Climate crisis is not a technical problem, it is a collapse of values: Shyam Saran

Former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran on Thursday said something that cut through the familiar language of net zero targets, carbon trading, and renewable energy mandates.

Addressing a gathering of intellectuals at the India International Centre (IIC), Saran said the world had already crossed the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, that the net zero concept is essentially a “sleight of hand” that creates the illusion of progress while emissions continue, that Europe’s response to record heatwaves has been to ask for more air conditioning. And that what humanity is facing is not a climate emergency but an ecological emergency, one that can only be resolved through a civilisational response, not a technological one, he said.

Ambassador Saran was the keynote speaker at Bharat Ki Soch’s Mantrana event on Climate Change and Sustainability in media partnership with The Pioneer. Bharat Ki Soch Chairperson Anil Rajput opened the discussion, and Saran, who is also the IIC President, delivered the keynote address that shaped the two hours that followed.

Former Union Minister Meenakshi Lekhi, Bharat Ki Soch Director RK Pachnanda, and The Pioneer newspapers and magazines group Chairman Prashant Tewari were also present on the occasion.

The framing Saran chose was deliberately broader than the standard climate discourse. He said climate change is one symptom of a larger ecological emergency involving dying oceans, disappearing forests, soil degradation, and biodiversity collapse, all of which are interconnected through feedback loops that modern thinking, divided into disciplines and specialisations, is structurally unable to see. “We have lost the ability to see the interconnectedness of things,” he said.

On the 1.5-degree target, which the Paris Agreement set as the aspirational ceiling for global warming above pre-industrial levels, Saran was blunt. “We have already crossed it,” he said. A 2019 IPCC report had warned that crossing 1.5 degrees would unleash what it called “climate mayhem.” That threshold, he noted, has been consistently overshot since 2024.

His critique of the net zero concept was pointed. He explained that net zero by 2050 does not mean zero emissions. It means that whatever gases are still being emitted in 2050 will be balanced by carbon sinks, including forests and oceans, and by carbon capture technology. The problem, he said, is that both major carbon sinks are being degraded.

He pointed to Europe as an example of what he called “collective blindness.” When temperatures crossed 40 degrees Celsius across multiple European countries in recent weeks, the public response was not a demand for faster climate action. It was a demand for more air conditioning, which will generate more emissions and accelerate the very warming that created the problem.

On technology, Saran was sceptical rather than dismissive. He noted that data centres required for artificial intelligence expansion consume vast quantities of both power and water, adding to resource pressures in the short term even if AI eventually offers solutions to climate challenges. He quoted astronomer Martin Rees to dispense with the idea of Mars as an escape route: “It is a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems.”

Rajput, in his opening remarks, noted that this year Europe has already experienced one of the most severe heatwaves in its recorded history, with temperatures crossing 43 degrees Celsius in France, and that estimates suggest more than 20,000 lives may have been lost to this summer’s extreme heat across the continent.