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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Okay, hello everyone and good evening. Welcome to the LSE. My name is Liam Bison McGrath. I'm an associate professor within the Department of Social Policy here at the LSE and the Chair of the Society Sustainable Social Policy Research Hub, as well at the Department of Social Policy. A very warm welcome to all of you joining us here in person but also online this evening. Tonight's lecture is jointly hosted by the Department of Social Policy as well as the Global School of Sustainability here at the LSE as part of our ongoing work to understand the political economy of climate change and the future of global governance. Now, before we delve into these timely topics, a few practical notes before we get started tonight. So for those in the theater, please switch your phones to silent. If the fire alarm sounds, please follow the instructions from LSE staff. They will guide you out of the building to the designated fire assembly point outside, where we'll wait until it's safe to return. For those online, you can follow the livestream and slides using your screen and use the Q and A function to send in any questions. And with that over, I'm delighted to welcome Professor Helen Milner to the LSE this evening. Professor Milner is the B.C. forbes professor of Politics and International affairs at Princeton University and one of the leading scholars of international political economy. Her work has shaped how we think about globalization, trade, domestic politics and international cooperation. Her latest book with Professor Alex Gazmarian is entitled Fault Lines. The Political Economy of a Warming World takes on one of the defining questions of our time, which is how climate change is not only a scientific and economic challenge, but rather a fundamentally political one, reshaping interests, coalitions and conflicts both within and between countries. Rather than treating climate politics as a simple divide between believers and deniers or between green and brown industries, Ford Lyons argues that as the impacts of climate change become more concrete and unequal, a new cleavage is emerging between places that stand to lose dramatically from rising temperatures and from those that are relatively shielded, who may even see opportunities. That geography of vulnerability runs through our national debates, our business lobbies, our cities, diplomacy, and helps explain both ambitious climate action and but also the backlash and rollbacks that we are seeing in many countries today. In a moment, I'll hand over to Helen, who will speak for around 45 minutes on this topic. After that, we'll open for a Q and a until around 8pm I'll start with questions from both the room and then also turning online. If you're here with us at that time, please raise your hand and wait for the roving microphone. If you're online, please type your questions into the Q and A box. I have an iPad on stage from which I can read them. We will finish at 8pm and then you're very welcome to stay for a reception in the foyer just outside the theater where the conversation can continue. Tonight's event is being recorded and we hope to make a recording available afterwards on LSE's channels, subject to technical quality and permissions. And our hashtag for this evening as displayed on the screen is LSE Events. So, without further ado, it's my great pleasure to invite Professor Helen Milner to deliver her lecture, Fault Lines, the New Political Economy of a Warming World.
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Well, thank you all for coming and thanks to Professor Van Baser McGrath for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here in London and to be speaking to you about my new book with Professor Alex Yasmerarian. We actually just sent it in on Thursday to our publisher, which, if you've written an article or a book or anything, you'll know what a happy moment that is to get it off your desk finally, after working on it for many, many years. And so I'm hoping this will, I'm hoping this will be our cover, but many publishers don't like to go with lots of coverage color on their covers these days. But this is what we're hoping for and I hope it's out in the late summer of next year. So I'm really excited to give you a preview of kind of what we're doing in the book. So as Liam has said, and as many of you know, I don't think you'd be here otherwise. Climate change is a major global challenge, challenge for everybody. It's going to have, and it is having, and it will increasingly have disruptive effects politically, socially, economically to the whole planet. We've known this for quite a while. The ipcc, the climate change sort of science came together starting in the late 80s, but there were even articles before then warning about this. So this is not something new. We're beginning to see it more and more. And the latest models indicate that the future could be very difficult because of climate change and the way it is affecting the globe. I present some of the evidence up here just to, you know, give you a sense of the many things. I mean, I could list slide after slide after slide of the things that can go wrong with climate change. But these are just a few of the things that we're looking at in terms of people being displaced, property being destroyed, GDP losses, all of these types of things. One thing that is important to note that is going to be key to our argument here is that the geography of climate change is very uneven and very unequal. And again, this is notable in many dimensions. As I'll talk about the book's title, Fault Lines, really refers to this. And that line you saw on the first slide with the graph with the globe, that is the fault line that we're talking about. It's a rough boundary. It shouldn't be seen like the equator, some very specific thing. It's this rough boundary that we want to talk about. And that's the fault line that is the essence of what we're arguing in the book. So this is just, I want to give you a couple slides that talk about global warming and what's going on with the process. This looks at the last like 25 years of emissions. And what you'll see here, right, is China has just overtaken everybody. And most of the other countries are flat, even going down a little bit in terms of their emissions of carbon dioxide. But China has been growing very steadily. In addition, some other countries, such as India, Brazil and Indonesia have been growing a bit as well. And these countries are going to be on sort of different sides of the the fault lines that I'll talk about. These are predictions about what global net emissions would be doing, could be doing, or should be doing. Many thought that they would peak right around 2024, 2025. The latest models are now pushing that out closer to 2030. And again, these make a lot of assumptions about how countries are going to be reacting. And it's not, not at all clear that this 2025 outlook is going to be any better than the 2023 outlook, which was just, you know, has just recently been overtaken. So emissions are still growing. Again, this is the essence of climate change for us is global warming, the planet in a sense heating up. And you can see Here again from 1880 onward up to the now what is happening with average temperatures going forward. We're getting very close to the 1.5 centigrade threshold of change from the pre industrial average. While we may have hit that this year, usually this is calculated on an average of five to 10 years. So we don't exactly know that we're quite there yet, but we're getting very close. So it seems as if the Paris agreement that tried to limit us to 1.5 degrees. So the 1.5 degree limit that we were average, that we were trying to stay at above pre industrial levels, we're very close to breaching. And as you know, since you're probably very interested in climate, the COP negotiations are going on now in Brazil and they're trying to deal with this issue because countries have put in these commitments, but very few countries have been living up to those commitments. And so this is why we're in a sense, the emissions are still rising and we're still in this situation. Why do we think we're having such trouble with climate change when we've known about this problem for a long time and we have kind of, in a sense, solutions or strategies for solving it? And the argument that we're going to make is it's really politics. The key argument that's been made before, that I'll talk a bit more about in a minute, is the fact that global warming is an externality in a sense, that the emissions that any one country emits, even if it's China with all of its emissions, aren't the sole source of the problem. That it's the emissions from everybody in a sense that are the problem and that you need to in a sense, get everybody, all countries in the world to agree to lower their emissions levels, not increase them, and to transition to a non fossil fuel future. And the three strategies for dealing with the problem that have been talked about are mitigation, which is really again getting these greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced. And this means the turn away from fossil fuels, which is the turn to renewable energy, solar, geothermal, all sorts of even nuclear. Now we're talking about to move away from oil and gas and coal. Adaptation is another strategy which is not going to stop climate change, climate change, it's just going to try and reduce the damage from climate change. And there is some thinking that if you can just reduce the damage from climate change, well, we can kind of go on. It's not at all clear that that is a realistic scenario. But if you do have damage from climate change, which we will, you're going to have to do something about it. And so adaptation is something that is also important. A third strategy that people have talked about is geoengineering. And in a sense this is kind of reversing climate change by trying to get, you know, get rid of the carbon that's in the atmosphere. And there are ongoing sort of attempts to figure out ways to manipulate the environment to do this. Right now in India, they're Having a Delhi's having horrible, horrible pollution problem and people are islands, streets protesting. And the government has started to try and do this by putting up silver oxide and things like this into the atmosphere to try and cause rain and to try and in a sense stanch the pollution that's rising. This has not worked. There are probably other solutions that will work, but these are very risky and we really don't know. They're costly and risky and we really don't know what their effect is to going, going to be. So with this, we've been working on a new theory about why we think this is a problem. And it in a sense can help us explain a little bit about the Paris Agreement and COP are having problems and not sort of being implemented as fully. And it really depends on the incentive, incentives that countries have to do things. And the theory we have has a macro part to it and it has a micro part to it. So the macro part is really about geography and it says, look, climate change is having unequal effects in different parts of the world. And that means that some parts are very vulnerable and are getting hit badly and are going to be hit worse over time. Other parts of the the world are not going to be hit as badly, at least not in the next 25 to 35 years. And they have less incentive to take on costly mitigation policies. And this makes a big difference to kind of the situation when you have these unequal vulnerabilities. And so this is the macro part of the story, the micro part of the story story is that people have to learn about this, they have to come to understand the situation in which they live. And we think that experience is probably the best way for them to do this, sadly. And that experience is what we call climate shocks. And these are kind of unexpected major sort of deviations in weather that places are going to experience. Floods, drinking, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, all sorts of things connected to climate change. Now none of these things, I mean you'll hear all the time that people say, oh, this wildfire was caused by climate change, or this drought was caused by climate change. It's very unclear to scientists that you can really say that most single events can't really be attributable. What you can start attributing though is when you have series of these events, events which take you out of the norm of the last 200 years or the pre industrial versus the industrial era. And what we're seeing is more and more of these kind of climate shocks and in these vulnerable regions you're going to get even more of these. And so we expect that in these regions that are facing these both geographically very vulnerable and facing these extreme climate, climate shocks on a more regular basis, that they're the ones that are going to be extremely highly motivated to do things to mitigate more. And our focus here is really on mitigation. But I think it would apply, as I'll talk about a little bit later, it would apply to any of those three strategies. They're going to be more motivated to mitigate and adopt costly policies to make a transition away from fossil fuels. They're going to be more motivated to of adapt because they're going to be hit worse by these events. And they're going to be more motivated to think about geoengineering in the end of the day because of this. And it's this climate fault line that tells about this geographic vulnerability. This is different than sort of existing arguments about why climate change has been such an intractable problem. I don't want to get into the this too much, but one of the major kind of theories has been that there's this north south development divide, that climate change is this externality. We'd like everybody to do something, but everybody's going to free ride. And it's the countries in the south that have been free riding the most. They don't want to do anything. They want the north to do everything. And in a sense rightly so is the north was the one that basically has polluted the most historically. And so that this divide then meant that these developing countries were in a sense free riding, not being willing to take these costly policies to transition. The argument was also that what would happen is that there would be reciprocity. That if you got something like the Paris Agreement where countries agreed to make consciousness commitments and they would sort of trade their commitment for somebody else's commitment, that that was a way to make progress. We just don't think this is really what's going on or what's likely to go on for us. It's the countries below the fault line, which is most of the south, that had the greatest incentives to do things. It's the north that's going to be dragging its feet, which is, you know, the UK, the US, Europe, China, Russia, the countries above that 35th degree parallel. And we don't think reciprocity is going to work. We think it's going to have to be much more a sense of either compensation or coercion strategies from the south to the north to get the north to pay attention more to what's going on in their country. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. I. So let me just. I think it's kind of interesting to ask people what they think, you know, the future brings. So there are three different scenarios you can imagine, right? One of them is that all these countries agree to cooperate. They enforce that cooperation. They adopt very strong mitigation policies. We see emissions peak very soon and we see emissions start declining. We see the transition to renewables, and we mitigate, in a sense, the climate problem. That's scenario one for the next 25, 30 years. Scenario two is nobody does anything. Everybody kind of waits for everybody else and you get no change, really, in emissions. In fact, admissions keep growing and the problem just gets worse, in a sense. The third is that some countries do a lot, other countries don't do much, and you get some change, but it's not a coordinated change. It's mostly unilateral with maybe a few countries in a region kind of cooperating. So I'd like to see the show of hands. How many people think we're going to be in scenario number one? There's only one pessimist in the group or no one optimist in the group. One optimist in the group. How many thinks we're going to be in scenario number two where nobody does anything? Maybe two. Two pessimists in the group. How many think we're in scenario three? That's everybody. Okay, so we're on the number three as well. We think you're going to see some people, some countries doing a lot and other countries not doing so some countries actually not doing very much. Let me just sketch out a few things that we want to talk about. I've talked a bit about the earlier theories. I'll mention those again just to give a little more detail. I then want to talk about this geographic divergence that we see and what our theory says about it, and then look at the research findings that we have in the book, which look at different, in a sense, different levels of politics. So the existing theories, as I said, focus very much on this collective action problem and the free riding that goes along with the collective action problem. We think this is a problem, but we don't think it's, in a sense the root of the problem. We think the root of the problem lies in the incentives countries have to do things. And as I said, with the COP going on right now, one of the reasons that you're not getting further action on many things is because countries, a lot of countries, especially the leading countries up there, China, the US with the biggest emissions, if you put Europe up there, it would be up there, too. They don't have as many incentives to do things as the other countries. And that's why it's very hard to get cooperation, because countries are very unevenly poised here to be affected by climate change. Others have looked at domestic politics and really at green groups. On the one hand, those that benefit from the shift to renewables versus the kind of oil and gas complex where they see a lot of blockage, and there's been a lot of blame for those that blockage on those industries and people who work in those industries. We don't think, we think that's important, but again, not in a sense the major source of problems here. And we want to focus on these differences in vulnerability that other people have talked about, but in a slightly different way than they've talked about. So you may be saying, well, I've always heard that climate change is going to affect everybody and it's going to hurt everybody. And at some level that's true, but some places are going to get hurt much more. And there are just numerous, numerous studies that show the heterogeneous effects of global warming. And global warming has very negative effects on growth, economic growth. It has negative effects on agriculture. It has negative effects on using energy. It has negative effects on human health and mortality, among other things. But these are going to be much worse in certain places, and they're going to be much worse in places that are already warmer. So places around the equator obviously tend to be warmer and places south of the equator tend to be warmer than places in a sense, north of the equator. And it's this uneven geography effect of global warming that in a sense, drives people's incentives to do things. This is, again, this is the slide you saw at the beginning, but with now, hopefully more context. And what we've done is, in a sense, to look at, let me go to look at what geoscientists say on a very detailed level about how each particular geographic area is going to be affected by global warming. And then to look overlaid on top of that, what the economists say, that global warming in that particular region, that very small region is going to do to the economy, to human health, productivity, agriculture, the ability to, to feed themselves and all sorts of things like that. And from that you get this kind of unequal, heterogeneous vulnerability. And countries that are in red and yellow tend to be the ones that are going to be most affected, especially the ones in red. And then the countries in yellow and green actually may do a bit better because they're going to be one, they're going to be more productive and they're going to have sort of, in a sense less cold environments that often are negative for humans and for productivity in the economy. So you've got this unequal geographic divide here. You may say to yourself, well, but I think it's all the countries in the northern part there that are emitting. And they are indeed, because as you can see, it's China, the United States, Europe, Russia, and these are big emitters. But it's also the case that if you look at the countries we call the south, that is below that 35 degree line, they're now producing 36% or a third of all the world's emissions. And that's growing. So over time they're going to be producing even more emissions as a world global, so their emissions are important. So the macro theory basically says, look, you've got this unequal distribution of costs and benefits from global warming and this is going to motivate people, industries, governments to do different things in different places. And you've got this micro theory that says these climate shocks are going to affect these different regions, they're going to affect these vulnerable regions much more. And these experiences with climate change and these climate shocks are going to actually induce people to be willing to take action in certain places and not in other places. So then we want to basically look at this, and in the book we look at this at four different levels. We look at individuals and their beliefs about climate change and their willingness to do something about climate change. We look at business firms because they're very important, and again, their motivations to do things, their willingness to see climate change as an important risk for them and to do things. And we look at governments and ask what are they willing to, to do in terms of public policies, especially mitigation policies, of moving to renewables from coal, oil and gas. And then we ask about world politics, because as you can see, that climate fault line is what we think is going to be the new cleavage in world politics. And so we want to ask, is there a way to deal with that new cleavage and what does it mean for, for world politics? So the individual level people care about their economic situations. It's not the only thing they care about, but it's certainly one of them. And we argue very strongly and look at data from a number of surveys that people in areas that are very vulnerable are more likely to be willing to undertake costly mitigation policies policies and accept them. And that experience with these climate shocks is likely again to convince people that the benefits of mitigation policy outweigh its costs. And what's going to happen is that these climate shocks lead people to update their beliefs even if they don't believe in climate change. Enough of these climate shocks that are sort of deviations from normal weather are going to, in a sense, change their minds. I'm not going to go through all the data analysis. I just want to give you a flavor for some of the things that we're looking at. And again, we look at cross national surveys, we put a number of them together and really ask about what do people think, how important is climate change as a risk for them? And if you look at most countries, people tend not to put that as a top risk that they're facing. Mostly it's things like the economy or other forms of politics. But what we're going to say, what we're going to look at is are people in vulnerable regions different than people in less vulnerable regions? And are people who face climate shocks different than others within the United States? We also look at this and we want to look at people who've been in these more vulnerable parts of the US Mostly the South, are they, when they're hit by extreme heat or by wildfires in their particular region, are they more likely to be willing to say that climate change is a big risk for them? And are they more likely to be willing to push the government to take action? We also did a survey of 25 countries in the north and the south and asked people there if they would be willing to again, support government policy, cost the government policies, and we gave them costs to undertake mitigation policies. And our expectation again is that people below and above the fault line are going to be different in their willingness to do this. And if they've experienced climate shocks of some sort, they're going to be more, even more willing. And so the hypotheses we have are really these, that after these climate shocks, people in these very vulnerable regions are going to be much more willing to say climate change is a serious risk and they're going to be Much more willing to support mitigation policy, even if it's cost. And that in democracy this gets magnified, obviously, because people should hopefully have more of a role in pushing their governments to do things. I don't want to get into all the sort of details, but all of these surveys suggest that indeed geography matters. People in the more vulnerable zones are more likely to see climate change as a big risk and that when they experience climate shocks, they're more likely to update their beliefs. We have some surveys that are done over time, so we actually can see that people who've been hit by these shocks, that in period one, maybe they weren't hit by a wildfire, but in period two, they were. And their views have changed. And indeed, what you see is very much this climate fault line that people in these high vulnerability areas that have experienced these climate shocks have updated their beliefs. They believe climate change is a very serious and real risk to them, one of the most important that they face, and they're willing to push their governments to do more things. So at the public level, we see this climate fault line and we see this even more in democracy. And again, this is going to be because these are vulnerable countries, they're going to be democracies in the South. Seeing this for businesses, we're also going to look at this question because we think in some sense two of the biggest groups in terms of pushing their governments to do things are the public and businesses. And businesses have been rightly pointed out as being very, very important sources of emissions and of policymaking. Most people have focused on the way in which the fossil fuel complex, industrial complex, kind of halts mitigation policies and puts a kind of damper on governments doing things. But we want to look at, in a sense, both sides of the this coin and ask, are different firms located in different places likely to take different steps? And firms, in our view, can do at least two different things when faced with climate change. One is they can move their operations, they can decide that they don't want to be in Florida anymore, and they can move to Minnesota and escape some of the problems that climate change brings to places like Florida. But they can also lobby governments and they can exercise voice and they can try and push governments to do things. And we're going to look at both of these things because in a sense, they're substitutes as well as complements. Firms can do both of them or they can decide to do one versus the other. Both of them are costly. Moving is probably even more costly. But we want to, in a Sense, look at these two. So again, our argument is, okay, businesses that are located in vulnerable areas that face these climate shock should be the ones who both try and exit and try and influence the government through lobbying. And they should be more likely to do these things than, than businesses in less vulnerable areas and ones that haven't faced climate shocks in their operations. And so we looked at most of the publicly traded firms in the United States over the course of about 20 years, and we asked, in a sense, using the mapping, the very sort of detailed mapping, micro level mapping of global warming's effects, do all of these operations of a firm lie mostly in a very vulnerable area or a not very vulnerable area? So that is, if your operations are all in Texas or Florida, you're probably in a pretty vulnerable area. If they're all in Minnesota or Montana, they're in a much less vulnerable area. And our firm's then going to differ in terms of their willingness to basically exit and use voice. And so we look at this and what we see here is you can see that on this side of the graph, this is where firms are mostly, all their operations are located in areas that are going to be heavily damaged by climate change. That is for firms that are mostly in areas that are going to be less damaged. And what this says is how much are they going to lobby? And what we see is that when hit by economic shocks, these countries that are located mostly in these very vulnerable zones are much more likely to lobby on climate change issues. Now it's very hard from the lobbying data to figure out what they're lobbying for, but we think that they're probably, they're lobbying definitely on climate change issues and climate change bills. It's not exactly clear what they're lobbying on, but we think that they're lobbying to try and get the government to help them, either through mitigation policies or through adaptation policies. And so this again sort of suggests that geography is a major component of what's going on here and that these climate shocks lead firms to update their beliefs and to be willing to exercise costly voice to get governments to change their behavior. We also looked at whether firms are moving because of climate shocks. We didn't see a lot of evidence of that. Now moving is very, very costly. So that may be even more costly than lobbying. So that may be one reason why you're not seeing a lot of this. So again, geography seems to matter. And these climate shocks seems to be the experience that leads firms to be willing to take costly government actions in favor of change. We Also looked at cities around the world and we thought that this would be interesting. Cities are where most of the pollution occurs, where most of the emissions occur. And we have, we got a lot of cities as a. I'll show you this map. We have data on cities pretty much all over the world. And we can look at this and basically ask, are local governments more willing to do things when they're located in these high vulnerable areas and when they're faced with these climate shocks? And again, governments, you may say to yourself, well, local government, cities, they're embedded in countries and they really don't have that much control over policy, but they actually do. They control a lot of kind of policies that affect emissions, all the transport, electricity generation, how land is used, building codes, waste management, a number of things cities and smaller regions control. And so they actually do control a number of policy areas, as I said, all over the world. And again, we're looking at the same sets of arguments about if you're a city in a very vulnerable area, are you more likely to take action? And is this the case when you face climate shocks? And we also look at whether this federalism kind of matters. And it turns out that it does, that obviously cities and regions that have a lot more control are also more likely to do things. There's data I can show you, but let me not do that and just talk about a little bit about two cities. So one of the cases that we kind of looked at is Buffalo, New York versus Johannesburg, South Africa. They're both in democracies. Johannesburg is obviously in the south below our climate fault line. Buffalo is obviously north of our fault line. And they've been hit by climate shocks, both of them. Johannesburg has been hit by quite a few more climate shocks than Buffalo has. Buffalo shocks tend to be snow and cold waves rather than heat waves waves. And Johannesburg has, as a city and a region has done much more in terms of the kind of metrics that we're looking at to address climate change and to try and mitigate. Now, obviously Johannesburg has fewer resources than Buffalo and that means it's going to be constrained, but again, it's trying very hard. Whereas Buffalo, when we looked at some of the things that people, politicians were saying in Buffalo was that, you know, it's nice, Buffalo's going to be warmer, we're going to be more productive, we're going to have more outdoor days, we could be a climate haven, people and firms are going to move here and we'll have actually be more productive. And so what we see is again Kind of, kind of this difference depending on your geography and the amount of climate shocks you have of what cities are willing to do at the national level. We ask, well, do politicians at the national level respond to the public as they change their views and to business firms as they change their views? And do politicians change their views as they see what's going on? After all, politicians do want to get reelected and they don't want to be blamed for the climate crises that damage property and people in their regions. And so they are willing, we think, to take climate change into account. And there are other papers that show that when climate shocks hit regions, politicians actually are willing to act in part because publics pushed them to act. So we looked at most of the countries in the world again over about a 30 year period, and we looked at this stock of climate mitigation laws. And these laws have been collected by the Grandum Institute, which I guess is here. And again, the kind of number of laws that different countries adopt over time. And what you can see is from virtually zero in 1990, the stock of laws has gone up quite substantially, especially since 2005. And this we were surprised to find out that there is some linkage between these laws and emissions reductions. So they're not completely just laws that don't go anywhere. They seem to have some effect. And indeed some of the research shows that they actually do more in the south than they do in the north. There are issues with using these laws because a law that does a whole lot counts for one and a law that doesn't do a whole lot counts for one. And so you've got comparability issues. So one of the things that we look at is if, if you look within a country over time as that country, if it's in a vulnerable region and becomes experiences these climate shocks, do they, are they more willing to adopt climate laws? And again, what we see is that when you have, when they're subjected to these extreme heat periods, droughts, fires, severe storms, they do actually react more and adopt more of these laws. What we, this is kind of the result of the work that we do. What you can see here is what is the probability of adopting one of these laws increasing as you go to the right. And if you're in the geographic south, in the damage zone, the high vulnerabilities zone versus in the geographic north. And what you can see is that if you're in the geographic north, that is the less vulnerable areas, these climate shocks aren't really changing your behavior very much. But if you're in the geographic south, they actually are changing your behavior and you're more willing to adopt laws. It's not huge because the body of laws is not enormous yet for any one country. We also then look at some placebo tests which say, well, is this, are these heat shocks just kind of like anything that happens that makes them more willing? So if they get a cold wave or if an earthquake happens, and these things tend to be unrelated, at least earthquakes, very unrelated to climate change. And what you see is that in those kind of, for those things, you don't get these changes in these laws. So it seems as if these laws are actually reacting to, to the kind of climate shocks that we're talking about that are much more related to global warming. I don't have a ton more time, so I'm going to kind of slide through things. But again, the fault line seems to be apparent in the way national governments are acting. And this is important for two reasons. One is that these laws are often unilateral. So if you remember, the other theories basically said countries aren't going to do anything unless they're cooperating and working together and doing things reciprocally. We're showing in a sense that no, they're actually willing to do things unilaterally and that that's important and that's different from what other theories and arguments claim. Moreover, it's the south that's willing to do more than the North. And so while the earlier studies and arguments were all about the south being free riding, what we're arguing is, no, it's actually the north that's kind of free riding. And especially when you consider that the north tends to have more means to do things. This is, again, one of the points that we wanted to make is that people always say, oh, well, Europe is doing, doing so much, you know, and the United States was doing a lot. And, you know, here we see all this activity going on, but one of the things that Liam also mentioned is that there's been this backlash. And we think this backlash is predictable because again, we think that people in the north are going to be much less willing because they're less subject to the bads, the harms of global warming than people in the south today do things. And so when political actors and activists push very hard for climate change in the north, for legislation about climate change in the north, there's going to be a backlash because there are going to be groups that lose and industry in Europe, industry in the United States in a number of areas, as well as agriculture and farmers are, are complaining very loudly about a lot of these attempts at mitigation and the transfer to renewables and the kind of legislation that's going on. And you can see some of the examples here. Lastly, in terms of world politics, we predict this climate fault line and this divide that you see on those, on that map. And what's interesting about this, right, is that who's in the North? Well, it's China, it's Russia, it's the United States, it's parts of Europe. These are all in a sense the natural kind of allies of not doing a whole lot, which is an odd kind of coalition of countries. And you know, we can talk about China and whether it's doing a lot or not doing a lot and the reasons for it.
- [46:36]
C
It.
- [46:37]
A
But it's an interesting coalition because it's very different than the coalitions that people have talked about. And this is the coalition that's going to be less willing to do anything. The coalition that's going to be much more willing to do everything is the coalition in the South. And there are kind of lots of things that the south can try and do. We looked at a whole series of strategies and we, we asked publics about them and how they would react to them. If the south tries to coerce the north to do more, if the south tries moral suasion on the north, if the south tries side payments and issue linkage, we'll keep our people in our country. If you do more mitigation things like geoengineering, will the south turn to that as they become increasing, increasingly frustrated with the north and the role of international institutions in perhaps helping push the South's cause? Sadly, what we find in a number of these different surveys, and we ask it in different ways, so we ask countries in the south, well, if the north doesn't mitigate, what do you think you should do? And by and large, even if the north doesn't do anything, the south, many, the publics in the south think that actually they should try and mitigate. So they're willing to do things even if the north does nothing. So we don't again see this collective action dilemma. They seem to be willing, the Southern countries, publics in the south also seem to be willing support attempts to coerce the North. And strikingly, surprisingly and horrifyingly, from an ethical and normative point of view view, they actually seem to be willing to consider giving side payments to the north, the rich north, to mitigate, which is the opposite of what we're seeing in the world right now. And which is the opposite of what we should be seeing when we then pose these questions to the North. You know, what if the south tries coercion on you to make you mitigate? And what if the south tries moral suasion on you? And when you ask people in the north, they it basically has no effect on their behavior. They're not willing to say their government in the north should spend more on mitigation no matter what the south does. It seems as if publics in the north by and large just don't care. So again, there's this kind of delinkage. And sadly for us, what we argue is that the most vulnerable are in this, a very difficult situation because they have fewer means, at least right now, and they're less able to convince the north to do more of what it should do because the north is the biggest emitter. And so in a sense these weapons of the weak, the things that the south could do, manipulating, you know, various trade agreements, immigration agreements, that these things are very unlikely in a sense to really help them greatly. I don't want to end on a super negative note, since a lot of this is pretty negative, but let me just pose the question. Is in some sense, no matter what the north does, is kind of a green transition inevitable? Are we going to see this move away from coal, oil and gas to a renewable future? And I think there are at least two pretty strong reasons why you might see this. One is related to other motivations for governments to do this. And in part this relates to China. China is building lots of coal plants, its emissions are still growing. It doesn't seem to be super, super motivated by worries about climate change. But what it does seem to be super motivated by is kind of the geopolitics of this situation, which is one, energy security and diversification so they don't have to rely upon the United States or anybody else for oil and gas. And two, that they can take leadership in the green energy industries and be very strong economic power in the world by basically controlling the entire kind of electricity stack. That may be the way that we get energy in the future. And that these two motivations don't apply just to China, but to a lot of countries that many countries, especially even European countries these days, don't want to be dependent on Saudi Arabia, Russia or the United States for their energy needs. That this is not a secure way to live your life, given the world we're in. And renewables are an alternative to innocence doing this. The second big reason is technology and technological Innovation and the declining cost of kind of green energy sources. And this is again pretty well documented. And you've seen the cost of solar panels, you've seen the costs of batteries, you've seen the cost of magnets, you've seen the cost of many of these inputs into the green energy industries decline very substantially and come on a par with oil and gas and coal these days, if not even becoming less expensive. And this I think is going to be continue to drive things because for most of these industries, as they get more users, as they produce more electricity, they innovate more, more innovation then leads to lower costs, more usage leads to lower costs, and you get a virtuous cycle where you've got technological innovation driving the cost down of a green energy system. And you've got more and more countries turning to this for a variety of reasons. So while I think our climate fault line story is a difficult story and not a very hopeful story, I think there are other sides to it that actually lead you to be a little bit more optimistic about the future. So thank you for your attention, I really appreciate it and happy to answer questions.
- [53:05]
B
Okay, so as noted, we're now moving to the Q and A portion of the evening. If you have a question, feel free to raise your hand and the great staff here are going to come over to you. So we already have our first question over right at the back there in the turquoise jumper. Before we get to that, I will read an online question from Abdul Kabir, who has a couple of different questions related to the geopolitical and world politics angle that was kind of talked about towards the end of the talk. And so in this way I kind of want to fuse them a bit together, which is kind of two dimensions that kind of come about from the talk. One is the predominant focus on mitigation and how maybe the global politics of climate moving forward because of these fault lines are actually going to be defined by more of cooperation over adaptation and ways to kind of ensure against the north actually not being able or not being willing to engage in this mitigation? And whether these kind of new coalitions that emerge between south south and north south dynamics, do we think they are potentially more going to follow that kind of line of being a bit more cooperative, maybe looking at side payments? Or do we think people just have an intention, intrinsic interest in being more combative given the nature of what's going on?
- [54:25]
A
Yes. So I guess the first question is more about adaptation rather than mitigation. We focused a lot on mitigation in part for kind of empirical reasons that there's more data, more comparable data that you can look at in terms of thinking about mitigation than for adaptation. Adaptation is. It's tricky to kind of even identify. You know, if you rebuild a road, is that adaptation? Well, maybe if you built it higher or something. So it's much harder empirically to deal with adaptation. We think that the same dynamics are going to apply to that. And I think if you look at the last couple cops where they've tried very much to get adaptation funds kind of going, you see the same kind of dynamics where the northern countries that have the resources really are pretty unwilling to pledge much. And even if they pledge something, they're not really willing to kind of live up to those pledges very much. And a lot of it is left very vague and not very satisfying. So in some sense, we expect this cleavage to hit at a pace because again, the north probably has to adapt a little bit less, at least to global warming than the south does. And it's probably better able to do this. And the question is, is it going to be motivated to give resources? That, I think, gets to the second question a little bit about these strategies. We don't, again, we don't see this as being very cooperative. We see the North.
- [56:05]
D
North.
- [56:05]
A
It's not like China, Russia and the United States are going to get together and form a big alliance and sort of say, no, we're not going to mitigate. They're just going to kind of do business as usual and kind of go slow and not be super cooperative. We're hoping that many of the southern nations can get together and in a sense, cooperate and put these, you know, put these strategies in place and maybe by cooperating, have a stronger impact. The problem is the south is not united either. You know, in there, you've got Saudi Arabia, you've got Australia, you've got India. And, you know, these countries don't have, in a sense, natural affinities in many dimensions. And so we're in a sense pessimistic that the south can really get together many, maybe if climate change, in a sense, becomes bad enough that they will push much harder and that they will have more resources as a group than they do individually. And maybe that's what COP is really about, is, in a sense, trying to rally them. I mean, Xi Jinping is not there. Trump is not there. Some of the other European leaders kind of darted in and darted out last week, you know, and it looks like, like a more south kind of meeting right now at Least from the perspective that I see.
- [57:29]
B
Excellent. So we have an in person question here. Please also state your name and affiliation beforehand.
- [57:33]
E
Hi, my name is Katija. I'm a master's student for Development Management. Great session. It was very insightful. So I belong from Pakistan, which is a country that has been disproportionately impacted from climate change in terms of floods, heat waves. And within Pakistan, I belong from Lahore, which is normally been voted one of the most polluted cities in the world. And right now our AQI back home is like I think about 1200, which is hazardous beyond proportion. My question to you would be because as you've said, right within the south there's so many geopolitical factors, there's division, there's fights. How does a city that is being impacted, impacted to in real life? It's not just a distant reality, it's happening right now and it's cutting years of the people living there if they're not privileged enough to have air purifiers, for example. So how do cities themselves try to bring themselves out of this situation when the economy and poverty and all these factors are still predominant implications for them?
- [58:39]
A
So, yeah, yeah, I mean, the cities actually have tried to band together in some ways in these more vulnerable regions of the world and try and sort of compare ideas and contrast ideas and borrow from each other. And I was giving the example of Johannesburg and I think they've tried to learn from other cities what works. And they've tried to do things with transportation again to transition away from some of the very polluting, you know, sources, which are cars and buses and things like that. And so pushing for electric vehicles, electric buses, pushing public transport instead of cars, bike lanes, you know, these types of things, and electricity making electricity more available to people so they're not using, you know, cook stoves and things like this. So I think there are ways that individual cities can do things and they're talking about it and trying to do it because they're motivated also by the pollution issue, which right now in Delhi is just, I think is as bad as Lahore. And people are out in the streets, they're angry about it. And you saw this in China a couple years ago, before the Chinese. I mean, if you go to Beijing now, it's a lot cleaner than it was 10, 15 years ago. And people, I think, notice this. So I think there are ways in which individual cities and individual countries in the south can do things that improve their lives. A lot of that is costly. This transition is costly. And for a lot of those countries, they have a lot of other demands on them, on their government budgets and things. So it's a very, it's often a very difficult choice, but it's becoming more and more of a less difficult choice in a way as they face more and more crises and more and more problems like these horrible pollution episodes.
- [60:38]
B
Okay, so we have another question towards the back denim jacket, I guess.
- [60:42]
F
Hello. So my question is around south, south coalitions, and I think you've alluded to this. Oh, sorry, my name is Sasha and I'm just an alumni. How does this intersect with hydrocarbon producers? Because it seems to me that Guyana is in a very different position than say, Costa Rica and that Saudi Arabia is in a very different position than India, despite the fact that they both will suffer from heat waves. So can these coalitions hold up in the face of different hydrocarbon incentives?
- [61:12]
A
Yeah, I mean, as I was saying, the south is not at all unified, Right. As you know, Guyana now has discovered tons and tons of oil, so they've kind of hooked their future to that. But they're also talking about using that oil money to transition. So I think that that's, that's kind of interesting. And Saudi Arabia is also talking, has been not just talking about using its oil money to transition, but actually trying to transition as well. So I think these countries individually can do things. You know, as I was saying, the hope for big coalitions of the South, I think some areas you're going to see this more, so some regions will be able to do this better. But again, you've got a lot of diversity in the south and a lot of conflict. I mean, India and Pakistan, for instance, are going to have a hard time cooperating, right? I mean, they've had these animosities for a long time. But maybe, you know, with pollution problems and these kind of climate shocks, maybe it pushes them more together, at least on these issues when they have to deal with them in an international forum.
- [62:19]
B
Okay, so we have a question about the pink sweater there. And before we do so, we'll go to an online question from Anthony, who's a LSE external alum, who has a somewhat provocative question, which is that will your book be sent to Republicans and how may they change their viewers use, especially those in the big blue states like Texas and Florida, the below the 35th parallel. And I think it raises an interesting question, right? Because if we look at the 35th parallel within the US it kind of is a bit contra to our expectations, right? The south is the more red states, but these are the ones who should be most affected. Whereas these northern states, if we think of like Buffalo within New York state or traditionally blue state, is maybe the laggard in this case. So how does this kind of fit in the US and with the fault line within the country?
- [63:03]
A
So we think that these fault lines affect politics within countries too. Right. As I said, this 35th parallel is kind of a fuzzy boundary. You know, it's sort of around there. And in those areas you're going to have a lot of division. And especially in countries that are sort of bisected by this, you're going to have of a lot, lot of division because there are going to be areas that are represented politically that don't have a lot of vulnerability and other areas that do have a lot of vulnerability. In the US Particular case, yeah, we sort of see this situation, you know, as you were describing, with the south being much more reluctant to do anything. But you're starting to see it. I mean, Texas now I think is the biggest renewables user and electricity catching up with and probably surpassing California pretty soon. And that's kind of surprising, right, for Texas. But what you're also starting to see is that people in Florida as well as in parts of California can't get insurance for their homes. And this is going to affect things. And you're starting now to see, I was reading this article just the other day that you're actually starting to see the flow, flow of people for the last 15 years in the US or 20 years has been from the north to the south and that flow is stopping now and it's actually starting to reverse. And you're more likely to see this as well, people, because people will move and they can, as with firms, they can exit. And if you can't get insurance for your house, it's not at all clear that you're A going to buy the house in the first place and B, you know, you're going to know that if something happens to it, you're really out. So maybe you want to live somewhere else. And again, real estate markets in Florida have started to kind of recognize this problem.
- [64:59]
B
Okay, so our in person question over there.
- [65:01]
F
Hi, my name is Sunita and I'm a climate campaigner. Thank you, Helen. That was really interesting and felt very timely, particularly with cop. Obviously, starting today, my question, I wanted to go back to what you were saying about firms because obviously in your research you mapped out firms situated in the geographical north compared with the south. And that was very interesting. I was wondering what you think about multinational Firms, and particularly I was interested in your thoughts about obviously those companies which are headquartered in the global north, but maybe have their operations in the Global south, and particularly those ones that are built on legacies, let's say, of empire and colonialism, where they outsource their manual labor. And, you know, thinking about sweatshops, for example, I mean, historically in China, but more so in South Asia and Southeast Asia nowadays. And a term that I've heard being used recently as well is zones of sacrifice. And I was wondering whether you possibly think that there are even countries of sacrifice where these firms that exist to make profit can consider these countries and these regions as sacrificeable and therefore sort of outsourcing their operations actually is acting as a further blocker to the global south being able to. To take action towards adapting to climate change. So, yeah. Interested in what you think about that.
- [66:33]
A
Yes. So sadly, when we were looking at these firms in the United States, we didn't sort of count their operations outside the United States. We were trying to locate them within the United States in terms of their vulnerability. And that's how we did this. We ideally would have wanted to look and see what they're doing outside the United States. Now, firms have an option, right, which is these global value chains. So if they're worried about, say, floods in Vietnam, they don't have to have an operation there. They just have to contract with a firm that has an operation there. And if that firm goes out of business because it gets flooded, I mean, it's going to affect them. But they may also have an operation in Australia and they could just turn to that. And so for firms, what it means on the global arena is, and what we would look for is that they want to diversify these supply chains. And if they are going to move into an area that's very vulnerable or are in an area that's very vulnerable, are they trying to exit it or are they trying to, in a sense, insure themselves against the problem by not having a plant there, so say, but using a contract with a local to do the production for them. So in some sense they can escape some of this through these kind of global value chains that firms have been setting up. So in a sense, we see that as an option for these big firms that domestic firms don't really have. I mean, they can move, but it's often within the country. And so. So it's kind of a different option.
- [68:13]
B
So I believe we had at the front here in the blue sweater and then also the blue shirt there. So we go front and back.
- [68:22]
G
Thanks Ian Gough here at the LSE and also at the Grantham Institute. It's very interesting to have climate impacts introduced into the debate on climate mitigation. So I enjoyed that though I think the 35th parallel is clearly a very fuzzy line. But so like others I'm questioning there must be many other variables which interact with this. There's lots of confounding factors, especially I mean income per head in the north and the south. And when I think about the north, if we look at the three big powers, the us, the EU and China, their position on climate action has been very different. The US has always been the great laggard. The EU has been on the whole proponent of climate action. And China, of course its emissions are affected by Africa, outsourcing and globalization and so forth. But it does tend to implement very effective policies on renewables. So I'm just, I suppose adding to some other people that this is a bit simplistic, Geography matters, but in the end I think political economy matters more.
- [69:49]
A
I guess my response would be that geography plus kind of this belief updating is political economy. And so we think that this integrates both geosciences, economics and politics. Right? Because you are looking at what people think are the geoscience foundations for this and what people think are then the economic implications of that geoscience and then how do humans react to all of that? And, and it's experience in our view that with these climate shocks, that's in a sense the biggest thing that motivates changes and beliefs. Because most people don't want to believe in this, right? I mean, if you really ask everybody in this room, do you really want to believe in climate change the way it's going, do you want to believe in global warming? Do you want to believe it's going to do all these horrible things? No, but you know, we've read the science, so we, you know, tend to believe it. But if you've, if you're sort of, I think the average person, they don't want to believe these things, they don't want to think these things. But when they get hit by these climate shocks, they start, they start believing these things and it changes behavior and it changes minds. So you know, other people say, well, it's really elites and politicians and they control the narrative and they control what everybody thinks. We looked at some of those, we tried to look at some of the political factors, like if you're on the left or on the right, does it really matter? At least in the south, we didn't find evidence of that very strongly. And in the north you do find evidence of it and you certainly see it nowadays, right, In Europe. Right. I mean, the far right is gaining in part because of their anti mitigation law policy, because of their anti climate change policies. So it's not clear to me that this isn't political economy and it's not clear that this doesn't integrate a lot of things that are really important and not that simplistic about what's going on in the world with global warming.
- [71:58]
B
Question over here.
- [72:00]
H
Hi, thank you very much, Helen, for a very interesting lecture. My name is Anton and I'm a citizen of the global North. I'm interested in mitigation. And one of the things I do worry about is the fact, as you said, people will go home, they'll forget about it. They won't really think about the fact that it's going to affect us in the future because we live in the now. We try and focus on getting paycheck to paycheck and people don't have time or the mental capacity to think about this. If you could have one piece of advice for everyone in the room here, what would you say to us to help steer the conversation in the right direction to take action?
- [72:37]
A
That's interesting. I mean, I guess in some ways I kind of turn to, you know, think about ways in which you can maybe push the green energy revolution forward. Maybe don't think about the background bad things, right? Think about technological innovation, think about new solutions, work with scientists, work with governments to try and innovate to deal with some of these problems. You know, I think other people would say, oh, you know, convince your neighbor that climate change is a serious problem. Well, I don't think you're going to convince your neighbor unless your neighbor has experiences with climate, bad climate shocks, maybe then he or she will listen. But otherwise, like you say, they're busy worried about their next paycheck. So in some sense, I think it's the focus on, at least for many people in the north, the focus on technological innovation, the new green economy, the electricity stack. In some sense, you know, how can you, how can you push these things forward? I mean, buy an ev, probably going to be Chinese EV these days, but that's one way I was also interested, I don't know if I guess many of you live here. I was told that there are no fast chargers in central London because the British government says that they're a safety hazard. Is this really true? No. There are slow chargers everywhere. Level two Chargers. But are there fast Chargers and Central One?
- [74:10]
I
Yeah.
- [74:11]
A
Okay, so the guy who's driving the EV doesn't know what he's talking about.
- [74:18]
I
Yeah, Just to one, one, quickly. How would you respond to Bill Gates and his open letter about Cop 30?
- [74:27]
A
How?
- [74:28]
I
What? Respond to Bill Gates in his open letter about climate change.
- [74:33]
B
So the audience is on the same page. You want to summarize that briefly, Mary? Sorry, do you want to summarize the letter briefly, Mary, for the audience?
- [74:40]
I
Yes. Okay. Briefly. Yeah. So the letter was he posted last week, if anyone else is familiar, and basically he was trying to say that we spend too much money on climate, fighting climate change, because there are other issues that are more important, such as poverty and disease. And very explicitly that we are spending too much time, too much money on trying to fight climate change when it will not, and I think I'm directly quoting, it won't be our demise for most of humanity, he says. And so it seemed the commentary has, has been that it's kind of, it was this veiled message to Trump to say, you know, we're embracing kind of your line on things. But it's, I mean, unfortunately, he's, he's Bill Gates and his word matters. But then there's been some reactions. So I think I'm thinking of Monbio, who in the Guardian responded that, okay, the one thing that he's forgetting is politics. Politics exist and there's vested interests and across the spectrum of different industries and politicians. And how do we square?
- [75:49]
A
How do we.
- [75:50]
I
I mean, when I read this letter, I was thinking, oh, God, what am I doing? How can we continue to push for this when one of the world's most influential, not only business people, but innovators, seem to be someone so on the frontier of also very wrong on a lot of different things. But people often tend to forget that about billionaires. But so how would you, as someone who holds a very important position of power in this, this discourse, how would you respond to that?
- [76:23]
A
I mean, one of the things I would do is look at where he's putting his money. He's still in this innovation fund, this green innovation fund. He's still putting a lot of money into that. So I think the statement was driven by fear of Trump and sort of politics, as you say. And I think that if you look at where he's actually continuing to put, put his money, it's in innovation and it's in the green energy, you know, the renewables area, but also still in fossil fuels.
- [76:53]
I
They're still getting a lot of Money from fossil fuels, even though they said they didn't. So it's a bit tricky.
- [77:05]
A
Miriam, Hi.
- [77:06]
D
Thank you for a very interesting presentation. My name is Miriam Paul, based at University College London. And I was wondering about the Arctic as a region that seems to me perhaps vulnerable in different ways from the rest of your northern portion, in the sense that melting permafrost is causing huge problems for infrastructure. And so maybe, if, even if in the sort of medium to long term, maybe there will be benefits and opportunities caused by global warming in the shorter time horizon. It strikes me as a region that is actually quite vulnerable. Did you sort of consider that there might be sub regions within these fault lines or just sort of, what do you think about potentially the Arctic, as. Do you think it is behaving the same way as the rest of the north?
- [78:08]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. I know there are, in a sense, different processes going on up in the Arctic, but on the other hand, it is getting warmer, it is getting more habitable, more people can sort of live there, more people can, you know, spend time there doing things. Businesses may be more interested in those kinds of areas. So I think, on balance, at least what some of the economists think is that those regions may benefit in the next, you know, 20 to 25 year kind of period from all of this. And you certainly see trade starting to flow across the north up there. So, yeah, I'm not a geoscientist, so I don't know all the processes that people think are going to affect the Arctic, but I think from what they've looked at, they think there are going to be some benefits, at least to global warming. I mean, I was just reading this article about China, actually. There's kind of a new metric that people have been looking at called outdoor days, which is the number of days in a region that are between like 55 and 70. I don't know what that is. Celsius, but. And those are the days that public people go outside and not freeze and not fry, and they want to go outside and they want to do activities outside. And in the north of China, those outdoor days have been increasing. And the south of China, they've been decreasing kind of along our lines, which means that up in the north, which used to be very cold, now China, the northern part of China, is not the Arctic. But my point is that if you extend that argument, they didn't look at Mongolia and they didn't look at Siberia and things like this, but if you extend that argument, you would see probably more outdoor days up there. Where people could actually be outside doing things. And maybe that makes the, the area in a sense, more habitable and more productive.
- [80:13]
J
Well, I think today was not an outdoor day in London, but I'm Kathy Hostelder, I'm a professor here at the Department of International Development at lse and I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned several times kind of in passing in your talk. It's not what you actually have evidence on, but I don't think anyone will disagree with you that many of the countries in the global south are ones that have fewer resources, less, less capacity to act in many cases. And I'm wondering if you can put it together with some of the data that you do have. Because when I think of your argument, your broader argument that says these climate impacts come, people become increasingly demanding of action. At least one of the scenarios that one can easily imagine is that there's a demand for action, maybe there's even a climate change law, but there's not actually meaningful response to climate. There's not capacity for really responding to a growing demand for action. And as I say, I know that this is, I think this is probably a bit outside of what you were focusing on, but I wonder if you have any insights from your individual responses about how popular then to respond to that. It seems at least it could create quite a bit of frustration. It could be migration. Is there anything in your data that provides insight on those kinds of scenarios?
- [81:40]
A
Yeah, so all the analysis we do kind of controls for countries, GDP per capita and economic growth. So we're sort of saying if you control for those things, the countries in the south are doing more than the, the countries in the north, even controlling for these very big, big differences. So, and in some of the work we do, it's within countries. So we're looking at like what has happened in Pakistan over the past 25 years. So you're not controlling. You know, Pakistan has grown and not grown in 25 years. Right. It's had different sort of trajectories as many of these countries in the south have. But it's sort of asking as they get hit by these climate shocks, what are they doing? And you do see this action and you do, I guess, you know, the Granum Institute with these climate laws, people have looked at these and are they associated with emissions changes? And they actually do seem to be associated with emissions declines. So it's not as if these things aren't doing anything and are just kind of, you know, greenwashing. They do seem to be doing things in terms of what publics can do. I mean, what publics, I think in the north did was they turned to green parties or parties that were willing to offer platforms that involve mitigation and mitigation policies and green transition policies and things like this. So if, at least in democracies, if countries, if governments and parties do offer these things, they may get more people sort of streaming to them. And even in China, where it's clearly not democratic, when you had this massive pollution in Peking, the government responded over time. And there's some papers by some former Princeton graduate students that basically show the government responded. They realized it was a cause for concern and social instability that they wanted to nip in the bud. And they've done quite a bit to, in a sense, you know, abate pollution, at least in the big cities. Now they moved everything out, so they're polluting more. It's just not in the center of Beijing. But yeah, and I think, you know, you see in India right now, people out in the streets demanding the government do something because, you know, pollution is killing them. And so I think public pressure and pressure from firms and things like this can, can push governments to do things. They won't always do it well, but that's true in the north too, right?
- [84:10]
B
Okay, so we have a question over there.
- [84:12]
C
Hi, thank you for the talk. Very interesting. I'm Maxime Paziot. I'm a student at Northeastern University London in digital politics and sustainable development. And I'm also facilitator of a workshop which educates about climate change. It's called Climate Risk. And we have different phases in the workshop and the action part, which is the final one, would you say that the most impactful for someone who comes to this workshop will be to understand the risk or the incentive of changing? So mitigation or adaptation, what would be the best way for someone participating into a workshop to understand and act unchanging?
- [84:53]
A
The best way to understand.
- [84:56]
C
The best way for someone to step to change would it be for them to understand the risk or understand the incentive of changing?
- [85:05]
B
So let me rephrase this question a bit, right? Because a lot of the communication for the past decade or two decades about climate change has been doom and gloom, right? It's been a lot of like, these are severe risks, these are the things that will happen. This is how the earth is going to change, and these are the negative consequences. But in contrast, and maybe this is kind of the point that brought up is actually, is there something to be focusing on? What are behavioral changes that can actually have Monetary payoffs or actual instrumental payoffs and incentives to actually move things forward and focus on those things, co benefits, for example, rather than just simply we're at risk from climate change.
- [85:45]
A
Yes. So again, in the less vulnerable areas, the focus on risk, I think doesn't work. And our argument would be that it really doesn't work. It's only going to work if you're in a more vulnerable area and you're getting hit by these climate shocks. And then the question is, when you're getting hit by these climate shocks, what are you going to do about the shock that you're facing right now, which is probably an adaptation question, and then what are you going to do, you know. You know, to, in a sense, to address the risk in the future of more of these climate shocks. And that may be more of a mitigation kind of question or a geoengineering question. I mean, one of the ways we end the book is to say, look, the South's best options may be unilateral geoengineering. And that's very scary because, you know, we're not sure what that's going to do to anybody. And if, you know, India starts messing with the, its atmosphere, which is not going to stay over India, it's going to move, you know, is Pakistan going to see it as trying to attack it? We don't know, you know, or is it China going to see it as trying to attack it? So, you know, geoengineering is a possibility and one that at a unilateral level may be very tempting for some countries. I mean, India's trying it right now at a very local level. But, you know, you could imagine as things get worse and worse, this becomes more of an option. So, you know, again, I think that thinking about these climate shocks and what you're going to do about them may be one of the ways that people deal with these things, emphasizing the risk. And I think this gets back to the Gates point. I think one of the things he was saying really was, you know, we're not all going to die tomorrow because of this. And so this existential kind of narrative that's gone around, it's not very helpful. And I think in the global north, that's probably true for many in the global South. It is existential. And so it's two different situations and two different narratives are probably going to work in those places.
- [87:51]
B
Okay, so is it is now 8pm which means that the events here have to end. I want to thank Helen again for a really fascinating talk and I want to also thank everyone who asked the question to have a really thought provoking discussion. And of course this could always continue longer and longer, but we can continue a little longer outside in the foyer. So please do join us and discuss more about this issue. Take care everyone.
- [88:20]
E
Great.
- [88:20]
A
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