It’s perhaps fitting that Simon Whalley and I chat as the news cycle is pumping out headlines on COP27, where Japan has nabbed another “fossil” award for being the world’s biggest public financier of oil, gas and coal projects.
Whalley, a 44-year-old Welshman who has been in Japan for the better part of two decades, is on his way to becoming one of the international community’s foremost voices in the climate conversation. And he’s quick to share his thoughts on the annual eco-meetup, where he says the “developed world’s leaders deliver pledges to combat climate change as the situation gets bleaker each year.”
“Nothing (at COP) is legally binding,” Whalley adds. “The social contract, as far as I can see, has been completely obliterated. (A politician’s) job is not to represent the fossil fuel and animal agriculture companies; their job is to represent us.”
As an English teacher in rural Japan, Whalley’s job has forced him to be peripatetic, jumping from contract to contract across the country. In 2018, while teaching at a university in Kumamoto, Whalley encouraged the institution to adopt more climate-friendly practices, like putting solar panels on the roof and adding plant-based options to the cafeteria menu, but his requests fell on deaf ears.
The Extinction Rebellion movement happened around the same time in London, and Whalley tried to import the campaign, which uses civil disobedience to spur governments into climate action, to his adopted homeland to draw proponents to the climate cause.
“But I realized this is just not going to work in Japan — you just can’t copy and paste it,” he says. “So I thought, ‘What am I going to do? Maybe if I can write a book and give people the facts, a few more might come on board.’”
Whalley made a start on his manuscript, its guiding principle fueled by a concern for the future his son was set to inherit.
Published this year, “Dear Indy: A Father’s Plea for Climate Action” is a raw and untamed account of the severity of climate change and its cascading effects. It also addresses the social and economic causes of a warming world and offers potential solutions to avert the ominous climate tipping points.
“I never thought anyone was going to read it,” Whalley says, “but once I started and got invested in it, I thought, ‘Well, I can’t really stop now.’”
By the time “Dear Indy” was complete, it clocked in at 250,000 words across 520 pages. The book is rigorously researched with more than 800 citations, but Whalley has also attempted to humanize its message with intermittent letters addressed to his son, Indy, that speak of the world Indy can’t yet fully grasp and augur the one he may yet live to see.
In the book’s at times tangential second half, the shackles come off as Whalley levels criticism at the dogmatic pursuit of economic growth and the widespread adoption of neoliberal capitalism as the source of the climate’s ills.
“Our societies have been built on growth for thousands of years,” he says. “It’s blindingly obvious you can’t have growth forever on a planet with finite resources.”
Whalley declares himself as a “glass-half-full kind of guy,” but the book reads more like the angel of optimism and the devil of fatalism embroiled in a constant tug of war. That’s not to say it lacks hope.
Whalley sets forth a solution, which was later published in the ScienceOpen journal under the title, “Introducing a Global Carbon Allowance Trading System (G-CATS) as an Ecological Alternative to Neoliberalism.”
As noted in the paper’s conclusion, “G-CATS aims to replace existing carbon trading schemes with a more relevant system that brings the zero-carbon target of 2050 forward to 2030 when we will still have a chance of remaining within 1.5 (degrees Celsius) of global heating.”
G-CATS is a six-phase approach. In phase 1, G-20 nations and non-G-20 nations are separated into blocs, within which citizens receive an annual carbon budget. In phase 2, a price of $160 per ton of carbon is set, with countries able to buy and sell emissions, earning money from their carbon surpluses. In phase 3, individuals can trade carbon domestically. A labeling scheme is implemented in high-consumption countries in phase 4, encouraging consumers to make carbon-friendly purchasing decisions. Phase 5 introduces an app to keep track of carbon allowances, and by phase 6 citizens can begin selling surplus carbon back to their governments.
“We can’t keep consuming the way we are and using resources the way we are — it’s not sustainable,” says Whalley. “So I thought about having an economic system where the societal costs and ecological footprint are built in.”
Major names in global climate discourse, including authors Sailesh Rao and Rupert Read, have endorsed Whalley’s book, convincing him that he can add value to the conversation. Public speaking commitments are now lining the schedule, too: he was recently invited to give a talk at the SDGs Green Forum at Toyo University and has more presentations set for Hokkaido in the near future.
Whalley’s climate concerns have also shaped his lifestyle. In 2020, he moved with his wife and son to Osakikami, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima Prefecture in the Seto Inland Sea. Living on a renovated mandarin farm, they practice a life of subsistence farming and veganism.
But he admits he’s unsure how Indy will eventually receive the book. That, Whalley explains, is all up to us. If we don’t do anything, then this could be a tough read. If we “make the decisions we need to, then I hope he’ll see that I tried my best and that his dad spent his time wisely.”
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