to lie; parts of the "World We Must Create" chapter struck me as somewhat pie-in-the-sky, and not just the part about children growing up in a world in which a diet of meat seems alien to them. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also imagine that private car-ownership will become a thing of the past, with people getting around in  cooperatively-owned self-driving electric car an and neighbors voluntarily forming food purchase groups and taking turns securing and delivering groceries.

While many of the elements they suggest will be part of the second, livable world seem perfectly suited to politically liberal urban environments, I have a hard time imagining them taking hold in some of the places I've lived in, and some of the places my family still live in. I mean, Seattle, New York City, almost any sizable city in California? Sure. Columbus or Cleveland? Sure, perhaps—I would hope. But places like Ashtabula, Conneaut or Mentor, Ohio? Erie, Pennsylvania? I'm sorry, I just can't see it.

Of course, Figueres and Rivett-Carnac have an answer to my inability to imagine their better world taking hold everywhere (Even, I suppose, in the small-ish, rust belt cities I've lived most of my life in.) Following the two worlds section of their book comes sections detailing three mindsets and then ten actions. One of those three mindsets is one they call "Stubborn Optimism," an intentional reprogramming of cynicism like my own and the "learned mindset of hopelessness."

Using neuroscience techniques of changing your thoughts to change your thinking familiar to me from behavior therapy, this chapter was a particularly helpful one, suggesting ways to "reprogram" yourself so that you can face the existential threat of climate change without crumpling into a fetal position. There's a nice passage where they write that when your mind tells you this, think that, covering many possibilities (For example, when your mind tells you it's too late to make a difference, "remember that every fraction of a degree of extra warming makes a big difference" and thus doing anything to reduce emissions helps; when your mind tells you it's impossible for a country to abandon fossil fuels entirely, know that Costa Rica has already done so; and so on).

As for the ten actions, these are each rather broad, general actions that can be tackled individually or collectively, at a variety of scales; some involve changing the way one thinks, others taking concrete steps in the physical world: Let go of the old world; face your grief but hold a vision for the future; defend the truth; see yourself as a citizen, not a consumer; move beyond fossil fuels; reforest the Earth; invest in a clean economy; use technology responsibly; build gender equality; engage in politics.

Throughout their book—which at just under 170 pages is an easy, quick read that shouldn't take more than a sitting or three to fly through—they continually refer back to their own experiences in negotiating the Paris Agreement, something that seemed impossible after the failure of the previous attempt to work out a global climate agreement in Copenhagen, as well as sharing anecdotes featuring familiar figures of inspiration: The Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Maya Angelou, John F. Kennedy and so on.

Beyond the dramatic binary between the two potential Earths of 2050 and the mindsets and strategies to achieve the far preferable one, The Future We Choose reads a bit like a blueprint for a climate movement and a bit like a self-help book, albeit a self-help book in which one helps one self help the planet, and, by doing so, oneself...and everyone else.


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As talk of a Green New Deal spread, there has been discussion of the best historical analogy to compare it to, the consensus seemingly being President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933-1939 programs, projects, reforms and regulations, imperfect an analogy as it may be

This is something I've puzzled over myself, and am therefore always interested in hearing what others think on the matter. I mentioned in the earlier post on Naomi Klein's On Fire, wherein she took up and explored the fitness of various historical analogies. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also touch on the subject in their book, offering a few more possibilities:

"Because climate change is unlike any other challenge that humanity has had to face, we have no template for the kind of political, economic, and societal transformation needed now--but there are a range of extraordinary examples we can learn from. Movements of civil disobedience from the early twentieth-century suffragettes to Gandhi's drive for Indian independence to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the 1960s civil right movement to the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia—to name just a few—are all inspirational insofar as they mobilized vast numbers of people to champion their causes. An open, inclusive narrative and a sense of working collectively to change history for the better took them further than they ever imagined possible. As Nelson Mandela said, "It always seems impossible until it is done." 

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Published in February, the book was obviously written before the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and the precise ways it would change our lives could be known, but reading and re-reading it during this long spring, there were a couple of things I found particularly noteworthy, things that may have jumped out at you while you were reading this post.

For example, the idea that wearing face masks when leaving one's home could become not only commonplace but necessary in the future. They wrote:

"You think about some countries in Asia, where out of consideration sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any.
...
When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford)."

Apparently, homemade cloth ones just won't cut it in the nightmare world of +3-degree warming in 2050.

The other, positive world of 2050 also reminded me of this spring's lockdowns, however, particularly the mention of people working from home more often, which has the benefit of reducing emissions associated with commuting to and from work, and the increase in flexibility and free time (although, as so many of us have learned these past few months, there can also be some drawbacks to working exclusively from home, particularly regarding child care.)

Repeatedly the book brings up the possibility of new—or, as we've all since learned to call them, novel—diseases, something that should cause more palpable, tangible anxiety now that we're suffering through a pandemic.

There are multiple ways in which environmental degradation can and will lead to disease outbreaks, from deforestation and increased human/wild animal interaction exposing people to denser populations leading to easier transmission.

Then there's this, from the chapter on "The World We Are Creating":

"Melting permafrost is also releasing ancient microbes that today's humans have never been exposed to—and as a result have no resistance to. Diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks are rampant as these species flourish in the changed climate, spreading to previously safe parts of the planet, increasingly overwhelming us. Worse still, the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance has only intensified as the population has grown denser in inhabitable areas and temperatures continue to rise." 

Truly, there is no worry that the climate crisis can't exacerbate.