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Kevin Anderson passed KTH by on the way to Uppsala and gave a 90-minute lunch talk (abstract below) entitled "“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial". He is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester but he is also affiliated with the Centre for Sustainability and the Environment (CEMUS) at Uppsala University.
While he is a professor and well-known (in some circles) for his research, I believe he is mostly known for his very frank, in-your-face talks about where we are and what lies ahead of us climate-wise. He is also well-known for never flying and based on this text it seems he took that decision almost 20 years ago... As apart from most other scientists (not to mention politicians) he doesn't hold back and tells it like it is:
On YouTube you can find a talk (90 minutes) that he gave at Uppsala University last month (Feb 12), "The New Denialism: Climate Change - from the Paris Agreement to Sweden" and a quick glance and the slides in the talk (video) indicates that it's similar to the talk I attended.
When I heard Kevin's talk, I put two and two together and realised Kevin was on his way to Uppsala to attend Isak Stoddard dissertation the following day. Isak is an acquaintance and our paths have crossed a few times over the years. Isak presented his Ph.D. thesis, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" Friday this past week (March 7).
I had been invited to the public defence and the subsequent dinner, but had not reacted quick enough and thus missed the deadline. After having listened to Kevin's lunch talk, I however felt that while I couldn't with short notice spend the whole day in Uppsala, I could at least ask Isak if it was possible to join the dinner - perhaps there was a last-minute cancellation? I sent a mail directly after the lunch talk and lo and behold, I got a quick answer that it was indeed possible to attend the dinner. When I left KTH that same evening, I told my colleague Elina I was going to Uppsala and was surprised to see also her and her husband Jonas at the dinner (she asked even later than I did).
Isak (as well as Kevin) also has strong ties to Uppsala University's "Centre for Sustainability and the Environment" (CEMUS). CEMUS is a student-initiated, transdisciplinary centre that offers undergraduate and masters level sustainability courses and many of the guests at the dinner had been or were currently active at CEMUS or had been active there five or ten years ago. I don't have a connection to CEMUS but still know upwards to 10 or possibly 15% of the 100+ guests at the dinner and had a great time there!
It was hard to get a world in edgewise with Isak as many others wanted to talk to him, so I don't know what's next for him. I do however wish him the best and expect that our paths will continue to cross now and then also in the future...
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Kevin Anderson, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial (lunch talk)
Abstract:
The saccharine headlines of recent COPs barely disguise the deliberate failure of national leaders, whether in politics, business or indeed journalism, to address the climate emergency. But peer a little deeper and the cossetted realm of academia is also revealed to be have been a crucial player in this endemic failure. From normalising deeply fraudulent technical futures to embedding neo-colonial norms in virtually all IPCC scenarios, our fingerprints are evident. Some of us have actively engaged in this systemic bias, whilst others have lent it legitimacy through our expedient silence. In 2025, wilful ignorance can no-longer be a defence.
Set against this damning indictment, Kevin Anderson will seek to lay bare the sheer quantitative scale of the gaping void between the rhetoric and the reality of our Paris Commitments. Unpicking the technical utopias and methodical avoidance of anything that would question existing power structures, Kevin will demonstrate that there are now no non-radical futures. The choice is between a profound but organised shake-up of structural and technical norms and societal values, or waiting a little longer for chaotic and violent social change.
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Isak Stoddard, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" (ph.d. dissertation)
Abstract:
Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of an international governance regime and a world-wide proliferation of policies and actions that in different ways attempt to mitigate the problem. However, the decades that have passed since the publication of the first IPCC report in 1990, have been beset by an inexorable rise in global greenhouse gas emissions, with more fossil carbon anthropogenically released into the atmosphere than previously throughout history. With the cumulative nature of emissions and rapidly dwindling size of global carbon budgets, achieving mitigation at rates concomitant with the Paris Agreement becomes increasingly urgent and challenging as time passes. This thesis explores the imaginaries, temporalities and practices involved in historical and ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change at global as well as national, regional and local levels in Sweden. The climate policy framework of Sweden is first analysed and found to fall far short of delivering on the temperature and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement. Factors contributing to the absence of a globally proportionate response are then reviewed, where a key impediment to mitigation is found to reside in various forms of power – from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Attention is then shifted to the Swedish counties of Uppsala and Gotland, where the temporalities of urgency and acceleration accompanying emerging (net) zero carbon imaginaries are seen to have the paradoxical effect of raising fundamental and difficult questions for regional planning while also risking to undermine its capacity for envisioning alternative futures. Moving closer to the ground, a series of walking interviews reveals everyday possibilities for escaping ineffective and extractive responses to the climate crisis amongst practitioners involved in the ongoing urban development of Ulleråker, in the city of Uppsala. The findings of this thesis collectively suggest that our times are perilous in at least three ways: In the escalating effects of the climate crisis, in the responses conceived to address the problem, and in the forms of attention that the accompanying temporalities give rise to
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