28/2/22, 08:42 The Realist Guide to Solving Climate Change

ARGUMENT
An expert's point of view on a current event.

The Realist Guide to Solving Climate

Change
Put aside all your idealistic fantasies about the world’s biggest crisis, and here’s
what’s left.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations
at Harvard University.

AUGUST 13, 2021, 12:44 PM

As you probably already know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) just issued its latest report detailing what the world’s leading
experts think is happening to our planet. Drawing on hundreds of rigorous
scientific studies, it deals solely with the sources and physical effects of global
warming. Subsequent reports—to be released next year—will address the
social, economic, and political consequences. If you were hoping for reassuring
news from this report, however, you’re going to be massively disappointed. For
a sobering assessment of what it means, see this overview from the Economist
or this quick explainer from Foreign Policy’s Christina Lu.

The IPCC has now concluded that average global temperatures will continue to
increase until at least 2050 and the pace is accelerating. In its words: “Global
surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century
under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will
be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other
greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”

It also says the evidence is “unequivocal” that this increased temperature is

due to human activity (mostly the burning of fossil fuels) and not to natural
variation. In the unlikely event that humanity drastically reduces greenhouse
gas emissions and gets to net zero by midcentury, then the increase could be
limited to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target
adopted by the G-7 countries back in May. That would be a remarkable
achievement, but it would still mean more extreme weather events—droughts,
fires, floods, etc.—of the sorts we’ve experienced this year.

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That target is probably too optimistic, however, because efforts to address this
problem have consistently fallen short in the past. Thus far, the nations of the
world have set inadequate targets and then failed to meet them. It takes little
imagination to foresee the likely social, economic, and political consequences
of this failure, and none of them are good. The Financial Times editorial board
got it right: “Time is running short to avert ‘hell on earth.’”

The bottom line: We are currently losing the battle to prevent catastrophic
human-made changes to the environment on which all life depends. And it is
the major powers—the advanced industrial states that have the biggest
economies and that produce the most greenhouse gases—that are primarily
responsible.

For realists, this outcome is both unsurprising and troubling. The central focus
of all realist thought is explaining how states will behave in a world without a
legitimate central authority that can protect them from each other or otherwise
constrain their behavior. Realists argue that this situation creates a “self-help”
system where each state relies primarily on its own resources and strategies to
survive. In such a world, the major powers will compete for power and/or
security and focus on relative position as much or more than on absolute gains
because being weaker than others may leave you vulnerable to pressure or at
risk of being conquered. Trust will be scarce, altruism rare to nonexistent, and
selfish national interests will routinely override broader cosmopolitan values.

If you don’t believe me, consider how the major powers have responded to the
COVID-19 crisis. They have blamed others for the problem, competed to get
vaccines for themselves while leaving billions of people with inadequate
supplies, imposed unilateral travel restrictions without consulting other
nations, and generally acted like the self-interested actors that realism depicts.
And dealing with the coronavirus was an easy problem compared with getting
humanity to make the adjustments necessary to achieve net-zero carbon
emissions.

Realists recognize that cooperation is possible—indeed, it happens all the time

—but they emphasize that it is inherently fragile, usually falls short of what
might be optimal, and rarely occurs if it requires a state to make sacrifices that
might leave it poorer and weaker and thus more vulnerable to others in the
long run.

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For these reasons, realists do not find it odd that the major powers have failed
to do enough to address the problem of climate change. On the contrary, their
behavior is precisely what the picture I just sketched would lead you to expect.
No major power is going to make big sacrifices in the near term to deal with
climate change if it thinks that doing so will leave it at a disadvantage relative
to others. Moreover, given that there is no global authority that can enforce an
agreement, states have to worry that they may make sacrifices while others
cheat, leaving themselves worse off yet still facing an overheating planet along
with everyone else.

In his landmark book Man, the State, and War, Kenneth Waltz used Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s famous parable of the Stag Hunt to elucidate this problem.
If a group of hunters cooperate to catch a stag, they will enjoy a venison dinner.
But if one spies a hare and goes for that instead, they will lose out on venison,
and most of them will go hungry. So it is with climate change: Success requires
all the major industrial powers to cut emissions, but each may be tempted to
cheat and especially if they expect the others to do so as well. If one or more of
them defects, all are left worse off.

To make matters worse, cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions also

has to overcome the human tendency to discount the future and other issues of
intergenerational equity. Getting people to sacrifice now in order to benefit
future generations is a tough sell, and getting incumbent politicians to take
positions that might cost them reelection is even harder. There are also cross-
national equity issues: Developing countries such as India rightfully resent the
United States, Canada, Germany, and other advanced industrial nations telling
them to cut emissions today, given that the former burnt fossil fuels with
abandon during their own rise to industrialized wealth.

Realists from Thucydides to John Mearsheimer have highlighted the tragic

nature of international politics—major powers seem doomed to compete and
fight even when they might prefer not to—but with climate change, the tragedy
will not be confined to the strongest or richest. On the contrary, poorer
countries will suffer most, even if they contributed least to the problem itself.
That’s another irony that realists would recognize: Justice is a scarce
commodity among states. Didn’t somebody once say that “the strong do what
they can, and the weak suffer what they must”?

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And let’s not lose sight of the worst-case scenario here, a set of events the IPCC
says “cannot be ruled out.” If warming greatly exceeds 1.5 or 2 degrees, then all
bets are off. Ice sheets will disappear completely; major ocean currents may
shift dramatically; sea level rise could drown dozens of coastal cities; absent
large-scale migration, as much as 30 percent of the human population may
experience mean annual temperatures of 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees
Fahrenheit) or more; and areas of the planet that are now home to millions of
people may experience wet-bulb temperatures (a measure that combines heat
and humidity) in excess of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Because
the human body cannot cool itself in those conditions, people in these regions
will have to move or die. If this is our future, then realism suggests that the
international system will become even more Hobbesian, with states taking
increasingly extreme measures to preserve whatever they can. Even liberal
democracies are capable of fearsome savagery if they think their survival is on
the line.

So, does realism also counsel girding our loins and preparing for a Mad Max
future? I don’t think so. The law of gravity doesn’t make it impossible for an
airplane to fly—you just have to take it into account—and the competitive
impulses that realism highlights can also be overcome if the power of these
impulses is recognized and the need to overcome them is apparent.

What is to be done? If this problem were easy to fix, it would have been solved
already, so I have no miracle solutions to offer. But here are a few thoughts to
consider.

First, galvanizing global action will require continued and effective efforts to
educate people as to what is happening to our planet and why it is happening
and to explain what needs to take place to avoid disaster. As with COVID-19,
there will still be a chorus of head-in-the-sand politicians, hired hacks working
for the fossil fuel industry, and conspiracy theorists sowing disinformation. I
am optimistic because climate change denialism has been steadily losing
ground—especially among younger people—and being smart on climate is
becoming a political advantage rather than a liability.

Changing public attitudes is the best way to exploit politicians’ own self-
interest: Around the world, more leaders need to realize being bad on climate is
a good way to lose an election (in a democracy) or face a popular uprising (in an
authoritarian state). The cultural issues that conservatives and populists

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routinely exploit to gain support are pretty trivial when compared with climate
change, but we can’t expect politicians to focus on what is vital unless they
know a well-informed public will punish them for ignoring it.

Realism also counsels telling people the truth about what it will take to address
these issues and not trying to fool them into thinking that fixing it will be
entirely cost-free. A Green New Deal may create good jobs for some, but the
effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change will inevitably require each of us
to change how we live. Some of these adjustments will be inconvenient or even
painful, especially for poorer societies and for people whose livelihoods are
presently based on the burning of fossil fuels. Just as globalization got oversold
and eventually faced a powerful backlash, pretending that solving this problem
is cost-free risks provoking a counterproductive reaction that could undermine
the entire effort.

At the global level, realism suggests that efforts to stop or reverse global
warming must rely not on idealistic appeals to our shared humanity but rather
on the narrow interests of each nation-state. As Anatol Lieven argues in an
important book on this topic, humans remain highly tribal—that impulse is
what nationalism is all about—and few if any governments are going to make
big sacrifices for the sake of people in other countries. But they will make those
sacrifices if they recognize that failing to do so will leave their own country a lot
worse off.

So, even if you’re a rich country well above sea level in a more-or-less
temperate zone (for the moment) and you don’t want millions of climate
refugees on your doorstep looking for a safe haven, then you might want to get
serious about curbing greenhouse gas emissions, even if it costs you a bit of
economic growth. If you’re a trading state that depends on exporting to other
thriving economies and importing food from agricultural zones, you might
want to make sure that your trading partners are still in a position to do
business. And so forth.

Finally, realism sees international politics primarily in terms of the great

powers: It is their actions that shape most of what happens on the planet
(though, of course, not all). It is the major powers that have done and are doing
most of the damage to the atmosphere, and solving the problem depends more
on their actions than on whatever Bolivia or Burundi or Brunei decide to do.
This situation suggests that all-inclusive climate summits involving the entire

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U.N. membership list are less important than minilateral forums like the G-7 or
G-20. Therein lies a sliver of hope: Reaching agreement among the top 5, 10, or
even 20 greenhouse gas emitters won’t be easy, but trying to get the entire U.N.
General Assembly to reach a meaningful consensus is improbable.

Realism is a pessimistic take on world affairs, and the challenge of addressing

global warming provides ample reason for gloom. Even so, I take some comfort
in the growing awareness of the seriousness of the problem, the bold initiatives
that some countries are beginning, and the political problems that prominent
climate deniers like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan
have experienced in recent years. I only hope it’s not too late.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international
relations at Harvard University.

TAGS:
CLIMATE CHANGE,
UNITED STATES

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