“The Missing x”
By Matthew Pye
“One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet’s house to see what Piglet was doing. It was still snowing as he stumped over the white forest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of his fire, but to his surprise he saw that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there.
The House at Pooh Corner1
Oddly, what is not there is sometimes the thing that is most there.
Think of the two chairs in “The Bedroom” by Van Gogh.2 This is a painting which is full of the absence of his friend Gaugin.
Think of the time you were stood up. Think of all those empty glances into the crowd.
Once you see that it is not there, you won’t be able to unsee it. Once you have thought about it, every time you hear politicians update their nations’ climate policies you may come to notice its absence. Each time you read an article about climate change you may come to notice it is not there. In fact, this x is missing at every level of our public discourse on climate change. It is not there in climate marches, it is not in climate education. The more you search, the more it isn’t there.
This x is the CUTx Index.
“Wot, no climate dashboard?”
If we dare turn our minds back to the intense and turbulent years of COVID-19, both politics and the media were tuned attentively to the numbers of the pandemic. How many deaths, how many cases, empty beds, immunisations, tests, and the pivotal “r- number”.
The pandemic was a prolonged moment when science and data drove public policy, even if that meant massive disruption to the economy and the social order in many countries.
We now have our noses up against various planetary boundaries, the crossing of which will take us into a minefield of irreversible tipping points. Given the severity of the dangers, we would expect politicians and the media to be very attentive to the key data. Given that entire economies and cultures are at risk, given that the stability and feasibility of human civilisation is threatened, we should be able to know, very clearly, how close such thresholds are.
But the more you look, the more you see that there are no such dashboards.
“Don’t look up”, sums it up.
“Hold our governments to account”
Since 2018, Greta Thunberg has rightly protested that we should “hold our governments to account” over climate change. But how on earth is that possible if there is no scientific, reliable and consistent measure to do that? Any accountability requires a standard, transparent measure.
We have no climate index.
What we do have is a thick fog.
The EU promises to reduce its emissions “55% by 2030 based on 1990 levels”, The USA “50-52% by 2030 based on 2005 levels, China, 65% by 2030 based on 2005; alongside 134 others, Japan and Canada promise to reach carbon neutrality by 2050; India pledges to get there by 2070.3
My day job is teaching. I am Head of Philosophy at the European School of Brussels II. Can we imagine a world in which teachers write reports like this for students and parents? “Billy will improve his grades by 45% in 3 years, based on his results of 7 years ago”, “Jenny will improve her grades by 52% in 5 years, based on her results of 8 years ago”. Would parents dig out the old reports, get a calculator, and do the maths? Surely not.
The more you look, the more the index isn’t there. In the absence of such a measure, how can we hold our governments to account?
The CUTx Index
Well, there is a measure.
This measure has the endorsement of all the leading climate scientists in the world, including:
- Prof. Jim Skea (Chair IPCC)
- Dr Jian Liu (Chief Scientist UNEP)
- Dr Pavel Kabat (Chief Scientist WMO)
- Dr Soumya Swaminathan (Chief Scientist WHO)
- Dr Youba Sokona (Vice Chair IPCC)
- Dr Janez Potocnik (Co Chair IRP)
- Dr Guido Schmidt-Traub (Executive Director UNSDSN)
- Dr Elizabeth Mrema (Executive Secretary CBD)
- Dr Stefan Swartling Peterson (Director Health UNICEF)
- Dr Shamila Nair-Bedouelle (Director General Science UNESCO)
Prof Kevin Anderson, and many more.
Although these scientists have underlined the importance of communicating these essential numbers, the data have not been adopted by the UNFCCC, and they are not yet used by the media.
Why?
There is a simple reason: why would anybody in power want to be held accountable for the fact that emissions are still accelerating? Politicians, the fossil fuel industry, and others with a vested interest in the status quo would likely do anything to keep things foggy. The vital statistics of those in power are very embarrassing.
The Missing x
The next time your nation announces it is on track or behind its policy commitment, ask these basic questions: what is this commitment rooted in? Does the commitment have anything to do with the actual carbon budget? Is this commitment a fair share of the global amount? Anytime you read about more solar panels, or less mining, how do you know if that action adds up to enough?
Real power belongs to those who set the limits to a debate. Problem framing is more potent than problem solving. Keeping something unthinkable is the best kind of control.
Dashboards appeared within weeks of the COVID outbreak. We have known about the existential threat of climate change for decades. It is imperative that we look up. We have a right to know what is going on above our heads. It is time to get ourselves an index.
It is time to point at the missing x. The next article will zoom in on those national numbers.
Previous articles in the series:
1 Are we nearly there yet?
Footnotes and references:
1 The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne
2 Van Gogh, Vincent. The Bedroom. 1888. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0047V1962. Accessed 10 May, 2024.
3 https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/. Accessed 7 May 2024.