Climate change: Blowing past the red lights

The world isn’t reducing carbon emissions nearly fast enough to prevent “catastrophic warming” by the early 2030s, said Sarah Kaplan in The Washington Post. That was the grave conclusion of a comprehensive new report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week. The report warned that humanity is rapidly burning through its “carbon budget” to avoid warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius

(2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—the threshold beyond which the impacts will become severe. If current emissions trends continue, the report says, planetary warming could blow past 1.5 degrees in a decade, and reach 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Millions will die as a result of rising sea levels, heat waves, drought, famine, infectious disease, and other warming-induced disasters. To head off the worst effects, the IPCC is asking the U.S. and other wealthy nations to eliminate carbon emissions by 2040—a decade earlier than previous goals—and for the rest to follow suit by 2050.

Why keep issuing these “doomsday warnings?” asked the New York Post in an editorial. China spent 2022 building two coal-powered plants a week. “India, too, has continued spewing emissions.” Halting a global temperature rise—“if that’s even possible” now—would cost trillions, and we’re better off investing in adaptation and innovation. That pessimism is unwarranted, said David Fickling in Bloomberg. Over the past decade, solar-energy costs have declined 85 percent, and at least 18 countries have succeeded in decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. This year’s report still estimates a need for “three to six times more investment” in green energy and infrastructure, but projects that solar, wind, and other renewables are growing so fast that emissions will plateau by 2040.

For clean energy to slow warming, said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times, it has to replace “the dirty kind,” which has to be kept in the ground. But in 2022 the U.S. greenlit “more oil and gas expansion than any other nation in the world.” Last week, President Biden approved the Willow Project, an $8 billion northern Alaska oilfield that could yield 600 million barrels of oil—an incremental increase, but still taking us in the wrong direction. Fossil-fuel production remains hugely profitable here and abroad, and “left to its own devices, the market won’t actually retire fossil fuels—at least not fast enough.”