Venue: UEA. 8th September 2025
Our Critical Decade for Climate Action
The text below is from Kevin’s talk that followed Dr Gaurav Gharde’s presentation, where Gaurav revisited the 2005 UK energy scenarios, which Kevin and colleagues developed, comparing them with other approaches from the time.
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The Chair (Professor Alice Larkin) has given me five questions to help me reflect personally on our 2005 scenarios and the scenario process more generally. In a rare departure from my usual presentations filled with numbers and graphs, I’ve opted for a more flowing narrative – actual paragraphs and sentences – which, with some trepidation, I’m going to attempt to read aloud. So, here goes!
Q1: What was your thinking at the time of setting up the scenario project’?
From what I witnessed, the early 1990s were marked by a cautious yet reasoned optimism about the climate challenge. By the 2000s, the mainstream mitigation and scenario-building community had drifted into a profoundly delusional and increasingly performative framing of the challenge. Ambition gave way to narratives shaped more by political convenience than physical reality.
In response, we sought to move beyond the political sensitivities dominating the scenario community and offer a more candid assessment of the scale of action needed to meet the 60% emissions reduction target – then seen as broadly consistent with the UK’s fair share in limiting warming to around 2°C.
As part of this, we thought it necessary to develop a full carbon footprint of the UK energy system, demand as well as supply, and explicitly include aviation and shipping, sectors then excluded from official inventories but responsible for around 10% of UK emissions and growing rapidly.
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Q2: How are things different now’?
The establishment has won. The shift from reasoned hope to hopium is near total. Informed optimism has given way to techno-utopianism, misleading models, and institutional denial. We now operate within a distorted climate narrative detached from the scale, urgency, and systemic nature of the crisis.
Sincere, skilled researchers across disciplines continue their work, but largely within politically drawn boundaries that exclude the most crucial aspects of the problem. What we are allowed or funded to ask, is tightly constrained, keeping outputs aligned with the illusions favoured by governments, corporations, and major institutions. It’s rigour without truth; scientific credibility serving political convenience; astrology with calculus.
The delusion is now systemic. Policy, modelling, and public discourse orbit what suits power, not what reality demands. The blue pill hasn’t just been swallowed; it’s been institutionalised and rebranded as “net zero.” Models promising distant technological salvation have displaced honest assessments of what Paris-aligned decarbonisation entails.
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Q3: What did you see as the positives that came out of the work ?
I hope the work created space to think differently, challenge accepted norms and recognise that trusted colleagues who support critical thinking – even in disagreement – are among our greatest assets. One lasting insight was realising that collectives, people working in solidarity, can be powerful, and deeply unsettling to the status quo.
Another consequence of the work may have been to unintentionally contribute to the gradual suppression of ideas considered ‘dangerous’—not because they are flawed, but because they challenge the status quo. That space is now all but closed. The mitigation agenda has been captured; nationally by the CCC, internationally by the IPCC, specifically Working Group III. Their narratives are echoed as if they were immutable truths. Repeat after me: ‘Net Zero 2050‘.
I’m not here offering defeat, but rather resistance anchored in evidence and academic integrity. The task now is to find – and prise open – the cracks in the concrete architecture of the status quo. As Leonard Cohen put it: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
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Q4: What was not thought about at the time that should be included now?
In 2005, a 60% cut in UK emissions (cf. 1990) by 2050 meant annual reductions of 1.9%. Today, even a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C requires global cuts of over 20% per year. That 1.5°C commitment has been sacrificed, along with the livelihoods and lives of many in climate-vulnerable communities, all in pursuit of reckless economic growth and the preservation of obscene inequalities, both between and within nations.
Even the far riskier 2°C threshold now demands global cuts of around 7% a year – two percentage points steeper than the sharpest drop during COVID. Apply even a weak equity lens, and the UK would need to cut emissions by 12–15% annually.
The climate realities of 2005 and 2025 are worlds apart. The pace, scale, and nature of the challenge have shifted so dramatically that earlier modelling offers little useful guidance.
Still, some lessons remain:
- Challenge the framework: Whether net zero, 1.5°C or 2°C, we must question the boundaries of accepted analysis, and even whether temperature is the best framing.
- Widen the lens: Climate change is one part of a broader ecological and social crisis. Treated in isolation, it invites narrow, technocratic fixes that deepen injustice and shifts damage elsewhere.
- Break the taboo on discretionary emissions: Structurally locked-in emissions dominate discourse; discretionary emissions – especially from the middle and upper classes – are ignored. Even now, questioning these lifestyles remains taboo, despite their hugely disproportionate impact and capacity for rapid change.
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Q5: What are your views on the contemporary scenario approach and how do you think this should be changed?
The contemporary scenario approach, shaped by the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), needs to be abandoned. It can’t be fixed – adding more maths, social science, or data won’t turn astrology into science. We are in a climate and ecological emergency, not an incremental political game.
But we must stay vigilant: the language of emergency can be hijacked to pursue regressive agendas, concentrating power, silencing dissent, and protecting privilege. For some, crisis becomes cover to deepen inequality and erode democratic norms.
Today we hide behind the economic numerology of mitigation models, paired with the soothing, middle-class rhetoric of “muddling through”. At best, this is disingenuous; at worst, it masks and obstructs the necessary scale of change.
We must break the Global North, white, middle-class, and colonial framing that shapes today’s climate discourse. The non-contextual economics driving policy is part of the problem. Integrated Assessment Models are not salvageable. For three decades, we have treated IAMs as tools to build a new world, when in fact they were always just differently weighted hammers misapplied to culturally complex and geographically diverse challenges.
What we need instead are contextual, pluralistic approaches, rooted in place, justice, lived experience and physical reality.
Think about what we truly value: our children, partners, parents; love, friendship, birdsong, laughter, waves on a beach, running in the park, watching cricket, sharing food, learning new things, reading a book. None of these can be priced without misunderstanding what they are. Treating them as commodities is a category mistake.
To an economic or IAM modeller, Judas simply got the price wrong, he should’ve asked for 300 or 3,000 pieces of silver. But to most of us, selling a friend, a child, or a lover isn’t a pricing error, it’s an ethical violation.
Still, this isn’t a message of despair. While non-contextual economics is part of the problem, other traditions offer hope. Political economy, in its culturally grounded, plural forms, offers ways forward. Ecological economics, especially in its reflexive and less formal iterations, takes us closer still. We are not adrift, but we must stop clinging to old maps as they lead us back to the very crises from which we need to escape. It’s time to chart new routes grounded in reality, justice, and possibility.
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I’m going to close with a few wise words from Primo Levi and Martin Luther King who speak to the heart of my argument: that, specifically on mitigation, there is an urgent need to shake up an all-too-often complacent – and at times complicit – academic establishment.
I’m particularly grateful to Primo Levi for holding a mirror to my own all-too-comfortable material existence, made possible, at least in significant part, by the suffering of others, both human and non-human.
This first quote is from “if this is a man”, Levi’s own account of surviving Auschwitz
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.
Following on from Primo’s challenge to us all, I think it’s fitting to close with something more directly constructive:
So, here’s Martin Luther King:
There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression by the bad people
but the silence over that by the good people.
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I stand here amongst a sea of good people — let’s support one another to speak out and stop our silence from continuing to fuel a system hellbent on accelerating climate breakdown.
Thanks for listening.