Losing war on climate change

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the Guardian:

Outside of the desperate and the deluded, everyone knows 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 civilizations 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 by the University of East Anglia for the conference show global carbon emissions will be higher than ever before this year. In fact, they will rise by nearly 3 per cent, an astonishing and terrifying annual figure at a time when the need to diminish them has never been more urgent.

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 purely physical feedback loops that drive climate change 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 civilization to the brink of catastrophe.