I met up with Professor Guy Midgley on a sunny winter’s day in August 2018 – in his office at the University of Stellenbosch. Formerly at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), he was instrumental in developing South Africa’s policy responses to climate change, including the Long-term Adaptation Scenarios (LTAS). In 2014, Thomson Reuters listed him as a “Highly Cited Researcher”, one of only six in South Africa, and in 2019 he was awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
In a move away from foundational science studying plant responses to global change, Guy worked for a decade with people across all disciplines on climate change as a societal challenge. He was part of the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and involved in the design of the Nairobi Work Programme. Now returned to academia, Guy teaches Global Change Ecology and exercises his scientific curiosity on topics like plant stress in response to Marion Island’s variable environment, and the effects of warming on plants in the Karoo.
This is a short, edited extract from our far-ranging conversation two years ago. Although belated, the issues Guy raises could not be more topical. When we spoke in 2018, it was halfway through Trump’s presidential term. It had become apparent that an area in which his chaotic administration was managing to succeed to a frightening extent was in repealing environmental regulations and curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
Just how bad this has been is revealed in today’s feature in The Guardian, “75 ways Trump made America dirtier and the world warmer”. Clearing the way for oil and gas drilling offshore and in Alaska, stripping protections for Atlantic Bluefin tuna and other endangered species, shrinking water pollution safeguards, stalling rules to reduce pesticide exposure for agricultural workers, shrivelling emissions standards for carbon dioxide and other pollutants from power plants and factories … the horrible list goes on and on.
Michael Mann, professor at Penn State University and world-esteemed climate scientist, has stated that four more years of the Trump administration’s actions would make it “essentially impossible” to hold global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is what we need to do for the best chance of a liveable future.
Two years later, we are barrelling towards the next US election, in a time of heightened global unease and elevated urgency to act decisively on climate change and ecosystem breakdown. I re-read the points raised by Guy on the political space for progressive change with a sense of poignancy and fragile hope. Will the US elect Joe Biden, who has a USD 2 trillion climate and environmental justice plan, and help pull us back from the edge? Or will Trump and the Republican Party somehow manage to hang on to the power that they so woefully deserve and cynically denigrate?
Back to August 2018, and my conversation with Guy Midgley.
PU: How do you feel about where we are now in terms of climate change? What are your greatest fears, what concerns you the most?
GM: I have become very regretful about missed opportunities. It becomes clearer with time, and as the temperature trend continues upward, that there have been pivotal missed opportunities. One was Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush (in 2000), and then the more recent one, with the election of Trump (in November 2016). It’s very, very disheartening to live through that again.
And I feel regret because I wonder about the message (from scientists) – was it clear enough? How could we have done better? Does it help to think like that? It probably doesn’t, but now that I’m approaching retirement, it’s something I think about. How could we have done better? Is there something to be learned from that?
I worry about the political atmosphere on the planet. And the multi-lateral space that provides the support for multi-lateral science, the kinds of things that support the ability to detect and respond to a multi-lateral threat like climate change. It worries me that we may be going into a period of quite extreme climate change, at a time when the scientific milieu needed to inform policy around that is being curtailed.
My worries are also around the quite complicated clashes of world views, the commercialised world view, the economic world view, and the value placed on public goods. Commercialisation is sitting at the heart of the thing. So is that going to be successful, is that the way it’s going to go? Is adaptation to climate change now going to become a huge commercial opportunity? What are we going to need to adapt cities? Are we going to have to move them? Then, are we going to need new kinds of engineers, and what companies are going to jump on that opportunity? Are we going to use the market to solve all that stuff? Is there huge money to be made out of geo-engineering, is that becoming a commercial opportunity?
There is very clear evidence that a lot of the government investment that was made into public goods like the internet is now being used by commercial interests, and are they really giving back, based on all the profits that they are making?
PU: No, would be my short answer. Laughs
GM: The Googles, and the Apples, and the Amazons, these are companies built off massive public investments, what is coming back from them now for the next set of investments?
We’ve changed in so many ways, climate change is only one of the changes. It’s like everything changed – global environmental change, global societal change, international travel, the internet and connectivity, clashes of civilisations and ideas.
And now we’ve got artificial intelligence. Are we going to solve the problem using artificial intelligence, what could that look like? Are we going to invent some new kind of way to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and just sort out the problem in the space of a few years or decades?
Are we going to have a world where energy is basically unlimited because it’s all based on renewables, in which case that’s a very different world. An unlimited energy world is a very different world because your paradigm is no longer one of scarcity, it’s one of abundance.
PU: Yes. And it could be.
GM: It’s a possibility, we have the technology to possibly get there. Where’s the leadership, where’s the thinking around this?
PU: I think that is a critical word, leadership.
GM: Well we have the dark future set out by Yuval Harari in his book ‘Homo Deus’ – we’ve got these sort of dark visions, but is that the only way to think about the future? Where are the inspirational visions? Are all the inspirational new leaders involved in fighting these difficult forces?
PU: Yes, it sometimes feels like that. And it’s this constant distraction, and constant rear-guard action, that’s preventing people, in certain circumstances, from being able to move forward. So imagine if Al Gore had been elected in November 2000, and not George W. Bush, and then Obama had still come in in 2008, and now we just had to build on that. It would be a completely different world.
GM: Absolutely. Well the UNFCCC would have moved ahead much faster, we would have had far less US intransigence, slowing down of progress, who knows, Kyoto might have been much more successful. You can play the scenarios.
PU: And it’s 10 years later now.
GM: Yes, and these are crucial decades for climate change.
PU: In the process you described of engaging in a broader societal way around climate change, can you identify any moments of internal realisation or personal transformation? Which changed the way you saw things going forward?
GM: Yes, I think one of the big realisations was the friction of legacy effects, and how difficult those are to overcome. For example, how are we going to adapt our cities when our architects and urban planners are not learning about climate change? There is a legacy effect of all these people in the sector, and other sectors, who don’t have that background.
What’s needed is systemic change, but how has that ever happened before? Peacefully.
We both laugh, and agree.
Because it’s a systemic change of thinking that is called for. We are polarised around socialism and capitalism, and it’s most stark in the US. Where any form of democratic socialism is seen as an extremely negative kind of thing. There’s excitement when Trump reduces taxes on the rich and then reduces company tax. ‘Oh, this is going to be great for the economy.’ And then you’ve got voices in Europe, like Yanis Varoufakis and others who are seen as extremists. But if you go and look at what they are saying, they make all the sense in the world. So it’s very polarised. The Greek crisis I think was a real window into another missed opportunity to rethink an economic policy for Europe. And such a sad ending, this heavy-handed shutdown of those ideas.
So that’s the one thing that’s really struck me, the friction that needs to be overcome. And I think it’s trite to talk about how that can just be transformed. It’s a hugely, fundamentally difficult problem. And it’s in all of us, we all have legacy effects. We all do things in certain ways because that’s how we’ve always done them.
PU: We all need to make transformations, basically.
GM: Yes, but how do you do it, where do you go, what’s the best thing to do? The evidence is mixed on all sorts of things, it’s very tricky.
PU: What do youthink? About how to transform.
GM: (chuckles) I think there are multiple ways of doing it, and I don’t think it implies that we all have to retreat into unilateral poverty. But I am really not sure. What I do suspect is that the more of us there are on the planet, the narrower the options are. But then that has a horrible elitist implication to it, that the future belongs to relatively few, relatively well-off people. My 15-year old son is quite interesting on this stuff. He says you can’t have a utopia, it’s impossible, you can’t experience only good things, because then you wouldn’t know they were good.
Human meaning comes from striving, from trying to get somewhere. So in that way climate change is a real challenge, and what we have to watch out for is nihilism, or defeatism, in the face of thing. Continuous effort, or at least a belief that there’s a way to get to a better place, or at least to adapt, that’s really important. Because once you give up on that idea, then what’s the point? And the same with reaching utopia, there’s no point in reaching utopia, because once you do, then what?
PU: Well, I think we can pretty much guarantee that’s not going to be an issue we’ll have to deal with! (both of us are laughing)
Within this context, where do you find sources of comfort, where do you find solace?
GM: Well, one thing I know for sure is that nature, the natural world, has enormous resilience. And while I’m aware that there are threats to endemic species and ecosystems, and many ecosystems are a mess because of pollution and dead zones off the coast, and many really horrible things that are happening around the world, we know that nature and life itself are resilient. They’ve coped with an asteroid impact, it may have taken hundreds of thousands to millions of years, but life and biodiversity are extremely creative and life recovers. So I take a lot of comfort from that. You know vegetation, plants, animals, they survive in very adverse conditions, and they transform ecosystems, and they continue to function.
So that’s a seed of comfort. That’s something we have in our favour. And that’s really where working with nature, you work with an extremely powerful force, if you can just accept that and take advantage of that. And align yourself with it. It’s an extremely powerful force to align with, and we are never not going to have that. That’s always going to be there in some form. So that’s a fundamental form of comfort that anyone can take something from. But we so often seem to not align with that powerful force.
We know that the world has been 10 degrees warmer. Nature survived. We go back in palaeo-history and there were times when CO2 was a couple of thousand parts per million, and the world was much warmer, the sea levels were much higher. The world was a different place, but there was a lot of life. Things survived. So I am not afraid of that. Of course there’s going to be a lot of regret, because we are going to lose – we are losing, and have lost – particular ecosystems that we’ve grown to love. Coral reefs, for example – it’s devastating what’s going on.
PU: Yes, it really is.
GM: Lots of these processes are going on. You can see it’s like a degraded world, we have degraded ecosystems as a result. But nonetheless, the force is still there.
PU: Yes. Pause. When you are most in touch with this sense of grief at the losses already, and the losses still to come, where do you go, what do you do? Literally or figuratively. Is nature itself a source of comfort – thinking of what you’ve said about the long-term regenerative force of nature as a being comforting?
GM: Hmm, that’s a good question. Long pause. Laughs.
PU: What makes you feel happy, if you are down thinking about some of these things? What is it that picks you up?
GM: Hmm … pauses
PU: Well, maybe you don’t need to be picked up. Laughs
GM: I don’t ever really get too down about things. You know, I’m not pessimistic that we are going to break the world. I do feel sad at the loss of a pure world, a pristine ecosystem, that kind of thing. But I do think that’s a bit of a luxury. I try to keep on learning new stuff, so I am always seeking out new music, and listening to new podcasts, trying to understand different things, about how the world is working.
PU: So your sense of natural curiosity keeps you going, in a way?
GM: Yes, I’m very curious about the way the world works. Not only nature, but politics, I’m always trying to get a sense of where things are going.
…
We ended off our discussion by talking about some of the tipping points at the heart of the climate crisis – these will be the subject of another blog, in which I’d like to draw on new scientific research about this.
Back to the present, and a reminder about the political atmosphere on the planet. Which right now is anxiety inducing – so much rides on the outcome of the US election. But with this comes opportunity and agency – American citizens can take a decisive step in the right direction by voting for the candidate who will re-orient the world’s biggest economy back on track to reducing the climate crisis. In case there is any doubt about this, it’s not the current incumbent.
I will leave the final words to Michael Mann, as quoted in Mark Hertsgaard’s excellent piece in The Guardian:
“The way we end this national and global nightmare is by coming out and voting for optimism over pessimism, for hope and justice and progress over fear and malice and superstition. This is a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be defeated on election day here in the United States.”