Two very different ways to see climate action
I have known the bare facts about climate change for a very long time but for years it was unreal, something that I knew was happening but did not think of in the way I would of (say) impending war. Even when I started researching my PhD on climate and agriculture in 2003, I felt oddly dispassionate – although we knew by then that we might be in serious trouble.
I can remember when it
did first chill me to the bone. It took me by surprise. It was 2007 and I was
in Bangkok; the British Council had flown five of us 6,000 miles to discuss
climate change. We had just finished a day with colleagues at Chulalongkorn
University and colleague Matt and I were on our way to buy Thai presents for
our respective partners.
“I’m getting
frightened,” I said, quite suddenly. “The climate, I mean. What’s going to happen? To all this?” – I waved vaguely at the
street – “to us?”
Matt was briefly taken
aback, but he recovered. “There’s no point in thinking like that,” he said
firmly. “Do something about it.”
 |
| Mike Robbins |
He was right of
course. And I’ve just read two books by people who really want to do
something. Both are Green Party members; one is a former party leader, while
the other has twice stood for Parliament as a Green candidate. They are both
good books, but they present – unintentionally, I think – two very different
ways of being green. The contrast has made me wonder what kind of
environmentalist I am, and has crystallised my own feelings somewhat.
First, Natalie
Bennett’s book is titled Change Everything. She is not joking.
*
Bennett was born in
Sydney in 1966. She graduated in agricultural science then became a journalist
on the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth, New South Wales. She later
served as a volunteer for some time in Thailand before joining the Bangkok
Daily Post. In 1999 she moved to Britain, where she had a successful career
in Fleet Street, ending up as editor of the Guardian Weekly. In 2012 she
decided she’d had enough of journalism and stood for and won the leadership of
the Green Party, which she had joined some years earlier. She served two
two-year terms, and although not in Parliament, she led the party into the 2015
general election.
Change Everything is Bennett’s statement of belief for Britain.
She begins by stating simply that our whole moral and economic system is wrong.
Green philosophy, she says, “believes in the power of human caring and
creativity when freed from the deadening hand of our present oligarchy.” Our
system has, she says, ossified; we have been run by a bunch of Oxbridge PPE
students who have all read the same political philosophies. …the key ideas that
neoliberal and social democratic visions …share in their narrow, so similar,
understandings of the world.”
In fact, since the July
2024 election many of these Oxbridge PPE graduates are gone from government. But
Labour seems bound by at least some of the same ideas, so Bennett still has a
point. She challenges several fallacies, as she sees them: that we must have
growth; that everyone must have a ‘job’ in the conventional sense, regardless
of its value to society; and that individuals, and nations, must compete with
each other.
Her thoughts on work
are especially well put. In our system, there are plenty of things that need
doing but aren’t done because they don’t pay. But many conventional “jobs”
don’t pay anyway, so that people need some sort of income support. Bennett’s
answer is Universal Basic Income, or UBI; that is, everyone receives an income
that enables a decent life. They can seek work that gives them additional
earnings if they wish – or they can rely on UBI and develop their own talents
and interests, and/or do work that needs doing in the community.
I am sympathetic to UBI
and want to believe it might work, and it might even become an imperative as
technology, including AI, displaces existing jobs. But I can’t forget a
magazine article I read in about 1970 (yes, I was very young). It assumed that
technical progress would give us the time and resources to be everything we
wanted. Several random people were invited to try the activities they would
pursue; one had a flying lesson, another went hospital visiting. But this
future never happened. The magazine assumed the wealth created by new
technology would reach everyone but that is not how the world works; the
internet and e-commerce have created massive wealth, but it resides with Jeff
Bezos and Elon Musk. UBI is not possible without a redistribution of wealth. Moreover
it will mean some people working, others not; the venom already directed at
folks on benefits should warn us how this might be taken. I would like to see
UBI. But I think Bennett is asking for more than she realises.
There is much more in
this book. On education, for instance; Bennett hates the way we bully children
with exams, SATS etc. In her view it achieves little and just makes them
miserable. I am strongly with her here. (She has recently advanced these views
in the Lords while speaking on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.) I
also agree with her on government’s insistence on ‘economically useful’
subjects; in recent years we’ve seemed to know the price of everything and the
value of nothing.
She rails against
wastefulness – in the fashion industry, for example, which generates piles of
unwanted clothing, and the commercial horrors of Christmas, which have always
grossed me out as well. And in general, she wants some big changes to the way
we live and think. She refers to “the key ideas that neoliberal and social
democratic visions of society share in their narrow, so similar, understandings
of the world.” It is unfair to bracket the social-democratic tradition with
neoliberalism in that way. But it’s true that Labour, and its equivalents
elsewhere, now share the same ideas of growth and linear progress. Bennett does
have a point here. And in general, there is a lot to like about her thinking.
Into the phalanstery?
But I have some
misgivings. Bennett has strong views about some things. These include gene
editing, which she opposes (again, she has recently spoken on this in the
Lords). She is not wrong to have reservations about this; I also do. But the
examples she uses in the book, Roundup-ready crops, are not a good example of
what crop breeders actually do with molecular markers. And she can be sweeping;
the US is, she says, a “white-settler empire” – a brusque dismissal of a complex
country of 331 million where I lived for years and have much-loved friends.
More seriously, Bennett’s vision is a little all-encompassing for me. Utopianism has a long and troubling history, from Charles Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstère, or phalanstery – a quite detailed design for a commune – to the collective farms of the Soviet era. In the last century, attempts to impose left- and right-wing utopian visions on populations have had terrible consequences. There is an inherent link between utopianism and authoritarianism, because the utopian seeks to define so many aspects of human activity. There is a sign of this when Bennett talks about advertising of consumer goods that she feels (often rightly) we do not need. “The Green alternative is to clamp down on this unhelpful, stressful bombardment,” she says. “There is no ‘right to advertise’. We can choose what to allow.” Can we? She asks, for instance: “Do we really need ‘smart toasters’?” No, of course not. But if my neighbour wants one, have I the right to stop that – or forbid someone from advertising them?
 |
| Mike Robbins |
But maybe we do
need that green view of the world? If you acknowledge the threat of climate
change but want to keep your way of life, you’re in effect saying we can fix
climate change with technology. Bennett wants more than this. There is no technology in
this book, she says: ”All those things are important and necessary, and
there are lots of books about them, but their authors generally have a vision
of a business-as-usual society with modern technology. …I mean something far
more fundamental and transformative.”
However, one can want a better world, as she does – but still accept that it’s
only science and technology that will save us right now, and that for the moment they are the priority. Which brings me onto the
second of these books, Chris Goodall’s Possible.
The road to Net
Zero
Chris Goodall is a researcher
and writer on green technologies and their economics. He runs an interesting,
if intermittent, green newsletter, Carbon Commentary. He also lectures, has the odd green business venture and has twice
stood as a Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon (most recently in
2024 against the high-profile LibDem Layla Moran; he did quite well).
I first heard of him
in 2016 when he published The Switch, in which he set out the potential
for solar power – which he foresaw being our main source of energy by
mid-century. I think he might have overestimated solar in relation to wind.
Even so, progress since 2016 tends to bear out many of his predictions; for
example he saw potential in perovskites, and it looks as if he may have been
right. A later book, What We Need to do Now (2020), set out the
potential for green hydrogen – Goodall is a hydrogen fan; but, almost as an
aside, he doubted that it would be economic for road transport. I thought this
odd at the time. But again, he’s turning out to be right.
Now, in Possible: Ways to Net Zero (Profile Books, 2024), he has sketched out just what we need to do to get to net zero by 2050. Goodall is not here to spread impending doom but to show us how it might be avoided. To this end he sets out how the main challenges really can be met, including in hard-to-emit industries like shipping, steel and ceramics. It is an ambitious book but practical and focused, and I found it very encouraging.
Goodall’s basic thesis
is simple: To get to net zero we’ll have to electrify pretty much everything,
including heavy machinery, so that we can run on renewable energy. But there
are three major obstacles. First, we will need one hell of a lot more
electricity. Second, intermittency; we’re going to need to store a lot of power
to guard against drops in solar and wind energy. And third, we must mitigate
emissions from industries that can’t be electrified – because they use
processes that require too much heat (steel, ceramics), or because batteries
are too heavy (aviation).
On the first point, Goodall
says we produce about 27,000 terawatt hours globally a year and that this could
rise to as much as 90,000 by 2050 if we are to realise net zero. Given that
four-fifths of the world’s energy supply does still come from fossil fuels, is
this really possible? He thinks yes, that the current rate of expansion in
green energy as documented by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has us on
target to get there. Still, in the UK’s case we will need about twice as much
electricity as we have now. But Goodall quotes a study that thinks we can do it
using solar and wind with hydrogen as storage, and without the need for
gas-fired backup. He admits not everyone accepts that (and is not against
nuclear if we need it, but doubts if it is economic).
For intermittency, he
thinks we will need three basic types of storage: Batteries for very short-term
smoothing-out; pumped hydro for slightly longer duration; and stored hydrogen
for longer periods. The first of these is working increasingly well in
California, so why not in the UK. But pumped hydro involves large construction
projects, which will be subject to delays and cost overruns (Australia’s Snowy
2.0 is a warning here). Moreover England’s topography is not great for such
schemes, although Scotland’s is better.
As for hydrogen, Goodall
thinks the UK needs to store two months’ worth. But this is an awful lot of
hydrogen. To put it in perspective, the boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has
just (May 2025) said that the UK has about 12 days’ supply of gas – which is
easier to handle than hydrogen – and
half of this is in a single place, the Rough storage facility, the future of
which is under discussion. Goodall sees the hydrogen being stored
underground/undersea, perhaps in what used to be gas storage facilities. He is
not being fanciful; large-scale geologic storage of hydrogen is widely seen by
scientists as feasible if the geology is right. (In fact Centrica wants to use
Rough partly for hydrogen.) Even so, the amount of new storage needed would be
huge. And this assumes we can make enough green hydrogen, which will require a
lot of green energy.
But Goodall sees
nothing insuperable and maybe he is right. What is great about this book is
that he is clear about the difficulties faced – then explains how they can be
overcome. For example, the third obstacle is hard-to-mitigate industries; Goodall
has talked to people who work in these (they include cement, steelmaking, glass
and ceramics and shipping) and found that they are pursuing solutions and
making them work. One of the most encouraging initiatives he looks at is Sweden’s
H2 Green Steel, now renamed Stegra, which is building a steel plant with an
integrated electrolyser to make hydrogen in situ, using hydropower. It
is not the only initiative of this type.
Equally interesting is
his look at shipping, which is one of the most polluting sectors and seen as
very hard to mitigate. But ships could be fuelled with e-methanol, which can be
made from captured CO2 and green hydrogen; and Maersk have already built a
dual-fuel containership that uses methanol. This could also have other uses; not
long after reading the book I heard about the Farizon G2M, a Chinese truck that
runs on methanol made from captured industrial CO2 emissions.
The caveats
I had the odd doubt when
reading this book. Goodall believes that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will
be necessary on a large scale, involving the capture of CO2 at its point of
emission from industrial sites and its storage underground, possibly in depleted
oil wells or aquifers. One objection to this (which Goodall acknowledges) is
that it can be a disincentive to industry to cut its emissions. In fact there
is much controversy over CCS on these grounds, especially in the UK following
the 2024 announcement of a £22bn investment in it by the Labour government. And
there may be other pitfalls; what about leakage from insecure sites, resulting
in unaccounted-for carbon emissions? I have even wondered if this might be
dangerous, especially if the CO2 is under pressure; it is, after all, an
asphyxiant and about 2,000 people died after a release from Lake Nyos in
Cameroon in 1986.
Goodall would
obviously understand these objections but thinks we cannot afford not to
include CCS, at least for now. He may be right, but I would rather see any
captured emissions turned into useful products – something Goodall alluded to
in The Switch but says little about here, although he does discuss
e-methanol for shipping. The potential for greater use of CO2 was outlined back
in 2019 in a report by the International Energy Agency, Putting CO2 to Use:
Creating Value from Emissions. This report did see the difficulties, in
particular the amount of hydrogen that might be required to produce fuel from
CO2. But Goodall is well aware of this and since the book was published he has
argued on Carbon Commentary (January 2025) that CCS might make more economic
sense than synthetic fuels, at least for now.
I also questioned some
of Goodall’s chapters on food and agriculture. This is an important source of
emissions, but some of it can be mitigated. He looks at livestock farming, a
source of emissions, and the sequestration of carbon dioxide through
agriculture, which is a potential sink. The latter was the subject of my own
PhD and I later wrote one of the first books about it (Crops and Carbon,
Routledge 2011). Goodall may underestimate the difficulties in getting useful
data on the carbon content of a farm; it is not solely about measurement. That
presents challenges of its own, but there are also difficult questions around
baselines, additionality and especially permanence.
 |
| Mike Robbins |
But more worrying for me is his approach to livestock farming. Goodall points out, rightly, that our taste for red meat is a major driver for climate change. Cattle and sheep are ruminants, and their digestive processes emit large amounts of methane. Goodall says cattle farming is responsible for about 8% of global emissions. He does not say where he got this figure, but it’s in the ballpark (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization thinks it’s 7%). We are going to have to confront this.
However, Goodall may
not understand the importance of crop-livestock integration in the maintenance
of soil fertility, especially in regions where farmers cannot afford N
fertiliser (a serious source of emissions in itself). In fact he is quite
dismissive, saying many researchers regard rotation with livestock as
‘nonsense’. In fact, it is an important part of many farming systems, and
maintaining carbon sinks in agriculture may be difficult without it. He also
advocates the use of no-till agriculture to increase soil carbon content; this
is not wrong, but it usually involves the use of crop residues and again, in
many farming systems these are needed for animal feed. Getting rid of animals
is not the answer. They are often essential to the farming system and would not
always be replaced by crops – in fact, in large parts of the world this might
be disastrous, especially on steppe.
There is also a trap
that some Greens seem too ready to walk into: a culture war about eating meat.
The fact is, people do. And whether they should or not, they are not going to
want to be lectured about it. Or about their choice of toaster.
It’s not easy being
green…
But in general, Goodall’s is a pragmatic approach: How do we do this, and save
our necks? Bennett by contrast has firm ideas about who we should be. Moreover, although she never says it, she seems somehow to feel that technology shouldn't save us; we should change who we are instead. It would be wrong to see
this as a gulf between two individuals; Goodall, like Bennett, is a committed
Green, and Bennett does do real-world politics – her record attests to that. In
fact they probably know each other. I doubt they would see themselves as having
any real ideological difference. Even so, these two books seem to exemplify two
very different approaches to being green.
I am happiest with
Goodall’s. There are three reasons: Practicality; the dangers of culture wars;
and my distrust of utopianism. The last two, in particular, are real threats to
the Green movement and they are interrelated.
First, practicality.
We are already set to overshoot the 1.5 deg C target agreed at Paris, and this
was not random; it was based on what was seen as sustainable. I don’t think we
can wait for human beings to become perfectible in nature. We need science and
technology to save our sorry ass right now.
Second, renewables
have become the subject of a culture war launched by the right. This was
predictable. In the UK it’s been spearheaded by Reform, a right-wing political
party that gets its funding from sources close to fossil fuels. We are dealing
with some quite unpleasant people and we should not hand them sticks to beat us
with. I don’t think we’re going to have much luck ordering people to completely
change their lifestyles. It’s not a question of whether they should or not;
they won’t do it. And telling people whether or not they are allowed a smart
toaster, or trying to make them stop eating meat, will be a gift to the other
side whether it is justified or not. No-one likes to be approved and
disapproved of.
But third, anything
that smacks of utopianism should be avoided. Governments must, sometimes, tell
people what to do. They must never tell them what to be. Bennett is an exception in some ways, perhaps, because so much of what she wants is profoundly decent, and her concern for individual freedom is clear. In general, though, utopianism has an
awful history. Those of us appalled by climate change must work for and with all decent humans, including those
with smart toasters. If we don’t, we may one day look just like the fools that have brought us to this.
 |
| Mike Robbins |
Natalie Bennett's website includes updates on her work in the Lords.
Chris Goodall’s Carbon Commentary can be found here and also here.
The pictures in this post were taken by the author at a climate-change demonstration in New York on September 21 2014. More of them here.
Thanks to Neil Monk for taking a look at a draft of this piece.
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Mike Robbins's book On the Rim of the Sea is available as a paperback or ebook. More details here. Follow Mike on Bluesky or X or browse his books here.
