I cite

Critical Theory and Climate Change 2

My remarks today are oriented around reading the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Concept of Enlightenment."

As with the introduction, the opening of the chapter resonates with Rousseau in it's articulation of a paradox: the aim of Enlightenment is the elimination of fear and the establishment of sovereignty (men's sovereignty). Enlightenment overcomes superstition and nature becomes disenchanted. And yet "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (3). Why? This is the puzzle of the chapter.

The version of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno investigate comes from Francis Bacon. For them, he is exemplary of the scientific attitude that replaces enchanted nature with usable nature, a nature that men can dominate (along with dominating other men). Man's knowledge is the ground of his power and power is associated with technology: "Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of other's work, and capital" (4). Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this kind of technological or instrumental thinking is "ultimately self-destructive": it eliminates "any trace of its own self-consciousness." Mystery and the "wish to reveal mystery" are extinguished.

It's worth pointing out that this is an odd claim. One need but recall the Freemasons who brought together both instrumental reason and cultic mode of association based in ritual and mystery. But this is not their concern. Rather, they are occupied with the separating out of science from philosophy, the emergence of a science that doesn't inquire into meaning but substitutes "formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive" (5). "For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (6).

Now even though they associate the scientific attitude with "bourgeois economy in the factory" and with "the exploitation of other's work and capital," Horkheimer and Adorno project the separation of science from philosophy, that is, the process of the disenchantment of the world, much further back, back to Greeks and the replacement of animism by logos. Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics absorbed mythic versions of primal matter, just as the myths had absorbed "the primal matter of nature" into personified deities. Enlightenment continues the process, conceiving Greek thought, too, as superstitious in its association of truth with universals.

What's the problem with universals or why does Enlightenment think that universals are just forms of superstition? Horkheimer and Adorno explain that Enlightenment sees "in the authority of universal concepts" "discernible fear of the demonic spirits which men sought to portray in magic rituals, hoping thus to influence nature" (6). Universals are, from the perspective of Enlightenment reason, illusory. Universals try to bring matter under concepts. Enlightenment, though, approaches mastery over matter differently. Mastery involves measurement and use, calculability and commensurability.

The path of disenchantment, or the process of Enlightenment, proceeds via confrontations with myth, encounters with resistance. As each resistance is overcome, Enlightenment gets stronger. Its ideal, then, is the unity of thought, the great unitary system that makes everything numerable, calculable.

Weirdly, or dialectically, Enlightenment depends on and even produces the myth that it is always overcoming. This makes it totalitarian insofar as even that which is ostensibly opposed to it reproduces and strengthens it. For example, myths were narrated, recorded, and collected. This means that they are also accounts that present, confirm, and explain -- tendencies that drive Enlightenment. Rituals, too, are activities that try to influence events in the world. These instrumental dimensions continue and intensify as Greek thought divides logos from the "mass of all things and creatures." In this dividing, "the world becomes subject to man" (8).

Horkheimer and Adorno write:

Myth turns into enlightenment and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator toward men, He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them (9).

The world becomes just a bunch of things for men to use, for men to have power over, "the unity of nature" rather than a wondrous world in all its mystery, diversity, and unknownness. But notice who is doing the making here: the man of science. We don't see any kind of craftsmen or farmers or people who work with their hands who might have another relation to the things that they make. This is not accidental: correlative to the unity of nature is a certain kind of self-identity, the unified self of abstract identity. So nature as a mass of all things and creatures corresponds to a particular sort of abstract self. It's like: rabbits are the same no matter who is engaging with them.

Of course, this is different from the perspective of magic. The magician is one with a special power to alter nature: he can pull rabbits out of hats, turning an empty space into a space that can spontaneously manifest life, and this with just a few magic words. We can contrast this with the laboratory: rabbits are just elements in experiments that any scientist can reproduce. Neither the rabbit nor the scientist is unique.

So myth goes over into Enlightenment. It has already elements of Enlightenment within it. And the reverse holds, Enlightenment itself becomes engulfed in myth. Horkheimer and Adorno develop this idea in a discussion of the principle of immanence, "the explanation of every event as a repetition" (12). As I understand it, what they are saying is that instead of their being the space for something new, whether that something is miraculous or accidental or a product of human agency, the principle of immanence sees events always as products of causes, causes that can be understood in terms of uniform laws and tendencies that are knowable and predictable. For them, this reproduces the basic structure of myth in so far as in myth what happens to the hero is a matter of fate and, in fact, as the myth will show, he deserves his fate; he will commit some sort of act for which retribution is justified. Hubris, for example, leads the hero to step outside his place, think himself a god, and create his own doom -- as an oracle no doubt warned him. The structure of myth precludes something new, something outside its structure. And the same is true for Enlightenment: "all possible discoveries can be construed in advance. and all men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation" (12).

There is a political dimension to this claim. Prior to Enlightenment (they don't say when), there was "unmediated lordship and mastery," that is, the injustice of inequality. With Enlightenment this injustice is both dissolved and preserved in the form of the excision of the incommensurable. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market does not enquire after one's birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of the commodities that can be bought in the market. Men are given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other" (12 -13).

So it's not just that bourgeois law says all citizens are equal. And it's not just that, say, population models treat each person as an interchangeable composite of demographic characteristics. It's that in a society characterized by commodity production individuality itself resembles the commodity form. The uniqueness of each is a characteristic of all. Everyone is an individual so individuality is a characteristic of everyone. It's what they have in common. The Enlightenment subject is the abstract individual.

For Horkheimer and Adorno abstraction exerts a "leveling domination." It makes everything in nature repeatable. And via industry it ordains repetition. As the social level, this manifests in collectivity, a herd or horde that negates the actual individual. Their example is the Hitler Youth as a triumph of repressive equality. So we can see how Enlightenment is totalitarian -- it results in a form of abstraction that manifests in the repetition of the same.

The gap between subject and object is not simply conceptual. It has a material basis in actual domination, expressing "the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free" (14), that is, those who have others working for them, looking after them, securing their basic needs, in other words, an upper class. They learn ideas of "order and subordination in the subjection of the world" (14). Their thought reproduces this order as it equates truth with fixed distinctions and regulative order and dismisses magic, mimesis, the image, and knowledge of the object.

In contrast, for people at earlier stages, "primitives," the world is quite different. There isn't such a strong division between subject and object. The "Natural" is intricate. It brings with it the element of surprise; the transcendent is the unknown, "whatever in things is more than their previously known reality" (15). The basic concept here is mana as the name for this primary undifferentiated unknown. This unknown is viewed as sacred. Now Enlightenment thought says that primitives projected their terror of the unknown onto things out of fear. Horkheimer and Adorno say this isn't a projection at all "but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men" (15). They write:

"When the tree is no longer approached merely as tree, but as evidence for an Other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical." (15)

The concept or name of a thing is thus separate from the thing; there is a difference between concept and object such that the concept is not the object -- they are separate. This simultaneity of identity and non-identity is dialectical thought and it's present in Homeric myth as well as modern science. But it is impotent, Horkheimer and Adorno say, because it preserves the fear that it attempts to overcome. Man thinks that knowledge will make him free from fear. Everything has to be known, brought inside, because "outsideness is the very source of fear" (16). In myth, there is the balance of life and death, fortune and misfortune, fate and retribution, the closure of the cycle of nature. In Enlightenment there is a similar principle of equivalence that effects a similar closure -- "equivalence itself has become a fetish" (17).

Critical Theory and Climate Change 1

In June 2020, I was supposed to be on the faculty of the Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Humanities Center in London. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, this, like everything else, was cancelled. As a way to give myself some structure, I've thought to start posting some of the reading and thinking that I was planning to do for that course. At this point, I don't know whether this will happen with any consistency, but I thought I'd try.

The intuition behind my course is the sense that there are claims regarding the newness of climate change, especially with regard to (1) the challenge climate change presents for critical thought and (2) the ways to address this challenge. In these posts/lectures, I will consider some of these more closely. At the outset, I am skeptical regarding the claim for newness as well as of the response to the perceived newness, as will become clear. Nevertheless, I hope to draw out aspects of these texts that are still helpful (in other words, to engage in sympathetic readings, although, who knows, they are just as likely to be symptomatic readings; what they might be symptoms of I cannot say).

I have three provisional wagers that I hope to explore in these posts/lectures:

1. Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment presents advance versions of some of the arguments most prevalent in climate change writing in the humanities;
2. This resemblance, foreshadowing, or prefiguration is a clue to the assumptions that give climate change writing in the humanities their basic shape, namely assumptions regarding the limits of reason and politics.
3. These assumptions are driven by an anti-communism that prevents them from escaping the confines of capitalism.

Introduction (commentary on xi -xvii of the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Press edition, 1982)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critical rejection of the conceits or premises of European modernity. The basic argument regarding the self-destructiveness of Enlightenment, not only Enlightenment's limits --enabling impediments -- but the dangerous effects of these limits/impediments, repeats Rousseau from "The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" -- the more we know, the less we know. Although Horkheimer and Adorno don't refer to Rousseau directly, they appear to gesture to this text when they write "The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress" (xiv). "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" is a story of the fall into civilization, of how a free being becomes neurotic and enfeebled by its dependence on the opinions of others. For Horkheimer and Adorno, we pay a price for scientific achievements -- more questions, confrontations with the limits of our knowledge, and a decline in other dimensions of understanding -- just as Rousseau's "civilized man" loses the capacities of so-called natural man. The limits of Enlightenment re-embed us in myth, in an irrationality that, the more we try to escape, the more deeply entraps us, again just as Rousseau's civilized man is ultimately fearful and enslaved. Enlightenment's push for freedom produces an all the greater unfreedom.

To illustrate the point regarding how knowledge turns into its opposite we can point to confidence in scientific methods of inquiry. Measurement, data gathering, model generation, predictions, etc have been accompanied by a loss of confidence in (denigration of) other forms of knowledge and theorization:  interpretation/hermeneutics, critique, imagination, "women's ways of knowing," rich description, folk knowledges, etc. In political science we see this in the bizarre positivism that insists on all sorts of "rigorous" methods to prove common sense or tell us that common sense is wrong (as with a claim  that class inequality has a damaging impact on democracy). A more contemporary example might be Big Data and algorithms. In 2008, Chris Anderson argued that theory was dead, over. Big data enables the discovery of correlations -- knowing why things correlate doesn't really matter if we know that things correlate. "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Models, theories, and interpretations are no longer necessary. Understanding is old school, outmoded.

Where Horkheimer and Adorno go further than Rousseau is with their explanation of why Enlightenment turns into its opposite. Their answer concerns the social forms that sustain thought, that enable scientific production. The problem is in the institutions that make thought possible. This element of their argument comes from Hegel. Recall how in The Philosophy of Right Hegel emphasizes the institutions of civil society and the state that are necessary for the idea of freedom to realize itself in the world. Freedom depends on the institutions and practices that transmit and secure it. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth it not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life" (xiv).

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the form consciousness assumes is a form of unfreedom -- conformity, fear of deviation. This form is a product of social institutions and the habits and mindset they produce.

"The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics -- cliche-like -- have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation" (xiv).

Language becomes debased. Any ideas or expressions that don't conform to the dominant mentality are condemned. We see both elements in critiques of theoretical jargon. On the one hand, jargon can be so cliched as to be a prison, absolutely incapable of expressing anything original, complexity and obscuring attempting to mask the fact that actually nothing new is being said. On the other hand, the critique of jargon is anti-intellectual, reinforces a generalized attempt to rule out complex thought, and operates to police and marginalize theoretical work. So here the critique of jargon affirms the dominant mentality and rules out critical thinking. Both hands are true at the same time.

Before too quickly acceding to Horkheimer and Adorno here, it's important to situate their argument in the broader set of criticisms of mass society circulating mid-century. At the same time that the social welfare state, emerging as a result of the post-war labor-capital compromise, was beginning to secure social benefits for ever wider portions of the population, its institutions came under fire for generating conformism and stifling individual creativity. There is something to be said about the critique of commodity culture. After all, rather than promoting individual consumption, post-war economies in the west (particularly the US) could have invested more in the development of social consumption as had been done in the thirties. But Horkheimer and Adorno don't take their argument in this direction. Instead, they level it at the loss of individual freedom and creativity, offering a version of the argument Hannah Arendt would make ten years later in The Human Condition.

"On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which we serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses growth with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind" (xiv -xv).

My ungenerous read here is that Horkheimer and Adorno are simply elitists and it makes no sense that they have somehow been viewed as theorists on the left. The victim in their sad story is the individual who disappears because of the rise in the overall standard of living. Notice: they don't make a class argument that says that increases in capitalist productivity immiserate the workers such that immense plenty is accompanied by immense deprivation. They don't present an "unjust state of life" in terms of racism, imperialism, sexism or other kinds of inequality prevalent at mid-century. Neither do they blame private property and the pursuit of profit for functioning as barriers to the greater justice expanded productivity enables. It's hard to know what to make of the idea that the rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is deplorable. This is a critique of technocracy and the administered society, that is, a critique of the possibility of using public institutions for the public good. It is one whose basic categories render it unable to distinguish between capitalist consumerism/mass democracy, soviet socialism, and fascism.

For Horkheimer and Adorno what lurks behind the administered society of mass culture and mass consumption is fascism: "progress becomes regression" (xv). That Germany did not pursue rigorous de-nazification after the war is true, but it's not their point. That the US brought over all sorts of Nazi scientists and assimilated them into US life is also not their point. Their point is more abstract, a point about the entanglement of rationality and social actuality. The rational is manifest in the social practices and institutions that produce it. Enlightenment ultimately means/leads to self-destruction: the destruction of the self, as a free and rational self, in positivism (scientism, technocracy), bureaucratic conformism, and mass culture.

Science v. Oligarch: victory goes to science!

Drought, famine, and starvation -- brought to you by climate change

from here:

Policymakers on Capitol Hill got a dire warning that climate change threatens food production, safety and affordability.

That stark message came in a briefing by the American Meteorological Society to congressional staff members, climate scientists and federal regulators that linked climate change to a host of troubling scenarios involving worldwide food availability.

Wednesday's briefing drew on a peer-reviewed study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture released during the Paris Climate Conference last month. That report, "Climate Change, Global Food Security and the U.S. Food System," concluded that the effects of climate change on food will strike urban and rural populations in wealthy and poor nations alike.

While the threat depends on many factors, its impact will increase by mid-century, according to the report. Under the least-optimistic scenario––based on high carbon emissions and low international cooperation to combat climate change––agricultural yields could fall by as much as 15 percent, and food prices could rise more than 30 percent by 2050.

"Climate change puts the world's food security at risk through both direct and indirect factors," said Margaret Walsh, an ecologist in USDA's Climate Change Program Office and one of the authors the report.

Widespread drought caused by climate change could decrease crop production, Walsh told InsideClimate News. At the same time, sea level rise could impact cargo ships' access to docks for importing and exporting food.

"There are many, complex factors that have to be considered when assessing the threat to food security," Walsh said.

Huge setback for climate denialism -- NYT: Koch steps down from AMNH

NYT:

David H. Koch, a philanthropist who has given millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History in New York but whose businesses in energy and other industries have drawn criticism from climate scientists and environmental groups, has left the museum’s board after serving on it for 23 years.

A museum spokeswoman, Anne Canty, said Mr. Koch’s last day on the board of trustees was Dec. 9 and that his departure was not related to the criticism, but simply because his term was ending.

Mr. Koch, who served on the board since 1992, has donated some $23 million to the museum and his name adorns its dinosaur wing.

More than nine months ago, dozens of members of the scientific community signed a letter that called for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like Mr. Koch, who also sits on the advisory board of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. A separate petition by environmental activists urged the museums to remove him from their respective boards.

The letter expressed deep concern about “the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science.” The letter was the project of the Natural History Museum, a mobile museum “that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature,” according to its co-founder and director, Beka Economopoulos.

But Cristyne Nicholas, a spokeswoman in New York for Mr. Koch, said that the letter and petition had nothing to do with Mr. Koch’s departure. “He was not swayed by that at all and it absolutely did not factor into his decision,” Ms. Nicholas said.

She noted that Mr. Koch is on about 20 different boards around the country and that he is cutting that number back while he focuses more time on cancer research. Last year, Mr. Koch, 75, who was once diagnosed with prostate cancer, donated $100 million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to help researchers develop a cure for prostate cancer.

Ms. Nicholas said that Mr. Koch had missed board meetings at the natural history museum and other institutions because of scheduling conflicts. “He remains supportive of the museum,” she said. “It is just that he does not have time to attend the board meetings.”

Ms. Canty said that Mr. Koch had served as an at-large trustee. These types of board members are up for re-election every year, she said.

Right-wing experimentation with the party form

"A new, data-filled study by the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez reports that the Kochs have established centralized command of a “nationally-federated, full-service, ideologically focused” machine that “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party.” The Koch network, they conclude, acts like a “force field,” pulling Republican candidates and office-holders further to the right. Last week, the Times reported that funds from the Koch network are fuelling both ongoing rebellions against government control of Western land and the legal challenge to labor unions that is before the Supreme Court."

from here

We are Seneca Lake Red-lines Crestwood: no fossil fuel infrastructure

“With this red line laid down across Crestwood’s driveway, we declare that its plans to store fracked gases in abandoned salt caverns on Seneca Lake constitutes an emergency,” said Colleen Boland, who recently returned from the Paris climate talks. “We declare that these plans threaten our water, our children, and our climate.”

The red line motif emerged at the end of the Paris climate talks last Saturday, as 15,000 people marched in the streets of Paris. It signifies a commitment to holding society to the lines that cannot be crossed in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Eighty percent of fossil fuels must be left in the ground in order to curb climate change.

The red line motif also was prominent last weekend as 300 residents in Porter Ranch, CA demanded closure of the Aliso Canyon Storage Facility. The Southern California Gas Co. field has spewed natural gas into the atmosphere since Oct. 23. It currently contributes a full one-quarter of California’s daily methane emissions. There have been hundreds of complaints from the surrounding community of headaches, nosebleeds, stomachaches, rashes, and respiratory illness from exposure to the gas and its additives. 1,000 families have evacuated. The company estimates it will take 3 months to plug the leak.

“Aliso Canyon is a clear warning to us of what can go wrong with underground gas storage,” said Tony Del Plato, 67, of Covert, “and how willing the companies are to ignore the plight of the communities around them, and the impact on the climate.”

Schuyler County deputies arrested the nine shortly before 10 a.m. as they blocked a Crestwood tanker truck from leaving the facility.

The nine protesters were transported to the Schuyler County Sheriff’s department, charged with disorderly conduct, and released. The total number of arrests in the civil disobedience campaign over the past year now stands at 441.

see the press release here

 

Progress on climate targets not good enough

from here:

In a key moment on the road to the much anticipated Paris climate meeting this December — and one underscoring just how difficult solving the climate problem will be — the United Nations has released a “synthesis” report assessing all of the emissions cutting pledges made by countries in advance of the meeting. And the upshot is both that countries have raised their climate ambitions greatly, but also that even by 2025 or 2030, global emissions are expected to still be rising despite of their efforts.

One hundred forty-six countries made pledges by Oct. 1 of this year, accounting for 86 percent of all of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. These pledges, or “INDCs” (intended nationally determined contributions), have been a major factor in raising hopes that Paris will succeed where Copenhagen failed in 2009.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, just 27 countries announced pledges that contained “concrete mitigation targets” for cutting greenhouse gases, according to Taryn Fransen of the World Resources Institute. But this time around, more than 100 countries have made pledges, including many developing nations, she said.

It’s “a real evolution in terms of how countries are appreciating the need to firmly reduce emissions, and seeing it as something that could be compatible with development,” Fransen said in a conference call with the media on Thursday.

However, the United Nations’ assessment is sobering. If all of the INDCs are implemented, then global emissions will stand at roughly 55 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents annually by 2025, and 57 gigatons by 2030, the report states. That’s an increase from current levels of about 48 gigatons in 2010.

A gigaton is a billion metric tons, and as of 2011, the world only had about 1,000 left to emit in order to ensure a two-thirds or better chance of avoiding 2 degrees Celsius of warming, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Thus, by 2030 in this scenario, the new report finds that about 750 of those remaining gigatons will have been emitted. Another five years, with 57 gigatons of emissions per year, and the 2 degree threshold would then be breached.

75% of fossil fuels have to stay in the ground (April -- Guardian)

from here:

Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a group of leading scientists and economists have said in a statement timed to coincide with Earth Day.

The Earth League, which includes Nicholas Stern, the author of several influential reports on the economics of climate change; Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a climate scientist and adviser to Angela Merkel; and the US economist Jeffrey Sachs, urged world leaders to follow up on their commitments to avoid dangerous global warming.

Spelling out what a global deal at the UN climate summit in Paris later this year should include, the group demanded governments adopt a goal of reducing economies’ carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, put a price on carbon and that the richest take the lead with the most aggressive cuts.

In its “Earth statement”, the group said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if warming was not to breach a rise of 2C, the “safety limit” agreed to by governments.

what has to be left in the ground (from the Guardian)

from here:

Major fossil fuel companies face the risk that significant parts of their reserves will become worthless, with Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Exxaro owning huge coal reserves and Lukoil, Exxon Mobil, BP, Gazprom and Chevron owning massive oil and gas reserves.

If the world’s nations keep their pledge to combat climate change, the analysis finds the prospects are bleakest for coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Globally, 82% of today’s reserves must be left underground. In major coal producing nations like the US, Australia and Russia, more than 90% of coal reserves are unused in meeting the 2C pledge. In China and India, both heavy and growing coal users, 66% of reserves are unburnable.

While the prospects for gas are better, the study still found 50% of global reserves must remain unburned. But there are stark regional variations, with the giant gas producers in the Middle East and Russia having to leave huge quantities underground, while the US and Europe can exploit 90% or more of their reserves to replace coal and provide local power to their large cities. Some fracking for shale gas is consistent with the 2C target, according to the study, but is dominated by the existing industry in the US, with China, India, Africa and the Middle East needing to leave 80% of their potential shale gas unburned.

Oil has the lowest proportion of unburnable fuel, with a third left unused. However, the Middle East is still required to leave 260bn barrels of oil in the ground, an amount equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s entire oil reserve. The study’s conclusion on the exploitation of Canada’s oil sands is blunt, finding production must fall to “negligible” levels after 2020 if the 2C scenario is to be fulfilled. The research also finds no climate-friendly scenario in which any oil or gas is drilled in the Arctic.