Buying Time for Climate Action: Exploring Ways around Stumbling Blocks (World Scientific, 2021), was edited by Jan W. Vasbinder (Para Limes, The Netherlands) and Jonathan Y. H. Sim (NUS Department of Philosophy). The book explores how we can address the global climate emergency and overcome the obstacles that arise when combating it. Even though people around the world are fully aware of the existential threats posed by the climate crisis, and what must be done to mitigate the effects, it remains difficult to transform that knowledge into successful action. The recent COP26 demonstrated just how difficult it can be to get moving on a global scale.

This is because many people have difficulties grasping the complexities surrounding the climate crisis. Climate change has forced numerous changes on many stable systems, both social and natural. But the changes forced on these systems are at a rate much faster than they can naturally handle, and this causes enormous stumbling blocks to emerge and block the plans for effective action. This book brings together the insights of leading experts fighting the climate crisis on the front lines to identify actions that can surmount these stumbling blocks to achieve effective action.

The book is divided into two sections. In the first section, experts discuss multiple climate change-tied problems facing nations around the world, with a focus on what stands in the way of changing the systems giving rise to them. There is an interlude between the two sections to provide discussion highlights, a historical context and analysis, discussions on stumbling blocks in dealing with the climate emergency and ways to surmount them.

The second section brings together vast and varied accounts from leading experts who have faced both failures and success in their efforts to tackle many of these climate-related problems. The editors surmise that indirect methods are best suited when dealing with these stumbling blocks: they must be navigated around creatively, rather than pushed through. Notably, the section expresses the importance of seeking an ideal balance of grassroots action and top-down planning to avoid the pitfalls of a “one size fits all” planning that is inflexible in the face of the myriad and complex ever-evolving stumbling blocks. Strategies must be tailored to their local contexts, and it is important to encourage a wide variety of approaches, while ensuring fairness is built in to policymaking and grassroots action to promote trust and thus mindset changes.

Jonathan Sim, Instructor at the NUS Department of Philosophy, discusses how he put the book together, its conceptual background, and what we can learn from it here, in the region, and beyond.

What were your most memorable experiences organizing the webinar ‘Removing Barriers to Buy Time’, and co-editing Buying Time for Climate Action?

The most memorable experience was helping to conceptualise a brand new format for interaction between a large group of participants. The event was originally meant to be a physical event, but COVID-19 brought about a lot of new challenges. Even though Zoom allows us to still meet and gather in a virtual space, it has its own set of challenges. For starters, we had to deal with time zone problems. Our participants comprised leading experts from all over the world. The sweet spot that could accommodate everyone just two hours each day, over three days from 9pm to 11pm Singapore time. This made it very tough to hold large group discussions in a productive way within the given time constraints.

Moreover, we wanted to preserve the spontaneity of the discussions. Hence, as much as possible, we wanted participants to still be able to discuss freely while allowing ideas to flow and bounce back and forth against each other. And we certainly did not want the discussions to be inhibited by technological restrictions or risk stifling with text chats.

I was able to bring in some of my online teaching innovations as the Instructor for GET1050 “Computational Reasoning,” and adapted it for the event. It was not an ordinary webinar, and the innovative format was able to fully engage all the participants to contribute maximally.

On Day 1, we had 7 experts present for 15 minutes, meant to provoke thoughts and discussions for the next day, with another 5 minutes after each presentation for clarifications and for participants to sound out some pressing thoughts.

On Day 2, we broke the participants up into 3 discussion groups, each group facilitated by two of the first day presenters. It was more of a free flow discussion to allow people of various backgrounds, disciplinary training, expertise and experience to share their thoughts and ideas. My co-editor, Jan W. Vasbinder, has had years of experience where he successfully was able to bring together people from various backgrounds, whether academia, industries or government, and regardless of their disciplinary training, they were eventually able to synthesise ideas together. We hoped to do the same likewise in each discussion group.

Day 3 was a panel discussion with the 7 presenters, moderated towards finding a common consensus on various issues about stumbling blocks.

How did your academic background in philosophy inform your work on the book?

The entire event generated 15 hours of recorded discussions, which would have been too long if put into a book. My academic background in philosophy proved useful in pushing to clarify the objective and purpose of the webinar, and to clarify the direction of the book when editing the transcripts. I was able to organise the open-ended discussions along broad themes that emerged spontaneously across the three days.

I also attribute my training in philosophy in giving me the mental flexibility to better handle multi-disciplinary discussions. Whether it was agriculture, economics, evolutionary biology, finance, public policy, or even urban planning, I was able to make sense of these discussions despite my lack of training in these areas – and more importantly, I was able to translate these discussions so that anyone without such backgrounds can easily pick up the book, read it, and understand the ideas that were discussed.

How did you and Jan Vasbinder decide on the concept of stumbling blocks as a way of explaining what is preventing necessary action against the climate crisis?

The seeds of the idea were sown back in December 2016, when the Institute Para Limes organised a conference in Singapore entitled, “Disrupted Balance – Societies at Risk”. The conclusion that speakers (which included the former head of Singapore’s Civil Service) and participants arrived at was that we could possibly eliminate existential threats to human society, but only if we buy time to delay the disruptions. Since then, there had been many discussions about how to go about buying time.

In the months leading up to the webinar, we had a core group comprising leading experts on the matter, people like Alexander Zehnder, Andrew Sheng, Daniel Brooks, Gert van Santen, Hillary Brown, and Sander van der Leeuw. Through regular discussions on Zoom, it became apparent that the reason why none of the actions were effective was because of the same few stumbling blocks that kept coming up time and time again.

After consulting other leading experts if they too had similar experiences, we came to the consensus that the stumbling blocks to effective climate action could be summarised into five main categories: finance (lack of funding), talent (inability to find the right talent to do the job well), vested interests (by stakeholders to protect their habits and positions), bureaucracy (governmental, institutional, and industrial rigidity and resistance to change), and political will and support (or rather, the lack of it). These stumbling blocks don’t stand alone. In fact, they are inter-connected with each other, and addressing one stumbling block alone will not suffice to overcome the difficulties as it may in fact exacerbate another stumbling block.

What do you see as the main stumbling blocks to responding to the climate emergency in Singapore?

In my view, at the core will be old habits and fixed mindsets. And these play out as stumbling blocks in the form of rigidity of bureaucracy, whether government, institutional, or industrial; as well as the vested interests of stakeholders to protect their habits and positions.

Perhaps the biggest mindset rigidity is the consumerist mentality with which we attempt to solve the climate crisis. A good example to illustrate this is the drinking straw. Many places have since phased out plastic straws, but then suddenly, many shops began selling reusable metallic straws. Many people bought these straws thinking that they were being more sustainable. Yet the irony is that months later, human laziness gets the best of us, and few continue to use these straws. Resources had been wasted to produce metal straws that are now collecting dust in so many peoples’ homes.

The point I’m making is that we – individuals and organisations – have this mindset that we can spend money purchasing new things to combat climate change, often forgetting about the environmental costs of producing them. Not all of them are bad, of course. But many such consumerist solutions are not effective and serve to perpetuate the problem. Real change can only come about once we have a change in mindset, one where the culture is more open to changing how we do certain things. Like changing processes to be more efficient, or embracing new, more sustainable habits and lifestyles.

What lessons from the book are most applicable to Singapore and Southeast Asia?

I have two key lessons. The first lesson has to do with the fact that many vested interests will remain resistant to change because there is no viable alternative for them to pursue. So it’s not enough to simply ask people to stop what they are doing if there are no viable alternatives to propose. We may get upset with fishermen for fishing in such an unsustainable way that it harms the environment. But it’s not possible to ask them to stop immediately because they have no alternative. Fishing is the only skill they know to support themselves and their families. Nor is it easy to ask a whole town of coal miners to stop mining for the sake of the environment. There is nothing else for them to do in such towns, and it is not that easy to ask them to move out, or to go for skills upgrading, especially if they come from a family of miners. So the reality is that there’s so much complexity at work. Many of these problems cannot be solved so simply by asking people to stop or cut down on what they’re doing.

This brings me to the second lesson. What’s interesting about this lesson was that it was brought up multiple times in discussions by so many participants, yet none of us realised the significance of this until we began editing the book. The realisation was that many of our participants found success going forward with their efforts to combat the climate crisis by working around stumbling blocks rather than attempting to address the stumbling blocks head on. When we understand the complexity of stumbling blocks – that they are complex human issues and that each stumbling block is affected by the other stumbling blocks – we start to realise that dealing with these stumbling blocks can too easily lead one down a rabbit hole that detracts from the real problem. It turns out that it is a fallacy to think that we can make much progress by attempting to address these stumbling blocks directly.

Where these leading experts found success was in their creativity to think out of the box and reframe issues in ways that avoided these blocks. As someone from the humanities, I recognise that this is a lacuna that people in the arts and social sciences can fill. What we need are people with a broad horizon of learning, bold and capable of challenging the status quo – challenging accepted norms and assumptions – in order to generate new ideas and approaches to solve such problems. And as an educator here in FASS, I believe that our students are more than capable of filling these gaps in the fight against the climate crisis. They have that creativity, and more importantly, the empathy and communication skills to be effective change managers in the community to bring about changes in mindsets, cultures, and habits.

What are your takeaways from the book?

I'll just end by saying that I'd like to think of this book as a kind of manual for the next generation. We've brought together an older generation of experts who have spent the last couple of decades trying to fight climate change, and we documented their experiences, their successes, and their frustrations.

On this issue, my co-editor, Jan W. Vasbinder, said: “Young people, our grandchildren, intuitively feel that humanity is in big trouble because of Climate Change. They demand action from our generation, from their grandparents. And we find it hard to help them, because our generation has been trapped in the illusion that making plans to solve a problem is equivalent to solving the problem. It is not. What we can help the younger generation with is making them see what we learnt about stumbling blocks and exploring ways around them.”

For this reason, this book will definitely be a very valuable manual for the next generation who will soon have to take the helm in leading the fight against the climate emergency. This will be a good read for many young people as they will learn about the complexities of climate change – issues that aren't typically covered in the classroom, and it will prepare them well to make a big difference in the future.

Buying Time for Climate Action: Exploring Ways around Stumbling Blocks is available from World Scientific. Check out the book trailer and watch a selection of presentations from the webinar “Removing barriers to buy time”, which comprise the book’s core.