Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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“Today’s interim report from the UNFCCC is a red alert for our planet,” said UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.
National Climate Goals (NDCs) are “nowhere close” to achieving the 1.5-degree Paris target, says the new report.
https://www.dw.com/en/un-red-alert-for-national-climate-goals/a-56713215
The individual contributions submitted to date would only cut about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions — a far cry from the 45% cut needed by 2030 to meet the 1.5 degree goal,
‘Runaway’ global heating is conceivable with sufficiently rapid release of methane from the huge clathrate deposits on the seabed (see Wikipedia article on ‘clathrate gun hypothesis’). This is a worst case scenario but we can’t be sure it will be avoided.
The more rational capitalists are seriously studying geoengineering measures. Bill Gates is funding a trial run of aerosol injection into the stratosphere to cool the surface, like what happens after a big volcanic eruption. In addition to other dire effects, survival in this scenario would be hostage to continued injections; any interruption would cause a sudden leap upward in temperature.
We must distinguish between capitalists who can adapt to a ‘green’ transition (and even make a profit out of it) and capitalists who would lose out, e.g. because they have sunk huge investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Even among petro-states some could adapt much more easily than others: Arabia can sell solar energy after giving up oil and gas, but Russia could not do this. Resulting divergence in transition policy may be a new source of international conflict.
An interesting interview with a climatologist. But a bit too conspiratorial in bits for my liking but nevertheless with some useful insights.
Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies. Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries… For a UK example look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs…Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others. But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes. If they can get us arguing with one another, and finger pointing and carbon shaming about lifestyle choices, that is extremely divisive and the community will no longer be effective in challenging vested interest and polluters.
Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science…Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
Another useful article
we are hardwired to react to events right in front of us…people can’t get too worked up about polar bears…two degrees of global warming and the loss of polar bears can sound “distant” in a way that doesn’t evoke the justified response./em>“People just aren’t getting the full story, which is that the food system is going to collapse. civilisation is going to collapse,” she says. “Billions of people are going to die, you could very well die, your family could die, the stakes could not be higher. But we just don’t hear that.”
“We are dealing with a variety of audiences who are receiving information about climate change,” she says. “For some, there are simply other issues that require urgent action, like ‘Where is my child’s next meal going to come from?’ or ‘Will we make rent this month?’”
“Humans evaluate risk socially, not rationally,”… If your friends and family are taking it seriously, you’ll probably take it seriously. If they aren’t, you probably won’t.”
Michael Mann presents his analysis of ‘soft denialism’ at greater length in his new book ‘The New Climate War’ (2021), which I have reviewed for the next issue of World Socialist. The ‘conspiracies’ are quite real, the main conspirators, besides the corporations themselves, being PR firms and charlatans paid to pose as scientists and say what the corporations want the public to believe.
I was alluding to his accusations against Russia he made in the interview, not that there is not an effective lobby that now tries to camouflage itself.
“Russia has perfected cyber warfare and used it to interfere in other countries and disrupt action on climate change… Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France… Julian Assange and WikiLeaks helped Donald Trump get elected, and in doing that they did the bidding of Putin. Their fingerprints are also all over the climategate affair 10 years ago. UK investigators have evidence of Russian involvement in that too…”
If Russia’s fingerprints are all over East Anglia’s hacking job, Wiki failed to mention it. But if there is evidence that some nations still dependent upon fossil fuels are discrediting the evidence for climate change, i wouldn’t be too surprised. But when i first read it, i thought of echoes of Russiagate and Trump
Thirty-one members of the FTSE 100 are emitting carbon dioxide at a rate consistent with global temperature increases of 2.7C or more by 2050. A temperature rise of 2.7C is thought to be likely to lead to severe damage to the environment and to human life.
While the UK promotes the new coalmine in Cumbria, the UN secretary-general António Guterres said all planned coal projects around the world must be cancelled to end the “deadly addiction” to the most polluting fossil fuel.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/02/cancel-all-planned-coal-projects-globally-to-end-deadly-addiction-says-un-chief
“Today, I am calling on all governments, private companies and local authorities to take three steps,” said Guterres. “First, cancel all global coal projects in the pipeline and end the deadly addiction to coal. Second, end the international financing of coal plants and … third, jump-start a global effort to finally organise a just transition [for coal industry workers], going plant by plant if necessary.”I can’t say i fully comprehend the technical financial aspects of carbon trading but this article does go into it a bit more.
Can it be done under capitalism?
Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.
Lockdowns around the world led to an unprecedented fall in emissions of about 7% in 2020, or about 2.6bn tonnes of CO2, but reductions of between 1bn and 2bn tonnes are needed every year of the next decade to have a good chance of holding temperature rises to within 1.5C or 2C of pre-industrial levels, as required by the Paris agreement.
Dave Reay, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, said: “Already there are signs that instead of build back better, it is more often a case of build back, whatever. If we are to have any chance of getting back on track to meet the Paris goals, the route out of the pandemic must be both global and green.”
As i have conceded, the intricacies of carbon trading confuses me but this report appears to pour cold water on its effect.
A 600% rise in carbon prices is required
“To be on a 1.5-degree pathway, carbon support prices will need to reach $160 per tonne of carbon dioxide by 2030,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Asia Pacific head of markets and transitions Prakash Sharma. As of the end of last year, the global average carbon price across various regimes stood at $22 per tonne of carbon dioxide, he said.
The climate crisis is pushing the planet’s tropical regions towards the limits of human livability, with rising heat and humidity threatening to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions, new research has found.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heating-tropical-regions-human-livability
More bad news
The Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) analysis found that human activities including logging and land-use changes—often for farming—have destroyed 34% of old-growth tropical rainforests and degraded 30% worldwide… over half of the destruction since 2002 has been in the Amazon and neighboring rainforests.
The economic benefits of protecting nature-rich sites such as wetlands and woodlands outweigh the profit that could be made from using the land for resource extraction, according to the largest study yet to look at the value of protecting nature at specific locations. Scientists analysed 24 sites in six continents and found the asset returns of “ecosystem services” such as carbon storage and flood prevention created by conservation work was, pound for pound, greater than manmade capital created by using the land for activities such as forestry or farming cereals, sugar, tea or cocoa…This suggests that even if people were only interested in money – and not nature – conserving these habitats still makes financial sense.
Even under a “best case” scenario where greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced in the coming decades and global warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, climate change will still drastically increase the size and likelihood of destructive wildfires globally, according to a new international study published in Environmental Research Letters.
Wildfires Will Keep Getting Worse — Even in “Best Case” Climate Scenarios
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