The race against time

Give or take a couple of years, the scientific consensus is that the world has about a decade left to effect a radical transformation in our energy systems and economies to prevent a climate catastrophe.

The Paris Climate Accord, which aims to keep Earth below 1.5 degrees of warming, is not ambitious enough to actually achieve its objectives and signatories are underachieving even today. On the topic of energy, however, doom and gloom hardly energise us to effective action. So in this race against time, let us first take note of the good news.

Fortunately, we seem to be witnessing an unprecedented shift towards sustainability, which has only kicked into full gear quite recently. The kind of movement both in the private sector and political arena alike would have been unimaginable a very short while ago. Words are one thing, but it is money which truly talks. The European Union’s Green Deal aims to spend €1 trillion on pushing Europe towards net zero emissions by 2050, while in the USA, President Biden has promised a $2 trillion climate and clean energy plan aiming for the same and 100%t clean electricity by 2035. Meanwhile, China has also pledged to reach net zero by 2060, a potentially game-changing commitment if followed through. The weight of China’s economy of scale and the thrust of its future innovation would make renewable energy solutions drastically cheaper and more achievable for global adoption. Nonetheless, while recognising the positive signals, it pays to take stock of the situation and plan ahead with realism, which we must not mistake for fatalism.

So far, all that we have are pledges. In practice, we are still a train without breaks, sliding towards the edge of a cliff. Deforestation in the Amazon continues apace and elsewhere in lesser known but highly important forests such as that of the Congo. Palm oil plantations continue to consume Borneo and push orangutans ever closer to extinction. Our oceans face devastating levels of overfishing and their acidity levels are set to increase with climate change, which will severely disrupt their ecosystem. Even under the more optimistic scenarios for climate change, it would seem that the warming we have been locked into is already severe enough to do away with almost all the coral in the world, while coral reefs are home to 25% of marine fish species. At further extreme ends of the problem we face, research is now showing that climate change will turn forests into carbon sources, rather than carbon sinks, meaning that they may become a part of the problem, rather than a way out of the mess. As science progresses, so too do we increasingly realise that the trouble we are in is greater than we could have imagined.

Part of this tragedy is that humanity does possess the intellect and adaptability to outgrow unsustainable practices. Our pitfall is that the rate of change we have set in motion is moving far faster than our ability to adapt to it. We have set in motion a series of dominoes which have locked us in towards self-destruction, even as we come up with solutions.

This realisation should encourage each individual to take a more active role in participating in positive change in the time left to us to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The first step lies in understanding the problem; no matter how grim or discouraging or depressing. By understanding the problem, one can begin to work towards its resolution. Hope must endure that even in the worst outcomes, instead of geo-engineering and terraforming Mars, we can reach a point where we start restoring Earth’s own diminished climate habitability instead.

CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, is developing heat resistant corals which in a very hypothetical future, could be used to redevelop and recreate coral reefs. Scientists have recently discovered algae, which if fed to cattle, reduces their methane emissions by 80%. Another bit of research shows that coffee pulp can be used to restore forests. In the study, the area treated with coffee pulphad 80% more canopy cover compared to 20% in the control area. Can one imagine living in a world where one is doing one’s civic duty by drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, as the process of creating it will have helped restore forests?

We must not lose hope, but we must keep in mind that what we lack is time. We must make sacrifices now, so that we may live comfortably tomorrow. At the same time, we cannot let the hope of future science make us idle, just as we have spent decades waiting for the first cloned mammoths to be born, and yet, we are still waiting. We cannot pin all our hopes on science and gamble with our future, when we can take very real action today. Nothing could be more profoundly meaningful than saving the world, and we are lucky enough to be at a pivotal moment in time where we can be a part of the solution, rather than the problem.