Climate Change Tipping Points Conference
First Take: News in Context.
The second Global Tipping Points conference was held recently, and their second report will be coming out sometime this year.1
To put this Tipping Points Conference and reports in context, let me explain why tipping points in nature are important to our vision, purpose and Major Goal, which is: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
First, given our call for justice, a quick reminder. The three actions of justice are to: (1) stop bad stuff; (2) set wrong right, and; (3) make things better.
In the climate space stopping bad stuff or climate impacts means keeping warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, or with minimal overshoot that is quickly brought back down; we then continue to reduce beyond 1.5C to a level that is natural for our time.
How we do this, by significantly reducing climate pollution or greenhouse gasses, should simultaneously do the other two actions of justice — set wrong right and make things better. Our job is to make sure we do all three, and not just the first one, important and essential as it is.
Where do tipping points come in? Let me quote from an earlier post of mine:
When people are tempted to despair it is because they aren’t sure we can stop the bad stuff in time to avoid the really bad consequences, the run-away, tipping-point consequences, the ones that will turn our planet into something outside the range of human experience.
We need to understand the danger of tipping points in nature so we are motivated to stay as far away from them as possible.
We need to understand the danger of tipping points in nature so we are motivated to stay as far away from them as possible.
Every step away from major tipping points in nature is a step towards justice, which in turn creates hope, a hope that powers achieving more justice.
Three Reasons for Gratitude
Given this, I’m quite grateful for these tipping point conferences and reports for three reasons.
First and foremost, we very much need the scientists to do their jobs and help us understand the threats tipping points in nature pose precisely so that we prevent them from happening. This by itself is a strategic contribution worthy of their time and talents.
Realistic hope and the action that springs from it can only arise from a clear-eyed understanding of the threat.
Second, I’m also glad to see discussions of “positive tipping points.” They are using the scientific concept as a metaphor to describe what can and needs to happen in human society. At this point — because the idea appears to be still evolving — it seems to have overlap with other concepts, including more broadly what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” as well as the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of “social transformation,” and more specifically “disruptive technologies.”
According to the Conference Statement, positive tipping points “generate self-propelling change in technologies and behaviours towards zero emissions.” As one of the chief organizers, Johan Rockstrom, explained to Carbon Brief, positive tipping points are: “‘social transformations’ that generate ‘feedbacks that are self-enforcing’, making them difficult to reverse.”
As Carbon Brief reported:
Examples of these social transformations that featured in plenaries and research sessions included the rapid rollout of EVs in Norway, tree-planting schemes in Uganda, investments in “regenerative” cotton farming and the falling costs and rising adoption of solar energy around the world.
Conceptually, just like negative tipping points in nature, once a positive tipping point is reached, its momentum transforms everything in its path creating the type of systemic change needed to stop the bad stuff, i.e. climate impacts driven by global warming caused by human-caused climate pollution or greenhouse gases.
It is important to note that if a positive tipping point is driven primarily by disruptive technologies, then the other two actions of justice, setting wrong right and making things better for everyone and everything, are not assured.
That’s why, third, I’m also grateful for their tag line: “accelerating action for a socially just transformation.” It sounds good. We want and need to do both of those things.
Three Concerns
And now for my concerns.
First, their negative tipping points work is a positive and strategic contribution that only a very few people can make. For the scientists working in this area, this is their field of climate action. I would hate to see this overshadowed by “positive tipping points” or for the latter to take time and energy from the former.
This may sound strange coming from the hope-guy. But as I said above and elsewhere, the hope we need is realistic hope, grounded in a sober understanding of the threat. The Climate Movement will only become what it needs to be, the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world, the indispensable driving force for achieving our vision, if we have a clear-eyed grasp of the challenge. Ours is the great moral cause of our time precisely because of the terrible consequences if we don’t act, combined with the better, more just world if we come together to make it so. It is one of the greatest choices for good or ill in the history of humanity. We need to understand the bad so we can create the good.
Second, the “positive tipping points” metaphor could lead us astray if we’re not careful. Metaphors are not clones of their referents. Shakespeare didn’t say “All the stage is a stage.” He said: “All the world’s a stage.” Some parts line up or fit; other parts don’t. It’s the parts that don’t fit that can get us into trouble.
Unfortunately, there are instances where this metaphor about what can happen in nature, i.e., a sudden major irreversible change, doesn’t quite fit what happens in society.
In the US, many of us thought that once the (poorly named) Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the major climate legislation of the Biden years, was passed and started to create benefits it would create business/consumer constituencies that would protect its provisions. But that didn’t stop Mr. Trump and MAGA Republicans from repealing it.
One could argue that the IRA hadn’t had enough time to help create positive tipping points. So yea, we could spend precious time and energy arguing about that.
My real concern with this metaphor is this: I don’t want Climate Movement Members, Climate Action Supporters and allies to think that once we reach what is perceived to be a positive tipping point that we’re done because what we want to have happen is inexorable, a positive version of fate.
The truth is we don’t know what the future will bring, including political backlashes and outright stupidity combined with arrogance.
I don’t want the Climate Movement, Climate Action Supporters and allies to think that once we reach what is perceived to be a positive tipping point that we’re done.
Furthermore, the idea contained in this metaphor may reflect how certain technologies that become “general purpose technologies” can reshape society and create what in hindsight appears unstoppable.
But on their own such transformations don’t create justice. They won’t automatically do what the Conference Statement calls for, “accelerating action for a socially just transformation.” We must work to have them help us do the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better.
Third, the Conference Statement has two basic calls for action:
for government to do its job, and
“to catalyse collective action from civil society.”
To put it bluntly: calls for the government to do what’s needed without the people-power to push them is a mirage.
But isn’t the Conference Statement calling for people-power? Here is what it says:
We also support the Global Mutirão initiative to catalyse collective action from civil society to help trigger positive tipping points to achieve common climate goals.
One of the speakers/panelists at the Conference was Tulio Andrade, who Carbon Brief described as the “chief strategy and alignment officer for the COP30 presidency.” He explicitly linked the concepts of global mutirão with “positive tipping points.”
The global mutirão is about inviting people to think about who they are and what they can offer. It is also about designing potential positive tipping points. Because if we have different initiatives that are self-organised, we can integrate those local initiatives in a global framework.
I do think positive outcomes can come from a Global Mutirão if it gains momentum.2 And there’s nothing wrong with government officials and politicians suggesting they need public support.
But my worries for this call for a global mutirão are two-fold.
First, given that this is from the head of this year’s international climate negotiations, does this lower the bar for what the negotiators can achieve with the political will that already exists, outsourcing needed progress to the Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters? In short, has he already thrown in the towel?
Second, governments still have to do their jobs; they must do their jobs.
The Climate Movement Must Not Be Tamed
The most strategic thing we can be doing right now is growing and improving the Climate Movement to keep us moving forward at the speed and scale needed and defend our advances from arrogance, stupidity, and greed. It is one of the two strategic fields of action upon which all Climate Movement’s Member/Athletes must be engaged. And what is the other strategic field of action for all of us? Push policymakers and governments to do their most basic job: protect their citizens and establish justice.
As such I am in complete agreement with calls for people to “self-organize.” But not as a replacement for government failure. Just like the “carbon footprint” scam for individuals,3 voluntary efforts by groups to do mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency themselves will never have us overcome climate change. The speed and scale of the changes needed are just too great.
That said, such voluntary efforts can be very important for growing and improving the Climate Movement. That is their strategic import.
One of the things the Climate Movement must do is balance organic and strategic change. As I have discussed briefly before and will do so more fully in the future, organic change is curvy, messy and non-linear, like nature. It doesn’t arise out of a strategic plan. It flows out of two of our Movement Values, freedom and creativity, and the unique, never-before-seen mixture of peoples working together in a potpourri of social entities such as self-organized Climate Action Teams.
The descriptions of a global mutirão have similarities with organic change. We need organic change.
But if organic change, or if what proponents mean by a global mutirão, isn’t combined with strategic change it can become self-indulgent, ineffectual, and even counterproductive.
Our role is not to be simply a compliment to what governments and the international talks are doing. Our role is to push them. We must not be tamed.
Our role as the Climate Movement is not to be simply a compliment to what governments and the international negotiations are doing.
Our role is to push them to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Again, speed and scale and the climate-clock demands that we do this. If an end result of global mutirão would be to tame us, then, we must say no.
The international negotiations are crucial and those involved must do their jobs. But, again, the most important thing right now and for the foreseeable future is to grow and improve an untamable Climate Movement. We are indispensable for making the other three of the Catalytic-4 work together to find strategic synergies. If calls for a global mutirão help us do that, great!
Where’s the hope in all this? Together, we are the hope, a hope that will not be tamed. Join us!
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I will have more to say about Global Mutirão and the Climate Movement in a forthcoming post.
In a future post I will explain why the “carbon footprint” is a scam.