Understanding the climate emergency – part one
The climate emergency is now impossible to deny, yet governments lack the will and the vision to tackle it effectively
image by tete_escape. Licensed by Shutterstock [SD]
Most people in the world now know that the climate emergency is very very real, seriously threatens the well-being and existence of much of the world’s population, and has been getting worse at an alarming rate. Most people also know that the single biggest direct cause of this emergency is the extraction, burning and use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas and their derivatives), which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This, together with the release of methane and other gases, traps heat which causes global warming. This causes dramatic and viciously harmful ocean and weather changes which play havoc with the planet’s eco-systems and animal and human living conditions.
280 parts per million (ppm) = The ideal level of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere
350 ppm = the maximum safe level (the planetary boundary)
424 ppm = the current level
Data from Global Monitoring Laboratory. See also Climate Portal
There are many other indirect contributory causes of the emergency too, such as the destruction of forests for farming, agri-business methods, neglect of nature, and the exponential growth of energy-hungry industries, manufacturing and distribution systems, together with some environmentally-costly lifestyles, policies and planning decisions.
Pressure groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Just Stop Oil, and many others, target governments, industries and companies with lobbying, campaign literature, meetings, protest marches, pressure campaigns and sometimes direct action, but with only limited success. They are up against a very powerful, well-financed, well-connected, international professional nexus of pro-fossil fuel interests, who have been shown over many years and decades to be almost unmoveable and invincible. They fight back strongly and successfully with their green-washing, disinformation, social media coverage, high-level lobbying and graft (politician buying).
All the pressure, arguments, overwhelming scientific evidence, United Nations reports, meetings, and demonstrations, have failed to secure the fast and extensive progress needed to reduce emissions and protect people from the environmental catastrophe that’s already here and accelerating.
Climate solutions are known and understood
Hope is not quite dead though. Technological changes are aiding progress, and some people, companies and governments are trying to reduce emissions, albeit too slowly according to recent reports from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UK’s Climate Change Committee. Both wind and solar-derived power sources are increasing their shares of the energy market, and wave and tidal energy is becoming commercially more viable. Other technologies are still mostly at the experimental stage. There are also some emission-reducing contributions from other sources, such as changes in people’s diet away from meat and dairy, and natural habitat and land use improvements. But much of industry, housing, planning, transport, aviation and personal lifestyles are resistant to change.
There is now abundant knowledge of the dire consequences of climate change – increasing impoverishment world-wide, widespread famine and death, increasing inequality, hunger and disease, loss of homes and livelihoods, mass migration, and nature depletion. This all contributes to the deadly and worsening impacts on human populations and the natural world.
There is also abundant knowledge of how to avert it. No other human problem has been so thoroughly explored, researched, understood, and potentially solved as the climate emergency in all its facets. For example, the International Energy Agency have said that there should be no new investments in oil, gas and coal from now on, and no new fossil-fuelled cars should be sold beyond 2035. But there is a huge gap between the rhetoric from governments and the reality. With the election of Donald Trump, we will have a regime in place which is not even pretending to make an effort.
So the climate emergency continues to remain unsolved in practice, despite strenuous efforts by some. The planet’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content continues to increase rapidly, and with it, the warming and climate deteriorations in so far as these are conducive to human habitation,
Why?
350 ppm = the maximum safe level (the planetary boundary)
424 ppm = the current level
Data from Global Monitoring Laboratory. See also Climate Portal
There are many other indirect contributory causes of the emergency too, such as the destruction of forests for farming, agri-business methods, neglect of nature, and the exponential growth of energy-hungry industries, manufacturing and distribution systems, together with some environmentally-costly lifestyles, policies and planning decisions.
Pressure groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Just Stop Oil, and many others, target governments, industries and companies with lobbying, campaign literature, meetings, protest marches, pressure campaigns and sometimes direct action, but with only limited success. They are up against a very powerful, well-financed, well-connected, international professional nexus of pro-fossil fuel interests, who have been shown over many years and decades to be almost unmoveable and invincible. They fight back strongly and successfully with their green-washing, disinformation, social media coverage, high-level lobbying and graft (politician buying).
All the pressure, arguments, overwhelming scientific evidence, United Nations reports, meetings, and demonstrations, have failed to secure the fast and extensive progress needed to reduce emissions and protect people from the environmental catastrophe that’s already here and accelerating.
Climate solutions are known and understood
Hope is not quite dead though. Technological changes are aiding progress, and some people, companies and governments are trying to reduce emissions, albeit too slowly according to recent reports from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UK’s Climate Change Committee. Both wind and solar-derived power sources are increasing their shares of the energy market, and wave and tidal energy is becoming commercially more viable. Other technologies are still mostly at the experimental stage. There are also some emission-reducing contributions from other sources, such as changes in people’s diet away from meat and dairy, and natural habitat and land use improvements. But much of industry, housing, planning, transport, aviation and personal lifestyles are resistant to change.
There is now abundant knowledge of the dire consequences of climate change – increasing impoverishment world-wide, widespread famine and death, increasing inequality, hunger and disease, loss of homes and livelihoods, mass migration, and nature depletion. This all contributes to the deadly and worsening impacts on human populations and the natural world.
There is also abundant knowledge of how to avert it. No other human problem has been so thoroughly explored, researched, understood, and potentially solved as the climate emergency in all its facets. For example, the International Energy Agency have said that there should be no new investments in oil, gas and coal from now on, and no new fossil-fuelled cars should be sold beyond 2035. But there is a huge gap between the rhetoric from governments and the reality. With the election of Donald Trump, we will have a regime in place which is not even pretending to make an effort.
So the climate emergency continues to remain unsolved in practice, despite strenuous efforts by some. The planet’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content continues to increase rapidly, and with it, the warming and climate deteriorations in so far as these are conducive to human habitation,
Why?
The blame game
It is common practice, when things go wrong, to look for someone or something to blame. People and organisations do it. It is a comforting process. It distributes responsibility, and ascribes, fairly or unfairly, incompetence or bad motives to another person or agency. It makes the blamer feel better.
On the receiving end of the blame game over global warming are firstly, governments, who permit, encourage, subsidise or de-regulate fossil fuel companies and the companies and organisations that support them. Secondly the industries themselves, that actually finance, extract, process, transport, supply and use the fuels. Thirdly, right-wing politicians and their voters who align themselves with the large and wealthy corporations who stand most to lose from a switch away from fossil fuels.
Blame needs to be tempered with a search for understanding, context, fundamental causes and wider issues. Blame requires an understanding that causes are rarely single or simple, are usually multiple and layered, and rarely exist without wider contributory factors.
Only in controlled laboratory experiments can individual effects be isolated, identified and linked to individual causes. In real life, such situations never exist. Blame associated with one simple cause or agency must be understood within the always-present wider context of multiple causes and contributory factors, if it is to help to focus attention on solutions.
Autocratic self interest
Over half the populations in the world are organised under autocratic governments, who respond very little to popular demand and have only limited respect for international agreements or United Nations mandates. They have their own priorities, usually related to maximising their own power. These do sometimes include some emission control policies. But there are now reports that Russia and China are seeking to exploit fossil fuel reserves in Antarctica, which is prohibited by the Antarctic Treaty originally adopted in 1960. Russia was an original signatory and China an associate member from 1983.
Russia sells as much fossil fuel as it can – and that is a lot – to fund its war in Ukraine and other acts of aggression. It is the mainstay of its economy. China continues to build coal-fired power stations, though at a lower rate now that its investments in solar and wind energy are increasing rapidly. India continues using coal extensively and buys cheap fossil fuel from Russia to aid its economic development. In the Middle-Eastern petro-states, the ruling families, governments and fossil-fuel companies are one and the same. None of these authoritarian countries take much responsibility for the common good of humankind.
China, Russia and India, plus the USA, account for 57% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, while accounting for 42% of the world’s population. The oil-producing countries of the Middle East also have very high emissions per head of population.
Democratic limitations
Many other parts of the world are organised under democratic governments of various qualities where some progress towards achieving the UN’s target of net zero by 2050 is occurring, but not nearly fast enough. Progress is limited by the short length of parliamentary terms, normally five years or less, and by governments’ perception of voter intolerance towards the more immediate cost and impact of environmental control and climate mitigation policies.
There is much popular support in theory for more and better green policies. 72% of respondents in a recent United Nations poll favoured a swift transition to a green economy. But that support lessens when extra costs or restrictions are believed to be associated with them, though that is a general misperception. Green policies can reduce costs and increase employment markedly in the medium and longer term, the overall payback from intelligent green policies is excellent.
The climate emergency is impacting the whole planet and everyone on it. If a government’s first duty is to protect its citizens, then no government, autocracy or democracy, is doing enough to protect citizens from the very present and widely predicted ravages of climate change. One possible exception is wealthy Norway, where the take-up rate of electric vehicles and heat pumps is high, and much of its electricity is generated from hydro-electric plants, though it has licenced large fossil fuel extraction from the North Sea which is mostly exported.
The outcome of all the failing politics is that world temperatures continue to rise, floods, landslides, melting ice, heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires are becoming more frequent and widespread, world food and water supplies are becoming more unreliable and expensive, and nature is becoming more depleted. This is all predicted to become much worse unless much more serious remedial action is taken now.
Understanding the climate emergency – part two
"For our today, we took your tomorrow" - What are the barriers to concerted action on climate change?
Explosive population growth
From about half a billion people in 1600, one billion in 1800, world population is now around eight billion, and forecast to be ten billion by about 2060. This inevitably puts enormous pressure on the world’s natural and environmental resources and is probably unsustainable.
“Populations expand in such a way as to overtake the development of sufficient land for crops”
– Thomas Malthus, 1798.
This, Malthus conjectured, would cause widespread hunger and death, and would act as a limiting factor on unconstrained population growth.
This theory may yet prove correct, though could perhaps be rephrased as:
“Populations contract when environmental conditions deteriorate making life unsustainable”
Human populations are no different to other animal species in that respect. They rise or fall depending on their environment. But the idea of politically inspired ‘population control’ is probably unrealistic and undesirable.
Human nature
Humans naturally seek to make a living, house and feed their families, and improve themselves. If you live in a shack, you will strive to build a house. If you grew up uneducated, you will strive to obtain an education for your children. If you live in a small, damp, or cold flat or house without a garden, you will strive to move to something bigger and better equipped.
But this natural and reasonable process has now reached absurd lengths in some sections of society, where every car/house/holiday/boat/job/clothing outfit has to be regularly followed by something newer, bigger or better than the last one, or bigger and better than ones’ neighbour, in an endless race for additional comforts, pleasures, competitive advantage or status. Both reasonable consumption and conspicuous consumption and the consumer society has exploded. My early years, like most others in the 1940s, were spent without central heating, carpets, a washing machine, a fridge, a vacuum cleaner, a car, a garden, an electric blanket etc. Floating gin palaces, private jets and multiple home ownership are the most blatant examples of excessive consumption. Private affluence for a few, public squalor for many.
Growth in inequality
There have been rises in inequality of income, wealth and peoples’ carbon footprint in many countries. The rich have become richer, fuelling their acquisitiveness and adding disproportionately to global warming, and the poor relatively poorer, making them more vulnerable.
According to Oxfam, the richest 10% of the world’s population accounted for over half (52%) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015, and in 2019 the super-rich 1% were responsible for the same quantity of emissions (16%) as 66% of the lowest income people (5 billion).
Explosive industrial growth
From about $1trillion in 1800, world GDP grew to $8.5tn in 1950, and $119tn in 2020 (constant 2011 prices, source: Our World in Data). Over the decades, technology and productivity endlessly improved, demand and supply endlessly increased, better products and methods were endlessly invented, and the global economy grew and grew as transportation costs per unit fell. The system worked incredibly well, with increased human longevity and rising average living standards and quality of life for most people over the medium and longer term, despite many being left behind or trampled on in the process.
Fossil fuel subsidies
Governments provide financial help to their fossil fuel companies to encourage economic growth, employment, energy security and wealth-creation. The subsidies take various forms, such as tax breaks, direct payments, grants, price controls, tax credits, exploration tax reductions, offsets of losses, preferential loans, and implicit subsidies such as favourable public infrastructure improvements. It is estimated that world-wide fossil fuel subsidies amount to $10.5 tn per annum (The Conversation).
Short-termism
Major countries have made some progress, although most have not made nearly enough, especially Australia, the USA, and Canada. Priority has been given by so many countries to their own economy, the tax revenues and employment that comes with continued use of fossil fuels, and to their understanding of government survival and re-electability in the short term.
This short-termism, prioritising the economy now, eating jam today, comes at the expense of the medium and longer term, tomorrow. Through support of a more extensive and faster green transition with greater attention to social justice, there could be lower energy costs, and a good chance of averting a climate-induced catastrophe for the human race. The current prioritisation of the short term is a trajectory which is likely to lead to the longer-term elimination of the human race as we know it. No tomorrow.
But it is a trajectory which is being widely followed, and indeed advocated, for example in The Daily Telegraph. Author Jeremy Warner asks, why should the UK be actively pursuing net-zero when it only represents 1% of world emissions and when other countries like China, USA and Norway ignore their UN COP commitments and prioritize their own economies over protecting the climate? When other countries are cheating, so should the UK.
There are several replies to that. A faster transition to a green economy will provide the UK with more self-sufficiency and security in its energy supply, and deliver power to consumers and industry at a cheaper price; it will show the world that the UK honours its international obligations, which will inspire other countries to follow suit; and it will help to avert the climate catastrophe which is rapidly approaching and which will spell disaster and death to the UK and to the many people and communities around the world to whom we owe a moral obligation.
Also in The Daily Telegraph, author David Blackmon welcomes ‘The Return of Sanity to the Business World’ and the roll-back, he claims, of ‘the madness of ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) investing’, as fossil fuel companies like BP, Shell, and Glencore adjust their portfolios away from sustainable sources and back to fossil fuels, including coal, and China doubles down on its use of coal. Business, not morality. But surely this is a very biased, regressive, irresponsible, and partisan view of such developments, and is in the face of repeated and urgent pleas from the United Nations not to act in this way.
Many people would choose, perhaps through force of circumstances or because of other priorities, not to save for their own future retirement. Psychologically, delaying gratification is hard. But the UK Government requires them to do so, through their national insurance, tax and employee superannuation payments.
Delaying a swift transition to a green economy is just as foolhardy. It will condemn future generations to a much harder life or extinction, which is not a legacy that current parents or grandparents would wish for their children and grandchildren. But as with pension saving, it will only happen if governments require them to do so. This should be a relatively easy sell, though it would be important to relate the payments to the ‘polluter pays’ principle.
Downsides
All the extra people, with their drive, cooperation and ability to succeed intact, have participated in and driven the economic system, causing the world economy to grow exponentially as the industrial revolution has spread. This was all largely made possible and supported by relatively cheap and available fossil-fuelled energy to drive all the mining, production, development, investment, packaging and transportation.
The natural environment, such as forests, green spaces, farmed land, oceans, rivers, ice sheets, air, plants, animals and natural resources such as coal, oil and gas, have been used freely, extensively over-exploited and plundered, and used as a dumping ground for waste.
Authoritarian governments proceed according to their own priorities. Democratic societies are run on shareholder capitalist lines, where company survival, size and profit are the main objectives, achieved by meeting and expanding demand. Laws, regulations, and taxes do place some boundaries on the drive for profit, securing some limited consideration of other objectives such as employee welfare and environmental impact.
Environmental boundaries
But environmental impacts have been very largely neglected, or only lightly considered, and nature, including its ability to store and process carbon, has been extensively depleted by all the excesses, with much of that unthinking, careless or wanton behaviour still on-going.
The planet’s environmental boundaries and limits have been comprehensively breached. The effects, most evident in global warming and nature depletion, and the consequences, are now glaringly obvious and threatening to all. Humans as a species are now becoming the victims of their own success. The Club of Rome, in their 1972 report ‘The Limits to Growth’, first drew the world’s attention to the consequences for planet Earth and its inhabitants. Their dire but far-sighted forecasts are seen in this graph:
World Model Standard Run as shown in The Limits to Growth
image by YaguraStation. Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.
Their report was greeted with woefully myopic scepticism at the time.
Now, the Guardian tells us ‘Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought’:
“ … many climate scientists predict a 3°C rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, and a 3°C temperature increase will cause ‘precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100 … the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels and curbing the impacts of climate change, while not trivial, pale in comparison to the cost of climate change itself”
In fact many respected climate models are forecasting 4°C or 5°C rises by 2100. Because these rises are averages, this could mean rises of 6°C, 8°C or 10°C at the poles, the ice sheets wiped out, and sea level rises sufficient to wipe out many coastal cities and areas.
Part Three will consider possible ways forward for the people and the planet.
Paul Ryder
Paul is a retired Civil Servant. He has worked in local government (mainly Greater London Council) and central government (Department of Transport), and in the private sector as a consultant.
Their report was greeted with woefully myopic scepticism at the time.
Now, the Guardian tells us ‘Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought’:
“ … many climate scientists predict a 3°C rise will occur by the end of this century due to the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, and a 3°C temperature increase will cause ‘precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100 … the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels and curbing the impacts of climate change, while not trivial, pale in comparison to the cost of climate change itself”
In fact many respected climate models are forecasting 4°C or 5°C rises by 2100. Because these rises are averages, this could mean rises of 6°C, 8°C or 10°C at the poles, the ice sheets wiped out, and sea level rises sufficient to wipe out many coastal cities and areas.
Part Three will consider possible ways forward for the people and the planet.
Paul Ryder
Paul is a retired Civil Servant. He has worked in local government (mainly Greater London Council) and central government (Department of Transport), and in the private sector as a consultant.
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