Why is it the Just Transition to a Sustainable Future So Hard? #

Human activity is significantly compromising the ability of the Earth to continue to provide conditions that allow humans (and many other species) to live as we have. While many details are unknown, there is a broad and deep scientific consensus that global temperatures will rise at least 2°C above pre-industrial levels, possibly much more, with serious–possibly catastrophic—consequences. We also know that we are losing species (biodiversity) at a rate unseen since the great extinction events.

While there is much more to learn, we also know the major activities that are driving the ecological crises and how to limit, stop and in some cases reverse those activities and impacts with current knowledge.

So why is it so hard for humans to transition to a sustainable future?

Here's my current (evolving) list of some of the major factors that make the change particularly difficult. (I am not suggesting all of the things on this list are bad; some are very good. I am simply saying they all contribute to the difficulty of attaining a just transition to a sustainable future.)

1. Uncertainty. While there is a broad and deep scientific consensus, and even most non-scientists now believe there's a problem, there are many remaining uncertainties about impact, speed of change, and consequences of change, all of which muddy the challenge (and can be weaponised by opponents of change).

2. Invisibility/intangibility. The signs of the crisis are all around (fires, droughts, floods, colony collapses, temperature records breaking, "hundred-year" events every few years etc.) but you can't see the greenhouse gases, and even if you could they amount to only a fraction of a percent of the air.

3. Vested Interests Too many rich and powerful people, companies and countries are making too much money from the status quo. As Upton Sinclair put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".¹

4. Misinformation. Exactly as we saw with tobacco before, vested interests and others not only fail (or refuse) to believe the evidence, but also counter it with misinformation. This is exacerbated when apparently neutral reporters seek balance through false equivalence.^{2 3}

5. Intense benefits and diffuse harms. If I pollute or use a finite resource, this typically has an intense benefit for me (I get thing, or avoid the cost of responsible disposal) while the negative impact (the pollution or resource depletion) is shared diffusely and collectively. This is similar to a phenomenon game theorists explore in the Prisoner's Dilemma⁴ where each player has to choose to cooperate or defect, and the best aggregate outcome occurs if everyone cooperates, but each person gets a better individual outcome by defecting (for any set of decisions by the opponents). I call this the Planetary Prisoner's Dilemma.⁵

6. (Apparently) continuous nature of harms. If this crisis were a large meteor heading for Earth in 2050, there might be uncertainty about whether it would hit, but the outcome would be binary and manifestly catastrophic. There might be temperature thresholds which, if crossed, will lead to runaway effects, but if there are, we don't know where those boundaries are. 5°C of warming is worse than 2°C, which is worse than 1.5°C and so forth; but there is no known, specific, scientifically determined critical threshold. Similarly, there may be single species, or small groups of species that are critical; but we don't really know and aren't specifically targeting species. It is harder to rally around "less is better" than an objective threshold that must not be crossed.

7. Arbitrariness of specific timeframes. Just as all specific target levels are arbitrary, so are timescales. Just as 2°C is a nice, round multiple of the temperature difference between freezing and boiling water, 2050 is a nice round year. But 2049 would be slightly better, and 2051 slightly worse (unless we cross a threshold we don't know about). Again, it's harder to rally around "lets' try to do this by 2050" than "the meteor will hit in 2050 if we don't divert it".

8. Social justice is a sine qua non. We live in a highly inequitable world with gross disparities of wealth, income, power and status. Redressing those injustices is intrinsically urgent and important. The global ecological crisis will have more severe consequences for the global poor than the rich (while being caused primarily by the rich), but people who are struggling to get food, shelter or heating cannot make immediate sacrifices for the sake of longer-term planetary imperatives. This means that tackling inequality and injustice are probably necessary subproblems to solve as part of creating a sustainable future. This is good, in that we need both; but is daunting, given that people have been fighting inequality and injustice for all of political history.

9. Economists (national income; growth) and & free-market economics. Almost all politicians advocate "economic growth", which is a shorthand for growth of national income, usually measured by GDP or GNP. But these figures are invented statistics⁶ that include many activities that have serious harms (like pollution and resource depetion), exclude many beneficial activities (like unpaid care and other work) and ignore the finite nature of the global ecosystem. A near universal focus among economists and politicians on undifferentuated GDP growth makes meaningful discussion of more sustainable futures harder.

10. Democracy. Democracy—while essential—is a difficult form of government for enabling long-term, difficult change, especially in a post-truth, polarised world with populist politicians.⁷ As Upton Sinclair might say, it's difficult to get politicians to advocate or enact policies for which they suspect the voters will punish them, even if they believe they are essential for the long-term good.

11. Whataboutery. The proponents of a just transition tend to feel like hypocrites who are not doing enough. The oppononents of a just transition also suggest that proponents are hypocrites who don't do enough. On this, at least, both sides agree.

12. Non-linearities. The Earth is a complex adaptive ecosystem that exhibits non-linearities (think: bad shower controls), tipping points (think: the straw that breaks the camel's back) and feedback loops, both positive (think: runs on stock markets) and negative (think: body temperature regulation through shivering and sweating). Earth responses are often slow on human timescales, so that (for example) we have locked in future temperature changes from past greenhouse gas emissions. Effects are often hard or practically impossible to reverse: for example, as temperatures rise, permafrost melts, releasing long-trapped methane, a greenhouse gas about 85 times as potent as CO₂ (though shorter lived), acting as a positive feedback loop and accelerant of further permafrost melting. For practical purposes, permafrost melting is irreversible.

13. (In Britain) Positive associations with warming. It may be peculiar to Britain, and a few other colder countries, but there is a constant tendency for people here to see "global warming" as potentially beneficial. Lord Frost (the UK's last lead Brexit negotiator), for example, said in the House of Lords: "Rising temperatures are likely to be beneficial."⁸

14. The vastness of the world and the smallness of us. To an astronomer, the Earth may seem tiny (NASA and Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot⁹). Michael Collins (the "third" member of the Apollo 11 crew) saw the Earth from lunar orbit¹⁰ and thought "God, it's fragile little thing, isn't it?"¹¹ But for most of us, most of the time, the Earth feels vast, and we feel tiny and powerless. Can it it really be the case that we so small (if numerous) can affect this vast planet's life support systems? We not only can and do, but we are making changes at a speed unprecidented in our geological era. It's Hard to believe.