Dr. Stefan Schäfer is a Research Group Leader at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), and maintains fellowships at Harvard University's Program on Science, Technology and Society and at the University of Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. He received training in Political Science, History, and Philosophy at Unversity of Tübingen and Cornell University and holds a PhD in International Relations from Freie Universität Berlin. His research draws on approaches from Science and Technology Studies to develop new questions about the intersection of democratic politics, sustainability science, and global governance. His interest is in understanding how political and environmental problems are framed, how solutions come to seem plausible or implausible, what the shortfalls and blind spots of dominant imaginaries and practices are, and what alternatives exist. He will be a Guest Professor in the University of Vienna's Department of Science and Technology Studies in spring 2020.
In this episode, we'll be discussing the Paris Climate Agreement, the world’s most recent comprehensive agreement on targets and goals for emissions reductions. Is there room for hope? Are we on track to meet the goals set out by the Paris Agreement? All that and more below.
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Guest: Dr. Stefan Schäfer
Hosts: Matthew Brune and Georgie Stammer
Producers: Matthew Brune and Georgie Stammer
Audio Engineer: Aimi Wen
Music: What u thinkin by Wataboi
TRANSCRIPT
OBAMA: The result was the Paris Agreement. Last month, the United States and China, the world's two largest economies and largest emitters, formally joined that agreement together.
TRUMP: The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
BIDEN: That's why, as President I immediately rejoined the Paris Agreement. And as of today, the United States is officially once again a party to the Paris agreement which we have put together.
MATTHEW: From Obama, to Trump to Biden, the United States has had a roller coaster experience with the Paris Climate Agreement. Why is the agreement so complex? Let's break it down.
KATHERINE: Hey, welcome to the Operation Climate podcast made by young people for young people, where we break down environmental issues through conversations with cool people.
GEORGIE: Hello, I'm Georgie, and I'm joined today by my co host, Matthew. So Matthew, what actually is the Paris Climate Agreement.
MATTHEW: So the Paris Climate Agreement, also known as the Paris Climate Accord, is one of the largest international climate agreements today. It was signed in 2016, and the agreement allows individual countries to pledge their own nationally determined contributions, or NDCs for the collective goal of minimizing temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. These nationally determined contributions gave countries a way to individually create their own targets for reducing their emissions by a certain date, and even improve on those goals, much like the ones that Britain and the United States have done this April in improving their NDC contributions. But all of this seems a little bit distant. So why does it matter to us?
GEORGIE: Well, this is basically our last shot. To preserve the earth and our current way of living, we need to work together globally to reduce emissions and limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. With the support of 189 countries, the Paris Agreement has the potential to be immensely impactful and make the changes that are needed to sustain our planet.
MATTHEW: So to investigate the ins and outs of the Paris Climate Agreement, today we'll talk to Stefan Schaffer, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies at Potsdam, Germany. He has appointments at Oxford, Harvard and the University of Vienna, and is a specialist in democratic politics and climate change. Let's dive in.
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Dr. Stefan Schäfer, thank you so much for joining us today.
SCHÄFER: Well, thank you for having me.
MATTHEW: Would you mind telling us a bit of your backstory and how you became involved in climate research?
SCHÄFER: I've actually encountered the topic of climate geoengineering first, when I was still a PhD student working with a professor at the time. My background is in international relations, and the professor I was working with was my supervisor. He was invited by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in Germany, to author a study on the politics of climate engineering. And so he recruited me to help him with that study. And that's how I came to work on first climate geoengineering, and then more broadly, also climate change.
MATTHEW: Great. So this season on Operation Climate, we're talking about carbon neutrality goals. So I'd like to ask first off, do you see room for hope in cutting emissions and mitigating climate change?
SCHÄFER: Oh, yes, absolutely. I think there is, of course, much happening in terms of trying to reduce emissions. Of course, the question is, I guess what you're trying to get at? Is that enough, right? Is it going to be enough to achieve these very ambitious goals that have been set out, for example, in the Paris Climate Agreement, right, with its 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius corridor of warming, that ideally should not be surpassed? And there indeed, that's where I then perhaps become a little skeptical of whether that is an achievable goal. But in general, I'd say yes, I mean, not just in terms of reducing emissions, but in terms of responding to climate change, in a broader sense, perhaps, you know, including ways of adapting to climate change. I think a lot can be done and is being done.
MATTHEW: So you just recently co-authored a brief article last year, or two years ago in 2019, in the journal Science entitled, “The Promises and Perils of the Paris Agreement.” Can you kind of take our listeners through some of these positives and negatives of the Paris agreement?
SCHÄFER: Sure; well the Paris Agreement is a huge diplomatic achievement in international climate politics after the 2009 disappointment in Copenhagen, 2015 in Paris is really when states came together and managed to agree on some very important matters concerning climate change. So the promise, I think, specifically for me, and the way in which we approach it in this article in Science that you mentioned, is that in Paris, a sense of handing back down to nation-states the authority for developing strategies to mitigate climate change to reduce their emissions. These are the so-called nationally determined contributions, which are voluntary targets that states submit that they promised to work towards achieving and that I think, is an advance over centrally negotiated binding targets approach that dominated climate politics before. The perils on the other hand are that this, indeed may not in the calculations that currently dominate how we think about climate change, these voluntary contributions may not add up in the end to the ambitious targets to the CO2 budgets that one would have to stay in to limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.
GEORGIE: Just to highlight the main points of Dr. Schäfer answers so far, climate politics is not just about reducing carbon emissions, but also adapting to climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement, the lack of a central authority is both a positive and a negative. Countries can set goals that are attainable for themselves. But this also means that these voluntary contributions, also known as NDCs, may not be enough to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement.
MATTHEW: Going along with this Paris Agreement, some say that the structure of allowing nations to voluntarily commit their NDCs or nationally determined contributions allows them to slack off; that they get the freedom of choosing their own timeline for reducing emissions. What would you say about that?
SCHÄFER: Well it's correct, if you think about it from the standpoint of a central authority that would determine what the appropriate thing to do is, what the appropriate level of ambition is. If you kind of have that imaginary, kind of global policymaker global steering approach in mind as the best way of organizing a political response to climate change. And, of course, the Paris Agreement approach, which is much more decentralized, falls short. But I think, you know, we also have to think about what realistic pathways are for achieving some kind of common response to climate change, and to say, you know, there is a shared agreement that there should be some level of ambition involved in developing responses, and we should continually kind of try and be more ambitious, and you know, submit our plans under the Paris Agreement, and we should know, kind of monitor our progress, then that I think, is perhaps a more realistic approach than to say, you know, kind of a top-down steering approach, where we say, this is what you have to achieve, if you don’t achieve then you have failed. There's not enough being done. So in that sense. Yes, of course, if you think about it from that centralized perspective, it falls short. But I think from a political perspective of what can in fact be achieved and how, then I think it has a lot of advantages.
GEORGIE: Like he said, The Paris Agreement doesn't have any centralized governing body. However, that's not to say that it won't get things done, as there's a lot of political weight and influence that can be important within the agreement. For example, the United States, being a part of the agreement is huge, as they're the second largest emitter worldwide, and the US is such a large part of the global economy, that they have a large pool of agreements like this, and thus, the US being a part of the agreement sends a message to other countries about the importance of it, and really helps to enforce the goals that the Paris Agreement aims for.
MATTHEW: Now, we're talking about a decentralized agreement in the Paris Climate Agreement, like Georgie was saying, but there are some central organizations that surround climate politics. Those are the UNFCCC, and the IPCC. These are organizations that we heard of in the episode with Dr. Shindell, when he talked about his time serving with the IPCC. And today we talked to Dr. Schaefer, more about how these organizations can play a role specifically within climate governance.
SCHÄFER: Of the two that you mentioned, the IPCC is the slightly older institution that was founded in 1988; it is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It has since 1990, when it published its first assessment report, published a series of assessment reports several years apart, and sometimes also special reports. And what the IPCC was mandated to do is to compile the state of the art, on climate science and the impacts of climate change and possible response options to make them accessible to the public and to policymakers. And the idea has always been that this would then inform the negotiations, especially the UNFCCC, that you mentioned, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed in 1992. And that is the institution in which states come together to negotiate about climate change, and there's always been a strong divide between different interest groups or different states that have different interests involved in climate politics.
MATTHEW: As Dr. Schaefer mentioned, the IPCC puts out regular assessment reports, just last week, they released the Assessment Report 6, and the outlook is bleak. We're not reaching the targets that we need to. So there may be other options to resort to in addition to simply mitigation. Let's hear what Dr. SCHÄFER had to say.
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We've also talked about negative emissions technologies throughout the season on Operation Climate, as in your article, our current forecasts rely on these technologies to hit 1.5 and 2 degree targets. And these technologies aren't yet even proven to work on a large scale. What do you think about our current reliance on technological advances to meet these 1.5 and 2 degree goals?
SCHÄFER: More generally, perhaps, imagined future technological change or sinking costs, lower costs for technologies have always been a part of constructing scenarios of future climate change, and how to meet future climate change targets. So in that sense, negative emissions technologies are not necessarily new. But it's particularly interesting, because they've allowed for a kind of a conceptual change in how we imagine the future of climate change. Because until negative emissions technologies were introduced on this large scale that you mentioned, the idea was always of course, that emissions would simply have to be reduced to zero by everyone so that climate change can be limited. And, you know, that involves also imagining all sorts of future technologies and changes in behavior. These are all assumptions that modelers make to devise pathways or scenarios for how climate change can be limited in the future with negative emissions, the conceptual change is that you can now imagine that perhaps not everyone would have to reduce their emissions to zero because if some begin taking emissions out of the atmosphere, CO2 out of the atmosphere, that would mean that if that is done on a sufficiently large scale, that elsewhere, CO2 could perhaps still be emitted. And that creates a whole new terrain that politics has to navigate now, of assigning, you know, who would be taking out how much CO2 out of the atmosphere and who would still be allowed to emit CO2, what sectors. So this could be between countries between sectors. So it really changes in some important ways, the politics of climate change, and that I think, the reverberations of that aren't fully felt yet.
MATTHEW: A subset of this geoengineering technology is carbon dioxide removal, otherwise known as negative emission technologies. These take the form of afforestation or reforestation, and forest management, or direct air capture, pulling carbon directly from the atmosphere, to bioenergy and carbon capture and storage where food is grown, burned for energy and then stored deep underground, having no emissions. All of these are very, very young technologies that have not been proven to work on a large scale. So why is it that the IPCC reports rely on it so heavily? Why is it to reach our Paris Climate accord goals, we have to rely on these negative emission technologies being developed? We'll see how accurate these forecasts are for this technological development.
SCHÄFER: One of the implications certainly if this huge reliance on negative emissions technologies is the targets that would otherwise not appear plausible or feasible, all of a sudden, are after all feasible, because you can simply assume that later on, a CO2 will be removed out of the atmosphere. So it's like a shifting, perhaps, of responsibility that could occur either between states or sectors, but also between the present and the future. Right. So the present generations could simply, you know, in their calculations, assume that wealth between generations, you know, in 2070, 2080, 2090, whatever are just going to take out, have these technologies available that will take out huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, and therefore, we in the present, can relax our ambition.
GEORGIE: To summarize Schäfer’s points, the Paris Climate Agreement relies on negative emissions technologies to justify its ambitious targets. The problem is that this technology is still in development. So we are still continuing to push the burden onto future years and future generations.
MATTHEW: For many of us international climate relations seem distant, they're a far away meeting of powerful people behind closed doors. And at some point, we can't help but feel a little bit powerless in those decisions. So in your opinion, why is this topic important to the students of today?
SCHÄFER: Well, like you said, they are the future generations, right. So they will be the ones living with potentially much more severe climate change than we're experiencing already, even today. And it is, you know, I mean, it's, I wonder if how you describe it is entirely accurate, because I see, especially in young people today, such strong engagement with this subject of climate change, right. So you've had climate movements, youth movements, in the US in Europe and elsewhere, this past year, I guess, I mean, it might have slowed down with the pandemic that we're all living through at the moment. But certainly before that, I mean, this was what really seemed to be very important to young people. So I think there's actually quite, you know, a strong sense of engaging with this, this topic, and also, perhaps, in, in many parts, you know, a certain happiness or a certain fatigue of the way in which this topic is being approached by current people in charge, right, on the scientific and political side.
MATTHEW: What can students do to learn more, or even become more involved in these processes of climate governance, both at their local and larger levels?
SCHÄFER: For me as someone with a specific disciplinary background, I think it's important to think through how the science and politics of climate and climate change together and how they come to create the conditions in which we think about what climate change is, and what can be done about it. So I'm speaking here, from, you know, as someone working with approaches from the discipline of science and technology studies, and political theory, and cultural anthropology. So I think that kind of reflection is an important part of thinking through what climate science and politics means today. What can be done about them? And then, of course, I mean, there are the activist movements that I mentioned before that students are driving. I mean, this is something that is already happening, and that is, to a large extent, you know, being carried forward by students. I mean, the people on my side of the classroom have reacted to this, right. They were not the drivers. I mean, this was something that now universities, organizing lectures for future say, I've been invited to give a talk in a series called lectures for future right, which is, of course, in response to the Friday's for Future protests, which is, you know, then there was something that's been driven, you know, by younger people today.
MATTHEW: Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Schaefer.
SCHÄFER: Welcome, thank you for having me.
GEORGIE: So it's pretty clear that the Paris Climate Agreement is a big deal. This agreement is one of the only ways that countries are working together to fight climate change on a large scale. Unfortunately, though, it hasn't been enough. Just last week, the UN's IPCC released a report on climate change that is being dubbed “Code Red” for humanity. This report makes clear that the world needs to take bold action as soon as possible if we want to prevent the worst of the worst effects of climate change from hitting the planet. This means that agreements like the Paris Agreement need to be strengthened and countries need to be more active and aggressive in achieving their goals. So as individuals, what can we do to make an impact on such a large issue? There are actually many ways that we can push our governments to take action on this. For one, you can call and email your representatives. You can also go to climate protests and join local environmental movements. And one of the most important things you can do is just talking to the people around you about the importance of this problem. Together we can show the people in charge that climate matters. And if we can help fight for more action and initiative and global agreements like the Paris Agreement, we can help move closer to a sustainable planet.
KATHERINE: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of operation climate. Make sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and anywhere else that you find your podcasts. In order to stay updated about future episodes. Visit our website bit.ly/operationclimatepodcast for a full transcript of this episode. And for more information and links that you can explore to learn more about this topic that we covered today. Follow us on our socials, we are @operationclimate on Instagram. And lastly, we want to hear from you. So write a review on Apple Podcasts that would help us so much and send us your feedback and your messages through our website. Email us you can DM us on Instagram, you can fill out our feedback form which is on our website. And if you're a student listening to this podcast, head to our website to fill out our students stories form to get the chance to have your story and voice featured on a future episode of Operation Climate. Thanks so much, and we hope you join us next time. See ya.