The Guardian view on climate change: too much, too soon
Outside of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows that the world is in the early stages of a truly catastrophic climate change. As Sir David Attenborough told the UN climate change conference in Poland, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”. We have even worked out, with scrupulous care, what we must do to avoid this or to mitigate the effects of climate change. We know what to do. We can see how to do it. There’s only one problem: we do almost nothing.
Figures released today by the University of East Anglia for the conference in Katowice show that global carbon emissions will be higher than ever before this year. In fact they will rise by nearly 3%, an astonishing and terrifying annual figure at a time when the need to diminish them has never been more urgent. The main driver of this growth has been the increased use of coal, which is rapidly approaching its previous peak level, from 2013. There is a particular irony in that this conference is being held in Poland, a country that still derives 80% of its electricity from coal, even if this is less grossly polluting than it was in the Communist era. In fact emissions there are down 30% from their peak in 1988. But far more must be done. To limit global warming to the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, CO2 emissions would need to decline by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050.
All this destructive activity far outweighs the progress that has been made on the use of renewable resources. That is considerable, but so long as renewables are understood only as a pastime for the rich, they will be wholly insufficient to meet the problems before us. The Paris goal often looks like a drunkard’s resolution that everything will be different as soon as tomorrow comes. Everything has stayed much the same, and the balance of expert opinion is that three degrees is now more likely than the target figure of half that.
It’s not just coal. China is now the biggest emitter of carbon, followed by the US and the EU as a whole, then India, Russia, and Japan. Oil use continues to grow. The worldwide demand for energy is outpacing efforts to deal its climate-altering side effects. In a characteristically greedy and destructive way, the Trump administration proposes to destroy one of the last great Arctic wildlife reserves in order to drill for oil there. The great oil-producing nations of Saudi Arabia and Iran both figure among the top 10 carbon-emitting countries despite having hardly any other components to their economies. Add to this the effects of deforestation in the Amazon, which will accelerate under the Bolsonaro government, and the future looks unimaginably grim. Climate change will exacerbate, as it already does, the world’s existing political and economic divisions.
The most worrying feature of the latest UN report is the suggestion that the relatively good performance of the years 2014-16 in reducing carbon emissions was the result of an economic slowdown. The political consequences of the resulting discontent are with us still. They produced Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and gravely weakened the EU. All those factors make a sane policy on climate change less likely. The purely physical feedback loops that drive climate change, such as the reduction of reflective ice surface, are now well enough understood. But it may be that the long-term message of the years since the Paris summit is that this understanding is not enough. We must also learn somehow to disrupt the political and economic feedback loops which are driving our civilisation to the brink of catastrophe.