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Watch the video of From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

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Transcript for From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice with Duncan McLaren

0:00:07.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Professor Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Duncan McLaren. Apart from being a good old friend of mine, Duncan is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. His research examines the politics and implications for justice of novel technologies, particularly using public engagement methods. Prior to his PhD studies completed in 2017, Duncan worked as an environmental researcher and campaigner, most recently as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 to 2011. He’s advised and consulted for research and financial institutions, government departments, philanthropic donors and non governmental bodies on energy, climate, urban and sustainable development issues. Duncan’s talk today is From City to Sink: Urban Carbon Removal as Promise and Practice. Duncan, a zoomtastic. Welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:16.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s a real pleasure to be with you, Julian, and to renew our association in the city space. Shall I just get kicked off? 

0:02:28.1 Professor Julian Agyeman: Okay, go straight away, thanks. Yep, yep.

0:02:31.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Great. So, thanks for the invitation and as Julian says, I’m talking about urban carbon removal. There’s a lot to get through. So here we go. So, first I’m going to introduce carbon dioxide removal and its purposes and limits. I’ll then outline some past CDR promises before exploring some urban CDR prospects with a library of examples offering an estimate of practical urban CDR potential in the light of the politics around it, highlighting particularly questions of justice, before ending with some policy recommendations and conclusions. So first, what is CDR and what is it not? Well, CDR techniques are human interventions that remove CO2 from the environment, place it into long term stable storage. They are both anthropogenic and intentional, not incidental. The CO2 must come from the atmosphere or the wider environment, not from flue gases or other point sources, and be stored for centuries to millennia and not re-released. CDR does not include the natural operation of biological or geological sinks on land or water. There are some blurry boundaries however. So looking a bit deeper into the terminology, carbon dioxide removal is often shortened to carbon removal, sometimes broadened to include other greenhouse gases may also be described as negative emissions techniques or technologies.

0:04:08.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s often mixed up with other things. By contrast, carbon capture and storage is typically an adjunct to fossil fuel use, capturing perhaps 90% of the emissions at a point source and shipping them for storage or utilization. Carbon utilization can be in durable materials, but is more often in chemicals, short lived plastic products or even synthetic fuels. So typically therefore it is at best a form of emissions abatement, not carbon removal. Sequestration Carbon sequestration refers to locking away carbon dioxide but with no concern about what source it’s come from. And while EOR or enhanced oil recovery might sequester some carbon dioxide, it does so by using it to force more oil or gas from old wells. One of the big issues here is that deliberate conflation of these different techniques under the rubric of carbon management allows the fossil industry and petrostates, to justify continued fossil fuel extraction. Such discursive tricks exacerbate the big policy challenges facing CDR. These are additionality ensuring that CDR would not that that CDR would not have happened anyway durability ensuring that the storage is long term and without significant leakage and avoiding mitigation deterrence where promises of future removal enable delay in cutting emissions.

0:05:50.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So getting into what these methods look like this schematic indicates the main techniques involved in CDR proposals. It’s not a comprehensive set, but hopefully enough to note the principal routes of capture and storage in CDR techniques. The options in the orange shaded box have clear urban applications and I’ll say a little more about how these might work as I run through the examples later. Here I’ve added one potentially important urban option for CO2 storage in building materials using carbon sourced from biomass, Biochar or direct CO2 capture.

0:06:32.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Before discussing particular techniques though, a reminder of why we’re talking about carbon dioxide removal. Typically, it’s seen as having three functions in climate policy. First, accelerating progress towards net zero, then counterbalancing recalcitrant residuals at net zero, and finally reversing overshoot through net negativity after net zero. To deliver any of these functions, CDR must be additional to emissions cuts not a substitute. But so far in practice, most CDR, primarily from forestry and a little from soils and biochar, is traded in offset markets, so does nothing to accelerate progress. And all those forms of biological CDR are vulnerable to reversal by wildfire or drought, for example. So such traded substitution could ultimately make things worse.

0:07:35.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And in exchanging emissions reductions now for future CDR, adding to overshoot in the hope of reparation, we’re gambling on the effective delivery of that future CDR. Here, of course, by we I mean humanity in general. Though of course such a simplification is unfair to those not involved in these choices. Nonetheless, modeling suggests that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius seems impossible unless CDR is deployed. Scenarios from the IPCC project CDR being used at rates of 6 to 11 gigatons a year in and after 2050. That’s in comparison to current emissions of around 40 to 45 gigatons a year. So about big big share and a vast increase from current levels of CDR, which are around 1.3 million tonnes, four orders of magnitude smaller. Analysis of nationally determined contributions and low emission development strategy pledges suggests countries are currently anticipating that CDR will reach 8 to 10 gigatons by 2050 to deliver net zero with around 20% of current emissions remaining. Much of the anticipated CDR is land based, with pledges accounting for over a billion hectares of land dedicated to CDR. That’s equivalent to 2/3 of all arable land. Delivery of such projected increased levels of CDR would likely transgress sustainability limits, harm human rights and exacerbate injustice.

0:09:27.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Experience so far suggests such modeled promises are exaggerated and dangerous. Inherent model features such as discounting future costs mean that CDR displaces early mitigation action. But the models then only square carbon budgets through huge future projected CDR capacity. That is likely impractical and almost inevitably socially and environmentally harmful. Early modeling presumed use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage until it was shown that the levels projected would require three times the land area of India to provide biomass, creating real threats to food security. Now modeling often assumes direct air capture, which would involve energy demand nine times India’s primary energy use or around 2/3 of current world primary energy use, suggesting similar threats to energy security. Some advocates have suggested that marine CDR might prove more fruitful, but the implications there are as yet little understood and some companies in the space have already failed. So could urban CDR help fill the gap? Some research and advocacy reports suggest potentials for urban CDR of between 5 and 20 gigatons per year. However, I’m going to pour cold water on this and argue that it’s too good to be true and risks fuelling further climate procrastination. Exaggerated promises of CDR contribution don’t come out of nowhere.

0:11:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So noted already models discount future costs of CDR. They also overlook sustainability limits and tend to exaggerate the costs of near term mitigation. But there are other sources too. In the neoliberal model of venture capital funded innovation, such technologies need to promise both scale and profits if they are to obtain investment. Developers therefore project lower than realistic costs and where these businesses get funded, VC works by shunting aside the scientific founders and installing business managers to find the earliest profitable exit. The prospect of inclusion of removal credits in carbon markets risks undermining climate purposes too. Carbon traders want more products and more credits to trade, and for them, higher continued emissions means more opportunities to profit from trading, a perverse incentive for them to big up CDR’s potential. CDR also acts as a promissory technology for the oil and gas industry to legitimate its operations and protect otherwise stranded assets.

0:12:28.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Here there may be some hope of delivery. The oil and gas companies think they can get paid by the public for transmission storage of CO2, even if they then use it for enhanced oil recovery. But overall, this means that even if CDR could be massively scaled and net zero achieved by balancing two carbon elephants rather than two mice, huge harms would remain from continued fossil extraction and combustion. This all leaves us facing something of a dilemma. Exaggerated promises of CDR undermine essential immediate action to mitigate and phase out fossil fuels. But without removals, we’ll likely exceed carbon budgets and impose substantial additional harms on future generations.

0:13:11.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Delivering large scale CDR could have serious implications for justice right now, not least for other species, but also through competition for agricultural land and clean energy. We can’t afford to have a carbon tunnel vision and disregard human rights, food security and biodiversity. But nor can we reject CDR out of hand. We need policy mechanisms that can support it in just and sustainable forms and scales while weeding out the false and exaggerated promises. In the next section of the talk, I’ll sketch out existing practice on urban CDR and explore the realistic prospects, highlighting some of the misleading promises about specific techniques and possible scales which CDR methods show particular promise for cities well thinking about urban functions in procuring, managing and regulating buildings, cities have opportunities to promote carbon storage and building materials, incorporate direct air capture in buildings as operators and regulators of energy systems and buyers of energy for buildings and transport systems. Cities offer opportunities for bioenergy with CCS, perhaps including biogas and biofuel production.

0:14:30.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Cities also operate and regulate solid and wastewater management with more opportunities for BECCS, biochar and capture of biogenic carbon from wastewater, possibly even incorporation of enhanced weathering or alkalinity enhancement into water treatment. And of course, cities own and manage land with opportunities for biochar, both biomass supply and biochar use in parks, urban forestry and so forth. Maybe enhanced weathering through rock dust use or carbon storage in trees and soil. There are also some niche CDR opportunities that I won’t talk more about that some cities might share, like desalination, sea defences and beach replenishment. I’m going to run through this library of cases quickly and maybe skip some if we run short of time. So timber construction is generally positive in climate terms.

0:15:37.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Timber buildings are better in earthquake zones that don’t increase fire risks. They’re lighter, requiring less deep foundations. Using timber in construction means that carbon accumulated by the trees prior to felling is kept out of the atmosphere for at least the lifespan of the building. Recent advances in mass or composite timber mean even large buildings up to 18 storeys high can be constructed entirely from timber. On average, mass timber construction stores about 380 kilograms of carbon dioxide per meter square of floor area, but costs less up to $150 per meter squared less to construct than concrete and steel.

0:16:16.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So Boston’s Mass Timber Accelerator provided development teams with technical assistance and funding grants to assess and integrate low carbon mass timber building practices into their projects. It supported 10 projects over three years involving buildings up to nine storeys high. If they all come to completion, there’ll be 48 buildings over 10 million square feet of total floor area and around 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide stored.

0:16:51.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, net gains in carbon storage in the building and built environment from timber may be at least partly offset by net losses in forest carbon. One estimate suggests mass timber use could average 2 gigatons per year of carbon dioxide, but notes that the forest pool is already declining at 0.7 gigatons a year. Highlights that potential increase in demand for timber for building materials threatens to intensify deforestation and illegal logging. Given that current timber supply would only cover about a third of estimated 2050 demand for construction if it was all shifted to timber, that means pressures on forests would grow dramatically. For this technique, lifespan and end of life issues are critical. Will these buildings remain in use for centuries or just decades? If construction waste can then be reused or become feedstock for BECCS or biochar, then storage might be meaningfully prolonged to really climatically meaningful timescales.

0:18:00.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: There are also several methods been explored for storing carbon in concrete buildings. These include enriching concrete with carbon dioxide in the curing process, using alternative minerals such as magnesium carbonate that absorb more CO2 in the curing, and directly incorporating carbon rich aggregate to biochar in concrete up to 15% by waste wait. The Four Corners Carbon Coalition partnership of several US cities provides grants to accelerate CO2 removal projects and in 2023 it awarded nearly $400 million to 4 billion businesses incorporating carbon removal in concrete, cement, synthetic limestone and insulation materials. However, claims in this field are likely exaggerated, perhaps in defense of the interests of a major energy intensive industry. Most alleged removal of storage in this sector is not enough to even offset the emissions involved in the production of cement and concrete. Accelerating carbon uptake in concrete curing is of questionable additionality as it largely merely replaces carbon dioxide that would be absorbed over some years from the atmosphere. Accelerating curing using CO2 from fossil sources as is happening in New York is therefore likely counterproductive in CDR terms.

0:19:29.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR promises here seem likely to help lock in the use of energy intensive concrete and steel where alternatives timber or building refurbishment would be environmentally preferable. Adding biochar or carbonaceous aggregate in residual concrete uses, however, would remain sensible. Direct air capture delivers carbon removal by the selective chemical capture of carbon dioxide from air passing over a contactor. Once saturated with CO2, the contactor is moved into an enclosed space and regenerated by temperature, pressure or humidity swing techniques. The collected CO2 would be pressurized and shipped to geological storage or utilization. Direct air capture uses a lot of energy for moving large volumes of air and regenerating the sorbent. Integrating DAC into building HVAC systems, as Solitaire Power are doing in pilot projects, should increase its capture efficiency by using air enriched with CO2 from respiration as the source, and it should reduce energy demand by utilizing the HVAC airflow.

0:20:46.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: The pilot in Aarhus promises 15 tonnes a year of removals for this one office building with no confirmed destination for the CO2 as yet. The costs are also unspecified, but described as adding 5 to 14% to rental and operational costs. At the lowest end. This implies over $1,000 a ton of carbon dioxide despite the efficiency savings. Whereas centralized DAC currently costs perhaps 400 to $600 a tonne in urban settings, collection transport costs will likely be higher too.

0:21:23.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: However, there are potentially significant health benefits from reducing CO2 concentrations indoors. Perhaps the poster child for urban CDR is Stockholm BECCS project. BECCS Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage works in theory by capturing up to 90% of the carbon dioxide from flue gas from biomass combustion, it counts as CDR because the biomass is considered carbon neutral. BECCS typically uses a chemical amine capture agent through which the flue gas is filtered. The amine is then regenerated to separate the captured CO2 which is then purified and compressed for storage, typically in a geological reservoir. Overall, this takes carbon dioxide that’s originally captured in photosynthesis into long term geological storage. But in practice most existing BECC’s plants do not result in net removals because they capture CO2 from biofuel fermentation with an overall capture rate only around 50% as the remainder of the carbon ends up in the fuel and they sell the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery, which can lead to 150% or higher rebound in emissions.

0:22:45.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: At least the Stockholm Beck’s proposal is better than those. It’s a form of biomass combustion generates heat and or electricity. Some 20% or so of the energy generated has to be used to run the capture system, which means that overall biomass use in a retrofit like this is increased. So Stockholm Exergy is retrofitting its Vertan biomass cogeneration district heating plant and the retrofit is scheduled to begin operations in 2028. The plant relies on importing biomass about 60% from elsewhere in Sweden and will export compressed CO2 by ship for storage. EXIGEE has won EU innovation funding of $180 million and Swedish government support of around $160 a ton for 800,000 tonnes of capture per year for 15 years. It’s also selling removal credits 3.3 million tonnes already sold in advance to Microsoft and around $50 million worth via Frontier to various buyers.

0:24:04.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This means much of the CDR benefit will be offset by emissions legitimated elsewhere. And intriguingly, EXIGEE has lobbied the EU in efforts to ensure that the Green Claims Directive doesn’t undermine the business logic of such credit sales. I’m going to skip this, as methanol production is a form of biofuel BECCS, which is at best a highly inefficient form of CDR. More biogenic emissions remain than are captured and a full life cycle analysis might not demonstrate net negativity. However, it was highlighted as a significant source of potential in the Amsterdam Region report commissioned by Carbon Traders South Pole, which I’ll mention later.

0:24:49.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Even for cities using biofuel or biogas for buses, electrifying the transit and directing biomass to more efficient CDR techniques would seem a better approach. In Trondheim we have another form of BECCs here, rather than using virgin biomass, it’s being put on a waste incinerator which incinerates mixed waste. Treating the biogenic component of mixed waste as carbon neutral by definition and thus capturing the emissions from its combustion cancer CDR. The potential here is around 300,000 tonnes per year capture from mixed waste in synergy of which about a third is fossil. The big downside here is that it creates incentives to increase or maintain waste production rather than avoid reuse or recycle or, as has already happened in Sweden, end up importing waste from other countries to feed the incinerators. Health risks from emissions make incineration unpopular in many countries, so tying CDR to such technologies might make it harder to promote.

0:26:04.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Turning to biochar. Biochar is the pyrolysis of biogenic materials, often waste such as forestry residues at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This generates a carbon rich solid character, the biochar and combustible gases and or oils. Burying the char in soil can result in stable storage of carbon for centuries.

0:26:32.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Nova Carbon’s biochar park, the third I think of four they’ve developed so far at Grevesmühlen, captures around 3,200 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The cost per ton are unclear, but biochar in general is estimated to cost a little under $200 per ton. The biochar may then be used in agriculture or urban landscaping. Char is believed to benefit soil stability, water retention and fertility in most settings.

0:27:13.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But concerns have been raised about contamination arising from waste feedstocks, especially if there’s things like heavy metals that survive the high temperatures involved. That might limit the use of such char to landscaping in relatively undisturbed areas. There are other possible biochar synergies in dry and wildfire risk areas. Incorporation of biochar might usefully enhance soil moisture retention, thus helping restrain fire spread. And there is a need to collect biomass. Harvest biomass for fire suppression purposes, which can then be supplied to the biochar facility like BECCS Biochar as CDR rests on the assumption that biomass is carbon neutral. Collection, transport and processing emissions are typically accounted for, as are emissions from any gaseous or oil fraction produced in the pyrolysis process. In this case, Nova Carbon claimed that the carb capture in char fully offsets process, energy use and the gaseous fraction.

0:28:12.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: But they’re also selling carbon credits and it’s not clear whether the net result would be some double counting once the emissions legitimated by the credits are included. Moving to Wastewater treatment this is the first of two different approaches in wastewater treatment. At Wood Huxley Sewage Treatment plant in Zurich, CCS is being installed on a sewage sludge incineration facility aiming to abate 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year at a cost of over $1,000 per ton. So this is another form of BECCS here, though the process is unlikely to generate surplus energy given the energy costs of drying sludge, so several questions are generated there. I’m going to skip on more innovative approach in New Haven, Crude carbon, a spinoff from Yale, is adding alkalinity to microbial wastewater treatment. This captures carbon dioxide as bicarbonate for export to the ocean via the plant outflow. Crew Carbon claims its pilot operations have demonstrated 4,000 tons a year removals and on this basis they have made advanced sales of carbon credits for 72,000 tonnes over the period 2025 to 2030 at a cost of around 450 tonnes at $450 per ton. Unlike BECCS, DAC or even Biochar, the total quantity of carbon captured here is difficult to measure directly and monitoring reporting verification standards become critical, especially if removals are to be marketed as credits.

0:30:02.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: A more conventional form of carbon removal has been practiced in Yokohama. Seagrass meadows and salt marshes are amongst the most effective biological carbon sinks with per hectare rates several times greater than forests. Since 2011 Yokohama has supported projects planting and protecting eel grass and seaweed beds which are generally being lost and degraded faster. But since 2015 they’ve been turning the carbon gains into tradable credits and as of 2019 total removals were just 80 tons.

0:30:45.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Such projects have valuable co benefits for fisheries, but the carbon removals are marginal at best and may even be double counting as these would be previously unmanaged spaces. Perhaps a bit of a niche as the this depends on a coastal location, but the Captura process uses electrodialysis, an energy consuming process to separate seawater into acid and alkali streams. The acid stream is first added to contain seawater, forcing out dissolved inorganic CO2 and the alkali stream is returned and mixed and the now CO2 depleted water returned to the ocean where it re equilibrates by drawing down atmospheric CO2. Captura have a 100 ton per annum pilot plant at the port of LA and are developing 1000 ton per annum plant In Hawaii, costs are currently estimated at perhaps $2,000 a ton and need to be cut significantly to make it competitive.

0:31:46.4 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Finally, Freetown in Sierra Leone is using reforestation tree planting to accumulate and store carbon in living biomass. Following the loss of over 500,000 trees each year from 2011 to 2018 and devastating mudslides killing over a thousand people in 2017, the city is aiming to plant 20 to 25 million trees by 2050. Motivated primarily by climate resilience benefits, stabilizing slopes and providing shade, citizens have been mobilized to plant and maintain trees through a digital app and micropayments. Funding has been raised in part through the sale of digitized tokens for corporate social responsibility purposes and plans to sell carbon credits. The project is deliberately targeted informal settlement areas for equity reasons. However, the long term durability of these carbon stores must be questioned as the land involved is in a growing urban area and policies on land use can change quickly.

0:32:58.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So the bottom line, how much carbon could cities remove? All these projects have generated only small numbers, none of them more than a million tons a year, some of them down in the level of tens of tonnes. Putting it together, there are a few reports that have made estimates, but there’s huge variation in the estimates and the amounts and even in the techniques considered.

0:33:28.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: This quick survey of the literature suggests a range from less than half a gigaton to 5 or even perhaps 13 gigatons. Those upper figures appear to me hugely over optimistic in terms of the credibility of the techniques that we’ve just looked at, the sustainability of supplies for them and the uptake levels that would be likely achieved in practice. So amongst the reports, the Mercator Institute’s estimates of 0.3 to 1.2 gigatons seem perhaps most responsible in this respect. But these exclude waste management routes. So my best guess, adding some potential for waste management to the Mercator estimates is a maximum of around 2 gigatons. That builds an estimate for waste treatment based on BECCS and 3.8 gigatons of municipal solid waste in 2050, around 70% of it urban and around 20% biogenic carbon. Even this, allowing an ambitious coverage of 50% of waste treated that way, would give the figure of 0.9 gigatons. So we’ve got an overall aggregate figure that’s certainly well worth pursuing in the light of the IPCC’s estimates of a need for 6 to 11 gigatons, but not something that’s a silver bullet. There’s lots of positives being raised in the cases that I’ve suggested and lots of questions outstanding.

0:35:15.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: So we need much more rigorous assessment of the promises of such proposals. It’s not to say such pilot projects are bad, but we should free them from the pressures and distortions of venture capital and carbon trading, providing instead public funding and public accountability based on radical transparency and public intellectual property. Rejecting offsetting for CDR is a first step towards addressing these problems, but also critical in moving away from continued magical thinking and the promises that go on contributing to mitigation, deterrence and climate procrastination CDR advocacy is riddled with magical thinking, notably expectations of technological fixes, a belief in technological wizardry to evade material and environmental limits, often coupled with financial wizardry, a belief that venture capital and novel financial instruments in constructed markets will somehow make these technologies effective and affordable.

0:36:20.9 Dr. Duncan McLaren: These combine to generate exaggerated expectations and facilitate delay and mitigation. Taking CDR into the public realm as a vital future shared utility might also seem magical thinking, especially at the current moment in US politics. But if any group of actors in the CDR space could lead such a move, then it might be cities focusing development of CDR on techniques with co-benefits for their existing services and facilities.

0:36:57.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Doing that will need careful navigation of a host of political currents and interests that want to turn CDR into a marketable commodity, deliberately substituting for mitigation efforts including finance, oil and gas, airlines and others. But there may be potential to win support from other sectors like the development sector as well as from the broader public. Key to public support is likely to be the question of justice and fairness, and taking account of all such issues is likely to further reduce practical potential for urban CDR.

0:37:45.5 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I think leaving an impression of perhaps half to 1 gigaton per annum by 2050 as the possible practical contribution would be responsible and realistic. David Morrow and his friends and his colleagues have suggested these guiding principles for climate justice with respect to CDR. Play the long game, support CDR as reparation, avoid carbon tunnel vision, account for all impacts, split, don’t lump measure and manage different techniques separately, and don’t bet the house on the models. Those are all useful guidance, I think for cities. More specifically, urban CDR could exacerbate injustice through several routes, notably via the location and impacts of pollution, odour, truck movements and so forth of energy and waste facilities.

0:38:37.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR doesn’t make energy generation or waste management magically clean, also via the effects of CDR in construction materials on relative housing costs and availability. Thirdly, through competition for land elsewhere for any additional BioMass to supply BECCS or biochar and finally through the many injustices in offsetting and carbon trading, such as intermediaries extracting the value, the wealthy purchasing offsets and the poor suffering project impacts. So with urban CDR cities must beware exporting impacts. BECCS and Biochar may still rely on land outside the city.

0:39:23.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: CDR is not exempt from the risks of green colonialism. Overall as well, we should remember that environmental justice is not necessarily served by every entity individually reaching net zero. Net zero is a global goal. Cities may well do more to cut emissions and less CDR, while rural areas might have more sustained emissions from agriculture and transport, but do much more in absolute terms to generate removals. Delivering environmental justice in CDR requires careful attention to historical and continuing inequalities, failures of recognition and uneven capabilities and vulnerabilities. Coming to conclusions. Some preliminary recommendations for urban CDR policy. Keep CDR subsidiary to mitigation and adaptation. Look for the co benefits for example in waste management, district heating, air quality and health, wildfire suppression, urban greening, shade and resilience.

0:40:35.0 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Focus any BECCS or biochar on genuine residual waste generated by the city and not on imported biomass. Integrate CDR in municipal functions, states management, waste management, building regulations and planning rules, for example, and avoid buying CDR offsets. Minimize selling removals that are generated by public utilities. For brief conclusions so urban CDR has lots of potential worth exploiting even at the total half to 1 gigaton level. But cities have far greater prospects to cut emissions and eliminate fossil fuel use. Those must be the priority. In climate policy terms, urban CDR can be part of a CDR portfolio. But neither urban CDR nor CDR as a whole is a silver bullet for the climate and cities exploring in this space must beware misleading and illusory promises from CDR promoters, especially those who are seeking to sell credits. And in working with CDR, cities must attend to justice Implications CDR is not a magic wand that will erase social and environmental side effects. Thanks so much for your attention and let’s move over to the question and discussion section. I’ll be making the slides available and there’s some extra slides with links.

0:42:21.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much Duncan for that. Fascinating. And you did cover some serious ground there. It’s a lot to take in and if you just stop the screen share then we can get a picture of everybody. There we go. Well, we’ve got a lot of questions and let me just go through them. So Venkata asks, what are the challenges and support systems for alkalinity enhancement in coastal cities that also provide some level of resiliency support for local corals against ocean acidification.

0:43:06.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: If I caught that correctly, the question is would these sort of alkalinity measures be good for protecting coral reefs and so forth? That’s one of the functions that I think researchers in the space are exploring. What’s not clear at the moment is whether a process like the Captura one would provide alkalinity in the right places and in weight in forms that reef organisms could make use of. I think there is… It’s an area that’s definitely worth thinking about, a very clear possible co-benefit here. And as I said, most of these things need co-benefits to become affordable for a start because they’re otherwise very expensive. And focusing on the co-benefits is a good way of deciding which techniques are most appropriate in the relevant location.

0:44:12.9 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks, Duncan. A very practical question from Michael. What are the super accessible interventions that cities and cities and groups can pursue in their cities? What’s the equivalent of eat less beef for citizens and city dwellers? 

0:44:32.7 Dr. Duncan McLaren: I don’t think there’s anything quite as simple as that. There’s nothing… There was a study that I looked at during preparing for this that looked at biochar incorporation in residential yards and the average result was 10kg of carbon a year. You do better than that by taking the train once instead of driving. So really personal carbon removal is probably not in the big picture. But at the city level, the shift to shifting at the margin of new build into timber buildings and using biochar in city parks and urban public spaces, those would seem to be probably the early win wins and there are probably some other no regrets in terms of the management of land, whether that be urban forests or urban coastal lands.

0:45:41.3 Professor Julian Agyeman: Is Edith in the room? Because she has a quite a long question, very detailed question, and I’d rather she ask Duncan directly. Edith, are you in the room? 

0:45:54.4 Edith Kutz: Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Hi. Hi. Hi. This was a great presentation. I went to one yesterday that was… Doesn’t even compare because you really hit. You really made it practical. You were critical and you also included policies. So anyhow, I just wanted to let you know, I mean, to ask you if you’re aware of. I’ve been following carbon collect. They are a direct air capture machine, let’s say, and it uses ambient air and it doesn’t use fans. So it doesn’t require huge sources of energy. And it has a proprietary transfer mechanism to absorb and release the carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can be reused in carbon Manufacture concrete, like through the carbon cure method. So it’s like this win, win for a city. I mean, because you could get a circular economy going. And it’s a modular and a really attractive, the most attractive DAC mechanism that I have come across thus far. It’s not like Climeworks or some of the others. So I just wanted to suggest that because as a landscape architect, I’ve been trying to find out ways to bring DAC right into the city in parks and in places. I mean, I work with natural bay solutions also, but I’ve been really trying to find the application for mechanical ones within a city, which is why I found your presentations really very interesting and really good.

0:47:20.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Well, thanks, Edith. I was at the same webinar as you yesterday. Appreciated your contributions in the chat. I haven’t heard of Karma Collect specifically as you describe them. They’re not dissimilar to solitaire that I did include in the, in the talk.

0:47:39.7 Edith Kutz: No, no, no, no. Solitaire is connected to buildings, right? Yeah, no, this is a freestanding.

0:47:47.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Right.

0:47:48.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Just Google Carbon Collect. You’ll see it as Mechanical Tree.

0:47:53.2 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Immediately, I would worry a little about the embodied capital cost of doing something that uses ambient air, at least in, in places that aren’t very windy. If you’ve got wind generating a good airflow, then then in theory you can get the efficiency high enough. And in general, I think DAC does have a lot of limitations because we look at photovoltaics and we think that’s brilliant. We have this dispersed, decentralized system which does away with or limits the amount of infrastructure we need because it supplants having such an intensive energy grid. DAC’s the opposite. If you make it modular and dispersed, then you have to have more infrastructure or more costly, less efficient ways of collecting up the CO2 to get it to permanent storage. And that’s partly because I’m more skeptical of the concrete reuse. So in concrete, I think incorporation of biochar is a better route than accelerated curing with DAC CO2 and more broadly, reuse of buildings. And timber buildings are better than concrete buildings.

0:49:22.5 Edith Kutz: Well, I think you ought to take a look at Carbon Collect’s site, because I’ll bring that question up to them. I’ve been in contact with them regarding their technology, but I think that the ambient air thing is not inefficient. So anyhow, I think you ought to check it out.

0:49:39.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And it’s a long standing debate in the in the DAC field about the potential for use of ambient air. It will probably have a niche. It will probably not be the only way to do DAC or necessarily the best way to do CDR in cities.

0:49:57.6 Edith Kutz: Okay, Well, a few… I agree. There’s going to be a mosaic of all kinds of different application technologies.

0:50:04.8 Professor Julian Agyeman: Yeah, great. Thanks for your question, Edith. Patricia Lacacia, what are smart technologies and policies that can enhance urban resilience in the face of climate disasters such as the increased frequency of hurricanes? 

0:50:20.6 Dr. Duncan McLaren: That’s a huge question, Patricia. And there are. What I’ll try and do is think if there are any contributions from CDR practices specifically. There are of course, many, many other ways in which cities should be building resilience. Starting from probably the biggest and most sweeping, increasing social equity as a way to build resilience amongst the population. That always seems to me the biggest and most overlooked way of preparing for these sort of disasters. In the CDR space, there may be possibilities for coastal cities in the way that coastal defenses and beach replenishment are done. I mentioned that as niches there are carbon removal techniques that involve putting pebbles or rocks on beaches where the wave action helps accelerate the carbon uptake, using particular basaltic rocks.

0:51:32.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: And if cities need those for to improve the defense of the city against storm surges or whatever, one could see a synergy there. That’s a very marginal thing, I think, or a niche thing in the overall resilience. Hurricanes obviously also tend to bring excess water. So anything that’s improving the permeability of urban areas is good. And here again at the margin, use of biochar in public parks and lands could be improving the ability of those parks to absorb and retain water. CDR wouldn’t be my go to technique or set of technologies for building disaster resilience in cities. I think I’d start from the other end.

0:52:24.7 Professor Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Duncan. Roger? Roger Hickman, are you still in here? For those of you who don’t know, Roger actually worked at Friends of the Earth in the in London around the same time as Duncan was there. Roger, are you in the room? 

0:52:47.8 Roger Hickman: Yeah, I am in the room. Nice to see you both and it’s great to see you both working together, which is why I came really more than anything else. But excellent presentation, Duncan. You just thoroughly exhaustively researched and great and albeit a bit depressing. I just in New England, but you know, a lot of British cities, we’re right next to Dartmoor territory and I’m wondering about sort of what potential is there and what the sort of carbon abatement is there.

0:53:17.8 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Thanks Roger, you broke up a bit. It’s a real pleasure to hear from you, but I got the gist that you were asking about peatland enhancement as a climate tool. Really? And yes, I didn’t mention it in the list of techniques because there’s rarely peatland managed by the city within the city boundaries. This would fall into the category of the rural areas doing more CDR and cities doing more emissions cuts in that cities should stop using peat in their gardens and urban public spaces because the extraction of peat from peatlands is a big carbon emitter because it ends up drying out the carbon comes out of it and protecting peatlands re wetting them is indeed a potentially valuable carbon removal tool.

0:54:25.3 Dr. Duncan McLaren: Peatlands can be more rapid and more dense sinks than forests. However, rewetting peatlands also does tend to increase methane emissions from and getting a net balance that is Capturing more carbon or in greenhouse gas terms is carbon negative rather than carbon positive will depend on the particularities of the location and the age of the peatland in particular. But broadly, yes, intervene to re-wet and restore growth in peatlands and stop digging them up and turning them into gardens.

0:55:08.6 Professor Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks Duncan. I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause for Dr. Duncan McLaren? Our next Cities@Tufts colloquium is on March 12th, when we have Hessann Farooqi, who is the ED of Boston climate Action Network talking about local leadership for climate change. Thank you for coming and see you on March 12th. Thanks again, Duncan.

0:55:37.1 Dr. Duncan McLaren: It’s been a pleasure.

0:55:39.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the Show Notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable with support from the Barr foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co producer, audio Editor and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff and Bobby Jones, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Environmental Justice, Political-Economic Inequalities, and Pathways to Justice

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Transcript for Environmental Justice, Political-Economic Inequalities, and Pathways to Justice

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Sharable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website Shareable.net just click the link in the show notes and now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome everybody to our first Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium of 2025. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Prakash Kashwan, who’s an Associate professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, not far away from Tufts. He’s also the Chair of the Environmental Justice Concentration in the Master of Public Policy Program at Brandeis Heller School of Social Policy and Management.

0:01:38.1 Julian Agyeman: I can’t even begin to encapsulate all his research in the one paragraph that I have here, but he is a scholar who focuses on the intersections of environment development and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. His research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two decades long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre academic career in international development from 1999 to 2005. He’s the author of Democracy in the Woods, Environmental Conservation and Social justice in India, Tanzania and Mexico, Oxford University Press, 2017, the editor of Climate justice in India, Cambridge University Press, 2022 and one of the editors of the excellent journal Environmental Politics.

0:02:31.3 Julian Agyeman: He’s also co founder of the Climate Justice Network. Prakash’s talk today is Political Economic Inequalities, Policy Narratives and Pathways to Environmental and Climate Justice. I think it’s the longest title we’ve ever had Prakash. Prakash a zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:51.9 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you Professor Agyeman and everyone else who’s involved with the organization of this fantastic series. I’ve listened to several of the videos and I’ve learned so much, so I really appreciate all of your work on this series. Without taking too long, I do want to take a moment to think about the moment we are in the context, the heaviness in the air. And I just want to say that challenging as the times are, we have learned so much from fellow scholars and activists. And Julian is one of those founding leading lights of the field of environmental justice, urban sustainability, just sustainability. And. And so I really want to thank you for your leadership. Of you and many others. I won’t name all the names, but just recognizing the general community of scholars and activists in the fields of environmental justice, climate justice, and social justice more broadly. And I think it’s drawing on the wisdom of all that work that you and others have done that hopefully will stand us on solid grounds as we prepare for the next four years, 10 years, next decade or so. So with that, I want to dive right into my PowerPoint presentation.

0:04:20.5 Prakash Kashwan: And I did change the title a little bit because it threatened to become even longer. So I cut out the policy narratives part, which I wasn’t really focusing so much on as the talk took shape. So now I’m talking about environmental justice, political economic inequalities, and pathways to justice. This audience probably does not need a long introduction to environmental justice, but just highlighting the definition of environmental justice that EPA and the federal agencies use means the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability. This phrase, all people has its own history.

0:05:12.3 Prakash Kashwan: As many of you might know, the environmental justice movement started with a very pointed focus on environmental racism. And one could argue that it got sanitized a little bit as it went through the process of institutionalization in federal policy making and state level policymaking. But this definition has been adopted very widely also within the EJ movement. And so that’s another point of discussion that sort of shows up in some of the literature review that I’ll share with you. So the contributions of environmental justice movement. We can’t spend enough time celebrate the contributions here in this limited format, but just to recognize that environmental justice movement has almost single handedly change the conversation and the policy and political debates on not just environment, but climate change and many other areas of policymaking and politics.

0:06:13.5 Prakash Kashwan: Having recognized those contributions, I think there’s also a very rich scholarship on environmental justice that talks about multiple histories, regional political economies, the EJ paradigm. There are methodological debates and policy engagements that have come about. And all of these scholars and scholar activists, they have shed light on different dimensions and aspects. So it’s a very rich body of literature. It has expanded starting from the toxic waste disposal to going on to conservation, food justice, carbon pollution, climate change, global climate governance, national and international case studies. So it has expanded tremendously in its scope and reach as it has gone. We will talk quite a bit about the whole paradigm of just sustainability. But there’s another sort of very active debate within the EJ scholarship that has focused on this idea of what is the role of the state and are the EJ agents, groups and movements, by working with the state, are they able to leverage this state for advancing emancipatory EJ outcomes or are they being co opted? And there’s a very vigorous some of these scholars, David Pellow, Laura Pulido and Jill Harrison and many others who have made tremendous contributions. You will hear glimpses of this debate, even though I don’t directly address their critique and the way they are framing this debate.

0:07:47.1 Prakash Kashwan: And finally, there’s been a lot of work on EJ policy, especially from the school that is, I went for my graduate studies at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Evan Rehnquist did some early work on grappling with the empirical questions, methodological questions, and David Konisky, now at the same school. But also folks like Mendy’s have done quite a bit of work sort of connecting the EJ debate to do specific sort of policy debates. And there’s also a more nascent kind of debate about globalization of EJ movement. And if you think about nationalization in the same sense that we think of globalization, the diffusion of EJ movements and scholarship from one region within the US to another region, and there are different origin stories. So the California EJ movement traces its trajectory back to the farm workers labor unions and farm workers unions, which is a different trajectory. And Tracy Perkins recent book is fantastic in just tracing these trajectories, but also showing what it means for us to take those alternative histories and trajectories seriously. And what does it tell us about where the EJ movement and the EJ policy engagements need to go? I’ve done some work engaging with this idea that now there’s a globalization of EJ movement.

0:09:11.2 Prakash Kashwan: John Martinez Elliott has written about this and I provided an initial critique of that kind of argument. So the main anchor that I want to use for this talk is in the just sustainability paradigm. And one reason I wanted to give you that kind of broad overview of the EJ scholarship and movement is to say that there are so many rich debates that one it’s impossible to do justice to all of those debates in the same talk, but also to push the debates and discussion beyond the sort of the basic argument that often get repeated within the context of say climate change, where some of the climate policy scholars are discovering EJ now and they’re bringing it in. And I’m afraid some of them are rediscovering the wheel because they haven’t actually engaged with the whole suite of EJ debates as they’ve unfolded over the years. So just sustainability again, I think this audience knows a lot about just sustainability, so I’ll jump through this. But the idea was to integrate questions of EJ into the debates on sustainability and sustainable development. And this definition of sustainability, which was an expanded definition of sustainability from the popular definition that we often see in the literature is by Kulin and co-authors, the need to ensure a better quality of life for all.

0:10:38.1 Prakash Kashwan: So you see the phrase all showing for all showing up here again now and into the future in a just and equitable manner. This last part is really important and I haven’t actually seen a lot of advancement of this particular part of the debate which is that all of this has to be done whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. So both sustainable and… One could argue that actually sustainable development community has not taken these limits very seriously, but also to then think about what it means for the program of an agenda of EJ as such. And again, just sustainability has blossomed into this multifaceted dense literature talking about alternative economic models, the approaches to co production of knowledge and policy agendas and policy models, intragenerational and intergenerational questions, and then reimagining needs. Thinking about good old man Gandhi who said there’s plenty to meet everybody’s needs, but not everybody’s wants. And so the just sustainability paradigm has sought to expand the the EJ debate beyond critiquing and fending off the bad effect of environmental toxic and waste disposal and hasn’t brought in this idea that a functioning thriving environment is also a prerequisite for the advancement of environmental justice and social justice. So this particular statement, a poor environment is not only a symptom of existing injustices, rather a functioning environment provides the necessary conditions to achieve social justice.

0:12:23.3 Prakash Kashwan: Now, all of this has brought us a long way from where we started in we as in the EJ movement started in the ’70s and some would argue even before then. And there’s a lot of scope to do a lot more meaningful work. The way I have understood this advancement of EJ literature, coming from a slightly different trajectory from the political economy and policy side, is that there are these main pillars of this argument rest on a couple of different kinds of arguments. One, that environmental bads also contribute to social injustices. Again, this argument is very familiar to this audience. Then there’s a second bit of argument which has been highlighted quite a bit and developed quite a bit by the just sustainability paradigm, which is that environmental goods, which is that good environment, protected environment, conservation, clean air, and along with alternative economic paradigms, et cetera, is a prerequisite for social and environmental justice. And this, I would argue that this also aligns with a body of work in economics, ecological economics, and some of the policy work that some of us have done, which talks about this inequality hypothesis, that environmental inequality, because it also hampers industrial regulation, inequalities are bad for the environment, and at the same time, they’re also bad for society.

0:13:56.9 Prakash Kashwan: So all in all, if you look at this literature, it clubs all the bad outcomes together. Bad environment, bad social justice outcome, bad EJ outcomes, and then all the good arguments that good environmental outcomes will reinforce the justice agenda as well as the pursuit of justice. And in all of this, I would argue that this literature still has three gaps, by and large, right? There’s been some work, but by and large, in the general sort of understanding of the field, I think there are three major gaps. One is that because of this good and bad sort of pooling of environmental and social outcomes, the literature is yet to get into a lot of critical scrutiny of the contested nature of the agenda of environment, because environmental protection is not one thing. There are many different ways and different ideologies of environmental protection that need to be scrutinized, and that has been done in other literatures, but it hasn’t somehow been fully integrated into the literature on EJ and just sustainability. And that’s really important because different ideological foundations of environmental protection are entangled with the dominant economic paradigm that the just sustainability argument has rightly criticized.

0:15:17.8 Prakash Kashwan: There’s an innate coherence to the argument that I’m making here. It’s coherent with just sustainability. And in that sense, one could argue that I’m trying to add to those arguments. This literature also has yet to take political and economic inequalities seriously in the sense that it has yet to deeply ask this question, what do political economic inequalities do to the kind of environmental policies, paradigms, and programs that come up in different societies? So not just on the environmental bad side, but also on the environmental good side. And then there’s this role of the state debate from the EJ literature. But there’s a different side to this kind of argument in the policy and institution literature. So that’s my, the lay of the landscape and how I’ve seen the gaps. But as I said, we look, really look forward to the discussions onto the extent to which we all are on the same page about this particular characterization of the literature and the gaps. So with this I want to first provide you some evidence about what do when I say critical scrutiny of the environmental protection paradigms, policies and programs. And one argument I want to make is that environmental protection, please put that in scare quotes.

0:16:41.5 Prakash Kashwan: “Environmental protection can produce both good and bad social justice outcomes, good and bad environmental justice outcomes.” So that’s first I want to show you quite a bit of evidence to make that argument and then use that argument to bring us to the current moment and what it means to think about this in the context, particularly in the context of renewable energy transition here in the US So my main focus here is on looking at the percentage of national territory that countries have set aside the agenda of nature protection. Now I know it’s a bit of a jump from talking about mostly about domestic environmental justice, but I’ll come back to it. Please stay with me for a while. It’ll all fit together. Hopefully it will. This graph shows you that if we go back to 1990 and please look at the green line, which is what we are concerned about, we’re not thinking so much about the marina area national jurisdiction right now. So green line shows you the global percentage of protected land globally, which has gone up from about 8% in 1990 to about 17% in 2022, 2023.

0:18:10.0 Prakash Kashwan: So it’s really almost gone up like 2.5 times in an era that has been full of neoliberal economic extractive development. And that context is really important because of the argument that is sometimes made about the fundamental contradictions between economic development and environmental protection. Here I’m showing you that one form of environmental protection has kept pace with the extractive development that we have seen over past quarter of a century, 35, 40 years. You could take this, expand this graph and you’ll see the same sort of trajectory which some of you who are in economics and public policy, this sort of contradicts some of the very popular economic arguments about nature conservation, poverty, development and so forth. But anyway, to come back to this progression of nature conservation, with the progression of nature conservation, we have seen a lot of conflicts around these conservation projects.

0:19:17.0 Prakash Kashwan: There’s another paradox here. The first paradox was the co evolution of extractive economic development and this nature conservation protected area based nature conservation. The second paradox is that all the countries that has big, large protected areas also have lots of conflicts around it. Which again calls into question ideas about how if you don’t do environmental protection in a way that takes the people along, then you won’t be able to do environmental protection.

0:19:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: It sort of questions that popular narrative which sometimes also shows up in the conservation, justice and EJ kind of literatures and debates to grapple with these two paradoxes. What I did was to look at the variation in the percentage of national territory that is set aside as protected area within countries. Greenland was not so popular. I did not actually include Greenland, even though it shows in the red color. I want you to be thinking about all of the other areas in red, particularly those in Africa. Red color, if you can see the legend at the bottom, is the countries that have more than 25% of their national territory set aside for nature protected areas. I want us to think about Africa in particular, because these are some of the poorest countries with some of the poorest people in the world, and they have more than a quarter of their national territories set aside as nature protected areas.

0:21:02.2 Prakash Kashwan: Tanzania, a country that I’ve studied, has 40% of its national territory under declared as set aside exclusively for protection of nature under these protected areas. This begs the question, how is it that first, why is it that these poor countries are deciding to set aside these large tracts of land for nature protection when they can clearly use that land, as economists would have us believe, that they would first like to use that land to do extractive economic development and poverty alleviation? Of course, there’s this popular argument about the conflict between poverty and environment again in the literature on environmental economics and so forth.

0:21:48.3 Prakash Kashwan: And so I run some very simple multivariate regression analysis and looked at the way in which political and economic inequalities mediate the designation or allocation of land for nature protection. The argument would be that inequality plays some role in this. As you can suspect that if you have unequal societies, those societies political decision making will not reflect the popular will. Right? Political inequalities, economic inequalities. If you have economic inequalities, very rich people can use poverty as a form of poverty alleviation and some kind of income programs as a form of incentives to promote the kind of nature protection programs that they want to promote. So there are many different ways in which economic inequality obviously plays a role. And similarly, poor leaders in poor, economically less advanced economies would have incentives to sign on to these programs if they come with some kind of economic support for park development or agency development and so forth. I Look at how political and economic inequality plays into this agenda of nature protection. And I’ll skip through the models and robustness tests and all of that. I went through a very torturous and painful review process, but in the end it all worked out.

0:23:24.0 Prakash Kashwan: And so the highlight results from this analysis are that democracy itself has positive effect on the percentage of national territory under protected area. If you control for everything else, democracy itself is actually associated positively with the larger area of national territory under protected areas. Now, there’s some dynamics going on here between European protected areas, which are different from African protected areas. But please stay with me and we can talk about rest of this stuff later. But this democratic dividend is undermined by increasing inequality within democracies. So if you take the sample of all the strong democracies and then see how, if you vary inequality within democracies, what happens to protected areas. What we see in this data set of 137 countries is that as economic inequality increases within democracies, the percentage of national territory set aside as protected area goes down. So democracy kicks in. And if you have inequality but strong democratic institutions, people who are subjected to unjust policies, they can protest and they can put some brakes on protected areas. That’s the basic argument, but this is the main finding here. Countries with poor democratic institutions and high economic inequalities, especially in Africa, have the largest percentage of national territories declared as protected areas.

0:25:09.1 Prakash Kashwan: In a nutshell, this global movement on conservation has ridden on poverty and lack of democracy, poverty and authoritarianism, if you will, to expand into global south territories. That’s the sort of the story here in the book Democracy in the woods that Julian mentioned in his very kind introduction. I unpack that whole thing. I’m not throwing you some crass empirical findings without sort of contextual understanding of those topics, but empirical analysis has its own sort of importance. Now these kinds of issues have traveled into or permeated into the ongoing debates on nature based solutions and nature based climate restoration and ecosystem restoration. So many of you may have heard there was this famous map, global map, prepared by Strasberg and colleagues. What they did was they, they said that if we wanted to look for three kinds of outcomes, so they created a global model and used remotely sensed imagery as well as geospatial analysis and spatial statistics to then say if we wanted to maximize the benefits of climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, and we wanted to do it at. At the minimum cost, globally speaking. So minimum cost requires cheap land and cheap labor. Right? The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is the kind of reference here.

0:26:46.1 Prakash Kashwan: And so cheap land, cheap labor takes you to all the places that you see on this map highlighted in dark red. So these are the lands that if you, again, if you take a look at the legend on the top right hand corner, These are top 5% and top 10% global priority areas for restoring back to nature. I want to repeat this again. This is a proposal that these lands in the red color should be restored lock, stock and barrel. These lands should be restored back to pre human restoration status. That’s the argument here. And of course you ask what happens to the most densely populated region in the world, which is South Asia and Southeast Asia, because it’s all red. Essentially, cheap land and cheap labor needs to give way to the agenda of nature restoration. Now what we did, we took this map, a group of us, we took this map and we said, okay, what if we insert some basic social and economic variables into this map? So we brought in economic inequality, political inequality, food insecurity, those kinds of variables that you think would be obviously related to this agenda of restoration because you’re restoring lands back to nature so all the farmland goes away and so forth.

0:28:18.0 Prakash Kashwan: What we found was that if you follow that top 15% restoration priority areas, almost all of agricultural land in Equatorial Guinea, Philippines, Nicaragua, Nepal, Indonesia, more than 80%, close to about 90% of agricultural land in some of these largest countries is supposed to be restored back to nature. What we found was that the map not remember, these scholars did not decide to prioritize. So I’m reading through the second bullet on the left side of the screen here. This map ends up prioritizing, right? Prioritizes in the sense that this is how things work out in the real world. When you’re looking for cheap land and cheap labor. It prioritizes restoration in countries that are poorer, more populated, more economically unequal, less food insecure, and that employed more people in agriculture. So all the wrong kinds of variables on the wrong side of the restoration priority areas. These equity effects hold, not just internationally. So it’s not just looking at countries as a whole, but you can also go sub nationally and look at which areas are being set aside for nature conservation within countries. Then we also see the same effect at the subnational level. So we started by looking at this rather simplistic sort of cross national international analysis.

0:29:49.3 Prakash Kashwan: But this analysis tells us that these outcomes actually percolate down all the way to the subnational level and they are applicable throughout the global landscape within these new programs of climate restoration and climate justice and so forth. Now I won’t. We don’t have. I haven’t seen analysis that test some of the same arguments within the US But I’m sure you’re familiar with the debates on public land in the US west and in different parts, and of course the debates around the histories of protected areas within us, the dispossession and displacement of indigenous people and the whole settler colonial project and how directly implicated protected areas were in that project of settler colonialism. So there’s a research agenda here that could be picked up if there are some interested graduate students listening to this talk right now. I have a framework to try and put together all of this, but I won’t talk about that for now. But the argument is to bring the literature from the policy and political economy with the literature on just sustainability to provide an integrated framework to look at these social ecological outcomes and thinking of environment, which is denoted in green here, both as a context to political policy, social outcomes as well as an outcome, right. So environment…

0:31:16.5 Prakash Kashwan: And this comes from the just sustainability idea. With that, let me move to the concluding part of this talk. I want to come back to this notion of staying within the limits of supporting ecosystems. This would have implications for the renewable energy agenda that is important and on the top of the political and policy debates and also debates within EJ movements and to some extent. Green New Deal, Inflation Reduction Act has this kind of electrify everything wipe to it, which is that with a maximalist argument about building so much renewable energy everywhere that we will have tons of jobs and prosperity and we’ll have money for care economy, supporting the care economy and all of that, remember that bipolar pooling of bad environmental, bad social outcomes, good environmental, good social outcomes, that pooling continues into the Green New Deal and IRA kind of policies and programs. And to the extent that just sustainability relies on this argument about good quality jobs that will contribute to social and economic justice, but will also contribute to a better environment. There’s a problem here in the sense that this idea of electrifying everything, maximizing everything, does not speak so well to this notion of staying within supporting ecosystems.

0:33:05.0 Prakash Kashwan: For those of you who are studying renewable energy transition here in the US the arguments that some of the indigenous nations and indigenous leaders are making, as well as some of the fishing communities and other communities who are dependent on the landscapes that are being reshaped by renewable energy projects, they are asking questions about how much renewable energy we need. And if there’s some debate on trying to minimize the need for renewable energy by reducing consumption, and if we do that, that then has implication for how we negotiate this tension between a speedy transition to renewable energy, while also thinking about social justice and environmental justice within this process. My argument is not that we should forego one or the other. We should continue to talk about limiting consumption. We should continue to talk about synergies between renewable energy transition and environmental justice. But this will become a contested process. And so I think there’s a need to muddy those two pools that we talked about. Good and bad environmental outcomes and social outcomes will not always go together. And that will then help us pierce through this almost omnipresent rhetoric that we see about community participation in scripts, stakeholderism within the federal policies and federal agencies.

0:34:40.7 Prakash Kashwan: If you look at offshore wind development or other kinds of renewable energy policies, it’s overflowing with this rhetoric of community participation. But those in practice, the community participation is not happening. And it is not happening with seriousness. And I argue that lack of seriousness is a symptom of avoiding the contestation that cannot be avoided and that should not be avoided. The other important part now I want to come back to, in the last couple of points, I want to come back to this kind of entanglement between the economic paradigms and this sort of renewable energy climate mitigation transition paradigm of maximalist outcomes. That the maximalist outcome has allowed a the corporate industry around renewable energy to take hold of the ongoing transition process. It has overpowered. And this is particularly evident in the offshore wind program that I’ve been studying for past few years. In a nutshell, the corporations are riding on this maximalist green energy transition program to maximize their profits. And as many of these corporations are the fossil fuel companies not just here in the US but also some of the largest European offshore wind companies are also the largest fossil fuel corporations of the yesterday, both the state owned corporations in Europe as well as the private corporations based here in the US.

0:36:20.0 Prakash Kashwan: This corporate agenda is the tension between EJ groups and labor unions. Labor unions do well under that paradigm of maximalist electrify everything paradigm because the more we build, the more jobs there are for unionized workers. And unions want that. And that should also happen. Of course unionization should expand. But still we cannot brush aside the tension that is showing up in New York and California. In many other states where EJ groups are strong, labor unions are struggling to deal with this idea of environmental justice and climate mitigation. The intersection of these two agendas is quite a bit. There has been an exception in Maine where labor unions have succeeded in building a broader coalition. And I’ve written about this, but that is Maine, right? So Maine does not have an EJ movement. And so that’s an exceptionalism. My concluding thought is this idea of the entanglement of the maximalist environmental agenda and the dominant economic paradigm, which is capitalism writ large. How do we rethink the environmental paradigm in a way so that it is effectively able to confront the economic paradigm as the Just Sustainability Program directs us to do, to makes us think to do broad based coalitions.

0:37:48.0 Prakash Kashwan: And obviously this audience again doesn’t need this reiteration that we need broad based coalitions struggling and shaping and negotiating and bargaining policies, laws, institutions that we need. And going back to that debate within the EJ movement, we cannot avoid engaging with this state. There’s no way, because anything at scale has to be done at speed, will require us to use the power of the state one way or another. Right now the corporations have been effectively able to use that power to that advantage. EJ movements have also succeeded, particularly in California and New York. But the larger story, that paradigm shift that Just Sustainability Program asks us to do that is still a long way off. And my hope is that in this current moment we can debate about and come out with some nuggets of wisdom collectively to think about both our scholarship as well as the social and environmental justice agenda that is even more important in the current context. So I’ll stop here.

0:38:56.9 Julian Agyeman: Thank you, Prakash. So last semester I taught my food justice class and I always use the quote that from Sen. That famine doesn’t happen because of an absence of food, it happens because of an absence of democracy. And I kept thinking of that as you were going through and challenging us to rethink our ideas about democracy. And my obvious thought here is we are, as you’ve intimated, we’re going to go through some very great challenges to democracy, not just here, but around the world. We are going to go through a period where states and regulation are changing greatly. What’s the agenda? Yes, we have to get back and look at these broad based coalitions, Prakash. But what is your prescription, Dr. Kashwan? 

0:39:51.8 Prakash Kashwan: As I said, I think this is an audience, especially in your presence, and I don’t know who else is around, but I wasn’t really. I was trying to avoid, to be prescriptive, but I’ll take the bait. Those of us who dabble a little bit in the positivist social science, sometimes you remove certain variables to get a clear picture on one of the many variables. And I think for me, and I haven’t because I Want to be very disciplined. In my 40 minutes that you gave me, I didn’t mention that I’ve been actually researching a comparative research on Maine, New York and California looking at how these three states are dealing with this agenda of renewable energy transition. So what we have seen in Maine, and remember it’s a state where we don’t have EJ. So we are taking out one of the variables. But what the labor unions have done in Maine is to engage with the environmental groups, the climate activist groups, as well as some of the indigenous nations and leaders to create a broad based coalition. And not just as a paper coalition. Right. This is a phrase that is often used that you sign on to some statements and make some paper coalitions.

0:41:05.8 Prakash Kashwan: But labor unions in Maine have actually taken that coalition building seriously and have put their own interest at stake, sometimes for the sake of advocating for indigenous people or advocating for the environmental protection agenda and so forth. And what we see in that particular case study, and I have a new paper in Environmental Energy and Social Science Journal which shows that the labor unions have confronted the corporate profit maximization tendency within the offshore wind industry in the Gulf of Maine. And that has not happened in many other places. And so that would be the first step, I would argue that labor unions, and this again, as many of you, there’s long standing debates about this wage bargaining model of labor union versus a larger societal political agenda that labor unions took on in Europe and sometimes also in the US in the New Deal era and so forth. And so the labor unions really have to think about working more closely with EJ groups in big states like California and New York. And similarly groups have to find ways of working more strongly with this politically powerful constituency of labor unions. And to me that, and again, I’m reducing it to a simplistic one sort of bullet point purposely to point out the ways in which we can connect the agenda of environmental and climate justice with the agenda of democracy, largely broadly speaking.

0:42:41.8 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Alejandro Manga, WPI. Alejandro, it’s an amazingly long one. Can you, are you on the line at the moment? Can you give it to Prakash in a couple of sentences? 

0:43:01.0 Prakash Kashwan: Oh, there’s. I’m scrolling. Okay.

0:43:03.3 Alejandro Manga: Allright. Yeah, now I can ask the question. Yes.

0:43:06.0 Prakash Kashwan: Well, please do. Please do.

0:43:10.1 Alejandro Manga: So this question is basically like you’re using, you’re doing regressions and you have a top down approach and a large approach of what is happening globally with this issue. And my question is framed from a perspective. I teach at WPI and I had this project where my students had this. They had to go and work on education, on community based natural resource management awareness. And so they had to go to communities that live in contact with the wildlife of Africa, say lions and elephants. And there were a couple of issues that they found. First, the communities care about this only insofar it does not. If it doesn’t impinge on the livelihoods, it works. So if the lion kills livestock and they get it back, it works. If the elephant tramples their cultures and they get it back, it works. But usually these programs to find out these kinds of research, they’re done with Western money and they’re framed by educated, mostly black people in Windhoek who are upper middle class people that have no experience and are trying to break away from their, like this whole thing, we are modern, we’re not peasants kind of framework. And I was looking at this and I was thinking this is the kind of stuff that irked the communities that we were working with. And yeah, so that’s. And it’s something that you cannot do if you stick to the methodologies that we’re using. And so I wanted to know whether you have something to say about that.

0:44:27.5 Prakash Kashwan: Right, absolutely. And along with this, I’ll also respond to the other comment that I saw about the confusion around the relationship between protected areas and democracy. The argument there is that it is contingent. So it’s the relationship between inequality and democracy. And protected areas is dependent on the level of inequalities, which means that in countries with lack of democracy and high level of inequality, more protected areas, because these elites and Alejandro talks about this, there are these people who are explicitly trying to sort of portray themselves as modern, as not peasants, as not being. And if I read the subtext, not being ignorant, but enlightened about the need for global conservation and so forth. And remember, these need not be the actual citrus. This might just be discourses. Right. So we think a lot about the power of the narrative to shape leaders and their actions. But yes, absolutely. And again, to think about this, it’s helpful to do a little bit of comparison between Latin America and, say, Africa. Protected areas in Latin America have benefited local surrounding communities more than they have benefited the communities in Africa. And that’s because the communities in peasants in Latin America have been very well organized and have been connected to national political parties and regional political parties.

0:46:00.2 Prakash Kashwan: And they are able to pull the strings so that whatever income the agencies earn from protected areas, that income is channeled back, effectively, relatively speaking, into local communities while in Africa, because the leaders are not accountable to local communities in the same way there Is this feudalism? Cheat tenancy hierarchies? And this also holds true for South Africa and large parts of Southeast Asia in those contexts, because there’s no accountability. These modern enlightened leaders impose protected areas on local communities. There’s another article that I would like to draw your attention which came out in the journal Environment, the Environment magazine. It’s called From Racist Conservation to Environmentalism, something like that, where we take you through the whole history of protected areas and bring you up to the speed on community based conservation and regional differences and infiltration of markets and financialism, financialization of conservation and all of that. So all of these forces are entangled and depending on what methodological tools you’re using, you look at different parts of it, Right? So you’re very right that it, it cannot show up in all of the empirical analysis. But one needs to do like qualitative case studies to show some of these effects.

0:47:24.3 Julian Agyeman: We’ve got a question from Barth wants to know. You talk about it, but you don’t mention degrowth. He wants to know, have you incorporated degrowth into your thinking? 

0:47:38.5 Prakash Kashwan: Degrowth, Absolutely. To the extent that it reminds us of the limits part. There are some naughty questions around the type of growth and degrowth. Scholars have been remarkably nuanced about what they mean by degrowth in terms of. It’s not a crass sort of argument about stopping all kinds of economic development, but de developing the global north, especially the extractive economies and all of that. But I would argue that de growth has been framed by and has been developed within the Western liberal framework. And so it has to deal with many kinds of issues that are quite complicated, but in a broader spirit of reducing consumption. I think that goes very well with the just sustainability idea of living within the surrounding ecosystems and the limits to that.

0:48:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Lorenzo asks, how do you define democracy? This sounds like a whole nother cities of Tufts. But how do you define democracy as a variable in your research? Is it just holding elections? Is it just a binary variable or are there degrees of democracy? 

0:48:50.6 Prakash Kashwan: So the Freedom House index that I used in that 2017 Ecological Economics article has a, has a scale with a variety of different indicators. And then in some of the subsequent projects we have also used Polity Score, which is a more. It’s a more politicized but a somewhat simpler measure. Remarkably, these two main indicators of democracy have a very high correlation of about 85, 90%. So even though they measure democracy very differently, they come to the same sort of conclusions about which countries are strong democracies. And which are weaker. In my qualitative work, of which I’ve done a lot actually I take a more nuanced approach of democracy with a smaller D where it is about grappling with the ongoing political and policy processes and holding leaders accountable and making them do the things that they wouldn’t normally do under corporate oligarchy, kind of democratic setup that have become very common in many countries. There I actually look at the actual struggle for democracy and how they develop. My argument is that we have already actually seen quite a bit of that. I don’t want to preview another argument here, but I think there’s quite a bit of that benefit gains to be had by looking at the small D democracy at the state level, energy transition processes.

0:50:19.8 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks Prakash. Lucia, do you want to talk about your question? It looks like a good one, but it’s again very long.

0:50:32.4 Lucia Cristea: Hi, yes, I’m Lucia. I’m from Italy at this moment and thank you very much for this. Yeah. In Europe we haven’t probably, you know very well we have an imposed process or imposed stage of co creation or involvement on the stakeholders in the process of implementing anything, anything, any project that we are doing we have to or strategy or even policy we have to discuss with stakeholders and end users and unfortunately how nice democratic this process is. It’s so long and sometimes over seen by the politicians or by the decision makers. And my major concern is to what extent all these nice stages in the process of implementing a project or a strategy or a policy allows us to reach quickly the targets that are imposed by different policies such as Green Dealer or I don’t know, achieving fit for 55 in in 2013 in Europe or something like this. So it is a gap in my opinion between how we engage or how we discuss with everybody and even how we can create or address the conflict resolutions between different, like you correctly said, between different stakeholders. So I’m interesting if you have some insights on this or mechanism I will be very grateful if you can have your insights. Thank you very much and very nice talk.

0:52:03.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate that question. It’s a big one. So I’ll say briefly that the state of affairs that we have now, they are a product of at least a century long, if not more of extractive development and then rigging of the policies, institutions, democracies by the extractives, the industries and actors who are benefiting. This includes both market actors as well as political actors who have benefited from that extractivist project. I think in all fairness, I think it’s a bit too much to ask the environmentalist to grapple with all of that in brief period of time. I think the dilemma that you point out is very real, but we have to live with dilemma and we have to tackle these questions in ways that justice to both the environmental agenda as well as the ecological and social justice and environmental justice agenda. I will say this, that this respecting the social justice and environmental protection agenda has been very difficult because we haven’t been able to tackle the original extractivist project. We are patching on these all of the other processes that you’re talking about on the top of an ongoing extractivist project, and this is why that’s so hard. So if we attack that more strongly, I think we’ll have a much better handle around these kinds of challenges.

0:53:33.5 Julian Agyeman: Prakash, thank you so much for getting us off to a fantastic Cities@Tufts colloquium start for spring 2025. Can we give a warm round of applause to Prakash Kashwan of Brandeis University? 

0:53:46.6 Prakash Kashwan: Thank you everyone. Please email me if we would like to continue some of these discussions.

0:53:52.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and Communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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Watch the video of Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

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Transcript for Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy

0:00:06.9 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities @ Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Bar Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities @ Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:39.9 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities @ Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Bar Foundation, we organize Cities @ Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues.

0:01:04.5 Julian Agyeman: We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Noel Healy, who’s actually in Medellín Colombia. Noel is a professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University and is the director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab. His research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of rapid climate change, climate mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy.

0:01:47.9 Julian Agyeman: Noel was contributing author to the UN IPCC’s AR6/WG3 report, and Noel, I’m sure you know what that means. And he serves on the Advisory Board of Cell Reports sustainability and on the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences. His work has been published in leading journals such as One Earth, Wire, Climate Change, Energy Policy, and Climate Change, as well as in popular outlets such as The Guardian, The Hill, Scientific American. His research has also garnered attention from major media outlets like the Boston Globe, W Radio, Colombia, the Times, and Forbes. Noel’s talk today is decolonizing Climate and energy policy, forging a just global green transition. Noel, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities @ Tufts.

0:02:42.4 Noel Healy: Thank you, Julian. It’s great to be here. And hello to everyone. I’m gonna start off by sharing my screen. We’ll just do that logistic first. And Julian, can you see my slides now? Okay. I presume you can.

0:03:01.4 Julian Agyeman: Yes.

0:03:02.6 Noel Healy: Okay, excellent. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here. Today I’m gonna talk about decolonizing climate and energy policy. Julian gave a nice introduction there. Basically, I work on three buckets of research, environmental climate justice, fossil fuel obstructionism, and climate and energy policymaking. For instance, one of my studies investigated the interconnected injustices along fossil fuel supply chains between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Colombia South America and currently in Medellín Colombia. My study documented the injustices enforceable displacement of indigenous YU and Afro Colombians from coal mining at the Sarah Horne open pit coal mine. In the US, I’ve worked with folks like Greenpeace and others to document public health hazards from air and water pollution and the risks associated with climate change.

0:03:55.1 Noel Healy: And also I’ve worked on a range of issues connected to the Green New Deal. Okay, so what is the current state of the climate crisis? I’m gonna go over this quite quickly ’cause I think my audience is well versed on this, but the IPCC has outlined a magnitude of ongoing and future threats, extreme weather events, sea level rise, increased frequency and severity of droughts, floods, wildfires, and the breakdown of food systems, mass human migration, something that I’m really worried about. Over 220 people died in flooding in Valencia, Spain just within the last two weeks and the Philippines have now been hit by four typhoons in the span of just 10 days or five major storms in three weeks.

0:04:41.2 Noel Healy: Sadly, those least responsible for historical emissions will get hit hardest and fastest. Okay, so in terms of what types of cuts that are needed, and this graph here on the left is from the IPCC’s 1.5 report, and I give a lot of climate and energy folk nightmares when it first come out because effectively we have to cut global net CO2 emissions by 45% as of 2030.

0:05:10.2 Noel Healy: So achieving such a steep decarbonization would involve reconstituting not only our electrical grid, our cultural system, our transportation system, financial system, trade, manufacturing, land use, political system, military, the entire economy. So within a decade, we must cut emissions almost by half, and that’s around 7.8% of pollution cut every year. Put this in context, despite global efforts, emissions have risen every year over the last five years. And while there was approximately 8.8% decrease in global emissions during the first six months of COVID, the emissions have rebounded. So global emissions continue to reach record highs with greenhouse gases 1.3% higher in 2023.

0:05:56.9 Noel Healy: Kevin Anderson is one of my favorite climate scientists because I don’t think that he really sugarcoats the level of transformation that is needed. So we had the opportunity to do an easy, moderate change, maybe 30 to 40 years ago the same time period when fossil fuel companies knew the impact of their products.

0:06:16.5 Noel Healy: But we are now at the point where we can either do a radical transformative shift or face climate chaos. There’s really no scenario in which we won’t be experiencing massive oil and change. So as we face into Trump 2.0, it’s important to first acknowledge that the United States is producing more oil and natural gas today than ever before, and far more than any other country. So the Biden administration might argue that increased oil and gas production during its administration is to some extent a result of issues of leases issued during the Trump administration. Trump auctioned off the leases and the Biden administration signed the permits.

0:06:57.7 Noel Healy: However, the Biden-Harris administration also gave the go ahead for the nation’s largest oil drilling operation, the ConocoPhillips Vast Willow Project in Alaska, known as the climate bomb. And this had nothing got to do with Trump. Okay, so that’s the kind of quick background to where we’re at. So what do I mean by international climate policy? 

0:07:20.1 Noel Healy: International climate policy refers to collective actions and treaties such as the UN’s Paris Agreement aimed at mitigating and adapting climate change on the local scale. So the COP29 is taking place right now, and in the next few slides, and I’ll illustrate how in the fine print of international climate policies, we can still witness the continuing entrenchment and the dominance of the global North over the global south, a region already burdened by historical extraction of trillions of dollars worth of resources and labor by its colonizers.

0:07:53.0 Noel Healy: So the US and the EU are not only accountable for almost half of all historical emissions, but as architects of global Empire, leverage their colonial wealth to steer climate negotiations, obscure historical emissions, overshadowing the severe consequences they have inflicted over the global south. This is a graphic from one of Jason Hickel’s research papers, I’m a big fan of Jason Hickel’s work and Julian Steinberg and others who work on this critical, climate justice stuff.

0:08:28.6 Noel Healy: So there’s a whole body of literature which outlines that decisions on how to count emissions are political ones, with social justice implications. And I think Professor Avi Chomsky, who also teaches at Salem State, does a good job of breaking this down. Almost all emissions are calculated in terms of countries. So most statistics required by the Paris Agreement use territorial or production based accounting, which means counting emissions at the point of production.

0:08:57.5 Noel Healy: On the other hand, calculating emissions per capita or per person highlights a country’s consumption levels. Alternatively, cumulative or historical emissions measure how much a country has emitted over time. So from this perspective, the US and the EU owe a huge climate debt to the world. And many scholars argued that because of the importance of global trade and the way rich countries have outsourced their production to poorer countries, it makes more sense to measure emissions by what is consumed in the country.

0:09:29.3 Noel Healy: We then have the historical perspective. The inequality of the responsibility appears even starker than a annual total or even per capita emissions. So the US accounts for twice the amount of historical emissions as China, even though China emits more every year. So international climate policy conveniently overlooks the historical emissions of the global North, an evasion of responsibility that is a modern extension of imperial dominance.

0:09:56.8 Noel Healy: The Global North represents a mere 14% of the population, yet has emitted 80% of CO2 since 1850. And this historical debt contributes to what can be turned to atmospheric colonization. And now the entire world, especially the global South, is forced to pay the climate price for the colonial industrialization of a few countries. My second point, the Global North’s continued domination within climate policy. UN climate agreements offer non-committal ambitious sounding goals that are not backed by concrete measures to curb fossil fuel production. Meanwhile, the global south endures the most severe ecological and economic impacts of this inaction.

0:10:40.3 Noel Healy: International climate policies entrenched inequality by permitting the global north to continue emitting at levels that dwarfed per capita emissions of the global south. And this non-committal nature of the UN climate agreements allows the global north to set broad unenforceable targets without real accountability. This dynamic enables the global North to dictate terms and priorities, sidelining the urgent needs and voices of the global south as we’re seeing now in COP29.

0:11:07.5 Noel Healy: Take carbon offsets for example, this climate policy allows polluters of the global north to buy their way out of climate impact by funding projects that reduce CO2 elsewhere, often in the global south. However, this can lead to land grabs or environmental projects that displace local communities, disrupting economies and ecosystems without reducing overall emissions. My next point is that it’s not just about emissions within national borders, it’s also about the ecological footprints that span globally.

0:11:37.3 Noel Healy: The Global North exports carbon emissions and pollution by shifting production to the global south. This carbon outsourcing allows the global north to appear greener, maintain higher consumption levels while offshoring environmental damage. International climate policy also has inadvertently triggered a neo imperial rush as nation’s vie for crucial minerals like lithium in the global south.

0:12:01.9 Noel Healy: This green tech race not only threatens to displace local communities, but also murs the historical patterns of exploitation, all in the name of advancing climate progress. My next point, the co-opting of the UNFCCC process by major fossil fuel companies like BP, fossil fuel producer nations like the US has led to non-inclusive policymaking and outcomes that are non-binding and ineffective.

0:12:30.6 Noel Healy: This partnership of public authority and private profit undermines the autonomy of the global south. A staggering 70% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution can be traced back to a mere of 78 entities. So these corporate giants are dictating the planet’s fate. So rather than heeding the urgent calls from the global south for fossil fuel production cuts, the UNFCCC process bows to the interest of a few corporations and Petro states effectively silencing the voices of billions.

0:13:06.1 Noel Healy: For instance, the graphic on the left-hand side shows that there were over 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP29, which is currently taking place. And this is more than delegates from the top 10 most climate vulnerable nations. Only three countries brought larger delegations. Additionally, 480 carbon capture lobbyists infiltrated, COP29 more than the US, UK, and Canada and the EU combined, even though 78% of large scale carbon capture projects have failed. And of course, it’s important to note that most negotiation red lines are drawn way before the COP takes place and fossil fuel interests have got access to all these people.

0:13:50.8 Noel Healy: My next point is that at the heart of international climate policy lies broken promises. The Global North has not fulfilled their 2009 UNFCCC pledge to provide a hundred billion annually in climate finance to the global south. Meanwhile, G20 nations blatantly contradict their old commitments, climate commitments by pouring over 1.4 trillion into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone. So when the global South is asking for the global north to pay its climate debt, the global north is already pumping close to 1.4 trillion of fossil fuel subsidies. So this shows you the contradiction of the system and how it perpetuates the cycle of neglect, where the economic interest of the powerful trump the needs of the formerly colonized.

0:14:39.2 Noel Healy: My second last point in this first half of the presentation. International climate policy, and the second half I’m gonna talk about solutions, binds nations not with chains of debt, but instead with chains of direct rule, but instead with shackles of debt. Approximately two thirds of climate finance is offered as loans. So rather than addressing historical injustices, the Global North provides loans under the pretense of climate finance, while imposing high interest rates that perpetuate debt dependency in the global south.

0:15:10.5 Noel Healy: Astonishingly in 2018, a staggering 90% of climate aid in Latin America and the Caribbean came in the forms of loans, not grants, strapping nations with debt instead of providing much needed aid. And this places formerly colonized countries in a position of financial subsidy, compelling the global south to spend fivefold on debt repayments over climate action. Meanwhile, wealth is funneled back to northern creditors, perpetuating a cycle of dependency and exploitation where the global north retains economic and political control at the expense of the global south’s sovereignty.

0:15:50.3 Noel Healy: My last point before we get on to the solutions, some pretty interesting graphics here on the left hand side. If you look at the loss and damage fund, which is established to address the irreversible impacts of climate change on the global south, the global north, historically most culpable for the climate crisis have pledged a mere 700 million. This sum is a drop in the ocean, less than 0.2 of the annual losses of the global South will incur due to global warming. A staggering shortfall anywhere or estimated between 300 billion and 1 trillion or even there’s some studies that go even further that a 30 year delay in establishing the loss and damage fund highlights the global north’s apathy, especially in the US, the leading historical emitter, which has no problem allocating 800 billion annually to its defense budget.

0:16:40.9 Noel Healy: So you can see the priorities there. What is more, the global north countries have funneled investments into fossil fuel projects at a rate 58 times higher than their contributions to the loss and damage fund from 2020 to 2022. So that was just seven big points that are condensed into why we need to transform the International Climate Policy system and how these systematic inequities are baked into the system.

0:17:12.3 Noel Healy: So what about solutions? These aren’t easy, but there are solutions out there and there are movements and peoples who are working on this, the first as a organizing framework is climate justice. So what is climate justice? And I use a definition here from Professor Avi Chomsky’s new book on Climate Justice. So climate justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income communities and communities of color around the world. The people least responsible for the problem. It seeks solutions that address the root causes of climate change. And in doing so, simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial and environmental justice.

0:17:55.8 Noel Healy: So this is an economic issue requiring a fundamental reorganizing of our society and economy, not just manipulating incentives and enhancing technologies. I like this quote here from Chico Mendez, “Climate Justice also centers people, marginalized communities and issues of labor, race, gender and class.” Mendez, who was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist famously, he said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” And you could apply that to a lot of conservationist organizations historically and even present day within the US in terms of their focus.

0:18:39.0 Noel Healy: This is a new book which has just came out edited by Farhana Sultana. I’ve just read the first chapter ’cause I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive here in Columbia. The first chapter is available online, and I plucked out this nice quote from the book when I was reading it yesterday. “Decolonizing climate is largely meaningless if it doesn’t accompany measurable shifts and law, policies and institutional frameworks are material distributions.”

0:19:08.7 Noel Healy: So I’m gonna talk about what some of these might actually look like in practice. A second book, which I would strongly recommend and arguably to me, maybe one of the most important books written on climate after Naomi Kleins. This changes everything and reconsidering reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. So this brings us to more complex questions around climate justice. So authors such as Táíwò, Jason Hickel, Julian Steinberg, and others, have outlined how European countries in the industrial offspring, US Canada, and Australia were built on the wealth of extractive colonialism.

0:19:41.2 Noel Healy: They used this to industrialize and build a fossil fuel economy. And I’m gonna read out this quote here from Olúfẹ́mi, “Figuring out who should pay for the loss and damage of climate change brings up familiar problems in distributive justice.” Should rich countries pay because they’re richer, because they’re more responsible? We can add another because they’ve inherited more liabilities from the global racial empire. What does he mean by this? So in his book, he outlines how the global social structure that resulted from transatlantic slavery and colonialism resulted in advantages accumulating to the Global North racially dominant communities. He and others outline that colonized countries, particularly the African continent, often inherited weak legislators, deeply autocratic political structures. And these initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal dependences weren’t what was one.

0:20:41.8 Noel Healy: And he uses this study here in the top left. This form of accumulation could then directly affect a number of measures that Brooks Setall have found to be key detriments of climate vulnerability, including government effectiveness, political rights, voice and accountability, and civil liberties. I’m conducting more research in Columbia at the moment, and Columbia arguably has one of the world’s strongest climate focused president, certainly from a country that has vast resources of fossil fuels.

0:21:12.9 Noel Healy: Gustavo Petro has pledged no new hydrocarbon exploration licenses, a halt on fracking pilots, and has stopped the offshore fossil fuel development. And this is significant ’cause Columbia produces around 1% of the world’s coal, oil and gas. As you can imagine, he’s facing huge opposition here for various reasons. And if you think US politics is complicated, I think Columbia is arguably even more complicated. One question that has been raised in discussions in Columbia is, will the international community compensate Columbia for leaving fossil fuels in the ground? 

0:21:49.4 Noel Healy: And as you can imagine, questions like this draw a lot of eyebrows from Global North officials, but it raises real questions of distributive justice on a global scale at the COP26 which happened in Glasgow, Costa Rica and Denmark launch an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And initiatives like this are critical in addressing the COP’s historical failure to tackle fossil fuel production directly.

0:22:17.4 Noel Healy: So the next solution framework is the National Fair Shares Approach. So climate justice groups argued that a system of climate reparations could require historical emitters to compensate poor countries for damages up to today by facilitating their rise to a common globally sustainable level of consumption by underwriting low carbon development there. And this kind of global climate justice that many grassroots organizations and the US Climate Fair Share Coalition are demanding. So what exactly is the Fair Share approach? 

0:22:51.4 Noel Healy: So the US is the largest historical contributor to climate change. It has a responsibility and capacity to commit to a Fair Share target, which was introduced by these groups. Within this framework, it calls for 195% reduction, which is 70% domestic reduction and 125 through international support. So this international support can address the Global South emission. So you might think that this, certainly in the next administration, this is not gonna happen that’s for sure. And you might think that something like this would never get implemented into any policy, but in fact, it actually did in some proposals for candidates for the 2020 election and specifically Bernie Sanders Green New Deal proposal. The graph on the right is a graphic from myself and Ray Galvin’s study, which appeared in energy research and social science.

0:23:41.0 Noel Healy: So Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal arguably represented the most transformative proposal of all 2020 climate plans. And it did in fact incorporate the fair shares approach. His Green New Deal proposed to reduce domestic emissions by at least 71% by 2030 and reduce emissions among lease industrialized nations by 36% by 2030. The total equivalent of reducing our domestic emission is by 161%. And this will be accomplished by providing 200 billion for the Green Climate Fund.

0:24:13.0 Noel Healy: So this is important because rich countries never met their stated yet insufficient goal of dispersing a hundred billion per year in climate violence. However, climate justice scholars and labor groups and EJ groups from the Global South argue that solutions should go way beyond the terms of transfer to mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. And I’m gonna name a few different types of mechanisms that we could explore. This is from a study from myself and Fergus Green.

0:24:42.7 Noel Healy: As a political scientist at University… At College London, we conducted a desk review of around 30 Green New Deal policies that were proposed between 2019 and 2021, mainly from the US and Europe. And we then categorized the different planks or components of Green New Deals. So if you look at the top, you have reconfiguring power, so pro-union reforms, racial and indigenous justice. You have then financial security policies, so proposals like job guarantees, minimum living wage. Then if we go back, one, we have supportive macroeconomic institutions. So Green Investment Banks, complementary carbon centric policies.

0:25:28.4 Noel Healy: So carbon centric policies are traditional climate policies like carbon taxes, regulation of upstream fossil fuel supply, and then foreign policy, which I’m gonna talk a lot about in the next two slides because those were something that Green New Deals were missing certainly from the mainstream US Green New Deals.

0:25:46.6 Noel Healy: And then the last bucket is, sustainable social provisioning policies. There was more radical Green New Deal proposals such as a Red New Deal, which was a number of indigenous groups proposed various counter proposals to a Green New deal which centralized even more so environmental justice, anti-capitalist principles, and decolonization. The Red Deal is a great example of this. It’s an indigenous action to save our earth. Is a political program for liberation and climate justice that emerged from one of the oldest class struggles in Americas. The fight by native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. And the central components include indigenous treaty rights, land restoration, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation, these rights-based approaches.

0:26:44.5 Noel Healy: So when we did this analysis of the Green New Deal, the one gap that was really missing was foreign policy. And of course, foreign policy is the one that would really challenge all or would be part of this decolonization process. So the Green New Deal is meant to be about redistribution and justice, and it shouldn’t stop at US or European borders. A recent study pointed to a real foreign policy justice gap.

0:27:10.5 Noel Healy: So among the few Green New Deals in our sample that mentioned foreign policy, some focused on border adjustments to penalize other countries taking inadequate action to reduce emissions, while others focus on rules about trade, capital flows. For example, a Green New Deal foreign policy might seek to facilitate sharing green technologies, intellectual property with poorer countries, liberalize trade and green technologies, and restrict trade in carbon-intensive goods and services.

0:27:38.0 Noel Healy: However, while the functioning of the global economy might seem obscure and beyond the reach for those who study climate, climate justice scholars and Global South groups contend this is essential for climate justice. So Global South debt, trade agreements, tax havens are big factors contributing to emissions, and how global corporate powers slow international climate action just as they do at the international level. Global Green New Deals need to name and challenge these usually invisible rules of the global economy. Our nation state-based thinking visibilizes inequality domestically, but it naturalizes it internationally.

0:28:18.2 Noel Healy: And it’s also critical to note the global inequality is racialized. So many climate justice groups and academics frame foreign policy in terms of climate reparations. Poor people in Global South are asking for foreign policy that dismantles the unjust global economic system that keeps poor countries poor and rich countries over-consuming. And climate reparations are important for both climate justice and for climate. Third world debts, global tax havens function to keep resources flowing from South to North and from poor to rich.

0:28:49.0 Noel Healy: So we shouldn’t just conceive reparations as the distant past. And this is a point made eloquently by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. It’s reparations for current extraction, not just past extraction, but it’s also how we understand the present and the future. So the Pacto Ecosocial del Sol was a Green New Deal proposal from the Global South, and they proposed plans like cancelling sovereign debt of countries, and that would allow them to reshape their political world and build platforms for countries to achieve low carbon development.

0:29:24.6 Noel Healy: This report got so little attention, and it’s just so important because Indigenous resistance stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual US and Canadian emissions. And when we’re talking about climate actions, this report highlights the various Indigenous-led campaigns against fossil fuel projects like pipelines, coal mines, LNG terminals, showcasing the diverse tactics used to resist development and it led to a huge amount of emissions and fossil fuels staying in the ground.

0:29:58.0 Noel Healy: So beyond direct emissions reduction, the report also argues that Indigenous resistance has also shifted public discourse around fossil fuels and Indigenous rights, and I think that that is quite accurate. If I’m to summarize all the different planks of international climate policy that could change, first one, if we look at decolonizing climate governance, so international financial institutions will have to change, establishing new global climate institutions, global trade agreements, climate refugee programmes.

0:30:32.7 Noel Healy: The second one, I’ve talked a little bit about that paying for climate debt. So climate reparations, debt cancellations, global wealth taxes, loss and damage fund, fair shares approach, Indigenous rights. So this would be Indigenous rights and climate agreements, Red New Deals, traditional ecological knowledge, legal pathways, that field is quite exciting and developing really fast at the moment in terms of climate lawsuits, global trade agreements, IP for climate tech sharing, etcetra. Fossil fuel phase-outs, so supply side climate policies which have been largely ignored. New initiatives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And then rethinking economies or eco-socialist, economic policies, degrowth policies, universal basic services, planetary boundaries policies, international Green New Deals.

0:31:23.8 Noel Healy: There’s also a number of different proposals on the table that climate justice groups are proposing some of the… If you’re able to zoom into the screen, you’ll see some of them there. There are also some other ones, there’s tax on dirty ship fuels, island nations are advocating a 2% tax on ships burning, polluting fuel oil, a tax on shipping and aviation which is supported by the IMF to address emissions from sectors contributing 3.5% to global emissions. I really like this one, it’s a windfall tax on fossil fuel profits that is proposed by the UN Secretary General. I think that would be politically actually attractive from the masses, maybe not from fossil fuel interests.

0:32:07.0 Noel Healy: Another one which would be really nice in this day and age with massive global inequality is wealth tax on billionaires. Politically challenging, yes, but a 2% tax to ensure a minimum contribution could be akin to a global corporate tax reform. This has been backed by Brazil who is hosting the next COP and they believe it could generate around $250 billion annually. There’s also loan deferral for climate disasters. So mechanisms like the World Bank’s debt pause, clause allows countries to delay repayments and debt for nature swaps as well. When we’re also looking at other systems, I just read this article from Jessica Green, who’s a political scientist at Toronto, and she called for the shifting focus to international trade and financial institutions. And this is actually a better focus.

0:33:00.0 Noel Healy: So the COPs have largely failed for the last 30 years. I’m not saying that we need to abolish them, but we need to change tact. If something is not working, we need to try new strategies. And a lot of her work, she argues that tax policy as climate policy. So she highlights the impact of corporate tax practices, particularly offshoring, which deprives countries of crucial revenue for climate initiatives. So a global minimum on corporate tax could redirect funds towards sustainable projects.

0:33:28.2 Noel Healy: Another proposal is reforming investment laws. So fossil and fuel companies have exploited foreign investment laws to sue governments for climate policies that impact our profits. And this creates a regulatory chill. So reforming our withdrawing from treaties with investors state dispute settlements provisions could help countries implement stronger climate policies without fear of lawsuits. There’s also trade policy adjustments such as the World Trade Organization, which restricts domestic support for Green industries and reforming trade policies to allow local Green initiatives adopt carbon border tariffs, which could create a more supportive environment for decarbonization.

0:34:09.5 Noel Healy: And then finally, and this is linked to some domestic points that I’m going to make in terms of the current election. We need to build political support through material benefits. So effective climate policies must prioritize material benefits for working class citizens such as secure jobs and clean energy. And while Biden’s IRA had a lot of good things within it, it was mainly focused on tax breaks for industries and manufacturing. And people on the street could not really see these benefits and we probably won’t see a lot of these benefits for many years to come.

0:34:46.2 Noel Healy: So these initiatives could gain wider political backing, moving climate action from austerity to more tangible economic growth and stability. And if I end with just one or two slides on the recent election, inflation was a major issue in this election with many voters feeling that the Biden administration failed to address it effectively leading them to support Trump. Voters experienced severe or moderate voters who experienced severe or moderate hardship due to inflation favored Trump by significant margins. While those unaffected by inflation leaned towards Harris.

0:35:24.2 Noel Healy: Prices included gas and housing rose more under Biden and Trump leading to declining real incomes, which influence voters perceptions of economic management. Of course, you can argue that the Trump administration is selling snake oil in terms of how they might address this, but the message that the economy was doing great fell flat with voters.

0:35:46.5 Noel Healy: This is a pretty interesting graphic, which shows how Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda around March, 2020. And he embraced austerity in March, 2020 onwards. And the Harris campaign effectively just carried on with this unappealing platform in terms of that it wasn’t economic populous platform. And so they gave up on economic popularism and pivoted towards austerity and a historic Pentagon budgets and that did not sit well with the electorate.

0:36:18.5 Noel Healy: And then this is my final slide, and I think one of the best climate think tanks in the US is the Climate and Community Institute, has some of the top green New Deal scholars and others. And I think that they’re really politically savvy in how they lay out, how we need to tackle the climate crisis and inequality at the same time. Essentially the Green New Deal argument and the majority of voters chose change and disruption over stability and the continuation of business as usual.

0:36:48.6 Noel Healy: So if we were to win power again to make people believe, again Democrats will have to be the party of change, which means the party itself will have to change. And I’m not sure everyone is really confident that is gonna happen soon, but the focus has to be on the material impacts not abstraction. So we need powerful, persuasive alternatives, visions of a different future to counteract Trump’s sledgehammer approach to the status quo. And many of the climate and economic conditions are devastating for working class communities, and they’re only set to deteriorate.

0:37:25.7 Noel Healy: So we need a political vision that links everyday concerns with the urgent issues facing our planet. And as the Community and Climate Project says, we need a political vision that connects kitchen table issues to the fate of the planet. Naomi Klein and others have said similar things that we all need to become Eco populous. That means championing policies that significantly lower costs while lowering emissions. So like heat pumps for all, robust tenant rights, rent caps, free and better public transportation, make polluters pay for the transition, tackling the cost of living, good jobs and infrastructure, strong unions, lower household costs by investing in public services, investing in social safety nets. All these planks within the Green New Deal actually have proven to be really popular across the political divide. Maybe when you term it green New Deal, there’s some bipartisan and cues within that. But even the Green New Deal itself, when you look at some of the polling over the last few years, it actually is very popular.

0:38:28.5 Noel Healy: And I think as we’re going into era, we have to rethink how we are framing and introducing climate policy within the US. We have to move away from this carbon centric approaches about carbon taxes that doesn’t sell. We have to tackle inequality, which is at its highest phase in many decades. So if we have a new vision for climate politics, and we have to start building that now as we’re coming up to Trump 2.0. Okay. All right. I think we’ll leave it at that. So I’ll stop sharing my screen. I think I’m within time, more or less.

0:39:08.1 Julian Agyeman: You are spot on, Noel.

0:39:08.3 Noel Healy: Here we go. How about that? 

0:39:10.7 Julian Agyeman: 12:45, we said, and it is 12:44. Noel, what a tour de force. I thought I knew something about this. You’ve opened my eyes to a whole range of new thoughts. One thing I just, one big omission, and the reason I’m gonna mention it is because next semester in Cities@Tufts, we’ve got Dr. Duncan McLaren who’s gonna talk about geoengineering as potential solutions. Now, you didn’t mention geoengineering, as I understand it, there’s two aspects to it. One is solar radiation management, the other one is carbon capture and removal. What’s your take on techno’s fixes, techno solutions? Noel.

0:39:52.9 Noel Healy: I guess the short answer would be false solutions. I think if a good rule of thumb is when you’re looking at climate solutions, what are the fossil fuel industry doing? What types of solutions are the fossil fuel industries promoting and funding within universities. And fossil fuel industry are funding geoengineering, again, like carbon capture and storage, carbon… These technologies haven’t worked at the scale we needed within the timeframe we needed right now.

0:40:26.1 Noel Healy: And even within Biden’s IRA, much of funding is going towards arguably false solutions like carbon capture and storage. Yes, they are within the IPCC but how do they get in there in the first place? Fossil fuel industries funds lots of monies into universities across the world to look at these techno fixes and these techno fixes won’t work within the timeframe.

0:40:50.9 Noel Healy: So I would argue that these geoengineering solutions are just another delay tactic by the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual and continue burning coal, oil and gas. On the flip side, if you talk about like supply side climate policies, bans, moratoriums, ending LNG exports, these are solutions that are real, that work, but they challenge the political… They challenge the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry. So when you’re thinking about solutions, it’s always good to see, to think about which solutions are the fossil fuel industry backing or not.

0:41:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Yeah. Exactly. And I’m excited for his talk though, because he’s gonna talk specifically on the justice implications of geoengineering which has received a scanned attention. Great. Thanks for that Noel. Could humanitarian issues such as the impacts of cobalt mining in Congo be included in climate finance packages going to the global south? What interventions have resulted in effective ways for shifting power dynamics between donor countries and receiving ones, if any? 

0:42:00.0 Noel Healy: Climate finance package? Yeah, the best of my knowledge, I’m not sure if that has been included in any formal COP talk. So unfortunately, the Green Tech rush is replicating a lot of the harms that fossil fuel extraction has created over the last, since Industrial Revolution. And I think there’s now a greater awareness that issues like mining for cobalt and the Congo is something to be addressed.

0:42:30.1 Noel Healy: So I’m unaware of any finance packages linked to that, but I think it’s a great idea. That’s certainly something that needs to happen. And for the most part, when we turn on our light switch, there’s a certain level of consumer blindness. We don’t know where our electricity comes from. So in the case of Boston and Salem, when we turned on our light switch, the Salem coal power plant used coal from Salem Home Mine in Colombia, and that’s why I did the lifecycle analysis. So there’s all these supply chain issues within fossil fuels, but also within Green Tech as we try and get more critical minerals for the energy transition.

0:43:09.6 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks Noel. Chris asks, given national and international policy makers have, as you said, failed to bring about the types of policy approaches we need for a climate justice perspective. In states and localities that have more progressive politics, what have you seen or what can you suggest could build a movement towards power and eventual international success? 

0:43:34.8 Noel Healy: Yeah, I guess over the next 40 years, everything’s gonna be decentralized in terms of the climate movement. And so that means that I’ve done a lot of research on the Green New Deal at the federal level, but the Green New Deal can be proposed and implemented at a local level. So we saw Michelle Wu, she had a fantastic Green New Deal and proposal that was central to her election campaign in Boston. And they’re now going through the sticky politics process of trying to get different components of a past. So I think that over the next four years, everything is going to be decentralized. We’re gonna go back to local climate policy planning, state level Green New deals, even within the UNFCCC process. So it looks like Trump is gonna pull the US out of the Paris agreement. Technically, that isn’t the worst thing in the world.

0:44:26.1 Noel Healy: Okay. Yes, it is terrible. Climate change is an existential crisis, but the UNFCCC is non-binding, so that doesn’t change the bread and butter of what the US does state by state level. And if you think about within the US states, there’s 10 states that make up most of the emissions. And if those 10 states continue with their strong climate policies, states like California, even Texas is now one of the biggest wind turbine producers within the US.

0:44:56.9 Noel Healy: There’s still a lot of hope in terms of decentralized climate action. But of course the real challenge with climate change in a global level is that we need everyone on board. We need massive federal funds and certainly in the US, we’re gonna have to pivot a little bit, but it does also open up an opportunity for the EU to take more leadership, for China to take more leadership and others. And I think that the climate movement can come out stronger in terms of after four years. The problem is the climate clock is going the opposite direction.

0:45:32.4 Julian Agyeman: Denise says, hydrogen, nuclear and geo technologies are false solutions, but are there instrumental bandaids to keep the climate crisis at bay? 

0:45:43.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, so I guess when nuclear… People are really passionate about nuclear as either pronuclear or anti-nuclear. And if we are thinking about even within the climate movement, I think there’s been a slight adjustment to people’s feelings on nuclear and that people are now weighing up the sheer level of transformation that must happen in such a short space of time. And even like slight changes to some of the, we’ll say, the 2020 Green New Deal proposal. Some had proposed to leave existing nuclear power plants in existence. And I think that seems to be a fairly reasonable plan at the moment.

0:46:21.6 Noel Healy: There is a lot of hustle and bustle around green hydrogen and other technologies at the moment. And I would add a little asterisk to those in terms of the fossil fuel industry are promoting them. Nuclear, I think is something that is… The debate has certainly changed over the last number of years. Yeah.

0:46:43.6 Julian Agyeman: Where do you stand on nuclear these days and has that changed, Noel, since you were a young radical, you’re an older radical now, but since you were a really young radical, has your position changed on nuclear power? I’m not gonna say whether I’m wavering, but…

0:46:56.3 Noel Healy: Yeah. I think it has changed a little bit in that we’ll say that Bernie signed a New Deal and to the best of my recollection, he called for the decommissioning of his existing nuclear power plants. I would probably, at this day and age of the climate crisis, be okay with nuclear plants not being decommissioned and letting them to continue. So I would say my thoughts on nuclear would’ve changed a little bit, but in terms of depending on nuclear for to solve the climate crisis, it’s not gonna happen within the timeframe needed. It’s too costly as well in terms of comparing to how cheap renewable energy is at the moment. And we have the solutions right now in terms of wind, solar, and wave energy. But the problem is the political will. The problem is we’re still subsidizing fossil fuels. So until we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, until we get political leaders who treat the climate like the emergency it is, yeah, we’re gonna be in a rough space.

0:48:06.2 Julian Agyeman: Going back to your points about Mayor Wu in Boston, I remember the night she was elected in her victory speech as soon as she mentioned, yes, Boston will become a Green New Deal city. It was the biggest cheer, and I suspect it was a lot of her younger supporters. And this is something my students and I are talking about in the coming four years, refocusing on the locality, refocusing on communities on working with progressive cities and things like that. Can you say a bit more about where you see Boston’s Green New Deal? Because politically, it seemed to have been a bit hampered when the Green New Deal SAR wasn’t given a chief role, but was given the role of director and I could never work out what was the difference and was this new Green New Deal SAR hampered by not being a chief, therefore not being able to have maybe the leverage that he could have had? 

0:49:05.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, I’m a little bit out of the loop in terms of what has happened since I’ve been down in Columbia for the last half a year or so, but just in general in terms of the Green New Deal as a new climate paradigm. So the basic principles of a Green New Deal is that we engage in deep decarbonization across all sectors. So it’s not just the traditional environmental sectors, it’s energy, it’s housing, it’s essentially all policy is climate policy. And at the same time, we’re tackling inequality. And because we are at a point in history where there’s just extreme inequality, it’s just politically wise to merge these two goals together. And that’s the kind of basic principle of what the Green New Deal is. And arguably, Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal proposal was one of the top state level or city level Green New Deal proposals within the US and hopefully over the next four years, you’ll have other cities who are mirroring this.

0:50:15.0 Noel Healy: And that movement will push people towards recognizing that we need to tackle inequality and climate at the same time. It’s no longer carbon tax. If you are getting your students and who’s gonna go out and march for carbon taxes in this day and age, like nobody, except for maybe a lot of climate wonks or climate scientists who think that carbon, in theory, carbon taxes are the most efficient method. But in this day and age, it’s not gonna cut it.

0:50:41.2 Noel Healy: We have to tackle inequality and climate at the same time talking about housing, public transportation, rent caps, and making the fossil fuel companies pay. Vermont just, I think in the start of this year, introduced a new… I can’t remember the name of the bill, but it’s polluters pay bill whereby the fossil fuel companies are on the hook for X% of damages that happens within Vermont and New York are also looking at similar proposals like this. So we have to push like economic populism works. Trump was smart to enough to realize this granted he’s selling snake oil, but the Democratic party and state level, we have to go back to old school economic populism akin to the FDR era, which jumpstart the US economy after a severe number of years.

0:51:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Right. Last question and just a 30 second, one minute answer. If there was a kind of silver bullet that could cascade other changes, catalyze them, what would it be? Of all of that raft of ideas of great solutions, what would be the one that would’ve maximum bang for the buck? 

0:52:05.7 Noel Healy: At the global level and from a justice perspective, canceling global south debt is an easy win in terms of your canceling debt. Instead of countries being forced to pay a high percentage of GDP back into repaying debt, they can instead use that for climate resilience, for expanding their low carbon economy. So debt cancellation. And it’s not charity, it’s actually, it’s repaying a climate debt, repaying economic debt for plundering, and also it’s preventing continued economic or climate damage, which is gonna impact the global north anyways.

0:52:46.7 Julian Agyeman: Noel, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your time in Medellín. Can we give Noel a great round of applause from Cities@Tufts from our last Cities@Tufts this semester? 

0:53:00.3 Noel Healy: Okay. Thanks for having me. And hopefully that was of some news.

0:53:01.1 Julian Agyeman: Absolutely. Thank you very much and happy holidays.

0:53:04.4 Noel Healy: Okay, thanks Julian. Bye everyone.

0:53:08.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager.

0:53:45.2 Tom Llewellyn: Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candace Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others, so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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