Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing Earth's Climate by 2050

Summary

Fourteen researchers ask how emissions could fall fast enough, and look for ‘social tipping interventions’: small pushes that set off “contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change”. Their six run from removing fossil-fuel subsidies to “revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels”, though they concede that “changes of norms, customs, and beliefs occur very slowly”.

Rationale

Tipping points show where a push might count, not what it sets off. Of the decentralised energy it proposes, we’d also ask: what dispositions towards land, ownership and belonging does it enact?