Constraining fossil fuels based on 2 °C carbon budgets: the rapid adoption of a transformative concept in politics and finance

Strauch, Yonatan; Dordi, Truzaar; Carter, Angela

doi:10.1007/s10584-020-02695-5

Cited by 23 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Following the publication of AR5, the concept of the remaining carbon budget has been used widely in public discourse, adopted especially as the scientific basis for new climate activism, such as fossil fuel divestment and climate school strike (Lahn 2021 ; Strauch et al 2020 ). For climate activists like Bill McKibben, 2 the remarkably small size of the remaining carbon budget for the 1.5°C or 2°C target means more than a mere estimate by the modelling.…”

Section: Three Metaphors Of Scarcity: Threshold Budget and Deadlinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is often referred to as the ‘gospel of science’ that unbiasedly tells us how little amount of CO 2 can be emitted in order to avert the climate crisis. The small number of carbon budget reveals the ‘inconvenient truth’ that a vast amount of fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground as ‘unburnable carbon’ (Strauch et al 2020 ). Importantly, the number can be trusted because it has been ‘authorised’ by IPCC assessment.…”

Section: Three Metaphors Of Scarcity: Threshold Budget and Deadlinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is because physical limits make us feel that we have (too) little space or time to do everything—choosing one thing means not choosing something else. This trade-off thinking is evident in the framing of a zero-sum choice, by using the carbon budget concept, in fossil fuel divestment campaigns (Strauch et al 2020 ). Divestment activists often argue that climate policy is about the choice of two incompatible futures: either a carbon-constrained world or a fossil-fuel development world.…”

Section: Post-political Control and Scarcity Mindsetmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Threshold, budget and deadline: beyond the discourse of climate scarcity and control

Asayama

2021

Climatic Change

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Since its inception, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has always been at the centre of the global climate debate. Its authoritative reports provide cultural resources for public understanding on the challenge of climate change. While the IPCC maintains its perception as a policy-neutral adviser, the IPCC in practice acts as a powerful discursive agent that guides policy debates in a certain direction by enacting influential scientific concepts. These concepts include three prominent metaphors—temperature threshold, carbon budget and climate deadline—that have been widely circulated across science, policy and advocacy. Three metaphors differ on ways in which the risk of climate change is expressed in terms of space and time. But they all constitute the discourse of climate scarcity—the cognitive view of that we have (too) little space and time to stay below a physical limit for avoiding dangerous climate change. This discursive construction of physical scarcity on climate change has significant political and psychological implications. Politically, the scarcity discourse has the risk of increasing a post-political tendency towards managerial control of the global climate (‘scarcity of politics’). Psychologically, however, scarcity has a greater risk of generating a ‘scarcity mindset’ that inhibits our cognitive capacity to imagine human life beyond managing physical scarcity. Under a narrow mindset of scarcity, the future is closed down to the ‘point of no return’ that, if crossed, is destined to be the end. To go beyond the scarcity discourse, a new discourse of emancipation has to be fostered. Climate change can be reframed not as a common single destination but as a predicament for actively reimagining human life. Such a narrative can expand our imaginative capacity and animate political action while embracing social losses.

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Section: Three Metaphors Of Scarcity: Threshold Budget and Deadlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Three Metaphors Of Scarcity: Threshold Budget and Deadlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Post-political Control and Scarcity Mindsetmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Threshold, budget and deadline: beyond the discourse of climate scarcity and control

Asayama

2021

Climatic Change

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“…Here, the new political problematization implied by the carbon budget was presented as a solvable math problem, in which the amount of fossil fuels being extracted would have to be limited in line with the physical constraints of the budget. In this way, much of the surge of activism against fossil fuel development in recent years can be tied directly to the emergence of the carbon budget concept (see also Strauch et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: The Carbon Budget As Issue Modificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing climate change: The carbon budget and the modifying-work of the IPCC

Lahn

2020

Soc Stud Sci

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Over the last 10 years, the concept of a global ‘carbon budget’ of allowable CO2 emissions has become ubiquitous in climate science and policy. Since it was brought to prominence by the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, the carbon budget has changed how climate change is enacted as an issue of public concern, from determining the optimal rate of future emissions to establishing a fixed limit for how much emissions should be allowed before they must be stopped altogether. Exploring the emergence of the carbon budget concept, this article shows how the assessment process of the IPCC has offered scientific experts the means to modify how the climate issue is problematized, and discusses the implications of this ‘modifying-work’ for the politics of climate change. It finds that the ‘modified climate issue’ must be seen as an outcome of the ordinary work within established scientific and political institutions, and the agency these institutions afford scientists to enact the issue differently. On this basis, it argues that the case of the carbon budget holds important insights not only for the relationship between climate science and policy, but also for the pragmatist literature on ‘issue formation’ in STS.

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“…1.1 Seeing like a fictive 'budget manager' Carbon budgets have become a powerful conceptual tool-a "staple of climate policy discourse" (Lahn 2020)-to define and quantify the climate challenge (Matthews et al 2020). The concept, for example, provides scientific grounds for climate justice movements such as fossil fuel divestment (Strauch et al 2020). Activists often refer to an estimate of the carbon budget as the 'magic number' that unbiasedly informs how little amount of CO 2 can be emitted to stay below the 1.5 or 2°C threshold.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Balancing a budget or running a deficit? The offset regime of carbon removal and solar geoengineering under a carbon budget

2021

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The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this fictive character of budget manager as a heuristic device, the paper analyses the roles of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) under a carbon budget. We argue that both CDR and SRM can be understood as ‘technologies of offset’. CDR offsets positive carbon emissions by negative emissions, whereas SRM offsets the warming from positive greenhouse gas forcing by the induced cooling from negative forcing. These offset technologies serve as flexible budgeting tools in two different strategies for budget management: they offer the promise of achieving a balanced budget, but also introduce the possibility for running a budget deficit. The lure of offsetting rests on the flexibility of keeping up an ‘appearance’ of delivering a given budget whilst at the same time easing budget constraints for a certain period of time. The political side-effect of offsetting is to change the stringency of budgetary constraints from being regulated by geophysics to being adjustable by human discretion. As a result, a budget deficit can be normalised as an acceptable fiscal condition. We suggest that the behavioural tendency of policymakers to avoid blame could lead them to resort to using offset technologies to circumvent the admission of failure to secure a given temperature target.

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Constraining fossil fuels based on 2 °C carbon budgets: the rapid adoption of a transformative concept in politics and finance

Cited by 23 publications

References 36 publications

Threshold, budget and deadline: beyond the discourse of climate scarcity and control

Threshold, budget and deadline: beyond the discourse of climate scarcity and control

Changing climate change: The carbon budget and the modifying-work of the IPCC

Balancing a budget or running a deficit? The offset regime of carbon removal and solar geoengineering under a carbon budget

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