Don’t be a climate unrealist: COP must begin to keep fossil fuels in the ground

Even before the Trump presidency, before the looney tarriffs and 19th century foreign policy, the world’s business community was abandoning the ineffectual energy transition mitigation path. Too costly, too hard a slog, not enough profit and power for the rich and greedy. 

As the climate worsened this decade and the science got more dire, the biz leaders and their news organs increasingly downplayed the possible climate dangers. As war in the Ukraine and the AI race both heated up, many of the power figures in our society decided that climate mitigation should be put on the back burner.  Climate change threatened what they thought important.

Bill Gates’ memo is an attempt to apply this ‘climate realism’ to the COP international negotiation process. ‘Climate change isn’t humanity threatening and the world’s political leaders should focus instead on creating wealth – for the poor people in the Third World, don’t you know. We’re slowly succeeding in lowering emissions and we should be focusing more on adaption than possibly disruptive mitigation.’

Now this sort of salesmanship is common currency in Trump’s America where advertising slogans for consumers are replacing truth and citizenship, but there is a gaping fundamental flaw in how Gates tells the climate and mitigation story.

The journalist George Monbiot has great language to describe Gates’ most insideous climate unrealism:

“Gates calls his essay Three Tough Truths About Climate. So here’s another tough truth he studiously ignores. If, as now seems likely, crucial Earth systems cross tipping points and suddenly collapse, the effects on human life, let alone the survival of other life forms (a topic he fails, as usual, to mention), would destroy the smooth and steady progress he foresees. Because environmental change is likely to proceed not in gradual and linear ways, but through sudden changes of state, the possible impacts on human wellbeing are extremely hard to predict. His argument that we should align all funding to current “data-based analysis” of improvements in human welfare, while it might sound rational, introduces in the face of systemic change a profound irrationality, prompting us to ignore the greatest threats.”

This is profoundly true: Gates and the unrealists just downplay the danger and don’t seem to understand or want to see past their own short-term self-interest to the damage their use of fossil fuels is doing today to innocents in more vulnerable, poorer countries and the tragedy their pro-biz management might be creating over the horizon.

Journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer has been making the same point: the importance of non-linearity, of feedbacks. Warming has accelerated and as we’ve flown past the 1.5C guardrail we’ve entered a minefield of possible feedbacks. 

“Money is tight, wars are a huge distraction, and climate has become unfashionable, so we’ll just have to wait and hope for better times.

“That could be a plausible, even a sensible strategy if we were still in the 1990s or the noughties, when climate change was still seen as a slow, linear and above all predictable process.

“But we now know that like most natural processes, climate change usually happens in sudden lurches: you cross an invisible threshold, and suddenly you are in a changed world.

“It’s not just plain old physics, which gives you nice, smooth curves. With the biosphere, you are dealing with complex systems that can change in abrupt and unforeseen ways. They may also resist attempts to switch them back to the original climate state…

“In effect, we are now walking across a minefield.

“Some other feedbacks we know about, like the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC or Gulf Stream), but we don’t know when they will activate. And there are probably others we simply don’t know about at all.

“Far from putting climate mitigation on the back burner, what is needed now is emergency action to urgently reduce emissions and geoengineering actions like cloud brightening to try and reduce warming before it’s too late.”

Climate unrealism is an own goal. Those fearing climate mitigation damage to the economy, especially the fossil fuel economy, thought they could downplay and dismiss climate and put it on the back burner. The ominous reality of a civilization threatening emergency is going to dampen our new King Canute’s feet sooner rather than later. It will become abundantly clear how he, his government and his business class has lied to themselves and conspired to use government to make climate worse for all Americans and everyone else on the planet. The unrealists tried to manage climate for their own short-term self-interest.

On one of the next El Ninos, aided possibly by a triggered feedback, the temperature will soar gobsmackingly again and all those who had penned climate realist bullshit will try and melt away into the background.

Going into COP30 the global climate community should seize on the Gates memo as a huge opportunity to confront the climate realists and the short-term, self-interest economic-centric governments that have been stifling needed mitigation. Here’s my example of the type of message needed:

‘After only weak, not sufficient emission reduction and with warming noticeably accelerating, and with potentially feedbacks that could be irreversible becoming much more dangerous fast, we urgently need effective mitigation – deep, immediate emission reduction. This must mean an immediate national and international regulated phase down of all fossil fuel production and use.

‘The climate dangers will probably never be humanity threatening but are now close to growing at least civilization threatening (as well as compounding every other major problem in our global society). Going into the COP we need increasing, not less, mitigation ambition. 

‘Here’s where we stand: a decade ago the world agreed upon the Paris climate treaty, the 1.5C guardrail, and a special IPCC report quantified the reasons why. Then the powers that be kept us upon a mitigation path that was ineffectual (with both fossil fuels and emissions continuing to rise); warming also accelerated (probably because of the dimmed albedo and cloud feedbacks) so that now we have crossed 1.5C and should expect to exceed a 2C rise before 2040. If you consider EVERYBODY involved, is now really the time to cut back on mitigation and refocus upon adaption?

‘No! Empathtically, it is most certainly not, and if Bill Gates wasn’t so deep in implicatory denial and so addicted to biz as god, if he truly did care for the innocents who need our help, he would never have written that memo. And shortly you will hear him bemoan the worst thing he ever did.

‘Effective mitigation is critical now. Nothing is more important. We need leadership now in rejecting wealthy biz self-interest and rejecting gangster government subversion of international law and order so that we can finally make the Paris Agreement work: reduce emissions by reducing the production and use of fossil fuels. For everybody’s sake, for the whole world, to protect everything we love and care for and to protect a safe climate future.’

Bill Henderson is a long time climate activist and long time CounterCurrents contributor  bhenderson(at)dccnet(dot)com