Climate change was high on the agenda on the first day of presentations at the 2023 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) on the Indonesian island of Bali.

In a session entitled ‘The Shifting Tides of Climate Change’, the controversial founder of the Deep Adaptation Forum, Jem Bendell, and sustainability author and consultant John Pabon were in conversation with moderator Amanda Katili Niode, who is a founding member of the International Environmental Communication Association and manager of The Climate Reality Project Indonesia.

Bendell told the audience that there were now two dominant narratives about climate change, both of which were incredibly well funded and allied to state interests and both of which were lies.

On the one hand, there’s what Bendell calls the eco-modern narrative, which is that climate change is controllable.

According to this narrative, Bendell says, “we just need some investments and leadership, some technology and entrepreneurship, and we all need to do as we’re told, shop a bit differently, hope for the best, and it won’t kill us”.

On the other hand, Bendell says, there’s the narrrative that climate change is a hoax and that “they’re just trying to control you and steal your money and lock you in your houses”.

This narrative is backed by the fossil fuel industry and the worldwide Atlas Network of think-tanks and is spreading massively, Bendell told the audience at UWRF 2023.

Bendell (pictured left) has a pessimistic view of the future. “The reality is climate change is proceeding far quicker than any of the mainstream scientists told us,” he said.

“September was 1.8 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures globally. And it’s not about that incremental heat. That means weird weather destroying crops.

“We are already in a world where we have uncontrollable climate change.”

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) predicts a multi-breadbasket failure within 1.5 degrees annual temperatures, Bendell notes.

“That means prices of basic grains going through the roof within three years from today,” he said. “That means food riots in many of the countries where you live.”

Bendell urges people to reject the idea that all that is needed is a bit more recycling.

“We’re citizens with community members. Let’s actually look at how we can help and how we can engage each other to prepare for a lot of disruptions that are already here for many of us, but are coming for all of us within just the next few years,” he said.

In 2018, after taking a year’s unpaid leave from his professorship at the University of Cumbria in England, Bendell published a paper called ‘Deep Adaptation’.

“The paper went viral and fuelled a new wave of activism, with Extinction Rebellion, and a new global network of people freely supporting each other, called the Deep Adaptation Forum,” he wrote in a blog post published on December 31, 2020.

Bendell added: “By taking time off from my job as a university professor, I studied the climate science more closely, and reached my personal conclusion that societal collapse in most countries in my lifetime is now inevitable.

“That meant I could not keep working on sustainable development and corporate sustainability any longer …”

Bendell says he discovered that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had been excluding a large number of incredibly relevant studies and a great deal of data because of its desire to create consensus.

“We have a watered-down message,” he said. “They had understated for decades the existential risks that we’re facing.”

Bendell says we are living in a hydrocarbon civilisation and net zero (achieving a balance between the greenhouse gas emissions produced and those removed from the atmosphere) is a lie.

“The politicians are lying about when they’re going to achieve it,” he said. “And the activists have been lying about it. They think that it’s actually possible. The shifting tide is that activists are finally being brutally honest with themselves and each other about reality.”

Bendell cites the damage done to the environment by driving an electric car in Poland, where electricity is produced mainly by burning coal.

“The whole way that we experience life has been greenwashed with the lie that we can somehow manage the transition of how we live into a sustainable renewably powered life,” he told the UWRF audience.

“This idea that there’s some kind of energy transition happening or possible is nonsense. Renewable energy is great, but it’s only adding to the amount of energy; it’s not displacing fossil fuels one bit.

“Societies have to power down and the rich must be made to go first. They won’t do it themselves.”

Climate change, Bendell says, is going to fundamentally undermine industrial consumer societies.

He says that we need to think about climate change with an open mind. That can only happen, he says, if we suspend our desire to feel reassured, our desire to avoid outright panic, despair and depression, and our desire to avoid not knowing what to do with the rest of our life.

“People are not apathetic,” Bendell said. “It’s amazing what people are doing. People are becoming activists, people are starting regenerative organic farms, people are doing all manner of amazing things precisely because they no longer believe that the elites and technology and politicians are going to do anything useful.

“The environmental issue always should have been a political revolutionary agenda and that is what the environmental movement is coming to realise.”

There needs to be a more honest discussion about reducing fossil fuels, Bendell says, and about doing other things to try and cool the environment such as regenerating forest cover. We’ve deforested in the last 200 years as much as the previous 9,000, Bendell says.

There needs to be more agroforestry, he adds, and consideration of safe, emergency geoengineering around the Arctic.

The need for pragmatic altruism

John Pabon (pictured left) works with the private sector. He’s spent most of his career working as a consultant for such companies as McKinsey and the Nielsen Corporation and organisations like Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). He’s an advisor to the United States Green Chamber of Commerce and chairs the The Conference Board’s Asia Sustainability Leaders Council.

The private sector has, if it’s put in the right position, the capacity and the resources to make a positive difference, Pabon says.

Pabon says he understands why people become doomists, not least because of the slow speed of change, but he told Changing Times: “We have to look at it from the perspective of moving the needle in the right direction. The more we think that we’re just going to stop capitalism, or stop oil … it’s bad for mental health, because it’s not going to happen. It’s just putting yourself up for failure.

“It’s really important that we’re patient and trusting that it is going in the right direction.”

Pabon says the most optimistic, realistic scenario now is a 2.7-degree future. “We’ve bypassed the 1.5 degrees,” he told the audience at UWRF 2023. “That’s gone.”

There are zero countries on track to meet the Paris climate targets, Pabon says.

“Right now, the problems are so massive that it does seem insurmountable for anybody as individuals, even collectives of individuals, to be doing much … governments as well have shown their hand; they’re not interested in helping, by and large,” he said.

“There are three big psychological shifts I think we can make if we really want to have a big impact, the first of which is to really become what I call a pragmatic altruist.” We need, Pabon says, to be strategic.

Secondly, Pabon says, we need to remember that we can do anything, but we cannot do everything.

“We need to pick a lane that we’re going to be passionate about and committed to and focus on that because we’ll be able to bring our best selves to that, confident in the knowledge that there are billions of other people around the world that will pick up in other places,” he told the UWRF audience.

Thirdly, Pabon urges people not to fall prey to climate doomism. “A lot of it is being fed through social media and the media by interested parties,” he said. “The majority of global media is owned by just six corporations so they are pushing a particular narrative that isn’t always in our best interest.”

Bendell takes a different view about doomism. “The psychological studies that treat us as individuals rather than just consumers actually find that catastrophic imaginings, believing that something is an existential threat, is far more motivating to people than thinking that technology and the billionaires and the governments and all the experts will fix it,” he said.

The problem, Bendell says, is that top climatologists and Al Gore still like to tell us that technology will fix everything and we should calm down.

“They don’t want us to rebel,” Bendell said. “And the work that I’m doing is inviting us to see how bad it is and therefore rebel.”

Bendell says that, for him, the entire environmental movement is greenwash, not just the corporations.

Pabon would argue that if people think there is nothing to be done they default to apathy. One way he has found to get people over this is to simplify things, showing people that there are things they can realistically do in their day-to-day lives.

He says people now have access to a great deal of information. “After 60 plus years of the modern environmental movement, if people don’t know what’s going on, if they’re not aware, I think they’re purposely having their heads in the sand,” he told the UWRF audience.

“So now our goal should … no longer be about ‘driving the impressions’, it should be about converting to action.”

Pabon told Changing Times that, with very few exceptions, governments were not using their levers of power to really push the needle forward on climate change. The private sector got us into the problem, he says, so it should  be their responsibility to get us out.

“They have access to capital and resources, and, if they’re strategic, they have a real business opportunity to differentiate themselves versus their competitors. So that’s a driving force.

“That sits squarely in the realm of capitalism, but, until a brilliant economist comes around to get us to the next evolution of an economic system, we have to work within the confines of what we’re given, which is capitalism. It’s an unfortunate reality.”

Pabon spent about a decade living and working in China. He cites the example of consultancy work he did for the American multinational retail corporation Walmart, which has about sixty factories in the country.

He was involved in a three-year programme to upskill about half a million female workers, not just in on-the-job capabilities, but in communication skills, financial literacy, family planning, and health and wellness.

Pabon argues that it’s the private sector that has the resources to implement programmes on such a massive scale.

He says companies are very reticent to talk about actions they are taking in relation to sustainability, climate change, and social governance.

“Marketing and legal departments are scared to talk about anything related to sustainability because they’re concerned that there are those in the activist community who will pick apart any claims trying to find something wrong,” he said.

“What we need is more companies talking about the good things they’re doing to encourage other companies to also talk about what they are doing.”

Pabon says companies are now starting to look at their Scope 3 suppliers (the third link in the chain after the direct suppliers and their suppliers).

“There are companies in which Scope 3 suppliers are responsible for more than 90% of the company’s greenhouse gas emissions,” he told Changing Times.

“The monitoring that’s been done for more than a decade has only been of 10% or less of the actual emissions that a company is responsible for,” Pabon said. “By looking at Scope 3 suppliers, companies are really dealing with this holistically. That’s something that gives me hope.”

Pabon says that in 10 to 15 years’ time, there won’t be room for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies that are not acting sustainably. “The bad players won’t be around,” he said. “There won’t be space. Nobody’s going to put up with it.

“This doesn’t include the high polluters like the mining and oil and gas companies, which will still be around. They’re not going anywhere, unfortunately. But as the good FMCG companies become better, they’re going to wean themselves off of oil and gas. And once these things start to scale, prices will come down.”

Breaking together

Bendell has published a new book entitled Breaking Together – a freedom-loving response to collapse, which is available as a free epub. The author of Climate: A New Story, Charles Eisenstein, said the book was “part of a healing movement that extends beyond what we normally think of as ecological”.

Stella Nyambura Mbau from Kenya, who does agroforestry, said in her review: “This book shows that instead of imposing elitist schemes and scams, regenerating nature and culture together is the only way forward.”

Bendell has left his employment as a professor and is moving away from academic endeavours. He’s now focusing on developing a regenerative farm school in Indonesia and playing devotional music for groups.

“It’s possible to do something useful,” he told the UWRF audience. “It’s possible to delocalise supply chains. It’s possible to become a bit more resilient to future shocks as global economics gets disrupted. And in the process, you’re regenerating biodiversity.”

Bendell says on his website: “Despite misrepresentation of me by reformist environmentalists, who unfortunately marginalise attempts to soften the breakdown of industrial consumer societies, I have never predicted near term human extinction, and have continued to support carbon cuts and natural drawdown for over 25 years.

“I have pushed for a wider agenda of harm reduction, beyond either giving up on social change, nor sticking to failed tactics, policies and ideologies.”

He describes his old bio, which includes co-authoring a World Economic Forum report on the sharing economy, helping to create The Finance Innovation Lab, writing a report for the WWF about the responsibility of luxury brands, and working in frontline British politics, as an “illustrious career of delusion”.

Pabon, who is an American now living in Melbourne, Australia, has published a second book The Great Greenwashing: How Brands, Governments, and Influencers Are Lying to You. His first book, Sustainability for the Rest of Us: Your No-Bullshit, Five-Point Plan for Saving the Planet, has been described as “a foundational read for practical sustainability in the 21st century”.

DONATE TO CHANGING TIMES VIA SIMPLE PAYMENTS

1= 5 euro, x 2 = 10 euro, X 3 =15 euro, etc.

€5.00