Climate: From bad to worse

Over this past decade climate change has gone from bad to worse – warming is accelerating; the past several years have seen gobsmaking bananas temperature rise; we’ve flown past the 1.5C of warming guardrail into a minefield of potential feedbacks and risk crossing tipping points in crucial natural processes like the AMOC.

Accelerating warming means that our mitigation timeframes are shortening, we have less time to act; net zero by 2050 is now not nearly good enough and a global emission reduction by at least half by 2030 is now even more of an imperative. Always a slow motion catastrophe, climate is now an exploding emergency but still too slow for business and governmental timeframes.

Instead of effectively mitigating the important actors in our global economics and politics have decided decarboniztion is too costly and threatening while prioritizing more immediate business like threats to economic security or winning the AI race. Political and business leaders have put climate mitigation on the back burner.

Consumers globally are worried about the rising cost of living, their jobs at risk, and how they’ll ever buy their home (or pay down their mortgage). Therefor the only emission reduction allowed by both the elites and by the masses must not effect cost of living, GDP, employment and investments. Mitigation policies can’t be too disruptive because us moderns are completely dependent upon an economy that is a highly diverse and complex (fragile yet resilient) global ecosystem.

Yes, we know climate change is serious but we are all climate and energy realists now and know religiously that the most important fundamental duty of government and society’s leaders is protecting the evolving economy. The iron law of climate policy is the economy always wins.

So instead of cutting emissions by half in the remainder of this decade we are planning to continue to expand fossil fuel production – and therefor GHG emissions and increased warming – for decades to come.

Climate change is already wrecking havoc, in rich North America, but much more seriously in poorer, more vulnerable third world countries where populations with much smaller energy and fossil fuel footprints are much more at risk from extreme weather, heat waves, fire or flood.

And if our continuing emissions set off possible feedbacks, we could cause warming of 5C or more, crashing our global civilization and, over time, making most of the world uninhabitable and reducing global population from billions to a few hundred millions near the poles. 

We benefit greatly from the production and use of fossil fuels but the accidental sideeffect of global warming is a building existential danger that we don’t want to deal with right now. Our emissions today and over the next decade could set off feedbacks that will obliterate everything we love and care for, all of our cultural, economic and scientific achievements, and create hell on earth for every future generation for hundreds if not thousands of years. (A con job, a new green scam.)

But suppose we wake up – after at least three decades of procrastination and failure, effective mitigation today will now have to be deeply disruptive, bad for business and painful for consumers. In other words, it isn’t remotely possible.

Even as the situation worsens with every year of inaction and rising emissions. Even if we know we are most responsible for the emissions and the damage done.

If we mobilized for climate as an emergency and got out of political and economic BAU, we could reduce emissions hopefully fast enough and use our powers of innovation and our incredible built up wealth to survive our fossil fuel addiction and evolve a new way of living where we could thrive.

We’re not even going to think about it till it’s too late. Those that should be responsible leaders are myopic, short-term, self-interested, profoundly unethical idiots like Trump. In fact, the best and the brightest – in the climate intelligentsia as well as government and business – refuse to even consider the only possibility of reducing emissions urgently: an emergency government regulated managed decline of fossil fuel production and use, nationally and globally. The smart guys in the room know this is heretical, too radical, impossible, never going to happen, isn’t allowed, not even to be considered.

And so climate goes from bad to worse.

Bill Henderson is a long time climate activist and CounterCurrents contributor

Bhenderson(at)dccnet(dot)com