The author of How Bad are Bananas? and There is no Planet B returns to print with this magnum opus. A Climate of Truth carefully blends together the realities of the climate emergency and the future, with the kind of political and institutional changes required to address decades of failure to cut emissions or stop the rise in global temperatures.
The polycrisis
Berners-Lee’s core argument is that each of our society’s institutions must work to an agenda in which truth is paramount. And he includes mainstream party politicians, businesses, and the media. Widening the scope for truth is what will, he believes, help society as a whole engage with and eventually eradicate the crises we are experiencing.
Professor Berners-Lee urges us to engage with a “polycrisis”. Climate, biodiversity, food security, and the permanence of pollution are all problems which are within our powers and technologies to resolve but are not being addressed.
Tackling these issues, and the perennial blight of inequality, is going to require a new approach to what constitutes truth within our key institutions, our political parties, and our societies. It appears all of those blocking solutions to aspects of the polycrisis propagate lies and rely upon them to convince others that lies are truth, and truths are lies.
No simple answer
The book suggests that addressing governance problems is an “urgent evolutionary challenge”. But evolution is not fast, or urgently changed, and in relation to worsening trends in greenhouse gases, temperatures, and species loss, we don’t have time to evolve our way out of the polycrisis.
There are practical and, to many people, not obvious problems even in doing the right thing. Improvements in the efficiency of how we use resources actually lead to increases in demand, including increases in the use of inputs.
We may make things better through state or household investment only to find more fossil fuels are being used in the process. Cement and steel are present in virtually all new energy-efficient buildings, to give an example of what Berners-Lee means.
So, we would have to constrain the inputs we use whilst making society better, consuming far less of finite resources and constructing what Kate Raworth described as a circular economy in the process. In short, he is arguing for what he calls a “system reset”.
Sadly, as the book notes, even nominally useful initiatives such as the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals may not be achieved by the target date of 2030. Emissions are still rising after successive climate conferences. In the focus on carbon dioxide, the source of a third of greenhouse gas emissions – methane – has had far less attention. And two-thirds of this arises from human activities, including those of the fossil fuel industry.
Human activity and energy use
There is a possibility that human activity could, in Berners-Lee’s words, lead to “cascading tipping points”.
We do not face continued population growth long-term as birth rates continue to decline in ever more countries. However, creating more equal societies means more consumption of resources by the poorest billions on the planet. So, planning for and achieving at least 2% energy use reduction annually on a global basis appears to me a challenge in the absence of global and regional institutions that are able to lead on this and take governments with them.
We have not, Berners-Lee notes, even succeeded in creating a downward trend in the use of that pervasive pollutant – plastics – that is found throughout the planet, given our profligate and careless use.
Berners-Lee is also pessimistic about aviation. Alternative fuels are problematic in production, storage, and the space they may occupy in aircraft. Batteries are currently heavy, but this may change with the use of sodium the Chinese are beginning to develop. Only with far lighter batteries can we imagine an electric aviation industry.
Solutions offered
Berners-Lee offers scenarios, based on International Energy Agency projections, for a planetary transition reducing fossil fuel energy use appreciably by 2050.
The first scenario relies on expanding both renewable energy and nuclear power, but the latter is notoriously expensive and slow to implement. The third scenario means little cutting of fossil fuels until 2050, which may turn out to be catastrophic.
The second scenario is the most promising but relies on improving energy used whilst cutting energy use at the same time by about 2% a year. The latter scenario would be the most difficult since it would involve successfully overcoming those interests which want growth in their particularly energy-hungry sectors.
Berners-Lee thinks we must use hydrogen because of “the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources”. But creating a much cheaper, large-scale ‘green hydrogen’ supply without using any fossil fuels in production and distribution requires an extraordinary scale-up and changes in current production techniques in an industry already experiencing problems in the UK.
Hydrogen creates a potential for new risks, including sabotage, that need not exist if renewable source electricity is used instead. Hydrogen use also appears to ignore the potential of battery technologies which are already beginning to be deployed.
Carbon pricing, which Berners-Lee advocates, is at the mercy of those industries which will lobby for prices to be forever too low. It is difficult to see a basis for optimism on this, by contrast with ending fossil fuel production at source through legislation.
Complex but hopeful
Generally, Berners-Lee is sceptical about technical solutions to the climate emergency. In short, the changes we need are societal, economic, and political – and system change would seem to be required. But the people being arrested or risking arrest while campaigning on climate and ecological issues show that our dominant institutions do not want to hear messages which threaten their world view.
This book is comprehensive, and a review cannot do it full justice. A holistic work urging wholesale changes in the UK and elsewhere, is necessarily complex. It is, however, a brilliant book for re-assessing the nature of the crises we are experiencing and how adjustments in values, particularly in the truths we want from the representatives of institutions, are essential.
A Climate of Truth is a tool for the hopeful, to help reinforce their will to act. As Berners-Lee frames it, we need to maintain levels of optimism to seek the kind of system change we actually need – even if our future ‘success’ is partial and imperfect.
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