Climate Forum debates: market solutions or revolution?

Warwick University’s second annual Climate Forum was hosted Saturday 22 February and debated the question ‘Climate Change: market solutions or revolution?’

The Forum, running for six and a half hours, featured four speakers, two workshops and concluded with a four-person panel.

The first speaker, Lord Anthony Giddens, a leading British sociologist and social theorist, began the debate with his talk ‘Capitalism fails the climate—Why we need to rethink our current system’.

“Would you get on a plane with a 95 percent chance of crashing?” he inquired, after highlighting the statistical probability of our planet’s temperature increasing to an unsustainable level.

The theme continued with Dr Alice Bows-Larkin’s ‘Why two degrees matters’. The talk drew attention to current government policies that will only limit Earth’s heating to a 4°C increase, 2°C more than is sustainable.

After the first two talks, attendees could choose between two workshops: ‘Alternative ways of communicating the climate change message’, run by Jamie Clarke executive director of Climate Outreach & Information Network, or ‘Is a 100 percent renewable world possible’, with Danny Chivers, author of the No-Nonsense Guide to Climate Change.

After a lunch break, there were two further talks discussing the political and economical side to the debate. Nick Dearden, director of World Development Movement, discussed ‘What role should international financial institutions play in combating climate change?’, and was followed by a compelling talk from Caroline Lucas, considering ‘Is the current structure of politics adequate to tackle climate change?’

The forum ended with a panel that aimed to resolve the question as to whether ‘market solutions or revolutions’ was the best way to tackle climate change. Nick Dearden and Jamie Clarke were joined by Ruth London, from Fuel Poverty Action and Jonathon Cave, Senior Research Fellow at RAND Europe.

Ellie Smith, a first year Engineering student, commented “I think the main thing I took away from it is that although I think we’ve still got time to act, if we’re really going to prevent serious damage it needs to be soon and it’s going to take some pretty drastic changes to the current system”.

General opinion was in favour of revolution, though the difficulty of rewriting the ingrained market system was not underestimated.

Clare Heyward, chair for the closing panel, observed that “I came away with an appreciation of the complexities of climate politics, but, more importantly, with a sense that there are ways forward if people around the world – are prepared to take the initiative and think creatively.  I hope others did too.”