Integrity in the context of the climate emergency

Making choices as a young professional

‘One of the real dangers of being brilliant, sensitive young people who hear the climate tock ticking loudly is the danger of taking on too much. Which is another manifestation of that inflated sense of our own self-importance.’

Naomi Klein.

‘We don’t have time to grow up and make an impact — it will be too late.’

Greta Thunberg.

How much is enough when our house is on fire?

You know the drill (or rather the science). While there remains some uncertainty about the details, scientific consensus is clear. The world has already warmed around one degree celsius from pre-industrial levels. Even if we collectively fulfil the commitments made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world will be on average 3.7 degrees warmer by 2100.¹ If we don’t fulfil registered commitments (which is where we’re currently at), we can expect warming of 4–5 degrees.¹ The consequences of a 3 degrees warmer world are bleak, with mass extinctions and entire regions of the world becoming uninhabitable. Some argue that this level of warming will lead to civilizational collapse due to extreme weather conditions and the simultaneous collapse in harvests across the world. Others point to the social conflicts likely to be created by mass migration.² The difference between a warming of 1.5 and 2 degrees is significant, with extreme heat estimated to be 2.6x worse at 2 degrees, species loss 2–3x worse, certain crop yields more than 2x worse and so on.³ Keeping average global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees is considered the only way the world can avoid preventing ‘runaway climate change’, whereby sea level rise, warming and associated consequences become locked into viciously self-amplifying and irreversible cycles.⁴

We’re far from on track. The October 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explained that we had a carbon budget of 420 gigatonnes in order to have a 66% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees of global warming.⁵ We’ve now exceeded 300 gigatonnes, and, should business-as-usual emissions continue, will have surpassed this in less than 7 years.⁵ To have a 50% chance of success at staying within 1.5 degrees, global emissions need to half by 2030, half again by 2040 and reach zero by 2050.¹

There is a climate emergency, and a dire lack of leadership driving adequate response. ‘Enough’ is not happening.

The below explores how one individual might consider what ‘doing enough’ in the context of the climate emergency might look like for their own life. It is based on my own feelings, experiences, and decision-making processes. The hope is that it might help like-minded others reconcile their own drive to contribute solutions to a problem — where ‘enough’ feels close to impossible — with other hopes and dreams, and thereby move away from the somewhat self-destructive ‘nothing is enough’ narrative.

The reason for this exploration is, quite simply, the desire to be happy. A good friend of mine lives by the mantra

“You do enough. You have enough. You are enough.”

It sounds lovely. The issue is that doing the recycling is not ‘enough’. It will not result in the global halving of emissions by 2030. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked hard to align my lifestyle with changes I believe to be necessary: I’ve chosen a career supporting businesses to embed sustainability, changed my consumer habits and taken part in civil disobedience. Simultaneously, I’ve never quite become a reliable vegetarian, the thought of never getting on a plane again is downright sad, and, as I enter my mid twenties, I’m beginning to think harder about my financial priorities and other things trying to be an adult entails.

So there are two issues:

• My existing efforts to date feel wildly insufficient given the scale of the climate emergency.
• I’m unsure how to balance the pursuit of climate action along with other life priorities.

These pose the question, what should one individual reasonably expect of themselves? What is integrity in the context of the climate emergency?

What is integrity?

In ordinary circumstances, a life of integrity is a life lived aligned with one’s values. My values include the effective pursuit of justice, being a bit wild, and having a sense of inner calm. In any ‘normal’ situation, I make decisions by weighing options up against these and other core values. But, given the urgency of the climate emergency, it seems worth challenging this approach.

Is the climate emergency such a distinct problem that this definition of integrity is no longer valid?

80,000 hours, a website helping people maximise their careers for positive impact, highlights that the climate emergency poses an existential risk to human civilization. Yet artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies also pose such a threat. My personal motivating factor to work on climate change is not the fundamental risk to humanity as a species, but rather that it will exacerbate existing inequalities in the process. For example, the impact of temperature rise will be far more dramatic in the world’s poorest countries, imposing critical challenges ranging from economic decline to the destruction of entire communities and vast premature deaths. All while Elon Musk and his buddies successfully space-ship away into the sunset (or space equivalent). Rising temperatures will also result in the extinction of entire species. The idea of so much biodiversity being destroyed by fires, floods and drought, even if plants do not feel the pain, and animals are not aware of the decline of their whole species, is devastating. Yet again, it is humans’ sense of superiority and separateness from nature driving them to wipe out vast swathes of it that seems so unjust. I am motivated to pursue climate solutions because it is the greatest inter-species, international and intergenerational justice issue of our time — not because it presents an existential threat to humanity or the world as we know it. Therefore, the climate emergency is not a reason not to live in line with my values, so the definition of integrity holds.

What does the effective pursuit of justice look like? Does ‘effectiveness’ look different for the climate emergency compared with other challenges?

A challenge in pursuing effectiveness through one’s career as a young professional (lacking experience, connections, respect, decision-making power compared with the elders in the workplace) is that the climate emergency is fundamentally distinct from other justice issues: the presence of tipping points escalates the urgency and scale of imminently required action. Tipping points are the thresholds beyond which certain impacts can no longer be avoided, whereby negative impacts become irreversible and self-reinforcing.⁶ For example, two Western Antarctic ice sheets, linchpins for the West Antarctic ice sheet as a whole, have already retreated to the point where further retreat is unstoppable. As the glacier ice shrinks, white ice is replaced by the sea, which absorbs more heat; decreased reflectivity results in more warming and rising temperatures; this increases the rate at which Arctic ice melts, creating a worsening cycle.⁶ As per the IPCC’s 2018 report, preventing the surpassing of tipping points requires “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” As such, ‘We don’t have time to grow up and make an impact — it will be too late.’

While other global challenges such as poverty or a lack of access to education are rooted in structural injustice, there are no other issues which require such urgent action, at vast scale, to prevent locking in exponentially worse impacts for young and future generations. Climate change also suffers from the ‘tragedy of the horizon’,⁴ the fact that present rather than future issues are prioritised by voters and politicians alike: impacts of policies will come to fruition decades later (outwith the lives of many voters), and globally (rather than within the geographies of those who voted for them). Would we drop tools to comply with lockdown restrictions to save the NHS and our children’s children of 2070? This further adds to the unique complexity of the challenge, but the fact remains: the effective pursuit of justice, in the context of the climate emergency, is urgent change.

Concluding thoughts

There is a climate emergency, and the scientifically defined ‘enough’ to give the earth a 50% chance of staying within 1.5 degrees — halving global emissions by 2030 — isn’t currently looking likely. With this overwhelming global reality, defining ‘enough’ for one individual is extremely challenging. Yet climate change is not a unique for the existential risk it poses to human civilization or the earth itself. Rather, it poses a threat to my own values. This implies that even monumental challenges such as the climate emergency do not fundamentally change what integrity means: living a life in line with one’s values. In this case, incorporating other values into one's life choices such as financial security, adventure etc., seems perfectly reasonable. Having said that, one should bear in mind Anand Giridharadas’s book Winners take all, which argues that those with power and privilege all too quickly suggest ‘win-win’ solutions which maintain existing power imbalances, at the expense of real justice. As such, deciding that one wants to balance the ‘pursuit of justice’ with ‘a sense of adventure’ or ‘wealth’ is fundamentally a privilege, and an active choice not to give more up.

For myself — and perhaps many others — effectiveness is another challenging value to live by. Climate change poses a unique threat to the pursuit of a fairer world because we are terrifyingly close to crossing the tipping points which will lead to runaway climate change. Therefore, the typical approach of using one’s early stage career to lay professional foundations, before eventually going on to use accumulated resources such as connections, finance, expertise, experience, respect etc., doesn’t cut it: it will be too late to prevent the locking in of the worst impacts. Naomi Klein, as part of an address to graduates said,

“The hard truth is that the answer to the question ‘What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?’ is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is complete nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.”⁷

Perhaps, therefore, reflecting on how to maximises one’s individual effectiveness is the wrong question. Perhaps a better alternative is what makes young professionals uniquely placed to effectively pursue climate justice — together? To do so, we need to maximise our impact both in the short term — which is when it really matters to prevent the worst impacts — as well as over the long-term — which is when our experience, skills and the professional foundations we lay in the next few years will bear their fruits. Tbd: whether there is a way to reconcile the two.

Sources

1. Figueres, Christiana & Tom Rivett-Carnac (2020) The Future We Choose, Bonnier Books (see website for further reading https://globaloptimism.com/the-future-we-choose/).
2. Wallace-Wells, David (2019) An Uninhabitable Earth, New York, Tim Duggan Books.
3. Levin, Kelly (2018) World Resources Institute ‘Half a Degree and a World Apart: The Difference in Climate Impacts Between 1.5˚C and 2˚C of Warming’, (available online https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/half-degree-and-world-apart-difference-climate-impacts-between-15-c-and-2-c-warming).
4. Porritt, Jonathon (2020) Hope in Hell, Simon & Schuster.
5. Hausfather, Zeke, (2018) Carbon Brief ‘Analysis: Why the IPCC 1.5C report expanded the carbon budget’ (available online https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-report-expanded-the-carbon-budget).
6. Carbon Brief, ‘Explainer: Nine ‘tipping points’ that could be triggered by climate change’ (available online https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change).
7. Klein, Naomi (2020) On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, Allen Lane.