Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to the first in a new series of conversations titled Oxford Net Zero Climate in the Balance,
which will run weekly throughout the term. First up, huge apologies for the slight delay.
Technical gremlins as expected on the first one of these series.
Hopefully we'll have them ironed out from now on and we'll give you a seamless set of conversations.
This series will take us on a Wide-Ranging journey across the issues and questions the world
needs to tackle as we transitions in that zero emissions and hence the stable climate,
hopefully in an effective and equitable way. And we'll be doing so by talking to the leading lights of Oxford.
Net zero. Oxford Net Zero is a new university funded initiative, bringing together experts from across departments including geography,
physics, economics, biology, law and earth sciences, a really wide range.
And the aim is to provide key insights and resources at this critical juncture for international action on climate change.
My name is Steve Smith. I'm based at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and I'm executive director of Oxfam Net Zero.
It's my pleasure to chair these conversations. Now, before we go on,
I should let you know that this talk is being recorded and also that we very much encourage you to ask questions as we go throughout these sessions.
And to do so, you must be locked into crowd casts, viewing it on crowd cost rather than via YouTube.
And hopefully, if you are in crowd cast, you can see and ask a question button at the bottom right of the screen and you can write in your question.
And equally importantly, you can vote up existing questions that you like.
And I'm gonna do my best to ensure that we cover a good number of those before we close.
Now, to help me with this first seminar, this first conversation,
I'm delighted to have three other members of Oxford and zero the team with me who will be helping set the scene with why net zero.
So I have Professor Myles Allen, Caia Axelsson and Professor Sam Fankhauser.
And the way we're going to structure this is that each of them is going to talk for hopefully no more than five minutes Miles, on why net zero?
So the physics of the climate system, which leads us to be talking about net zero in the first place.
Sam is going to talk about why net zero is relevant to our activities as a society.
So where do emissions come from and where are the key challenges? Where do they lie in terms of economic sectors?
And then CIA is going to talk about the why and how of net zero organisational and individual levels.
So in particular, what are the tools and information needed to drive net zero ambition and importantly, action?
Of course, after that, we're going to open it up to a bit of conversation and ask as many of your questions as possible to to these three people.
So we're gonna kick off with Professor Myles Allen. Many of you will know Miles already.
He is a professor of Geo Systems Science in the School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Physics as well.
He's actually been described as the physicist behind net zero on BBC Radio four and is also the overall director of Oxford Net Zero.
So, Miles, hopefully your slides are going to work well and I'm gonna hand it over to you.
Thank you very much indeed, Steve. And yes, I just wanted to show you a few slides which Hal is putting up for me.
Thanks, Hannah. And we'll start off with the science of net zero normally.
But the science talk is considered the complicated one, and then we get onto the sort of more straightforward stuff.
But actually, when it comes to net zero, it's almost the other way round.
The science is zero is really astonishingly simple.
And it's summarised by are attracted logo are created for us.
Our last term. And if we go to the first slide, we can illustrate the point of this logo.
So the the fundamental observation that underlies the fact that we need to get to net zero emissions is that it's cumulative
carbon dioxide warming equivalent emissions to the time of peak warming that determine the level of temperature we end up at.
So this was an insight that really came out of research in the 2000s that it was the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The globe drove global temperatures, not the rate of emission at any particular year.
I hope you can see the whole slide, by the way, because it's it's slightly corrupted on my screen, but hopefully great.
That's that's just sorted it out. Thank you, Hannah.
So so it's that sort of Left-Hand Wedge is the as a schematic of the accumulation of carbon dioxide emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And the reason we sort of sketched it in this way is that it's almost inevitable that a pathway to net zero will look something like this.
We've got we've got to start reducing emissions. We've got to start reducing emissions as soon as we can.
And the longer we delay reducing emissions, so the longer that round hump at the beginning of this declining pathway to net zero,
the faster we have to reduce them in the future. It's analogies to the motion of a braking time if you're approaching the stop sign.
You've got a few seconds to go before you reach the stop sign.
The longer you put off hitting the brakes, the harder you're gonna have to brakes brake to actually stop in time.
And so that's that pay off. We see between delaying now and faster reductions in the future to achieve the same climate goal.
Given this challenge, it's almost inevitable if we go to the next slide that the amount we can reduce our production of carbon dioxide,
which is the outer envelope of these three curves. The total amount of carbon dioxide we're producing from our continued use of fossil fuels,
the amount we can reduce it by reducing production of carbon dioxide alone,
by changing behaviour patterns, electrifying transport and so forth, won't be enough to get emissions down in time.
So there's an urgent need to complement near-term emission reductions with nature based climate solutions.
So storing carbon, restoring carbon back into the Earth's biosphere in wonderful resources such as our own white and woods,
the acute minded, the acute eyes amongst you may spot that's a little scene of white in there.
But one thing I'm doing here in this schematic, and this is where, you know, here's a schematic,
but it does illustrate the big issues we need to think about are in on the paths to net zero.
Is that this process, as we move forward in time to the right of the slide?
This process of storing carbon in the biosphere has an end date to it.
At some point, we will reach, as it were, peak tree.
At some point, our ability to store carbon in the biosphere, if we go to the next slide, please, is going to run out,
because in the longer term, net carbon dioxide uptake by the biosphere must decline due to Earth's system feedbacks.
So many of the natural process systems we have that currently absorb carbon or could absorb carbon if they were better managed from the atmosphere,
will struggle to continue to absorb carbon at the same rate as the world warms.
That's just due to the warming we're going to get from from the emissions we're already committed to.
So this doesn't apps I should very much stress on.
And Nathalie Seddon is going to be coming back to nature based climate solutions later in this in this series.
This absolutely doesn't undermine the importance of nature based climate solutions.
In fact, it's it's vitally important that we conserve and we protect natural carbon sinks in
order to to to put off the time at which they they may be degraded by warming itself.
But we also have to acknowledge that. The process of turning fossil fuels into trees, so to speak, just a caricature.
The whole thing can't go on forever. And the devil is in need if we go to the next slide, please, to scale up geological carbon dioxide storage.
And that final wedge is the. Is this carbon dark?
If the carbon dioxide. We will need to pump back underground if we go to the final slide.
The destination we need to be aiming for is what we might call hard.
Net zero. That's a situation in which one ton, every ton of CO2 that's generated by the burning of fossil fuels needs to be re fossilised.
We need to move on from changing fossil fuels into active forms of carbon, either in the atmosphere or in the surface biosphere.
And we need to essentially stop fossil fuels from causing global warming by pumping CO2 back down underground.
And that's going to be our ultimate destination for achieving net zero.
So that's really sets the parameters, these sort of three things we need to do.
Reducing consumption, reducing the production of CO2 in the first place, offsetting by some as far as we can,
or remaining emissions with nature based climate solutions and recognising that in the long term we need to be moving to our
geological storage of the remaining CO2 we produce as the only way of ultimately stopping fossil fuels from causing global warming.
That's the scientific context in which we're working.
And that's the challenge which the economists like Sam Fankhauser are going to have to step up to.
Over to Sam. Thank you, Miles.
Just just before I start up, before I introduce Sam,
I'm going to take chairmen's privilege and ask you a question with a very quick response since you're the climate scientist in this conversation.
What actually happens to the climate system when we get to net zero CO2 emissions?
Oh, we get to net zero CO2. It's no longer seeing any carbon dioxide induced warming.
So carbon and we then get stable temperatures. We don't we don't see any further warming that's cooling either.
If you want to draw temperatures down again, you actually have to actively take CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
There are other pollutants which cause warming as well. And so that's why we increasingly talk in terms of warming equivalent emissions,
which is a composite of the various greenhouse gases we are dealing with that have the same warming impact as CO2.
There's a technical discussion we can wander off on, too, if if we if anybody, anybody's interested as to exactly how we define warming emissions.
But that's the essential point, is that they they have the same warming impact on the climate system as CO2 itself.
And the crucial point is if you stop CO2 emissions, you stop causing warming, but you don't undo the warming you've already caused.
So the warming caused by British emissions up until till now will remain in the climate system indefinitely unless we
actually actively take some of the CO2 that we have already dumped into the atmosphere back out again in the future.
Thanks. Good to know. So if if we're serious about stabilising temperatures at any level, we'll be at one and a half to three, four degrees.
We have to ultimately reach this net zero CO2 and point. But some still have to get.
Yeah, we have to get exactly. We have to get CO2 emissions back down to zero. Thank you very much, Miles.
I'm going to pass it over to Sam Funkhouser now.
Now, Sam is currently the director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
And many of you will know him, too.
His work to the forefront not only of research in climate economics, but also advising policymakers and businesses in many contexts.
Now, we're delighted that Sam is actually gonna be joining us later in the spring at Oxford to become professor of Climate Change,
Economics and Policy and the director of research for Scrubland Zero.
So over to you, Sam. Thanks, Steve.
That. I can see that you can see it.
Can you hear me all right? Can you see my screen hope? Yeah, it's it's it's great to be part of Oxford next year at the moment.
I'm still part of the LSC. So dislikes, you're going to see a combination of work that I've done in the past and some of the Oxford maps, euro scenes.
The question I'm going to answer in the sense of trying to answer is to what extent is the economics and the
policy of the politics of net zero different from the economics and the policy of climate change has been,
as we had it for many years and many decades. The opening thing I'm going to say is that one big thing that's changed over the last, say,
to maybe two years or so is that there is now a big, broad societal consensus about the need to do something about climate change.
Two years ago or so, you have to make the case for climate action.
You have to ask you why it was important. You have to explain what it was.
And that sort of narrative has really shifted.
A lot of people now understand why climate change is important.
And I tell you, six feet pictures here of wider societal consensus is so broad.
It isn't just the ones you're familiar with,
the sort of national governments passing climate policies or civil society, people going on school strike and so on.
We also see a lot of work, a lot of interest in local communities, for example.
And in the UK there something like 400 or so local councils, some 300 of them have declared the climate emergency.
And they're starting to take actions including very participatory things like climate assemblies and citizens juries.
As you see in the little picture of Leeds Leapster, the courts are also increasingly taking an interest in climate change,
are starting to to implement the legislative assets that exist and they are starting to do on climate change.
The picture, I fear, is of a Dutch NGO that the Dutch government,
the court and one the Dutch government had to tighten its climate change provisions in climate change ambitions.
I would all in the world, there's something like fourteen hundred climate change court cases already.
I will tell you another time about finance and what happens when the fish shop, when the stock exchange.
Let's look a little bit about the picture there in the middle of those national government actions.
The picture you see there is the number of climate change laws that there exists in the world.
There's about two thousand of them. And the good news is that every country in the world is doing something about climate change.
The bad news is it doesn't add up to net zero yet.
The little waterfall chart you're looking at here is a piece of sort of counterfactual analysis that we recently date and we tried
to calculate how much carbon dioxide would have been emitted if there had been no climate change action whatsoever since 1999.
And the answer is that between 1999 and 2016 and we would have saved about one year's worth of carbon emissions.
So about 38 kickett tons of CO2. That's a lot of carbon, but it doesn't sort of make a lot of inroads.
It doesn't use a lot of carbon space in the diagram that mindset shown you a while ago.
That Boatful also shows you here that it's about 40 percent of the emissions growth since 1999 has been avoided through climate legislation.
Of course, that means that 60 percent has still happened. And that, in a sense, gets us to the challenge of net zero,
to the things that make net zero different from from just climate politics and climate policy as we have had it.
Let me give you three items that I think are particularly sort of salient for next.
You wrote on the first one is the first challenge is that we have to speed up that,
that the action at that the speed at which we reduce our emissions.
This chart jockey is quite busy, but hopefully in Twitter, if it's also quite old.
But let me quickly talk you through it. The formula there on the right tells you what determines carbon emissions in the energy sector.
And it's a combination pathologically, almost a combination of three factors.
One is the amount of CO2 that we use per unit of energy.
So the carbon intensity of our energy. The second is how much energy use per unit of GDP.
So that's our energy intensity. And then the final one is GDP.
So our economic output.
We don't want to reduce economic output, which means we have to play around with the CO2 intensity of energy and the energy intensive just yet at GDP.
You see those here on the two axis, on the Y axis, you have the CO2 intensity on the x axis.
You have energy intensity. Each dot is a country. And you see that a lot of countries, particularly the grey and low income countries,
are still intensifying their their CO2 and the energy that their carbon ising their energy sector.
But most countries are to the left of the chart. That means energy intensity of GDP is improving.
That's the good news. The bad news is look at that red line there to be on on the path that even for two degrees,
let alone one and a half degrees, warming each country, each one of those stocks would have to be below the red line.
They would have to have a combination of their carbon intensity and energy intensity at this at this more than five percent reduction a year.
And you see there's only a handful of countries doing that. So challenge number one, speeding up the rate of decarbonisation.
Talash, number two, follows directly from that,
and that's that we have to move from the sort of sectors that we have learnt to associate with climate action,
with renewable energy and energy efficiency, which are, in inverted commas, the easy things.
We have to start moving to the broader set of emissions and to start looking at the difficult emissions that we also have.
You've all heard sort of words like that, the race to net zero or the race of our lives.
If you think of net zero as a race, the electric power sector, surface transport, electric cars and renewables, they're ahead in the race.
You're not there yet, but it's happening. It's starting to happen.
The challenge of net zero is that we start looking at the stragglers at the back of this race.
How do we decarbonise aviation? How could it be carbonised agriculture and industry?
So the second challenge is to start looking at those difficult emissions.
The third challenge I'm going to give you is the net in net zero. We're not talking about reducing gross emissions to zero.
We're allowing for an element of offsetting residual emissions through negative emissions.
My last month has talked about what those might be a mixture of nature based solutions,
like a forestation and technical solutions, like direct their capture and so on.
Now, these things don't happen on their own. They don't have a value unless the government intervenes and incentivised these things to happen.
So a third challenge is how do we give negative emissions an economic value?
How do we incentivise people to produce them?
For us, the various ways in which we can do that. That this info graphic here shows you two.
And I'm not going to go into the details, but just to tell you what the two are,
you can I just think of a market solution where everybody who emits a positive ton
of CO2 has to buy a negative time to sort of offset the balance individually.
Another approach is that the government, through collective action,
buys up and incentivises and procures negative emissions through auctions in the way that the government auctions renewable energy, for example.
And there's a lot of technical details as to which one of those we should do.
But we definitely, as a big challenge of net zero, have to make sure that the net thought the negative emissions actually happen.
Let me stop here. And Tando drew Kaiya. Thanks so much, Sam.
So I'm going to build on much of that. I think a lot of people ask me about my job with Oxford Net zero.
They asked a lot about greenwashing. Sort of trusts are a net zero trajectory.
So I think I'll start with the moment of hope, which is that 2020 is a real landslide year for increased net zero ambition.
According to Oxford and and Steve Smiths and Thomas Hale,
the research net Netzer commitments now covers sixty three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of GDP.
And I'm going to talk about kind of stricter criteria that we've helped to develop for the UNbacked Race to zero campaign.
Well, 50 percent of net zero targets within 50 percent of GDP covered by net zero targets is in the race to zero sort of stricter criteria.
But, you know, a lot of a lot of people are concerned about the credibility of these targets.
The U.N. AP puts out an annual emissions gap report of underlying simps points.
Many current nationally determined targets are exaggerations on what national policies are delivering,
which means that we need to advocate for new policies that integrate the net zero
target even full implementation of our current nationally determined targets.
Still, leaves are two degree carbon budget, 80 percent depleted by 2030 and missing this COP 26 window.
Coming up in our option to revise nationally determined targets would make closing that 2030 emissions gap practically impossible.
So it's really, really important that this year coming up is so important.
There's growing but limited evidence of the subnational action, the kind of,
you know, private sector or regional or city level action filling that gap.
But that just shows the importance of us all doing that work, because if we begin holding our own to high standards,
that can often influence the nationally determined target process and create more ambition.
So that's what we call the ambition loop, which I think brings me a lot of hope when I think about it.
And I've seen it in the UK,
just as the UK has set out a net zero target working weekly with the UK government to think about how we incentivise action amongst small businesses,
amongst large businesses, and then in turn those businesses, as they start figuring out their net zero strategies,
put more pressure on the government to develop policies that are that are integrating and flowing with them.
And I added this ambition loop graphic is, I think, really inspiring.
It was developed by a coalition of climate action organisations.
I added one more column here very cheaply, which is just this the role of innovation and the role of research in, you know, systemic.
Did a report that seor, that showed that low carbon solutions could be competitive in 75 percent of sectors by 2030 compared to zero in 2015.
So that just shows you how hard people are working.
The real heroes of the net zero process are things that engineers and innovators who are making this possible.
And we're going to create over thirty five million jobs, we might add, in the net zero transition.
So who is in what we would call the race to zero,
which is this U.N. backs campaign to build momentum around the shift to a decarbonised economy ahead of COP 26 and Glasgow and Oxford
has been really privileged to be able to help develop the criteria that have kind of created a minimum for joining this race.
Meaning that you have to have a more robust net,
zero target than sort of whatever you come up with in your kind of corporate strategy that you think means net zero.
I'll talk about that in a second. But there's 452 cities in the race to zero.
I mean, and this is this is a race that started just a year ago.
Twenty two regions, over a thousand businesses and growing every day.
I've got a message on LinkedIn yesterday from someone who had seen me speak of the race to zero from a major food company.
And they they said we saw you speak. We said we join the race to zero.
You think you're never making an impact and you get messages like that. Forty five investors and that's growing.
There's a U.N. Asset Owners Alliance that's growing and growing. And universities like Oxford all over the world are in the race to zero.
Acting as thought leaders. So what are these minimum criteria that we've come up with?
And I really have to say that it's not just an Oxford.
We had a huge coalition building process by which we invited all the smartest people that we know in climate action organisations,
practitioners who are actually developing their strategies for their business or for their city, for the region.
And we we brought them together and we kind of developed a four step plan, which is much more detailed if you go to our Web site.
But the kind of premises that you have to pledge at the. Head of the organisation. So maybe that's a mayor.
Maybe that's a CEO. You have to reach net zero in the twenty 40s or much sooner.
And you have to set out a plan.
I think what's wonderful about net zero targets is that just as Miles said, we start from our destination, which is Hardan at zero.
Right. And then we move backwards from that. And that's unveiling all of these uncertainties that we have to deal with.
Oh, we need more research and development on on this aspect of decarbonisation.
Oh, it looks like I'm relying on the same resource as another sector.
It looks like we need to pool our resources to make sure that we have alternative options and we're not fighting over the same resource in 10 years.
We need to take immediate action as part of our criteria.
You know, it's not enough to just say you'll you'll push it down the line and we'll handle that in 30 years.
If you're offsetting, you need to spell out how you're offsetting, which goes to Miles Point earlier.
And you also need to publish your progress at least annually, including Veha to the extent possible,
platforms that feed into the Global Action Tracker so that we know how far we've come.
And it's not just about ambition. So has been working really hard to help people actually do the work.
We've been reviewing tools that we think might be helpful to businesses, cities, regions, investors.
And we have them up on a Web site. And that tool library is incomplete.
It's not a rubber stamp on any of these tools per say, but it's a first pass to say we think these tools are part of the solution.
And we're encouraging and engaging with those tool providers to keep maintaining robust criteria and and strategies that are aligned with science.
So you can go over to net zero climate dot org for explanations on net zero for definitions, for tools.
And the last thing I'll just leave you with is that, you know, no matter who you are, where you work, if you're part of any institution,
if your children are part of any institution anywhere, if you have a phone, you can help in the race to zero.
Sometimes all it takes was the right person asking at the right time to make a major organisation shift its course, as I've seen in the last year.
And here are just the logos of some examples of the Coalition's campaigns, all working to raise ambition across universities.
The climate pledges a group of companies that are trying to do it, what they call 10 years early.
I might call it 10 years late, but it's definitely earlier than 20 50.
So those are all 20, 40 commitments. And then you've got the business ambition for one point five.
Science based targets is working to align. And the Global Covenant of Mayors is, I think, joining the race to zero along with an SMB climate.
Oxford has partnered with to help launch in the fall.
So if you know any organisation, ask them to join the race to zero and help us communicate the science that you've heard about today.
Thank you very much, Sam and CIA, for those very comprehensive overviews of Miles as well, I should say, for those of you who don't know, Kyra.
She's a policy engagement fellow for Oxford Net Zero and actually previously as
a student and vice president of the University Student Union here at Oxford.
She was really a driving force behind getting the university to set its own targets for net zero carbon
emissions and also to engage on net zero in fossil fuel divestment across this whole endowment portfolio.
So really, really keen knowledge on how this works when the rubber really hits the road.
So after those oversights, overviews, where we're going to move to questions from from you, the audience, and ask the panel members to answer them.
So if you haven't already do look in the ask a question section,
upvote those questions you like and and add your own and we'll get through as many of them as possible.
The first one I'd like to ask is, is the most popular one at the moment. And that's a great question from Philip Michelson.
I think I'll I'll ask you Caia and maybe some of the car about this.
Are there global standards for assessing net zero?
I think, Kai, you touched on the race to zero criteria and perhaps that's a start, although what strikes me is that in a way quite process focussed.
And I saw, for instance, an article just this morning on Bloomberg which was showing the amount of offsetting that
some companies with net zero strategies were were banking on using to meet net zero sum.
Some from some industries, which you may say are going to have a genuine tough time to get to net zero.
So perhaps they're justified in using offsets, but also some other companies, you could argue, could could do more themselves.
So, yes, I think global standards or what what would be the way you'd think about assessing a robust net zero target and strategy?
Sure. So you mean you've just mentioned that one of our criteria in the race, Deserto,
is that you should decarbonise as far as possible before you rely on offsetting?
First of all, it's going to be probably cheaper than having to invest in.
Ultimately, what we'll need for a sustainable net zero, which is geological storage options are much more expensive.
So you might as well do the work of decarbonising, you know, the real work of doing it in-house first.
So that's one kind of principle.
But then I think that there are organisations that are really great and helping other organisations set in that territory.
So I think that the SETI is one that is looked on as a really high standard organisation.
You know, like every organisation, they I think they still have some work to do to be filene that zero aligned.
But I think then in terms of reporting this, TDP is often looked to.
But I think to answer your question fully and honestly,
and this is something that's in development and very much something that Oxford is is helping on.
We are developing standards as we go. This Race to Zero campaign is the first coordinated international campaign ahead of cop of this scale.
And so sort of I think you'll see our research come out to try to devise methodology on new standards over the next year.
And I hope you stay tuned for that. Some models.
Do you think that should be a single global standard? And if so, what do you think should be in it?
Yeah, I don't think we really have a global standard any time soon that there should be national standards
and there will be standards for particular sort of schemes are voluntary schemes or regulated schemes.
The standards come in two parts. One is the amount of offsets you you have to buy in.
The other is the quality of the offsets. You have to buy. I sort of talked about the amount of offsets already that that's quite hard to do.
I mean, this is to as possible is the answer. We will find out with time that we actually need fewer than the time we have sold in the beginning.
That's my prediction. In terms of the quality of the offset, this the important distinction between offsets such as to reduce emissions.
So energy efficiency offsets, for example, are also the fuel switching offsets.
They make you call and they make your carbon neutral. They don't make you net zero.
So we will have to move to offsets that genuinely remove carbon from the atmosphere, the way forestation or similar.
So net zero means the quality of the offset is top and removal of other countries emission reductions.
And the other point to stress is that in the really big picture, we are, as I emphasised at the beginning.
At some point we're going to need all our capacity to risk for biosphere restoration
just to compensate for the carbon being released by global warming itself.
So we can't afford to rely on the biosphere to mop up fossil carbon emissions forever,
which is why we need to be thinking about reducing those emissions as far as possible
and investing in longer term storage solutions for the emissions that remain.
Thank you, and that that leads us really nicely, actually, to a couple of other questions which proved popular.
One is. I'm interested in the panel's views on the role of soil carbon based carbon sequestration as a means of reducing
atmospheric APAs emissions or concentrations and the CO benefits I could bring to food production below stat,
but also linked to that as a question from Bob Dogherty saying, what can we do in the food system to reach net zero emissions?
Obviously soils critical parts of growing food. And and I guess that the role of food,
the food system in reaching that theory can be both emissions reductions and soil carbon sequestration and other forms of sequestration.
So perhaps some, given that you talked a bit about the roles of different sectors and different difficulties, you can talk about that.
And then, Miles, you could talk a bit about storing carbon in soils specifically.
Yeah, thanks for the question in LAND-USE. This is agriculture, certainly and hard to treat.
Habitability also emissions, but it's partly in the hard to treat degree of emissions because we we happen in policy terms anyway.
We haven't tried very hard.
It's it's quite striking that in the UK at least, there's been a lot of regulation on a lot of emissions in the agricultural sector.
It was always voluntary like approaches and that you can you can sort of do more in the
agricultural sector by actually applying the policy tools that we have applied somewhere else.
I don't say that very often, but there is actually a potentially as of a Brexit benefit here in that that we have
more degrees of freedom than we used to have on the Common Agricultural Policy.
It is a difficult area because there are a lot of competing objectives around.
It isn't just about maximising carbon emissions.
You have to worry about animal welfare. You have to worry about food production.
You have to worry about the natural environment. So this is genuinely an area where you have multiple objectives balanced.
Yeah, I'm soil restoration is incredibly important. And clearly, this is one of the areas where there are opportunities in the short term.
But again, it's important to keep an eye on the fact that I my understanding is the most important earth system.
Feedback is, in fact, increased respiration of bacteria in warming soils.
So soils could be our friend in the short term,
but we need to look after them for fear that the carbon contained in the world soils may be released into the atmosphere later in this century.
So that I mean, actually, that makes it all more important to look after our soils and to look often much better than we've been doing so far.
But again, all of these carbon storage option,
carbon storage needs to be a become a massive industry this century because it's it's clear that we are going
to generate more carbon dioxide than we can afford to dump in the atmosphere and still meet our climate goals.
So the really big question for the world in addressing climate change is what are we going to do with the rest of it?
What are we going to do with the excess? Where are we going to store it safely so that it doesn't remain a burden for future generations?
Dumping it into the atmosphere is the worst option because that just imposes climate risks on future generations.
We're gonna have to find alternatives. They all come with pluses and minuses.
And that's a big part of Ocean Zero is weighing up those different options. How must you make a big claim there?
You say it's clear that we're going to be using fossil fuels for longer than the time scale needed to get to net zero.
And that might be a claim, actually, that some people might take issue with and say,
well, actually, we we need to get rid of fossil fuels and we can do that.
We must act quickly and have a not just a zero carbon world or a net zero Kanawa, but a fossil free world.
So on what basis are you saying that it's clear to you that that we can carry on using fossil fuels beyond the point of net zero?
Well, there's really only two alternatives. We either have to ban fossil fuels globally or we have to if we want to stop global warming,
we have to either ban fossil fuels or decarbonise fossil fuels.
We have to make sure that we fully compensate for the come down side released by continued use of fossil fuels.
The idea that we might just wait for fossil fuels to become not uneconomic so that people just stop using them one day, that will happen.
But it could be a very long time away. And I think it's quite a risk to to rely on people just moving on from using fossil fuels.
So so if you're counting on absolute zero, so to speak, then you are counting on a ban now.
A ban when we hear is important. If you're talking about we being, you know, wealthy people in rich countries, I mean,
it's perhaps realistic to talk about us and not just realistic, but perhaps ethically acceptable to talk about banning fossil fuels in the.
Fossil fuel use. In the UK, for example, the Cambridge Zero reports from last year sort of set out just such a vision,
but was also commendably clear on what that meant.
It meant no further radiation, no further shipping, no you know, a lot of things changing pretty dramatically,
which a lot of people even within the UK might take exception to.
But a much bigger picture question is, can we really talk about banning fossil fuels worldwide?
I think that's that's a big stretch. And actually, you know,
I think the important way of we need to accept the way we need to frame this problem is we need to decarbonise fossil fuels by,
in effect, allowing the next generation kind's generation, if you like, the choice of whether they use them or not.
If we if we don't develop the technologies to make sure that fossil fuels can be used without causing climate change,
then we cut off that option entirely from the next generation. And that's really important.
It's not up to us to decide whether the next generation uses fossil fuels or not.
It's going to be up to them. But it is up to us to decide whether we invest in the technologies that will allow them to use fossil fuels safely.
I'm sure a great parts of debate we can continue with, but I must move on because there are many other great questions.
Actually, every Laslett Bently asked a linked question about food, saying,
how do you see the food supply chain achieving its contribution to net zero?
It's a great question and actually it raises the important point that emissions from food are not just from food growing itself.
A great resource if you haven't come across it already from Oxford, called Our World and Data and that they've got a really good page pointing out
that actually six percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are from food waste.
And of course, they say it's not just the food we waste and the emissions from the food we grow.
It already is how we transport them.
Our aviation of sort of precious soft fruits in the middle of winter so that we can enjoy our mangoes or other fruits or blueberries.
Those are all issues. But there's another good question as well from Edwards or E-Trade Whittingham,
which is a really good question, I think, for the Oxford Net Zero initiative in general.
What does the panel believe is the role of non STEM graduates in getting to zero emissions?
So this really touches on. Is this just a science issue?
We're deliberately trying to attack and attack it from multiple angles and multiple disciplines.
So, Kyra, I'm sure you'd be keen to have a go at that one. Yeah, I am.
I'm a social scientist, and I think it was very clear from the IPCC special one point five reports that I feel
in some ways the physical scientists are handing the baton to us in that report to say,
you know, we've done the hard stuff of trying to figure out some pathways. Here you go, communicate them and help drive the policies.
And I think that in the past year, we've seen just the role of mass social movements to create the conditions, the political conditions.
You're sort of walking through open doors now.
If you use the word climate change, you know, getting into the nitty gritty details, there's going to still be debate.
But that's where I think a lot of testing around what is going to become socially acceptable and what is necessary.
There's still a gulf between what might be socially acceptable and what's necessary.
So we need social scientists to be helping develop policies and and risk assessment and engagement strategies that help us close that gap.
And then also, you know, there's a lot of changing behaviour that you saw.
You saw the curve. There's a large curve around changing behaviour that we might not want to put all our eggs in that basket.
But it's definitely something that's coming. So it's a wave and we're riding it.
And we're also driving it. Right. Kind of reinforced up just slightly to provoke two gentlemen at the bottom of my screen, a little bit for me.
The on STEM subjects discussed behavioural economics, the political skills at this point, probably more important than the sort of the science.
Why do I say that? There's a lot of people out there who say, technologically, we know what we have to do.
We have those blueprints. We know how one decolonised is an economy.
What we haven't figured out is how one, get societies and political systems and economies to adopt them and to do that in a rational way.
And that's a social science show. She likes the response to that mouse.
I'm afraid I can't hear you. Maybe you're suffering from your Internet connexion again.
No, no. I think it was, too. That's lie. On toggling at you. So thanks.
Thanks. No, no, no. That's absolutely fair enough.
And I, I broadly agree on that one. But I, I do want to stress one phrase that makes me feel uncomfortable.
Which, of course was popularised by Grétar Thornburg. And it is very dangerous to criticise anything coming from Brett or Thornburg.
But the phrase listen to the scientists worries me.
And because nobody told me that I had a privileged position to tell the world what to do and there's no you know,
so I think it is important that we and I think we've seen the dangers really over recent years in sort of technocratic.
There is no alternative. You have to do it this way because that's what the scientists say approaches
to solving problems ranging from the global financial crisis to coronavirus.
I mean, you know, people objecting to lockdown's and mask wearing and saying, what are these scientists?
No, no. Because and and so. So I think it is important that we maintain the dialogue and we're not suggesting science is done.
You need to worry about it. Just, you know, read read the latest IPCC report and it will tell you what to do.
Now, it's just a matter of persuading people to do it. I don't I, I don't think that will work.
I think it's going to be it's going to be up to the scientists to engage with the public and understand what they want and what's driving them,
particularly in different parts of the world. We live in a very, you know, or bubble in terms of Europeans.
And here's where the coastal us, in terms of our priorities and a big part of ocean net zero is actually diversifying the conversation
so that we're getting a broader range of perspectives and not just from other countries,
but also from other strata of society in the U.K. who perhaps haven't really engaged with the environmental
conversation so much up until now and who might be quite adversely affected by the wrong climate policies.
Get climate policy right and everybody wins. But but get it wrong. And that will be major losers.
And we need to be very careful of that. Yeah, I wholly agree on that.
I think in terms of listening to science, I agree everyone should listen to the science,
but and they can expect that to provide answers about what is but not necessarily what we ought to do about that.
And that in in avoidably involves science plus values. So huge role for others there.
And I think that links quite nicely to a question from John Matteis.
Do you think that the inequitable access to resources across the globe will be a barrier to achieving net zero?
Again, I might be a question you all have views on, but perhaps, Miles,
I know that's something that we are hoping to address actually or broadly address this issue
of different ways of perceiving and dealing with the net zero challenge and other possible.
So do you want to kick off with that one? Yes, I think, you know, for example, I can't resist the plug.
I was involved in the TED Countdown series. Please go and look at.
Go to Ted dot, dot, dot, dot com, slash Moreau's Ellen if you want to see more.
But Onlar there was one of the other from from Ruth Witchey.
So one of the follow up talks to mine was, was her perspective representing an organisation that's all about energy access for Africa.
And you know, they feel very strongly that Africa needs energy and fossil fuels are part of that energy
mix that Africa needs to develop and we need to engage with with these conversations.
And, you know, it's quite it's quite easy for us in some sense in the UK.
One of my concerns actually is the net zero conversation in the UK is very UK focussed.
We're all working out how to get the UK to net zero by 2050, which is fine.
But if the rest of the world, if we're not helping the rest of the world do the same on a similar timescale,
then we're not really solving the problem. So we need to we need to be looking at this broad, much broader range of perspectives and in particular,
avoiding being judgemental, particularly given, you know, after we started this.
So it should be up to us really to show the world the way out of it.
Some of my point about the UK is 2050 targets are the UK has legislated.
It's set in law. It's going to end to hit net zero by 2050.
And you, of course, have direct experience because you are a member of the Committee on Climate Change.
So you appointed independent expert advisers to actually really advise the government on what it should do.
And it was the CCC whose advice actually that pretty led pretty directly to the legislation of his target and the 2050 date.
Do you do you see that as overall a good thing and enough from the UK,
given that there is this inequity across the world and capabilities and any responsibility for the problem?
Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is equity. The equity dimension is hugely important.
Miles mentioned just as to the right of at least developed countries for modern forms of electricity, modern forms of energy,
which has been a huge driver of development everywhere else, that that becomes the trust that is important.
And we also have to worry about all those people that are worried about their jobs because they happen to be high carbon jobs.
We have to help those people make the transition into new green jobs.
So that's absolutely important. So that equity I mentioned is important.
The question about the UK versus the rest of the world.
And yeah, I think the UK has an obligation under self-interest to worry about global emissions, not just the UK emissions.
How does one do that? Step number one is lead by example. And that's in the process of doing in terms of the legislative frameworks.
We have not necessarily yet emphasised the actions we take.
Leading by example is very important. The second point is sharing good practise.
To the extent that we know what good practises in this country, we can share it.
And the UK has done things like that as its Climate Change Act.
So I've talked to other countries about good governance and then the desert dimension is this climate finance?
There's an obligation under the Paris Agreement and number two UNFCCC to provide generous amounts of climate finance
over above normal financial flows and to help other countries in that better organisation and in their resilience.
The UK is it's not. But in that the UK has quite generous climate finance budget.
One of the biggest in the world. And obviously the UK has also just talked its point.
Seven percent of GDP talk on development date.
So it's a bit of swings and roundabouts. But Thursday also means three things the UK could do.
Steve, I'll jump in on this because I think that argument is only talked about in terms of net zero, in terms of climate in this one way,
which is people worrying about just transition and people see fighting poverty against the ways we have to address climate change.
And that's just not always true. You know, I said earlier, thirty five million jobs are being created by green solutions over the next 10 years.
There's 10 times more green jobs in the US economy currently than there are fossil fuel industry jobs.
And I think that there's so much that if we do this right, if we don't do this transition right, you know, we we can really prosper.
And there's other concerns related to equity. Any time there's a shock to the system or a major transition.
It's often the poorest people who sort of get left out of those communities discussions.
And so, you know. It's not just about jobs, but it's also about land use.
How we have to make sure that we're stipulating that in these policy transitions to net zero, we're doing community consultations.
We're not just taking people's land away in order to to get there or if we are really doing it with a fair process.
There's definitely concerns around equity when it when it comes to indigenous communities and the way that we're gonna have to use,
you know, new mining materials to decarbonise.
And I think these are all the kinds of questions that come into to the net zero discussion that I'm hoping our new equity fellow is considering.
But I just wanted to point out that, you know, equity is sometimes posed opposite climate solutions and it just doesn't have to be.
And I think we should keep that in mind. Climate solutions are not always a cost.
Yes, we're past two o'clock, but I'm going to continue to ten past two.
So those of you watching do feel free to stay until then, given our late start.
And I'm going to therefore try and squeeze in two more of these excellent questions from the
audience and then and then take chairman's prerogative to add to squeeze in a final one of mine.
So Alice Ultimate asks, what is the most efficient nature based climate solution today?
I guess you could measure efficiency in one of several ways.
Does any of you want to tackle that one?
By that, you really like to punted forward to Natalie, to the experts on major race climate solutions in our forthcoming Net Zero talk.
I this there's one thing that I read a lot about at the moment.
This is things like mangroves, which seem to have multiple benefits on climate resilience, on biodiversity, on emissions.
But I'm sure Natalie will have many better examples. That's a great plug because that is the very next talk.
MacSween Week, actually,
I'll be in conversation with Professor Matt Saddam and Cecil Zero down in both who can be nature based solutions initiative here at Oxford.
So stay tuned for that one. Ask your question again. Great question.
So one more question. This is from Jim Smith. What gives you the most hope, given that a topic tends to be pretty scary?
I don't know about you. This is something I find I'm asked quite a lot, actually, these days.
So I am going to ask you some to get it out first and then Kyra and Miles.
There's two things that give me hope. One is something I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, richest.
Really broad consensus across all stopped our society in the financial sector, in the business sector,
at local government, in the courts and amongst civil society that we have to do something.
If you think that sort of the last general election,
the slowest political party or at least ambitious political party on climate action in the UK was the Tories that they wanted to be next year by 2050.
That's the slowest ambition that we have in society at the moment. That gives me hope.
And the other thing that gives me hope is that the technological solutions to the ingenuity of reducing emissions,
as is becoming increasingly available and increasingly cheaper renewables, batteries, electric cars, these things are starting to happen.
So that gives me hope. But, yeah, it's not going to be easy.
We should be clear about that. I get a lot of hope by just seeing almost how sometimes it's really hard, but sometimes it's really easy.
And I think I said before, sometimes it really just takes people starting the conversation.
And because we've had these environmental movements speaking up, because people are realising partly through the work of, you know,
oxfords research on stranded assets or sort of the normalisation of this
understanding that it is economically important to align with climate solutions.
Sometimes you are pushing on open doors. And the more I push that, the more they open and respond.
And so I just think staying active and, you know, racking your brain for people you could talk to to try to influence to join the race to zero,
that that alone would bring you hope because, you know, it's the only way to ensure that we're doing everything that we can.
Mauls. I think it's important to recognise how far and how fast we've already come.
I mean, I first gave a talk on the need for net zero in 2005.
I kind of know exactly when it was because it sort of a lot of people were puzzled by it at the time.
I was talking at one of the UNEF Triple C meetings in 2012. The one in Doha.
And again, presenting the fact that we're going to have to get to net zero emissions.
And at that time, a lot of the participants, even in the U.N. of Triple C process were quite suspicious of this.
You know, it's like, you know, really. Are you sure about that? Let's wait and see what the next IPCC assessment says.
And that was, of course, the IPCC. If the assessment which came out the following year was extremely clear on
this point that we needed to get to net zero emissions to stop global warming.
And within, you know, a couple of years really from then this this this point was acknowledged in the Paris agreement.
And it seems to be broadly accepted in every government, in every country around the world.
So, you know, in a world where everybody is wringing their hands and worrying about what happened to truth, I mean, actually, that's pretty good.
That's you know, that's pretty fast for a scientific a pretty uncomfortable scientific result to propagate through and and be accepted in policy.
So, you know, that doesn't mean we've done it yet. But at least we've accepted what we need to do.
Thank you. Three of you, since Myles plenteous Ted.
I'm just going to plug that in the last week.
Usborne published a book for Children, The Climate Crisis for Beginners, which I was involved in advising for.
And I was really keen, actually, that it was a book that doesn't just give people the doom and gloom.
It gives people hope, because I think that's important when speaking to children about this.
But it was a real challenge. I think it's important. I hope that we've achieved it.
Finishing on a hopeful note, it's not a false hope that everything's fine.
I mean, we're committed to future changes. And a lot of those are really not going to be good changes.
The idea that we do have some agency in this and that agency looks different and probably
has a different overall size for how old we are and what our roles are in society.
But but everyone can do something.
And I think the fact that we're talking about net zero and kind of the stats on the number of people or at least aiming for it.
And we have to see the action that is grounds for hope. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you one final question.
I'd like the answers to be as brief as possible, even though it's completely unjustified by the question it's given.
We're embarking on this New York's with net zero initiative. What do you see as the really big research question that needs to be tackled in
order for us to achieve a global net effective and equitable net zero world?
So, Miles, would you go first? Well, I think I keep coming back to it's gonna be all about storage of CO2, not.
You know, the many forms of sources here, too. How are we going to manage it?
How are we gonna look after it? Who's going to own it? This is this is the big problem.
If we leave it in the atmosphere belongs to nobody. And it's everybody's problem.
We've got to find other things to do with it. And, of course, generate a great deal less of a problem to start with.
Some other Laski to tackle that one next. Yes, that answer and sort of have them quite direct questions on me.
Why? What made me choying us next? You know, what excites me is two questions, really.
One is what Minds has already said. How does one make sense of that need for next defamations?
How do you make economic policy societal sense? Stop that.
But then there's also the second part which we shouldn't forget. And how do we tackle that difficult emissions that still remains that the you know,
the amount of negative emissions that we actually need is as low as possible.
There's some fascinating economic science, technology, engineering, lico governance questions there as well.
And, Kyra, it won't surprise you to hear that I'm I'm focussed on impacts, and so I think in the short term,
the research questions that I have have to do with how do we ask the right
questions of the right people as quickly as possible to get them to take action.
But I think long term,
my questions are around a post a post climate era in which we have actually developed in that Zeira transition that involves issues like,
you know, equity questions.
People often talk about climate change as if it's a cliff, that we eventually just fall off one day and then it's all over.
The world goes black. But that's not what it looks like. It looks like a lot more suffering for a lot more people or less suffering.
And how can we use our opportunity that we have in these transitions to maybe create
more distributed power to to give people more opportunities through education,
all the kind of co benefits that come along with the climate crisis, which is a lot to handle all in one.
And I look forward to seeing how all of our postdocs that we're bringing in help to answer those questions.
Plenty to say, so thank you very much to two, the three people who've join me in conversation today, Myles Allen, Sam Fankhauser and Kyle Axelsson.
And thank you to all of you for for participating online as well.
I'm very sorry that we didn't get the chance to cover all your questions.
But fear not, because this is the first in the series running throughout the term.
And we'll be touching on a lot of the topics you're asking questions on.
So the role of nature in achieving that zero different elements of energy system and energy vectors and also the roles of laws and societies,
not just in the U.K. but around the world in very different situations. So do join us if you can.
Next Monday, we'll be discussing the value and limits of working with nature to address climate change.
And that will be with Professor Matsakis. Dr. Cecile, you're done here at Oxford.
So it's a register. Click the green button under the video screen. And in the meantime, have a very good week for all of us.
Goodbye.