How bad will climate change get? Sometimes things change so quickly you hardly notice, and over the last year, amidst climate horrors and climate suffering, the good news has come fast enough it has been hard to keep track. (1/x)
A year ago, @TimDugganBooks published my climate change book, The Uninhabitable Earth. When I turned in the ms, in September 2018, we hadn't heard of Greta. The "Doomsday" report hadn't arrived. Australia hadn't burned. It's been an incredible year. And worth looking back on.
The book is often called “alarmist,” which is, I think, basically, fair—I am indeed alarmed, and I believe anyone who looks seriously at the science would be too. (In a pair of reviews, the Times called it both "brilliant" and "the most terrifying book I have ever read.")
The essay I published just before publication was called “Time to Panic,” and what followed over the spring and summer marked a global high-tide of alarm—climate strikes and protests and dramatic movement in opinion polls the world over.
Over the last year, as in the years before, there was a cascade of terrifying news from science, and natural disasters following so closely after one another there was scarcely time to breathe. But for the first time, there have also been meaningful signs of hope.
Every time I came across some good news I felt relieved, and even, in spurts, genuinely hopeful. Which also made me wonder: what if I’d been wrong? Could this all turn out sort of OK?
The rise of climate protest politics was especially eye-opening. When I finished the book, Greta had just begun her climate strikes. Extinction Rebellion hadn't announcing itself. Neither had the Sunrise Movement. AOC had not yet been elected to congress.
A conservative Parliament (overwhelmed by Brexit) had not yet declared a climate emergency, or committed to completely decarbonizing by 2050. The governments of Finland, Norway, and Denmark hadn't yet made even more ambitious pledges—to decarbonize entirely by 2035 or even 2030.
Those few Americans who knew the phrase “Green New Deal” had heard it last as Jill Stein’s climate policy. A Democratic primary campaign had not yet begun in which even the most retrograde of the candidates on climate, Joe Biden, was miles ahead of the last Dem administration.
This is most important not just for what it has made possible, today, in this cycle, but because it suggests that if political momentum continues, what seems unthinkable in 2020 may become quite possible in 2024 or 2028. We need it to.
It hasn’t just been protest politics, though, or policy pledges, which often go unfulfilled (Norway, for instance, still has plans to drill for oil in the North Sea through 2075). In the business community, the change in public rhetoric has been head-spinning.
Davos was dominated by climate talk, and Jim Cramer, nobody’s idea of an environmental moralist, said he was done with “anything fossil.” BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced it would place climate considerations at the center of its investment decisions.
Microsoft committed to sucking so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it would be not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative by 2030—and would then continue sucking that carbon, to make up for all the emissions they’d created in the past.
The Bank of England announced a “climate stress test” on its member banks, inspiring other central banks (including, believe it or not, the Fed); BP declared it would become carbon-neutral by 2050; and Delta said it would spend a billion dollars to offset its carbon emissions.
To be clear, there are shortcomings and limitations to each of these commitments, some of them crippling: BlackRock is really only turning away from coal, which is already unprofitable, not oil and gas, which remain good business.
It’s not clear what standard the Bank of England will be applying, and BP’s pledge refers only to emissions from the production of energy, not its use by consumers; and Delta is counting on carbon-offset programs with a very spotty history of delivering any benefits at all.
And yet, at the surface level at least, it can be tempting to believe that some tide may finally be turning.
House Republicans even introduced a climate bill, and though it was quickly shot down by members of their own caucus and laughed out of the room by climate scientists, well, it’s still better than a snowball on the floor of congress...
...if only as an acknowledgment that, given extreme weather and natural disaster, our new political reality simply wouldn’t allow outright disengagement.
Some of the most encouraging news has come from the power sector. Over the last year, a growing consensus has formed among energy analysts that the worst-case trajectory — often called “business-as-usual” — was not actually a business as usual path.
Indeed, it might be worse than worst case—worse than we could engineer even if we tried.
Which means that many of the scariest predictions made over the last half decade now seem less likely. And that anyone, including me, who has built their understanding on what level of warming is likely on that scenario should probably revise that understanding.
All of these developments are, inarguably, good news. But it is a sign of just how large, indeed all-encompassing, the threat from climate change really is, that all that progress has amounted to only very marginally good news, in the big picture.
When I opened my book to make changes for the paperback, adjusting the picture of our future in it to better reflect the new "business as usual, I expected the revisions to be major. In fact, they were tiny, and very few—maybe a dozen small changes over several hundred pages.
The IPCC says that, to safely avoid two degrees of warming requires that the world decarbonize at a rate of about 7.5% every year over the next decade—then continue, even more rapidly, so that the planet entirely zeroes out on carbon by 2050.
7.5% is faster than any individual nation has ever decarbonized for any single year, at any point in history, and the IPCC says we would need all nations to move that fast, every year for the next ten, then accelerate.
It is, according to recent estimates, about the size of the likely drop, this year, due to the coronavirus and the economic shutdown to prevent it. So we would have to achieve annual emissions reductions at the scale precipitated by this unprecedented global crisis—every year.
On top of which, we would need to so quickly build out a “negative emissions” industry, allowing us to take carbon out of the atmosphere, that by 2030, that industry would have to be at least twice as big as today’s oil and gas business, which took more than a century to build.
And since many energy analysts say that the true challenge will be getting all the way to zero, all of that, which we would need to do over the next decade to decarbonize the entire planet by half, is probably the easy part.
We are not even close to managing it.
Practically speaking, all of the recent signs of progress have been adjustments to our projections for the future.
In the present, we have dithered, not just moving too slowly in the right direction but, by the only metric that ultimately matters, carbon emissions, moving still in the wrong direction, setting new records every year.
Scientists often describe two degrees of warming as “catastrophic.” Island nations of the world have called it “genocide.” The big picture is: we are now heading inevitably toward that level. In fact, given the inaction of the last few years, almost certainly past it.
At two degrees, scientists estimate, superstorms that used to hit just once a century could arrive every year.
Cities in South Asia and the Middle East that are today home to more than ten million people could become so hot in summer that during heat waves just walking around outside would risk heat stroke or heat death.
And there could be 150 million additional deaths from air pollution, a scale of dying equivalent to 25 Holocausts.
Migration patterns would shift, and accelerate rapidly; the geopolitical map would be redrawn as well, perhaps placing climate concerns at the center of the international order, where human rights and free trade used to be.
It is hard to imagine any aspect of modern life, in fact, that would seem safe from the assault of warming, which would define the century.
Climate skeptics like to point out that all of these projections ignore the possibility of human adaptation—all the ways that populations will respond, say, to sea level rise, by moving rather than simply drowning. They are right.
Humans are adaptable, and resilient, and, at least in parts of the world, wealthy enough to invest in such large-scale measures of adaptation they seem lifted from science fiction—the $119 billion sea wall the Army Corps of Engineers proposed for New York harbor, for instance.
(Criticism from Trump killed the project.)
Or the much cheaper one they’ve suggested should be built on the Miami mainland, exposing all of the state’s barrier islands, including Miami Beach, to the ravages of the ocean.
In other parts of the world, where the least has been done to produce warming but the most intense impacts are expected, adaptation would be considerably more difficult, involving still harder trade-offs.
But even if adaptation becomes possible in those places, the question becomes—adapting to what level of devastation, and what amount of human suffering?
Your answer to that question probably reflects you relative inclination towards optimism. But optimism is a matter of perspective.
Here's mine: If what you are hoping for is a world in which it is possible to preserve the climate we have today — the climate of those Australian bushfires, and the floods that forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate in Japan and Indonesia last year...
...or those in the midwest that crippled American agriculture last spring and are expected to return again this year, to name just three — there is simply no basis for your optimism.
If you’d like to celebrate the fact that we are probably now headed for 3 degrees, not four or more, well, that is reasonable. Personally, I prefer to measure my own optimism off of that current path—that new “business as usual” baseline of about 3 degrees this century.
Against that baseline, we can and will and indeed are already making exhilarating progress. That is the promise extended by the new politics and finance of climate, and by the new policies they are now, finally, beginning to produce.
It is also why, as crazy as it may seem, in the midst of our coronavirus panic, I still think of myself as an optimist as I watch that paperback edition go out into the world.
In fact, as grim as the pandemic situation may feel, is in its way inspiring—not just for the political possibilities it seems to have opened up, but for the incredible, unprecedented showcase of global solidarity and care for one another enacted by a hemisphere-wide shutdown.
We are enduring restrictive, once-unimaginable conditions for an extended period of time, enduring once-unimaginable economic suffering as well, to protect one another at a global scale. This response isn't just unprecedented; it's breathtaking.
And while some large amount of our collective willingness, all across the northern hemisphere, may be, yes, a sense of individual health panic in the face of pandemic, it is hard not to feel inspired, too, if you can manage to pull the whole horrible tragedy briefly into focus.
With climate, too, it can be hard to hold two contrary ideas in your head at once.
But the ones I cling to, myself, are these: things are getting better faster than seemed likely just a few years ago, and through denial and complacency and inaction we have entirely missed the window of opportunity that would have allowed us to avoid catastrophic warming.
And if you need a single take-away, unfortunately I think it is this: even given aggressive decarbonization that might allow us to land at 2C, the experience of the next century will be defined by normalization of, and adaptation to, an unconscionable level of climate suffering.
The world scientists have taught us to fear over a generation is now unavoidable, and will be arriving soon. We will surely find a way to live in it. But how?
That world, and the way we might live on it, is the subject of the Uninhabitable Earth. And though it feels (to me at least) like it was published a million years ago, these questions have only gotten more urgent in this one year.
The landscape of climate politics has changed, the landscape of energy has changed, the landscape of public concern has changed—all of them dramatically, perhaps even at unprecedented speeds, given our glacial standards.
But among all the other things the coronavirus shows, it shows that when facing true crisis, it is best to respond urgently and aggressively to contain the problem, rather than wait until it gets out of hand to respond, haphazardly.
And though climate change has begun to invade our lives, in ways both material and emotional, we have only just begun to reckoning with the big questions—
about what kind of future do we want to make for ourselves, and each other, and how we might engineer a relatively safe, relative just, relatively prosperous, relatively inhabitable world for ourselves and all that come after. The climate isn't waiting for us to answer. (x/x)
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