There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change

 

moon of  alabama  

The recently published report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is grim:

B.1.3. Global warming of 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 would be exceeded during the 21st century under the intermediate, high and very high scenarios considered in this report. Under the five illustrative scenarios, in the near term (2021-2040), the 1.5°C global warming level is very likely to be exceeded under the very high GHG emissions scenario, likely to be exceeded under the intermediate and high GHG emissions scenarios, more likely than not to be exceeded under the low GHG emissions scenario and more likely than not to be reached under the very low GHG emissions scenario.

The global reductions of Green House Gases (GHG) which are required to fit even the intermediate scenario are unlikely to be reached with the current policies:

The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.

The reasons are of course political. There is a lot of lobbying for policies which continue the output of GHG while there is little immediate interest in reducing them. A decade ago Peter Lee had already done the math. Looking back at what happened since he lays out a list of failures:

The United States under Joe Biden has doubled down on the absurd narrative that the United States has the national capacity and moral stature to lead the world’s response to climate change.

Let me dismiss this claim in a few words.

First, the doom of the climate change regime was sealed when the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 1998.

It was double doomed when the United States under Barack Obama imposed a successor regime that eliminated legally binding caps for anyone.

It was triple doomed when Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement.

It was quadruple doomed when the United States under Joe Biden decided that its highest priority and organizing principle of policy was to treat the People’s Republic of China as America’s prime geopolitical adversary.

Doom doom de doom doom doom. You get the picture.

It is not only the U.S. which is guilty here. All political system seem to prefer short term rewards over avoiding future pain., especially when others can be plausibly blamed for the outcome. The U.S. is just the most hypocritical actor here.

That Joe Biden is still playing nice with the fossil fuel industry demonstrates the mechanism:

The Biden administration is now on track to approve more oil and gas drilling on public lands—activity that accounts for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—than any administration since George W. Bush. Climate envoy John Kerry has balked at the idea of committing the U.S. to a coal phaseout. Politicians who call themselves climate hawks are still going out of their way to make clear that there’s a vibrant future ahead for the companies that funded climate denial, whose business model remains built around burning up and extracting as many fossil fuels as possible. Administration officials, meanwhile, have talked repeatedly about the need to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This is climate denial.

Just look at the recent infrastructure bill:

Many of the bill’s provisions are on the oil industry’s wish list. The proposed legislation has more than $10 billion for carbon capture, transport and storage — a suite of technologies fossil fuel companies hope will allow them to extend their license to operate for years, if not decades. There’s also $8 billion for hydrogen — with no stipulation that the energy used to produce it comes from clean sources. A new liquid natural gas plant in Alaska won billions in loan guarantees, while other waivers in the bill will weaken environmental reviews of new construction projects, experts say.

“This infrastructure proposal is not a down payment on real climate action,” said Mitch Jones, director of Food & Water Watch Policy, a Washington accountability organization. “It is doubling down on support for climate polluters.”

Just yesterday Biden confirmed his pro fossil fuel position by asking for cheaper pollution:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon added to the pressure on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, after one of his top advisers said earlier in the day that OPEC and its allies “must do more” to support the economic recovery.
...
Oil futures recently traded higher, but they had retreated earlier Wednesday after U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pressed OPEC and its allies to further boost output and described a recent agreement to increase production as “simply not enough.”

Which lets me agree with Peter Lee's scary conclusion:

Lacking a time machine that can take us back to 1998 when we still had a chance to turn things around--or a nice big catastrophic war that wipes out enough humanity and industrial capacity to accomplish the same thing--it might be up to the planet to deal with the problem herself: churning up enough sea level rise, weather calamity, drought, famine, and disease to reduce the human load on the planet by the ugliest means imaginable.

That’s all the climate change optimism I can muster, and that’s it!

This not a pessimistic view but a realistic one. It does not mean that we should give up. All of us, personally and politically, should try to reduce our environmental footprint as much as we can.

Unfortunately that is neither easy nor convenient to do.

Posted by b on August 12, 2021 at 14:05 UTC | Permalink

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