The Roadmap to a low carbon world is staggeringly difficult.

Scientists made a detailed “roadmap” for meeting the Paris climate goals. It’s eye-opening.

Updated by Brad Plumer@bradplumerbrad@vox.com Mar 24, 2017, 7:02am EDT

Back in 2015, the world’s governments met in Paris and agreed to keep global warming below 2°C, to avoid the worst risks of a hotter planet. See here for background on why, but that’s the goal. For context, the planet’s warmed ~1°C since the 19th century.

One problem with framing the goal this way, though, is that it’s maddeningly abstract. What does staying below 2°C entail? Papers on this topic usually drone on about a “carbon budget” — the total amount of CO2 humans can emit this century before we likely bust past 2°C — and then debate how to divvy up that budget among nations. There’s math involved. It’s eye-glazing, and hard to translate into actual policy. It’s also a long-term goal, easy for policymakers to shrug off.

So, not surprisingly, countries have thus far responded by putting forward a welter of vague pledges on curbing emissions that are hard to compare and definitely don’t add up to staying below 2°C. Everyone agrees more is needed, but there’s lots of uncertainty as to what “more” means. Few people grasp how radically — or how quickly — we’d have to revamp the global economy to meet the Paris climate goals. 

Surely there’s a better, more concrete way to think about this. So, in a new paper for Science, a group of European researchers try to do just that — laying out in vivid detail what would have to happen in each of the next three decades if we want to stay well below 2°C. Fair warning: It’s unsettling.

A simple (but daunting!) road map for staying below 2°C

They start with the big picture: To hit the Paris climate goals without geoengineering, the world has to do three broad (and incredibly ambitious) things:

1) Global CO2 emissions from energy and industry have to fall in half each decade. That is, in the 2020s, the world cuts emissions in half. Then we do it again in the 2030s. Then we do it again in the 2040s. They dub this a “carbon law.” Lead author Johan Rockström told me they were thinking of an analogy to Moore’s law for transistors; we’ll see why. 

2) Net emissions from land use — i.e., from agriculture and deforestation — have to fall steadily to zero by 2050. This would need to happen even as the world population grows and we’re feeding ever more people.

3) Technologies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere have to start scaling up massively, until we’re artificially pulling 5 gigatons of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere by 2050 — nearly double what all the world’s trees and soils already do. 

 “It’s way more than adding solar or wind,” says Rockström. “It’s rapid decarbonization, plus a revolution in food production, plus a sustainability revolution, plus a massive engineering scale-up [for carbon removal].”

So, uh, how do we cut CO2 emissions in half, then half again, then half again? Here, the authors lay out a sample “roadmap” of what specific actions the world would have to take each decade, based on current research. This isn’t the only path for making big CO2 cuts, but it gives a sense of the sheer scale and speed required:

2017-2020: All countries would prepare for the herculean task ahead by laying vital policy groundwork. Like: scrapping the $500 billion per year in global fossil fuel subsidies. Zeroing out investments in any new coal plants, even in countries like India and Indonesia. All major nations commit to going carbon-neutral by 2050 and put in place policies — like carbon pricing or clean electricity standards — that point down that path. “By 2020,” the paper adds, “all cities and major corporations in the industrialized world should have decarbonization strategies in place.”

2020-2030: Now the hard stuff begins! In this decade, carbon pricing would expand to cover most aspects of the global economy, averaging around $50 per ton (far higher than seen almost anywhere today) and rising. Aggressive energy efficiency programs ramp up. Coal power is phased out in rich countries by the end of the decade and is declining sharply elsewhere. Leading cities like Copenhagen are going totally fossil fuel free. Wealthy countries no longer sell new combustion engine cars by 2030, and transportation gets widely electrified, with many short-haul flights replaced by rail.

In addition, spending on clean energy research increases by “an order of magnitude” this decade, with a sustained focus on developing new batteries, drastically reducing the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS), and perfecting low-carbon processes for producing steel and concrete, plus improving smart grids, greener aircraft systems, and sustainable urbanization techniques. 

Meanwhile, efforts to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the air start this decade. That means reforesting degraded land and deploying technologies such as direct-air capture or bioenergy with CCS to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. By 2030, we’d need to be removing 100 to 500 megatons of CO2 each year and have a sense of how to scale up.

2030-2040: By this decade, hopefully, we’re reaping the fruits of major technological advances in clean energy. Leading countries like Denmark and Sweden should now have completely carbon-free grids and have electrified virtually all of their transport, heating, and industry. Cars with internal combustion engines “will have become rare on roads worldwide.” (Let that sink in.) Aircraft will be almost entirely powered by carbon-neutral fuels, say, biofuels or hydrogen. New building construction will be largely carbon-neutral, by using emissions-free methods for steel and concrete or through other techniques. And “radical new energy generation solutions will enter the market.”

Meanwhile, we’d need to be sucking about 1 to 2 gigatons of CO2 from the air each year, with a heavy R&D effort on expanding that further. 

2040-2050: By the early 2040s, major European countries are close to carbon-neutral, and the rest of the world is moving toward that goal by the end of the decade. Electricity grids are nearly entirely carbon-free: “Natural gas still provides some back up energy, but CCS ensures its carbon footprint is limited. Modular nuclear reactors may contribute to the energy mix in some places.” Lower-income countries are still using some fossil fuels, and the world is still emitting a small bit of CO2 in 2050 (about one-eighth the amount of today), but work continues on eventually phasing that out.

Finally, by 2050, we’d need to be removing more than 5 gigatons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. It’s possible this is simply impractical — if we tried to do that all by burning biomass for energy and sequestering the resulting carbon (a “negative emissions” process), we might well run into serious land constraints that hinder agriculture. If, in the 2020s, we realize this will be the case, then we’ll have to revamp the road map to cut CO2 emissions from energy and industry even faster.

The paper also notes that the precise details of any road map will be tentative — after all, the nature of unpredictable technological change means it’s difficult to say what the world will look like in 2030 or 2040 or 2050. So policymakers will need to meet regularly, take stock of where they are, and revise as needed. 

This road map is staggering. That’s the point.

It’d be entirely understandable to look at this all and say, “That’s insane.” Phasing out sales of combustion engine vehicles by 2030? Carbon-neutral air travel within two decades? Cities going entirely fossil fuel–free in the next 13 years? Come on.

And fair enough. None of this is easy. It might well prove impossible. But this is roughly what staying well below 2°C entails — at least without large-scale geoengineering to filter out sunlight and cool the planet (a risky step). This is what world governments implicitly agreed to when they all signed on to the Paris accord. 

“We wanted to show what meeting those Paris goals requires,” says Rockström. “Up until now, we felt that scientists haven’t been very effective in communicating what these carbon budgets actually mean in terms of concrete action.”

Rockström and his colleagues argue that future UN climate talks should strive to create a much more detailed decade-by-decade road map along the lines of their Science paper, in order to gain much more clarity on what needs to happen to stay below 2°C.

Rockström adds that the road map’s sheer difficulty doesn’t mean climate action is hopeless. “You could just as easily see this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says. “Countries start taking these targets seriously and then begin pursuing the innovation needed to make this come true.” That’s what Moore’s law did for the semiconductor industry; the prediction that chip performance would double every 18 months helped guide firms in thinking what they needed to do to make that come true. A “carbon law,” Rockström argues, could do the same for countries and cities and companies.

Oliver Geden — a German climate policy analyst who wasn’t involved in the Science paper but who has criticized scientists and policymakers for obscuring what the 2°C target really requires — praised the broad approach here, though noted that some of the details were debatable. 

“One thing I like is that this is not just another global calculation [on CO2 emissions] that doesn’t talk about actors or policies,” Geden told me by email. “I think this should be the way forward, translating [overarching climate goals] into ‘policy portfolios’ and then asking policymakers if they are going to do it or not.”

For example, the paper lays out a specific timeline for deploying technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most modeling scenarios for staying below 2°C now envision massive CO2 removal efforts, but few policymakers have acknowledged this fact. Presenting them with a detailed proposed timeline could, hopefully, change that. If it turns out that scaling up bioenergy with CCS is logistically impossible (as it might be), then at least we’d come to terms with that sooner, rather than keeping it as an unspoken background assumption in broad climate plans.

Of course, it’s possible that if policymakers really grappled with what staying below 2°C entails, they might come away thinking it’s impractical or undesirable. They might decide to accept more global warming, say, 2.5°C or 3°C or more, and deal with the severe risks that result, from higher sea-level rise to droughts to crop failures. (I’ve written more on that here.) 

But something has to force that conversation. If this 2°C climate goal is going to loom over every international climate meeting, every white paper and discussion, then the least people can do is take it seriously.

Further reading

— Here is a history of the 2°C global warming target — and what it would mean to miss it. And note that no country in the world is currently taking the goal seriously.

— This new paper by Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom looks at the research around achieving deep decarbonization in the electricity sector. Note that while it might be physically possible to decarbonize the grid using only renewables, a number of studies suggest it’d be much more cost-effective to harness nuclear power or coal/gas with carbon capture and storage as well.

— The Science paper is also a good framework for thinking about Donald Trump. Trump, recall, wants to dismantle US climate policies and slash clean energy research. In the short term, that probably won’t hamper the incremental decline in US emissions already underway, as natural gas and renewables keep pushing out coal in the power sector. But Trump’s policies could easily hinder the push for deep decarbonization in the US — or at least delay it until well after 2020, making the 2°C goal all the harder.

Why the West is still worth fighting for

Why the West is still worth fighting for

By Oliver Wiseman @ollywiseman

• The West's triumphalism after the Cold War was grossly premature

• The ideological threats we face are more potent than ever

• For all the foreign threats and internal angst, Western values still beat the alternative

Maurice Saatchi opened today’s Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security with a reminder that security is about more than nuclear deterrents, tanks and soldiers. Military might only gets you so far. As Lord Saatchi himself put it on CapX this morning, “How can we confront an ideology without an ideology of our own?”

The next question is obvious: what should that ideology be? Or, more specifically: when it comes to the numerous threats facing the West, what are the values that need not only to be defended with physical force but argued for with moral authority?

That this remains an open question in 2017 would probably have come as a surprise a quarter of a century ago, when it was assumed that, with the Cold War won, liberal democracy’s spread was inevitable, and that the case for Western values was so self-evident that it hardly needed to be made.

But as we now know, that triumphalism was grossly premature. There have been successes: not least the transformation of Central and Eastern European countries into prosperous democracies. Old challenges, however, remain, and new ones have emerged: Russia has not followed its neighbours’ Westward ideological shift; radical Islam has emerged as a lethal ideological competitor; and China, which grows more prosperous while remaining a one-party state, is not only shifting the world’s centre of gravity eastwards, but has established itself as an alternative political model to Western democracy.

Inextricably linked to these challenges – and the West’s response to them – are internal insecurities: economic, political, social and cultural worries that have thrown up internal threats at least as destabilising as those coming from overseas.

Facing up to those challenges has to start with establishing when, and why, we lost our ideological self-confidence. And at today’s conference that task fell to a well-qualified panel – comprised of Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum; Lord Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi; Richard Chartres, who until recently was Bishop of London; and Telegraph columnist and Thatcher biographer Charles Moore.

There is a risk that such a discussion ends up, as Moore put it, being about “absolutely bloody everything”. But the conversation started straightforwardly enough: with freedom and democracy. As Anne Applebaum explained, though the West has ancient origins, as a modern political project it was established an “institutional and ideological challenge to totalitarianism”.

Yet from that starting point, tensions and contradictions creep in almost immediately.

For Lord Sacks, the split identified by Friedrich Hayek between the French and Anglo-American versions of human rights is at the root of almost all debates about what Western values should mean. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American Bill of Rights may sound similar. But according to Lord Sacks, “they are very, very different”. The former is secular, the latter religious. The former is a formula for maximal government, the latter for limited government.

The problem, as Lord Sacks sees it, is that “in the last half century the French version has taken over the elites in America and Britain. The French tradition leaves little between the individual and the state.” So when the state is not meeting people’s needs, they turn to populism – “and populist politics,” Lord Sacks warned, “is the beginning of the end of liberty.”

For Richard Chartres, democracy is faltering because it lacks a demos. “When the demos disintegrates,” he said, “what follows is a crowd of atomised individuals.” For Chartres, one of the problems has been the “sinister view that we will bring about progress by purging memories” – in other words, by ignoring our history. To which the Bishop’s response came straight from the pulpit: “You don’t exorcise the Satanic by creating a spiritual vacuum.”

Yet if culture has forgotten history, then politics has become obsessed with economics. Applebaum argued that one of the lessons the West’s elites must take from the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory – however distinct those events may be – is that politics must be about more than prosperity.

“Having defeated Marxism,” she lamented, “we have adopted one of its key tenants, which is to say that politics is all about economics.” Brexit and Trump, she said, are both expressions of searching for something more profound than economics: sovereignty and identity, respectively.

The ideological threats to the West have structural advantages today that make them more potent than they were a generation ago. For example, as Applebaum explained, we underestimated the disruptive nature of the internet, and in particular the degree to which it disrupts politics: “People have been able to reorganise themselves and find new identities online, organising themselves through means other than traditional parties.”

Why Are Green Buildings So Inefficient in Their Energy Usage?

Why Don’t Green Buildings Live Up to Hype on Energy Efficiency?

Analysts call it the “energy performance gap” — the difference between promised energy savings in green buildings and the actual savings delivered. The problem, researchers say, is inept modeling systems that fail to capture how buildings really work.

By Richard Conniff • May 25, 2017

Not long ago in the southwest of England, a local community set out to replace a 1960s-vintage school with a new building using triple-pane windows and super-insulated walls to achieve the highest possible energy efficiency. The new school proudly opened on the same site as the old one, with the same number of students, and the same head person—and was soon burning more energy in a month than the old building had in a year.

The underfloor heating system in the new building was so badly designed that the windows automatically opened to dump heat several times a day even in winter.  A camera in the parking lot somehow got wired as if it were a thermal sensor, and put out a call for energy any time anything passed in front of the lens.  It was “a catalogue of disasters,” according to David Coley, a University of Bath specialist who came in to investigate.

Many of the disasters were traceable to the building energy model, a software simulation of energy use that is a critical step in designing any building intended to be green. Among other errors, the designers had extrapolated their plan from a simplified model of an isolated classroom set in a flat landscape, with full sun for much of the day. That dictated window tinting and shading to reduce solar gain. Nobody seems to have noticed that the new school actually stood in a valley surrounded by shade trees and needed all the solar gain it could get.  The classrooms were so dark the lights had to be on all day. 

It was an extreme case.  But it was also a good example, according to Coley, of how overly optimistic energy modeling helps cause the “energy performance gap,” a problem that has become frustratingly familiar in green building projects.   The performance gap refers to the failure of energy improvements, often undertaken at great expense, to deliver some (or occasionally all) of the promised savings. A study last year of refurbished apartment buildings in Germany, for instance, found that they missed the predicted energy savings by anywhere from 5 to 28 percent. In Britain, an evaluation of 50 “leading-edge modern buildings,” from supermarkets to health care centers, reported that they “were routinely using up to 3.5 times more energy than their design had allowed for” — and producing on average 3.8 times the predicted carbon emissions

Buildings account for 40 percent of climate change emissions and are the fastest growing source of emissions.

The performance gap is “a vast, terrible enormous problem,” in the words of one building technology specialist, and that’s not an exaggeration.  Though much of the public concern about energy consumption and climate change focuses on automotive miles-per-gallon, the entire transport sector — including trains, planes, ships, trucks, and cars — accounts for just 26 percent of U.S. climate change emissions.  Buildings come in at 40 percent, and they are the fastest growing source of emissions, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.

Eliminating the performance gap matters particularly for European Union nations, which have a legally binding commitment to reduce emissions by 80 to 95 percent below 1990 levels by mid-century.  But knowing with confidence what savings will result matters for anybody trying to figure out how much to invest in a particular energy improvement.

Researchers have generally blamed the performance gap on careless work by builders, overly complicated energy-saving technology, or the bad behaviors of the eventual occupants of a building.  But in a new study, Coley and his co-authors put much of the blame on inept energy modeling.  The title of the study asks the provocative question “Are Modelers Literate?” Even more provocatively, a press release from the University of Bath likens the misleading claims about building energy performance to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which actual emissions from diesel engine cars were up to 40 times higher than “the performance promised by the car manufacturer.”

For their study, Coley and his co-authors surveyed 108 building industry professionals — architects, engineers, and energy consultants — who routinely use energy performance models.  To keep the problem simple, the researchers asked participants to look at a typical British semi-detached home recently updated to meet current building codes. Then they asked test subjects to rank which improvements made the most difference to energy performance. Their answers had little correlation with objective reality, as determined by a study monitoring the actual energy performance of that home hour-by-hour over the course of a year. A quarter of the test subjects made judgments “that appeared worse than a person responding at random,” according to the study, which concluded that the sample of modelers, “and by implication the population of building modelers, cannot be considered modeling literate.”

‘We have cases where modelers will come up with a savings measure that is more than the energy use of the house,’ says one scientist.

Predictably, that conclusion raised hackles. “The sample seems odd to me,” said Evan Mills, a building technology specialist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “to include so many people who are junior in the practice, and then to be criticizing the industry at large.” He noted that almost two-thirds of the 108 test subjects had five years or less experience in construction.  But Coley and his co-authors found that even test subjects with “higher-level qualifications, or having many years of experience in modeling,” were no more accurate than their juniors.

In any case, Mills acknowledged, “the performance gap is real, and we must be aware of models not properly capturing things. We have cases where modelers will come up with a savings measure that is more than the energy use of the house, because they are just working with the model,” and not paying attention to the real house.

That sort of problem — energy models showing unreasonable results — also turns up at the preliminary stage on 50 percent of projects going through the LEED certification process, said Gail Hampsmire of the U.S. Green Building Council.   Designers have a tendency to take a “black box” approach, providing whatever inputs a particular energy model requires and then accepting the outputs “without evaluating the reasonability of those results,” she said. “You always have the issue of garbage in/garbage out, and the capability of the modeler to identify whether they are getting garbage out is critical.”

So what’s the fix?  The current accreditation requirements for energy modelers are “very gentle,” said Coley, but “when you’re trying to get something off the ground relatively quickly, you can’t send everybody back to college for three years.” In any case, the problem isn’t really education in the formal sense.

“It has to do with feedback,” he said, or the lack of it. The culture of building construction says it’s perfectly reasonable for architects — but not energy modelers —to travel hundreds of miles to see how the actual building compares with what they designed.  For energy modelers, there’s not even an expectation that they’ll get on the phone with the building manager at year one and ask how energy usage compares with the original model. As a result, said Coley, energy modeling can become like theoretical physics: “You can very easily create a whole web of theories, and then you find yourself studying the physics of your theories, not the physics of the real world.”

The organization that gives LEED certification is now requiring that developers post actual energy usage on an online data base.

The answer, he suggested, is a regulatory requirement that modelers follow up on their work by routinely checking their predictions against a building’s actual energy consumption. A system of modest inducements could also make that feedback more broadly available — for instance, by promising to take three weeks off the planning permissions process for developers who commit to posting actual energy usage to an online database. The Green Building Council has begun to require that sort of reporting for projects seeking LEED certification, said Hampsmire, with an online platform now in development “for building owners to track their own performance and compare it with other buildings.”

A second problem, according to Coley, is the tendency of government agencies to require simplified energy models at the start of the design process.  The requirements often include certain uniform assumptions about energy use, making it easier to compare one building with another.  “Because you have to do that at the start, it becomes the default, and this sets up a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world, and it’s not surprising that modelers model this artificial world.”  But at least in the United States that has become less of a problem in recent years, according to Hampsmire.  Current building code requirements are “fairly good,” she said. “They don’t say, ‘Model energy use for a building occupied eight hours a day,’” or some other arbitrary standard. Instead, “they specifically state that all energy use has to be modeled as anticipated.”

The takeaway from all this isn’t to discredit energy modeling but to improve it.  Builders increasingly need realistic modeling, said Coley, by people with a deep knowledge of building physics and at least as much experience with real buildings as with energy models. Without that, the result will be even more $500-million office blocks with too much glass on the southern exposure, causing everybody inside to bake on a hot summer afternoon.  Without smart energy modeling, the result will be a world spinning even faster into out-of-control climate change.

“This isn’t rocket science,” said the Berkeley Laboratory’s Mills.  But then he added, “It’s harder than rocket science.”

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. His latest book is House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth. He is a frequent contributor to Yale Environment 360.

Doom and gloom won't save the world

Doom and gloom won't save the world

The best way to encourage conservation is to share our success stories, not to write obituaries for the planet, says Nancy Knowlton.

18 April 2017

Early in my career, I witnessed first-hand the depressing side of the job. The coral reefs off the north coast of Jamaica, where I had spent several magical years as a graduate student in the mid 1970s, were struck by a category-5 hurricane in 1980. Then came mysterious ailments that devastated two of the most important coral species, along with a species of sea urchin that, because of previous overfishing, had become the last defence against a tide of seaweed that was choking the struggling coral. Ten years after my first dive in Jamaica, the reefs I'd studied were all but gone.

These days, students studying reefs spend their time investigating bleaching and acidification, terms that were never mentioned when I took my first coral-reef class in 1974.

As we observe Earth Day on 22 April, it's worth recounting how researchers like myself have managed to rebound a bit from all this depressing news.

In 2001, my colleagues and I at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Core to our programme was an interdisciplinary summer course, which brought together students ranging from marine biologists to physical oceanographers, economists and anthropologists. We thought of it as medical school for the ocean.

We began with what we thought was a logical starting point — the state of the ocean. These were depressing lectures. Doom and gloom consumed the entire course. Basically, we were training our students to write ever-more-refined obituaries for the seas.

We quickly realized the folly of focusing so much on the problems — we could see it on our students' faces. There had to be another way. After all, in medical school the focus is on preserving life, not describing death. So in 2009, my husband Jeremy Jackson and I began running symposia at academic meetings called 'Beyond the Obituaries', which were about success stories in ocean conservation. A small workshop in 2014 led to a Twitter campaign, #OceanOptimism, which has now reached more than 76 million Twitter accounts.

On the weekend of Earth Day, the first ever Earth Optimism Summits will take place. In Washington DC, more than 235 scientists and civic leaders from 24 countries will share their success stories of conservation on land and water. Sister summits and activities are being held in nine countries around the globe. The goal is to learn from each other, and change the conservation conversation.

This journey has taught me several lessons. First, unrelenting doom and gloom in the absence of solutions is not effective. Social scientists have known for decades that large problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action. Yet much of conservation communication still seems to be focused on scaring people into caring.

As a community, we seem to be addicted to despair. For example, when the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) was bumped down from endangered to threatened status under the US Endangered Species Act last month, many environmentalists protested and worried about relaxed protections, rather than celebrating the practices (boat speed limits and winter-refuge safeguards) that enabled the animals' partial recovery.

Second, an extraordinary number of success stories are largely unknown — not just to the general public but also to conservation scientists, policymakers and philanthropists. Searching Twitter for #OceanOptimism (and its offspring #EarthOptimism) is still one of the best ways to find examples. My favourite instance of unrecognized success was the 2015 announcement of the recovery of seagrasses in Tampa Bay, Florida, to 1950s levels. Of the 300 or so people I have mentioned this to (including 200 marine scientists at a research meeting in Tampa), fewer than 10 were aware of this important conservation achievement, which was the result of keeping fertilizer-filled run-off waters from flowing into the bay. Elsewhere, stocks of Chilean loco (an edible sea snail), Madagascar octopus and marine fish in parts of the Philippines are healthier thanks to the establishment of small-scale, locally empowered, sustainable fisheries.

Many young people have told me and my colleagues that our messages of optimism energize them and provide direction and inspiration. They also tell us that they almost left the field because so many of their courses were dispiriting.

Let me be clear: I am no Pollyanna when it comes to the future of the planet. The catastrophic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year and last cannot be denied. The problems remain huge: daunting even. Conservation is often two steps forward, one step back — or frustratingly, one step forward, two steps back.

But we must also celebrate successes: species brought back from the brink of extinction, landscapes and seascapes protected or newly restored, and the integration of sustainability into corporate boardroom decisions. Even when these success stories are shared, we often undermine them with caveats and bury the story of how they were accomplished. Yet talking about these successes is how we will learn to expand them.

Nature

544,

271

(20 April 2017)

doi:10.1038/544271a

A Century Later, Lenin's Legacy Lives On

Ian Morris, Stratfor

 On Easter Sunday exactly a century ago, a train pulled out of Zurich's central station, beginning one of the most famous railroad journeys of all time. On board were Vladimir Lenin, his wife and 30 of their closest friends. Eight days later, after two boat trips and a second train ride, the little band of revolutionaries reached Russia. The rest, of course, is history.

Shipping Lenin home in a sealed train to foment a revolution and thereby take Russia out of the First World War was the idea of Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister at the time. Germany launched several similar plots in that stage of the war, including inciting a Republican rising in Ireland, Islamist jihadism in the Middle East and — the one for which Zimmermann is best remembered — a Mexican invasion of Texas. All except the Russian gambit failed; but though Lenin succeeded in doing what Zimmermann wanted, he succeeded in several other, very different ways, too.

While Lenin's ambitions were chiefly sociological and ideological — to create a socialist paradise — Zimmermann's were more geostrategic, and through most of the 20th century it seemed that Zimmermann had gotten more of what he wanted than Lenin had. On Easter 1918, one year after Lenin's trip, his most obvious accomplishment was getting Russia out of the war and freeing up a million German troops for a last great offensive on the Western Front, exactly as Zimmermann had intended. By Easter 1927, however, a decade after the train left Zurich, Lenin's most important consequence seemed to be the creation of a crusading communist state spreading revolution across Europe. By Easter 1967, half a century after Lenin, his main legacy appeared to be a nuclear-armed superpower capable of ending civilization if the doctrine of mutual assured destruction broke down.
Seen from Easter 2017, however, the geopolitical effects that were so important in the 20th century seem to have faded. Pundits regularly suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin's grand strategy differs little from that of the czars before him. But that doesn't mean Zimmermann and Lenin have been consigned, as Trotsky said of Lenin's socialist rivals, to the scrapheap of history. Rather, the importance of Easter 1917 now looks to have more in common with Lenin's sociological and ideological aims than with Zimmermann's geostrategic ambitions.

Imposing Equality, by Any Means Necessary

In 1962, just as the geostrategic consequences of Lenin's trip were reaching a terrifying peak in the Cuban missile crisis, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm published a classic book called The Age of Revolution. In it he argued that the modern world had been born between 1789 and 1848 in linked economic and political revolutions. On one hand, the British Industrial Revolution gave humanity access to undreamed-of amounts of energy trapped in fossil fuels; on the other, political revolutionaries argued over what kind of society should replace the monarchies and aristocracies that had ruled almost every state on Earth for 5,000 years.

In an earlier column, Jason Lopata and I drew attention to the account that anthropologist Ernest Gellner offered in his 1983 book, Nations and Nationalism, of what he called "Agraria" — a simplified model of how premodern states worked. In these agrarian states, Gellner suggested, "the ruling class forms a small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants.

"Below the horizontally stratified minority at the top," Gellner went on, "there is another world, that of the laterally insulated petty communities of the lay members of society" — that is, peasant villages. Gellner called these villages "laterally insulated" because peasants did not get out much: Throughout most of history, few farmers went more than a day's walk from their birthplaces. In Agraria, peasants in each district tended to have their own dialects, rituals and traditions — living, says Gellner, "inward-turned lives, tied to the locality by economic need if not by political prescription."

 In Gellner's diagram, broken vertical lines symbolize the fragmentation of the peasant world, while a solid line marks the chasm dividing the masses and elite. States of this kind persisted for five millennia because, at the end of the day, both masses and elites needed each other. Peasants could get on with farming only if managerial elites established a monopoly on violence and used it to back up courts of law and other institutions that made peace, trade and markets possible. Meanwhile, managerial elites could survive only if peasants paid taxes to support them (often in considerable luxury). Agraria was basically a protection racket.

The Industrial Revolution swept Agraria away. To take advantage of the flood of energy released by coal and later oil, societies needed much more sophisticated divisions of labor. "Perpetually growing productivity," Gellner noted, "requires that this division be not merely complex, but also perpetually, and often rapidly, changing." This meant that rather than staying on the farm and doing as their forefathers had done, people had to be able to learn new skills and move where labor was needed. "The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a certain kind of egalitarianism," said Gellner. "Modern society is not mobile because it is egalitarian; it is egalitarian because it is mobile."
Consequently, a diagram of industrial society would not be full of lines, like the diagram of Agraria. It would be an empty rectangle, within which people move freely — because, as Gellner put it, "A society which is destined to a permanent game of musical chairs cannot erect deep barriers of rank, of caste or estate, between the various sets of chairs which it possesses."

Agraria had worked by drawing lines, not just between the elite and the masses but also between men and women, free and enslaved, believers and heretics, pure and defiled, and countless other categories. Each group was assigned its place in a complex hierarchy of mutual obligations and privileges, guaranteed by the divine will (as explained by a priesthood) and state violence. Fossil-fuel society, by contrast, needed to erase lines, creating a homogeneous community of interchangeable citizens, each equally free to move to whatever place they would be most useful.

As a result, if traditional expectations about how people should worship, whom they could marry, and what jobs they might do interfered with the growth of the markets needed to supply the labor fueling an industrialized economy, and to buy the goods and services that it could produce in such abundance, then those traditions had to go. "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify," Marx and Engels rightly observed in 1848. "All that is solid melts into air."
The great challenge of the past two centuries has been how to erase the lines within Agraria. The shift was always going to be traumatic; but in Western Europe and its overseas settler colonies, it was never as violent as Marx and Engels had expected. This was partly because traditional agrarian elites mostly mounted fighting retreats across the 19th century. Rather than making last-ditch stands, they compromised with their critics and even became critics themselves, thereby hanging onto much of their wealth and power as the world changed around them. In the face of such slippery tactics, the critics increasingly turned toward buying cooperation by pursuing liberal, nonviolent transformation.
Yet this hadn't always been the case. In Britain, the kind of new elite that Charles Dickens' novels criticized so savagely initially herded paupers into workhouses and deported felons to Australia to create a more open society, while Euro-Americans first drove Native Americans beyond their borders and then confined them on reservations. But as the 19th century wore on, that changed. As early as the 1830s, British governments legislated on workplace conditions, and in the 1860s the United States deployed massive state violence — not to expel or eliminate African-Americans but to turn them (in principle, at least) into full citizens. By the 1870s, most liberal regimes had legalized trade unions and introduced free compulsory primary education. Some governments even offered savings plans for retirement, public health programs and unemployment insurance. The very word "liberal" changed its meaning, from someone who believed in having the smallest possible state consistent with protecting the individual pursuit of wealth, to someone who believed in governments big enough to intervene to guarantee equal liberties for everyone.

The physical energy released by fossil fuels and the social energy released by the new liberal deal between governments and citizens made Western societies vastly richer and stronger than any others in the world. And unsurprisingly, some non-Westerners began pursuing industrial revolutions of their own. Like the Western liberals, they recognized the need to sweep away Agraria's ancient internal barriers. But outside the West, their opponents were often much more deeply entrenched, and much more willing to shed blood to defend the old ways. Predictably, perhaps, non-Western reformers proved equally willing to try violent, illiberal paths toward a world of homogeneous, interchangeable comrades.

Lenin's legacy for the 21st century was in being the first person to show how an illiberal path to modernity could work.

A Permanent or Temporary Triumph?

In the late 19th century, industrializing autocrats generally did well in their uppermost aim of holding onto power. Between 1911 and 1925, however, all of them — Qing China, Romanov Russia, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Hohenzollern Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia — collapsed under the strain of mobilizing to fight modern wars against more liberal powers. As the historian Robert Gerwarth shows in his recent book, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, the violence this process let loose was often even worse than that of World War I, and almost all of these ex-Agrarias ended up on extremely illiberal paths toward modernization.

Where liberals used state power to erase boundaries by making everyone equally free to exercise the rights of citizens, illiberals used state power to erase the people themselves if they did not seem to fit into the in-group, defined in terms of class by communists and race by fascists. The path away from Agraria that Lenin forged was deeply paradoxical, subjecting citizens to harsh discipline in the name of equality, deploying armies of slave laborers in the name of economic progress, and swinging back toward treating rulers as semi-divine superhumans in the name of the people. The original cult of personality was Lenin's own, implying at his funeral in 1924 that concentrating all power in the hands of one man was actually the same thing as giving all power to the people, because the Communist Party's leaders were so wise that they singlehandedly embodied the general will. Between 1917 and 1939, these wise leaders killed more than 10 million of their comrades who did not fit.

There were several points in the 20th century, especially during the 1930s and 1970s, when Lenin's illiberal path toward industrial society seemed to be moving faster than the liberal one. 1945 and 1989, however, seemed to falsify such claims, the latter so decisively that political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously announced that the world had reached "the end of history" because liberal democracy had outperformed all its conceivable rivals. Freedom House even provided statistical support for this claim, calculating that while in 1972 just 29 percent of the world's societies were free and 46 percent unfree, by 1998 the proportions had been reversed, with 46 percent free and 26 percent unfree.

In the nearly 10 years since the financial crisis of 2008, however, the forward march of liberalism has been checked. Since the 1980s, China's post-Maoist version of illiberal development has consistently provided faster economic growth than the liberal versions. Admittedly, it began from a much lower starting point than the West and, despite being able to pluck a lot of low-hanging fruit, has generated environmental disaster, massive corruption and violent protests. But some observers nonetheless conclude that illiberal policies might be the best option for growth in the 21st century.

Voters in Turkey, Hungary and Russia certainly seem to think so, returning to power the self-proclaimed "illiberal democrats" Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, all while 2016 brought nationalist and populist backlashes against liberal globalization to the Western core. Comparing Donald Trump, Theresa May or Marine Le Pen to Hitler — as some shrill journalists do — reveals a profound lack of perspective, but the fact remains that in the 2010s, more people seem attracted to illiberal paths than at any time in the past 40 years. Lenin's legacy continues to mutate; today it is the example he set as the founding father of the first modern but illiberal society that most commands our attention. And a century after Lenin's train left Zurich's central station, the long-term triumph of liberalism is once again in question.