
Climate mitigation is stalling out; governments, businesses and publics are ignoring climate, putting seemingly more important issues first – the economy especially. And, in effect, they’re giving up: after decades of ineffectual mitigation, emergency, potentially very disruptive, mitigation policies are now needed urgently and no one wants to go there.
But climate change isn’t going away, it’s getting worse rapidly, and existential dangers are becoming more likely. Effective mitigation is needed urgently but those in economic and political control don’t want the potential loss and disruption and so we are in society-wide implicatory climate denial with time running out.
Would it be possible to build a much more robust, more accurate, definitive, present state of the art consensus on climate change? So that effective mitigation becomes possible? Could we get almost everybody on the same page agreeing about the severity and probabilities of the suite of climate change dangers and what we should do to mitigate?
Well, what if we could get one legislative assembly somewhere in the world to agree – given what is potentially at stake – to undertake a process to see what they could all agree upon about climate change: causes, dangers, timelines and effective mitigation?
Their particular legislature has a diverse composition including most sections of the political spectrum, members from most age classes, economic groups, and sexual and racial demographics – in other words, their legislature is a good microcosm for their society’s diverse publics and their opinions. And they have some experience with a process where information is introduced and debated and then considered, if not necessarily leading to action delivered. If they can agree on a broad consensus on climate change and the process is open (videotaped and with a transcript, in other words transparent), and they reach consensus, then you would expect that this process could lead to such consensus across their society.
And if they undertook such a process and reached such a consensus then you would expect that every other legislative body globally would be at least interested in their conclusions, how they reached their conclusions, and whether such a consensus would be their own consensus and their countries consensus too. Considering the crucial importance of climate change today.
The process would be facilitated by either science and policy organizations – the science faculty of a local university, for example, or an organization specializing in facilitation and conflict resolution. The facilitators would scope out the process, provide the best information to members questions, organize texts of the building consensus, and in general allow the members to advance as far as possible to consensus.
The process shouldn’t take more than days. You wouldn’t need every member of the legislature for the whole multi day period, but you would need a large enough, representative sample and for every vote so that the process would be representative of the whole legislature. The process wouldn’t be part of the regular legislative agenda. The members would not be whipped or controlled by their parties but would take part in the process as individuals. A deputy or senior staff person could join, help or represent each member if they were called away to more pressing business.
They would each have one vote and the process would move from basics – what causes climate change? Is it happening? How do we know? etc. – to the more difficult, complex questions about such pertinent issues as tipping points, feedbacks and differing conceptions of possible mitigation. They would be provided with the best state of the art science and policy information for their deliberations.
On each point a weighted majority vote – 70-80% – in agreement would signal consensus on the point in question and move to the next question, allowing the process to accumulate consensus deeper and deeper into the pertinent areas of climate change.
Hopefully a more robust consensus, learning, and a vision for the future would result. This process isn’t perfect; one can imagine how it could be subverted; some assemblies would have a systemic bias. Reaching all but the most shallow consensus would require leadership from the members, careful facilitation, good will and reasonable responsibility.
A much more robust consensus on climate change is needed to effectively mitigate. Right now the best climate science is ignored and climate change as an issue is downplayed and brightsided, shoehorned into BAU (so that important things to do can be done and nothing is disrupted). A process that can build a much more robust consensus on climate change will force everyone to accept the same in-depth perspective, with a lot less wiggle room for how we should responsibly act.
Every future generation requires that we act today in due diligence on the best information. Our emissions over the next several decades could set off feedbacks leading to warming that could potentially crash our global civilization, kill billions, and make most of the world uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Three decades of failed mitigation with warming surging up to and over the 1.5C guardrail and headed for (in a recent scientist survey) over a 3C rise if not more, strongly suggests that we should be at least exploring alternative paths to keeping climate safe for all future generations. Innovating in order to build a more robust consensus on climate should be on our to-do list for 2025.
Bill Henderson is a climate change activist