By Jason Hickel
Along with their latest dire predictions, the world’s leading climate scientists offered a new path forward—but will anyone take it?
Cracked mud is pictured at sunrise on the dried shores of Lake Gruyère, affected by continuous drought, near the western Swiss village of Avry-devant-Pont. (Fabrice Cofrin/AFP/Getty Images)
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a new special report last week, it came with both good news and bad.
The good news is that the carbon budget for staying under 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is larger than we thought, so we have a bit more time to act.
The bad news is that the consequences of overshooting that threshold are very, very bad.
The catastrophes that we once believed would be triggered by only 2 degrees of warming are likely to occur at this lower threshold, including widespread collapse of food yields and extreme levels of human displacement.
The IPCC has issued a clear and trenchant call for action—its most urgent yet.
It says we need to cut annual global emissions by half in the next 12 years and hit net zero by the middle of the century.
It would be difficult to overstate how dramatic this trajectory is.
It requires nothing less than a total and rapid reversal of our present direction as a civilization.
The challenge is staggering in its scale, and the stakes are even more so.
As the co-chair of an IPCC working group put it, “The next few years are probably the most important in our history.”
After decades of delay, this is our last chance to get it right.
Most people hope that we’ll be able to prevent catastrophe by rolling out clean energy systems, ultimately decarbonizing the economy. But so far this plan has not been working very well.
Global emissions continue to rise, year after year, and the peak is nowhere in sight.
Even with the Paris climate agreement in place, adding up all of the pledges that the world’s governments have made, the IPCC predicts that we’re headed for as much as 3.4 degrees of warming.
The destruction will be unimaginable.
It’s not for lack of trying.
Of course, we must try much harder, but the problem is that economic growth is devouring our best attempts to decarbonize.
The economy is expanding much faster than we are able to transition to clean energy.
We’re fighting an uphill battle, and we’re losing.
Think about it this way.
The IPCC says we need to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of the century. But during that very same period, the global economy is set to nearly triple in size.
That means three times more production and consumption than we are already doing each year.
It would be hard enough to decarbonize the existing global economy in such a short timespan.
It’s virtually impossible to do it three times over.
If we carry on with growth as usual, then cutting emissions in half by 2030 would require that we decarbonize the economy at a rate of 11 percent per year.
For perspective, that’s more than five times faster than the historic rate of decarbonization and about three times faster than what scientists project is possible even under highly optimistic conditions.
If we roll out a towering carbon tax and massive subsidies for clean energy, we might be able to decarbonize by 3 to 4 percent per year, but that’s nowhere near fast enough.
This is a problem, and the IPCC knows it.
The special report sets out several possible scenarios for keeping us under 1.5 degrees.
Most of them assume that we continue growing global industrial output. And because this makes the challenge so difficult, they rely on speculative “negative emissions” technologies to save us.
We can go ahead and pollute now (exceeding the carbon budget twice over) so long as we figure out a way to suck that carbon back out of the atmosphere later in the century.
The plan the IPCC has in mind is called BECCS, which stands for “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.”
The idea is to grow massive plantations around the world to absorb carbon dioxide, turn those crops into biofuel, burn it in power stations, capture the carbon dioxide that’s emitted from the smokestacks, and store it deep under the ground. Voila: negative emissions.
It sounds like an elegant solution.
Politicians love it because it suggests that we can prevent climate catastrophe without having to make any major changes to the economic status quo.
It’s a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.
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