A Call for Physical Politics

This article was originally published in STANCE.
STANCE is the journal of the Politics Society of Trinity College Dublin

A physical context

Our universe follows physical laws. Because our societies exist in this world, they are bound to obey these same physical limitations. Although this seems evident, the connection between Natural Sciences and Political Sciences isn’t always obvious.

Geopolitics study the effect of geography on politics and international relations. This is the first step towards bridging the gap between politics and physical factors (local climate, natural barriers, resources, etc.).

To read further on how our environment has historically shaped societies, one can read Guns, germs & Steel. Written in 1997 by Jared Diamond, this book explores global History under the framework of Geography and Natural Sciences.¹

Economies depend on the manufacture and transport of goods using energy, usually coming from fossil resources. Yet the physical limits of our economies often seems to be rejected, one example is the underlying promise of limitless growth.

Climate Change

An obvious physical limitation that our societies are facing is the current anthropogenic climate change, global warming from human activities. The Paris Accords, adopted in 2015, is a recent example of policies taking into account physical limitations.²

Accepting this limit is arguably one of the most polarizing topic in current western politics. From climate denial to radical activism, agreeing on a common limit and its sobriety plan isn’t straightforward.

As an Engineering graduate, I believe that quantification is the first step towards scientific knowledge. The carbon footprint is a controversial metric that puts the fault on individuals, without questioning powerful polluting industries. Taken with a pinch of salt, it is still an interesting metric with an individual -thus emotional- scale.

The carbon cycle are the exchanges of carbon between four ‘reservoirs’: the Atmosphere, the Oceans, the Lands & Fossil Fuels.³ Burning coal in a chimney results in the flux of carbon from Fossil Fuel to the Atmosphere. This flux is the main cause of our current climate change. These global fluxes are estimated annually in a carbon budget publication.⁴ This budget can be used to calculate a value of maximum anthropogenic emissions for carbon neutrality, so that our emissions are cancelled by natural sinks/uptakes (ie. plants sucking up CO₂).

Dividing this global carbon neutral value by the global population gives us a sustainable limit that we need to follow: 2 tonnes of CO_2eq per person and per year. CO_2eq is used as a common unit, aggregating all greenhouse gas to their equivalent CO₂ effect (eg. 1 CH₄ (methane) ≈ 25 CO_2eq).

In Ireland, the current annual carbon footprint is around 11.5 tonnes of CO_2eq per person.⁵ This is more than six times the target, which leads to the saying some of you may have heard : “Irish people consume/would need 6.5 earth”. Once we have the 2 tonnes target in mind, we can break it down to its most impactful sectors (Transport, Food, etc.) and quantify them.

Let’s have a concrete example : a return flight from Ireland to Australia. Such trip emits about 2 tonnes of CO_2eq,⁶ thus using up one’s annual budget in a few days. Any further CO₂ emissions would be overdue for the year, thus accumulating in the Atmosphere as greenhouse gas.

Kaya’s equation

An amazing equation highlights the link between carbon, energy, demographics and economics. It was written in 1997 by the mineral economist Yoichi Kaya:⁷

  CO_2eq : Annual carbon budget
  E : Global energy use per year
  GDP : Global gross domestic product per year
  POP : Global population

This equation links our annual carbon budget on the left with four terms on the right. These four terms are keys that we can tune to achieve a carbon goal (eg. Paris Agreements). An exception is the global population, which we can’t ethically change radically.

Let’s try to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 (European Green Deal).⁸ We currently emit 3 times more CO_2eq than carbon neutrality.⁴ We therefore need to divide both sides of the equation by 3 until 2050.

The global population is estimated to grow by 20% by 2050.⁹ As we won’t touch the population key, we need to divide the rest by ≈4.

(CO2eq /E) & (E/GDP) are sometimes called the engineering keys.
(CO2eq /E) is the carbon intensity of our energy use and (E/GDP) is the energy efficiency of our economy -how much energy is used per GDP unit. We can lower their key values by respectively switching from coal to renewables/nuclear and by designing efficient motors. Engineering is often about solving problems under constraints, but there is only so much that we can do until 2050. These engineering keys are currently decreasing but -to keep it short- not fast enough.

This means that we would have to turn down the last key : (GDP/POP).

This entails economic degrowth.

On the flip side, if an election candidate promises economic growth, the equation shows that we would struggle even more to balance the keys.

A lack of physicality

Kaya’s equation might not be the panacea but highlights one thing : we have little idea of what a global degrowh would look like. This unknown can be quite scary.

Our society isn’t sustainable in many ways (we wont delve into the details of why but our reliance on the mining industry and fossil fuels is a good start) and we have little idea of what true sustainability would even look like in practice. Yet we can learn from natural science to better build the future we want.

Oil production needs to go down in order to cut greenhouse gas, yet we are still building motorways and enlarging cities. If you are eating in a city today, your food is likely to have traveled by trucks before arriving in your plate: cities are dependent of an oil-driven truck fleet. If we stop oil tomorrow cities might have to shrink. This highlights the scale of the change we will have to face.

The last carbon budget suggests that our current global emission rate is 11.1 GtC/yr. Following this trend gives us 7-9 years before overshooting the 1.5°C target.⁴

We need to act quickly.

A physical lense enables us to surpass the surface of political statements and offer a solid framework for a sustainable future. There is a need for collaboration between Scientists and Politicians. I would recommend any political student to be scientifically curious and to any science student to get an interest in politics. Such multidisciplinarity is key for understanding and tackling our societal challenges.

It is also a wonderful and enriching journey.

References

[1] Jared M. Diamond. Guns, germs and steel: the fates of human societies. eng. New York: Norton, 1997. isbn: 978-0-393-03891-0.

[2] Geert van Calster and Leonie Reins, eds. The Paris agreement on climate change: a commentary. Elgar commentaries. OCLC: on1201655591. Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. isbn: 978-1-78897-918-4.

[3] Heinrich D. Holland, ed. Treatise on geochemistry. eng. 2. ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014. isbn: 978-0-08-095975-7.

[4] Pierre Friedlingstein et al. ‘Global Carbon Budget 2022’. en. In: Earth System Science Data 14.11 (Nov. 2022), pp. 4811–4900. issn: 1866-3516. doi: 10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022. url: https://essd.copernicus. org/articles/14/4811/2022/ (visited on 20/12/2023).

[5] Matthew W. Jones et al. National contributions to climate change due to historical emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. en. Jan. 2023. doi: 10.5281/ZENODO.7076347. url: https://zenodo.org/record/7076347 (visited on 20/12/2023).

[6] IATA. IATA CO2Connect. url: https://www.iata.org/en/youandiata/
travelers/environment/ (visited on 20/12/2023).

[7] Yōichi Kaya and Keiichi Yokobori, eds. Environment, energy, and economy: strategies for sustainability. Meeting Name: Tokyo Conference on ”Global Environment, Energy, and Economic Development”. Tokyo; New York: United Nations University Press, 1997. isbn: 978-92-808-0911-4.

[8] Ludwig Krämer. ‘Planning for Climate and the Environment: the EU Green Deal’. In: Journal for European Environmental & Planning Law 17.3 (July 2020), pp. 267–306. issn: 1613-7272, 1876-0104. doi: 10.1163/18760104-01703003. url: https://brill.com/view/journals/jeep/17/3/article-p267_267.xml (visited on 20/12/2023).

[9] World population prospects 2022: summary of results. eng. OCLC: 1377293288. New York: United Nations, 2022. isbn: 978-92-1-148373-4