Why climate change starting to look too massive to solve
IN THE daunting maths of climate action, individual choices and government policies aren’t adding up.
Solar panels are being nailed to rooftops, colossal wind turbines bestride the plains and oceans, and a million electric vehicles are on US roads - and it isn’t enough. Even if the world did an unlikely series of about- faces - halting deforestation, going vegetarian, paying US$ 50 a ton carbon taxes, boosting energy efficiency, doubling car mileage, and more - it would not be enough.
“There’s no silver bullet,” said Andrew Jones, co- founder of the modelling firm Climate Interactive. “There’s silver buckshot: many actions in many domains.”
As the 24th UN conference on climate change kicked off, a steady drumbeat of scientific reports have sounded warnings about current climate trajectories. One warned of the need to curb global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius - 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit - over pre-industrial levels instead of the widely accepted target of 2 degrees Celsius. Another warned of the growing gap between the commitments made at earlier UN conferences and what is needed to steer the planet off its current path to calamitous global warming.
If it sounds downbeat, that’s because it is.
The world has waited so long that preventing disruptive climate change requires action “unprecedented in scale,” the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in an October report.
William Nordhaus, the Yale University professor who just won the Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of climate change, recently described his outlook like this: “I never use the word ‘pessimism’; I always use the word ‘realism,’ but I’d say it’s a kind of dark realism today.”
Climate scientists and policy experts realise that they walk a fine line between jolting consumers and policymakers into action and immobilising them with paralysing pessimism about the world’s ability to hit climate targets.
“If you’re driving on a highway and the car in front of you stops short, and you slam on brakes and realise that you’re going to hit the guy no matter what, that’s not the time to take your foot off the brake,” said John Sterman, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school. “And you certainly don’t step on the gas.”
Sterman said that the world has missed the chance to contain warming without huge disruptions. “Now, it’s technically possible to do that, but we don’t have the policies in place,” he said. “That’s discouraging. But that just means we have to redouble our efforts.”
It’s not that corporations and governments haven’t attacked the problem or made breathtaking advances in energy technology. The cost of solar has plunged 78 per cent for utility- scale projects since 2010. Over the same period, the cost of wind electricity fell nearly a quarter; the biggest turbines offshore now have arms weighing roughly 35 tons each that stretch nearly two football fields across.
Even China is making some progress. While its rapidly growing economy keeps emissions rising overall, it is coughing out less carbon dioxide for every unit of economic output. But effective policy is lacking. Nordhaus advocates a whopping carbon tax, which the Climate Interactive model shows would kill off most coal, sharply reduce driving and boost purchases of more fuel efficient vehicles.
Getting such a carbon tax adopted in the United States, however, is hard to imagine. Washington state voters in November rejected a $ 15-perton carbon “fee” after Big Oil companies poured more than $ 31 million into the state to block the measure. BP, which had endorsed a US$ 40-per-ton nationwide tax, gave the most to defeat the bill.
Congress hasn’t shown any appetite for a carbon tax, either.
I never use the word ‘pessimism’; I always use the word ‘realism,’ but I’d say it’s a kind of dark realism today. William Nordhaus, Yale University professor
A proposal to impose a US$ 40per-ton carbon tax and return the revenue to people in dividends has not caught fire yet.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has ignited protests by proposing fuel taxes he says are needed to fight climate change. “One cannot be on Monday for the environment,” Macron said, “and on Tuesday against the increase of fuel prices.”
In an email, Nordhaus said that hitting the 2- degree target would require global carbon dioxide prices of about US$ 250 a ton in 2020, and rising rapidly after that. “This assumes that all major countries are onboard and that economies can handle a large fiscal and trade shock in which energy expenditures rise by about US$ 2 trillion in a few years.”
In November, the number of electric vehicles in the United States hit the one million mark. But that was three years later than President Barack Obama’s target, first issued in 2009. And that makes only a small dent in the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to the growth in the car market, in 2016 there were nearly 12 million more cars with internal combustion engines emitting greenhouse gases than there were in 2008.
The maths on coal is just as grim. Global coal consumption is running at more than five billion tons annually. In the United States alone, coal fills 4.4 million rail cars every year. Closing down US and European coal-fired power plants, which are 40 years old on average, could happen, but the average age of coal plants in Asia is just 11 years.
“Most emissions linked to energy infrastructure are already essentially locked-in,” the International Energy Agency said in its November World Energy Outlook. — Washington Post.