a position of negligible influence

Given my line of work, I should probably be among the many people who scour the latest missives from the IPCC as soon as they drop. My reasons for not doing so are two-fold. Firstly, I’m very short of time, and scanning 800+ pages of written-by-committee material in order to confirm the details of what I already know to be the general case is not a productive use of the time I have.

Secondly, I’m aware that the bit that actually gets read by anyone other than the scientific community—the tellingly-named “executive summary”—is bowdlerised to such an extent that it effectively negates the effort of the main report. It’s depressing to have that knowledge reconfirmed, but it is at least heartening to see that the fact of that bowdlerisation—and the people who are involved in making it happen—is starting to become somewhat newsworthy in itself:

Unlike the research-heavy chapters, which are controlled entirely by the scientists who research and write them, the Summary for Policymakers must be approved by government representatives from 195 countries around the world; the approval process for this year’s mitigation report was the longest and most contentious in the history of the IPCC. According to leaked reports, representatives from Saudi Arabia in particular argued for multiple references to carbon capture and storage and the watering down of language on shutting down fossil fuel production.

Oil company representatives were also included in this process as both authors and editors of the report, which has been the case since the IPCC began. For the latest report, a senior staffer for Saudi Aramco – Saudia Arabia’s state-owned oil and gas company – was one of the two coordinating lead authors, a position of considerable influence, for the chapter on cross-sector perspectives. A longtime Chevron staffer was also the review editor for the chapter on energy systems.

Fellow academics sometimes take me to task for my flat-out refusal to cater my work to audiences in the policy and business sectors; this is exactly why I stick to my guns. The revolving door between those two assemblages means it’s wasted effort.

Better, then, to build a mandate from the ground up by understanding the social side of the problem. Which is what many of us are trying to do… but while I was aware that the distribution of resources for that struggle were unevenly distributed, to say the least, the numbers are even worse than I would have guessed:

Social scientists hoping to make further inroads into not only the IPCC process, but policymaking more broadly, have a chicken-and-egg problem, according to Dana Fisher, director of the program for society and the environment at the University of Maryland and a contributing author to chapter 13. Fisher’s research focuses on the impact that activism has had on climate policymaking.

“We have insufficient funding to support the sort of large-scale research that enables you to have high confidence in your findings,” she says, which limits the amount of social science research that can be used in the report.

Less than 1% of research funding on climate from 1990 to 2018 went toward social sciences, including political science, sociology, and economics. That’s despite the fact that even physical scientists themselves agree that inaction on climate will probably not be solved by more scientific evidence.

Less than one percent. In the accounts of most big firms, that would be considered a rounding error, hardly worth a footnote. Which is exactly how most social scientific research on climate change is treated in the IPCC reports, funnily enough.

But like I say, perhaps our relentless messaging is paying off a little bit; we make that <1% work pretty fucking hard, after all.

“Back in the 80s, we believed in the information deficit model of social change, and that if we could only get the information to policymakers they would do the right thing,” says atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, senior scientist for Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy. “And now we see that really it’s not about information deficit, it’s about power relations, and people wanting to keep economic and political power. And so just telling people some more climate science isn’t going to help anything.”

To see someone publicly knocking the information deficit model—which was already discredited in medical science by the mid-1980s, incidentally—is always nice; to see it coming from a representative of one of Wild Billy Gates’s foundations borders on cognitive dissonance. Gates’s projects are, unsurprisingly, profoundly solutionist in their approach to the issue, due to solutionism being a load-bearing plank of the paradigmatic episteme; it’s not malice, it’s just the way people think about these things in this period of history. So for one of his people to be talking about the problematic sustainment of power relations is therefore kinda weird, though I’m confident that Breakthrough Energy has some palatable pretzel logic through which “not needing any more climate science” converts neatly to “unquestioned roll-out of disruptive and innovative solutions from the private sector”. Which is to say: they’re still working on the info deficit model, but in a way that builds on the expertise of the tech sector for selling solutions. Everyone’s aware of the problem; a market has been created. The opportunity which recognises itself is doing what it does best, unable to confront the possibility that its self-recognition is the root of the problem it’s trying to solve.

Ah, well—there ain’t much point in bitching. The only thing to do is to do the work… though sometimes a bit of bitching into the aether is what you need to be able to pick up your shovel and wade into the sewers once again. Selah.

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