From Climate Cacophony to Demographic and Economic Degrowth Goals: in 200 days

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The IPCC Synthesis Report AR6SYR of 20 March 2023 has just made public the terms of reference of the Demographic and Economic Degrowth Goals (DEDGs), exposing the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to a double challenge: to put an end to the climate cacophony that reached its peak at COP27 (Sharm El Sheik 2022) and to render useless its backdrop, the paradigms war which become hybrid since 1988. By COP28 (Dubai 2023), they have 200 days to learn from experience in war planning and the implementation of international initiatives, with the understanding that the consensus around the DEDGs also implies a conceptual revolution. It is a little and a lot at the same time to operationalize this metaphor intended to reconcile the big emitters with nature, once dragged before the court of the future as long as they believe themselves "TPol-TP" (Too Polluters-To Pay) when others are "TP-TPol" (Too Payers-To Pollute).

The climate cacophony stems from a cumulative chain of confusion and error maintained since the creation of the IPCC. The confusion between certain and uncertain, inscribed from the outset in the format chosen in 1988 to institutionalize the fight against climate change, is amplified since COP6 (2000) when the physical science of climate occupies all the place with the "Emission Scenarios" designed by a "climate cliodynamics" as a transition between cliometrics and the model system.

This approach anticipates global warming and attributes it to environmental degradation as a result of a double socio-economic and demographic megatrend shift that occurred since the end of the nineteenth century for the first and in the twentieth century for the second. Despite their over-mediatization, these "Emission Scenarios" remain at most factors breaking a megatrend among others arbitrarily reduced to adjustment variables. This approach creates confusion and moves away from the exploratory methodology, the only one capable of distinguishing between the certain and the uncertain and within the latter between the radical, the conflictual and the consensual to build global scenarios, a vision and options for climate transformation according to the modalities of articulation to the policy cycle.

Global climate change is a long process involving physical science and other disciplines that contribute to putting climate on the international agenda. Climate Cliodynamics defines it, in turn as a mega warming trend, a trend scenario of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, a vision of the fight against climate change from the reduction of these emissions, a single choice in the absence of an option and an urgent problem that requires the mobilization of a whole arsenal for the imperative implementation of a global initiative such as the DEDGs. This was not always the case because at the very beginning, scientific research was reduced to "concerted action" within the selective climate club serving as a private agenda interest group oflarge emitters whose logistical and financial support goes to modeling centers as illustrated in this map drawn up by Carbon Brief.

For half a century, the environmental trend has become synonymous with degradation, associated with climate change and the multiplication of extreme events. The disruption of the carbon, oxygen and water cycle caused now dictates the global agenda through an unprecedented mechanism for managing interactions between scientists, international institutions, political decision-makers and interest groups. Its emblematic figures make climate a triple science: physics, the future and policy analysis. The first is enshrined in the brief and no less fundamental intervention of the Inter-Academy Panel when - at the request of the United Nations in 2010 - the IPA defines it as such. The second - highly publicized - is at the heart of the IPCC's mandate, whose work covers an increasingly long, broad, deep, extensive, concentrated and specific spectrum through Representative Concentration Trajectories (RCPs), then the Special Report on Scenarios (SRES) and Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP). The third - more discreet - is materialized by the succession of COP which organizes anarchy in a garbage can model with windows of opportunity that close as soon as open, in reference to the various theoretical currents precursors since the time of the American New Deal.

The link between these three disciplines or approaches is becoming increasingly complex. Everything happens as if each of them encompasses the other two while putting itself at their service. Thus, the physical science of climate anticipates the evolution of the environmental trend through climate change, their impacts on other megatrends both socio-economic and demographic. But it remains helpless in the face of the impacts on radical uncertainties concerning, for example, the evolution of possible forms of globalization, the game of major polluters and their ability to anticipate. The science of the future naturally invites itself with the help of projections and scenarios that extend the past or present without really exploring this habitat and building narratives. Thus, it in turn remains helpless in the face of the impacts on the policy process and the cyclical capacity essential to structure the agenda and guard against mistakes or other attempts at capture. The policy analysis science takes over around evolutionary approaches of sequential, network or matrix type, the first so-called positive being at the origin of so many misunderstandings including with nature.

It should also be remembered that the media coverage of climate change has its source in two reports and two summits that have gone almost unnoticed today. The two reports in question were produced at the initiative of MIT but independently by C. L. Wilson. They concern the study of Critical Environmental Problems. CEP, 1971. Study of Man's Impact on Climate SMIC, 1972). The Stockholm Summit (1972) took up the theme before it was on the agenda of the "Earth Summit" (1992, Rio de Janeiro). Meanwhile, the US Federal State is placing it on the international agenda with the support of the G7 and the United Nations behind the notion of climate change. A hybrid structure called COP (Conference of Parties) bringing together scientists and policy makers is responsible for this agenda fueled by the work of the IPCC of which SCEP is ultimately the precursor. The reason given for this choice was to limit the risks inherent in the scientifization of policies in a UN rightly or wrongly qualified as an ecological or even "carbocentrist" tendency, to use B. Rittaud's term (Le Mythe Climatique, Seuil 2010.).

How to navigate when the answers are formulated as injunctions to "an intellectual revolution as to the very conception of the State" (J.J. Laffont: Steps towards a modern State: an economic analysis in State and public management. CAE. 1999), a "systemic transformation" (UNEP 2022) or "making peace with nature"(UN Secretary-General). This will always be the case as long as this field of investigation remains reserved for this centuries-old disruptive hotbed of the world and atmosphere in which the major polluters compete for first place. Their activities increase the global temperature by about 1.2° by impacting the natural carbon cycle through forest clearing, land use change and the extraction of fossil fuels, which have released nearly 2,500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since 1850. Not to mention indirect emissions by importing products after relocating polluting industries. Of this global total, 509 billion tons of cumulative CO2 or 20% are emitted by a single country that proclaims itself Hegemon, embodies the most intensive form of globalization in the name of its "Manifest Destiny" and sets itself up as a rating agency that owns the criterion of entry into the climate club reserved for ultra-rich polluters. It does not take more for other members of the family of the Great Emitters to pretend to embody another without knowing what the wing brings more to the paper tiger, the hedge fund to the bionic bull, the glacis to the depressed bear, the rooster to the cicada ... The application of L. Wittgenstein's family resemblance predicates (FRP) facilitates - in a classificatory and attributive approach - their location in time and space the trajectory of this disruptive focus for nearly a millennium from a series of maps taken from "World Anthology of Strategy" (G. Challiand. Laffont, 1990) and "Blood and Ruins. The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945" (R. Overy. Viking. 2022) R.Overy Viking. 2022).

To make matters worse, the permanent reference to "making peace with nature" (UN) shifts the problem to the extent that this last remunerative target of hunters becomes the main enemy of this climate-disruptive hotbed and the major obstacle to the great acceleration since the last imperial war that left only "blood and ruins".

With this appeal, the UN finally names an enemy all the more fictitious because there is no question of equating the break in trend that causes environmental degradation with a "war against nature". The main effect of this rhetoric was to shield big polluters from the court of the future and prosecution for crimes against the earth in all its forms. On the other hand, human development is gradually becoming the main enemy of nature, with which peace is won at the cost of demographic and economic decline. The whole thing, expressed in the language of "climate diplomacy", ends up producing cacophony.

The confusion between certain and uncertain amplifies a succession of errors. It is part of the paradigms war that dates back to the Great Depression and has just crossed a new threshold at COP27 when the frantic race of research laboratories within the climate club gives "Monsoon" (IPCC_AR6_WGI_AnnexV Monsoon) or produces in 2022 several independent contributions to the work of the IPCC.

Since its inclusion in the international agenda in 1988, the climate cacophony has been amplified under the cumulative effect of two series of errors whose typology distinguishes the refusal or denial of reality that locks the major emitters in bad decisions and the monopolistic relationship to the truth or certainty of holding it that excludes them from good decisions. Will history repeat itself as a farce or a tragedy? The first set of mistakes had already plunged the world into the Great Depression and then into World War 2. The selective Marshall Plan, which is supposed to limit its effects, excludes any feedback from a federal state model. On the contrary, it promotes its foil or "union of nation states", causes the collapse of the competing project by containment in the hope of keeping Heartland and its Ukrainian strategic target, now at the heart of the news.

The second set of errors establishes a causal link between world population growth, improved living conditions and environmental degradation through the concepts of the Anthropocene, climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. The planet is exposed to geocide as a result of the multiple damages caused to the environment and health which, once elevated to the rank of resource - more precisely a non-market public good for private use - precludes any possibility of making it a "common good" under the responsibility of the United Nations. The war of attrition reinforces the legitimacy of major emitters in holding a monopoly on the truth, polarizes the world in order to absolve any responsibility for the failure of collective action, externalizes by locking-in effect the damages and costs of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. They take advantage of multiple biases: status quo bias and crowding-out effect, selection bias, free-rider and picking losers. The rest of the world, transformed into a "strategic target", is part of the "garbage-can" and "organized anarchy" theory.

Since its inclusion in the international agenda in 1988, the climate cacophony has been amplified under the cumulative effect of two series of errors whose typology distinguishes the refusal or denial of reality that locks the major emitters in bad decisions and the monopolistic relationship to the truth or certainty of holding it that excludes them from good decisions. Will history repeat itself as a farce or a tragedy? The first set of mistakes had already plunged the world into the Great Depression and then into World War 2. The selective Marshall Plan, which is supposed to limit its effects, excludes any feedback from a federal state model. On the contrary, it promotes its foil or "union of nation states", causes the collapse of the competing project by containment in the hope of keeping Heartland and its Ukrainian strategic target, now at the heart of the news.

The second set of errors establishes a causal link between world population growth, improved living conditions and environmental degradation through the concepts of the Anthropocene, climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. The planet is exposed to geocide as a result of the multiple damages caused to the environment and health which, once elevated to the rank of resource - more precisely a non-market public good for private use - precludes any possibility of making it a "common good" under the responsibility of the United Nations. The war of attrition reinforces the legitimacy of major emitters in holding a monopoly on the truth, polarizes the world in order to absolve any responsibility for the failure of collective action, externalizes by locking-in effect the damages and costs of stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. They take advantage of multiple biases: status quo bias and crowding-out effect, selection bias, free-rider and picking losers. The rest of the world, transformed into a "strategic target", is part of the "garbage-can" and "organized anarchy" theory.

COP27 was the seat of a drift that exacerbates the cacophony by the over-mediatization of the financial issue and that of fossil fuels to better demonstrate that the fight against climate change is only a matter of concerted action between research programs. Mobilized in this context, a complementary independent global expertise consolidates this perspective behind five reports all published in 2022 as an independent contribution to IPCC meetings respectively on the financial issue (climate finance, Multilateral Development Banks, opportunities), public diplomacy (Africa Europe) and the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.

The first (Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance. Finance for climate action: scaling up investment for climate and development, November 2022) castigates the poor choices of rich countries to rely on the market on the basis of estimates of tail risks, losses and damages by "Integrated Assessment Models IAM" (N. Stern, J. Stiglitz, C.Taylor. The economics of immense risk, urgent action and radical change: towards new approaches to the economics of climate change. The Journal of Economic Methodology. 2022) not to invest in climate action until the temperature rise exceeds 3.5 to 4 degrees Celsius (Nordhaus, 2018a).

This means blaming emerging and developing countries dependent on fossil fuels and emissions for climate change and thus for the destruction of billions of lives and livelihoods in rich and poor countries alike. The report confirms the need to guard against both types of errors (wrongly accept and/or wrongly reject) especially in the presence of uncertainties. This message is not new, one of the authors has already stated it (N. Stern. Managing climate change. College de France. 2010) after presenting climate change as the biggest market failure ever known (Stern Review).

However, this observation is not sufficient since the root causes of these errors are not identified. In fact, it refers to the 2nd principle of J.J. Laffont (1999) according to which making bad decisions and/or dismissing good decisions stem from mediocrity and corruption, two scourges to be stopped by an intellectual revolution in the conception of the State. However, this perspective is receding as interest groups with a private agenda strengthen their grip, as the other two reports confirm.

The second report (Boosting MDBs' investing capacity. (2022). An Independent Review of Multilateral Development Banks' Capital Adequacy Frameworks, 2022) prepared for the G20 aims to accelerate the greening of the multilateral development banks' portfolios under the watchful eye of rating agencies invited to a better risk weighting and the watchful eye of majority shareholders whose preferred creditor status is preserved as well as the current mode of governance. The report provides the keys to the financialization of the fight against climate change through the use of a whole series of innovations: relaxation of capital adequacy frameworks (CAF), private insurance, securitization, hybrid capital, shareholder lending power...

While these innovations make it possible to maintain the strategic interest of major GHG emitters, they cannot, in the absence of financial scenarios, be part of a vision that allows Africa to integrate globalized financial markets where financial concepts, instruments and assets are developed. This vision is not new either since it was already developed in the 2010 climate financial foresight exercise (S.D. Sy). The instruments and investments necessary to be a financial actor are clearly defined. Also, making CAF the key deliverable is the best way to assign Africa in the analycentric model and thus to make the continent a biodiversity to be protected from its population, a provider of ecosystem service while its resources remain open access for the benefit of large emitters.

The third (BCG. Better Climate Financing Depends on Better Data challenges the position adopted by financial expertise in the previous two by sounding the alarm on the availability of data and its quantification as a source of opportunities. Climate Finance Funding Flows and Opportunities. "What Gets Measured Gets Financed" (The Rockefeller Foundation, Boston Consulting Group. November 2022) estimates the financial needs of climate action at nearly $ 3.8 trillion, a sum beyond the reach of public financial institutions whether multi or bilateral, especially in the absence of data. With the postulate "Better Climate Financing Depends on Better Data" that holds the data holds the power of lender and market essential to exercise the monopoly on the truth reducing the rest to an adjustment variable, a sample to conduct Test-Bed or Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT). The recommendations of the report submitted to the G20, which the Foundation has supported, are thus obsolete.

The fourth report is a plea for "erga omnes development" that is not compatible with the constraints of public diplomacy (MIF. The Road to COP27: Making Africa's Case in the Global Climate Debate, July 2022), reprinted in "AEF. The Africa-Europe Foundation Report October 2022) ». In addition, he popularized the "Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN)" by referring thirty times to one of those research laboratories in the physical sciences of the climate, whose number has exploded since the Paris Agreement and which continuously convey the message "Common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC)" which no one believes anymore. This report mediates the confusion between resilience and capacity following all this work pronatalist trend but full of empathy for a continent that in any case does not have it, therefore condemned to both demographic and economic decline. The prevailing view that only these capacities are to be developed in Africa could not be better supported, whether through the massive multiplication of randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) or through voluntary burial in exchange for mystical promises. This report also serves as a new milestone for an unlikely "Marshall Plan with Africa" launched in 2017 by a G7 partner whose activism at the 2007 G8 Summit, Heiligendamm, Germany empties the NEPAD Action Plan for Africa of all its content. Failing to master the underlying paradigmatic of the Plan, the prospect of a New Partnership for Development, Peace and the Future is undoubtedly emerging behind the project to build the African Opera Village (Operndorf Afrika) that it sponsors. However, this village would have to be a real source of inspiration and innovation.

The fifth report on the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions (UNEP. Emissions Gap Report 2022) delivers a clear sentence: the window is closing since Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) do not prevent a temperature rise of up to 2.6°C in 2100. The scenario of COP21 (1.5°) being discredited, the wrong decision would be to remain attached to the stages heuristic and the right one to embark on a systemic transformation during this decade without specifying its content because the recommended approach only sketches the political nature of this transformation reduced to its structural dimension (electricity, industry, transport, construction, finance). This ignores the fact that transformation becomes systemic when it relies globally on the currency, the central bank and the platform to guide public policies and behaviors for ultimate impact on living conditions.

International experience in crisis management, development financing and lessons learned are not reflected in any of these five reports. Their main interest is to support the hypothesis of massive government intervention to avoid the collapse of a global financial system unable to cope with extreme events and risks.

Their common point is to illustrate the reactive or even passive attitude and duplicity of major emitters faced with the loss of credibility of the IPCC's work. They simply repeat the "damage cover" scenario outlined in the climate financial foresight exercise (S D SY 2010), subsequently supported by a whole series of studies that apply network policy analysis in the wake of TBTG (Too Big Too Fall), this concept invented during the last financial crisis to preserve the status quo. After TITF (Too-Interconnected-To-Fail) or TCTF (Too Central To Fail), it will be TPol-TP (Too Polluters-Too Pay) as long as others are "TP-TPol" (Too Payers-To Pollute) to mitigate the contagion effect by transferring the load to all those who are not sufficiently connected and therefore more vulnerable. Even central banks are getting into it by celebrating in the Jackson Hole monetary temple the TIFT slogan and rough scenarios produced by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NFGS), a climate monetary macroeconomics club. The key is to shift the costs of climate change onto the most vulnerable, exposed and underprivileged.

In terms of financing for development, the experience of UNDP (Jackson Report, 1970), its transformation (Jansson Report, 1989) and its integration within the UNDG in the perspective of "Delivering as One" provides other avenues such as the refocusing of the IPCC on its initial mandate by redesigning UNEP with the option of merging with UNDP around the DEDGs with a substantial budget to achieve them. Such a step implies the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions to end their exceptional status within the United Nations system. Preserving their status adds confusion if not precipitates the complete overhaul of the United Nations system, including the outright dissolution of the Security Council. This body, entirely occupied by the major emitters, still remains a powerful lever in their hands even when its members engage in rearguard battles obsessed with their status as powerless. Interesting, all these reports confirm that the ambition of the IPCC and successive COPs does not go beyond the concerted action reserved for actors in countries with research capacity and funding of both technological and political innovation systems

At the next COP (Dubai 2023), the DEDGs will be in the 28th draft, the first dating back to the First Assessment Report (FAR, 1990). A laborious and chaotic process until the publication of the first SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios - Nakicenovic et al., 2000) which constitutes the starting point of scenario planning. This approach draws on the resource planning widely used for a century, in turn to get out of the Great Depression, bring down the Nazi regime, reduce "barbaric Europe" to a shoreless Overseas (P. Kennedy. The rise and fall of great powers. Unwin, 1988) stripped of all its colonies in exchange for the Marshall Plan, disqualify in the middle of the Cold War the Soviet Gosplan in the hope of holding Heartland and beyond all the space that the application of family resemblance predicates (FRP) suggest to qualify "Hundoeuropean". But until 2010, the DEDGs were not explicitly included in the COP agenda given that GHG emissions were unintended effects of the Great Acceleration following the last imperial war 1931-1945. However, the approach is reduced to the methodological aspects of managing the uncertainties of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions before switching to that of extreme risks and disasters (SREX, 2011 Durban). Once validated by the Inter Academy Panel, IAP in 2010 which confirms its physical science base, climate scenarios planning switches to eco-planning with the creation of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBS) which recovers the know-how accumulated by the IPCC after having registered in the demo-resourcing agenda. Consciously or not? The response will not be long especially if COP28 condemns the Big Polluters for "Crime Against Nature” (CCN) while inviting them to the reconciliation table that are the DEDGs. Well beyond the injunctions made in March 2023 by COP15 ("Kunming-Montreal Agreement") to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 and to increase to 30 billion dollars the annual aid for biodiversity in developing countries or "peace pact with nature".

The profile of the DEDGs becomes clearer when its financial implications are addressed, particularly at COP15 (Copenhagen) and COP21 (Paris) without making it a priority. The Major Emitters take the opportunity to first support aid for the protection of the atmosphere through concerted action. Supporting nature conservation through the provision of ecosystem services remains an option. The same applies, but to a lesser extent, to financial coverage of damagesunder CBDR-RC. It was only at COP27 (Sharm el-Sheikh 2022) that the creation of a "loss and damage" fund included the DEDGs in the objective of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. There are now some editorial changes to be made to facilitate the early adoption of the initiative. It is therefore up to each participant to be transparent and to project themselves into systemic transformation.

This innovative approach refers the Major Polluters to the Court of the Future whose final judgment condemns them for crimes against nature. The effort designed to reconcile them with the latter will encourage them to learn from global planning initiatives in light of their impact (New Deal, Marshall Plan) and international development experience (UN, SDGs). These experiences - all rich in lessons - highlight the role played by foresight and policy analysis, two intellectual movements whose almost simultaneous eruption disrupted the academic field and public action throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Revisited by the Distance Theory, they provide a framework for DEDGs.

Sams Dine SY, March 31 2023
*Former facilitator specialized in expert group managementFacilitator of the Global Foresight and Policy Analysis platform.
https://samsdinesy.org/

P.S. This article is a non-technical introductory summary of the current publication entitled:

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