Several UN agencies have issued gloomy reports recently about climate change:
Emissions must fall by about half by 2030 to meet the internationally agreed target of 1.5C of heating but are still rising, the reports showed....The UN environment agency’s report found there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and that “woefully inadequate” progress on cutting carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.
This is all correct. It's a fantasy to think we will come within a light year of meeting our 2030 goal, and nearly as big a fantasy to think we'll come close to our 2050 goal. There's no evidence that this will happen, nor any evidence that anyone is willing to accept the sacrifices necessary for a "rapid transformation" of society. There are only two things that have even the slightest chance of working:
- Pouring massive amounts of money into R&D and hoping we come up with something revolutionary.
- Committing to geoengineering whether we like it or not.
Unfortunately, virtually no one support these things either, other than rhetorically in a few cases. Here is the annual change in global carbon emissions over the past century, with a trendline from 1950-2021 drawn in:
The trendline is dead flat. Every year the world adds about half a billion more tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere than it did the year before. This has stayed the same for more than 70 years in the face of endless COP meetings; international goals by the dozens; buildouts of wind and solar; reams of scientific research; and almost universal agreement that climate change is a crisis. Despite all this, it's pretty obvious that the world isn't making any real effort at this.
UPDATE: The chart and text originally said we added half a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. That should be half a billion tonnes, and this is not total emissions but the increase in total emissions each and every year. We're currently emitting about 36 billion tonnes of CO2 every year from fossil sources.
The NYT has a good in-depth article today explaining why the consequences will not be as catastrophic as they could have been, mainly due to a narrowing of the range of possible outcomes for the rest of the century. It's now a global increase 2 - 3 degrees C by 2100, as opposed to 1 - 5 in models a decade ago. It's too late to prevent the lower rise, but the rapid adoption of renewable energy coupled with a reduction in cost exceeding all expectations will probably ensure we don't exceed the higher one. Life is still going to be very difficult for billions of people, but humanity is not going to perish from the earth any time soon, at least not from climate change.
Naturally Trumpropagandists reported this as 'CLIMATE DELUSIONISTS ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE'.
I'm actually much less worried about "humanity" perishing than our technological society.
Capitalism can't solve the problem. The success of capitalism from the start of the industrial revolution has been based on unrestrained exploitation of the environment and its resources. The conversion to non-fossil energy could be done, but it would require state direction of investment.
Kevin thinks that China is doomed because it is moving away from capitalism, but everyone is doomed if capitalism continues to run things.
Eco-fascism here we come.
Welcome to the Tragedy of the Commons
Despite all this, it's pretty obvious that the world isn't making any real effort at this.
Isn't it truer to say the world isn't making adequate effort? "Real" effort seems an overstatement. There has been a pretty massive increase in the quantity of energy being produced via renewables, world-wide, no? As well as massive quantities of money flowing into energy R&D. Huge reductions in the price of green electricity. And so on.
Yeah, the whole thing is a mixed bag, where every country is different. The US has, because of wind, solar and fracking, greatly reduced its CO2 emissions. India and China are more than making up for our gains, of course.
I can imagine a mix of solar, wind and a safer and more replicable nuclear getting the US and Europe to near carbon neutral for electricity generation and maybe automobile use in 15-25 years.
But that still leaves harder problems to solve as well -- transportation beyond commuting vehicles, material manufacturing, and farming come to mind. And the developing world, including China, isn't even close to carbon neutrality.
We're really going to need some form of geoengineering, I'd guess.
My brilliant idea is to use the war in Ukraine as a justification for a massive build out of solar and wind based microgrids noting the fragility of an electrical system that relies on big, centralized power plants which are easy targets. It's an urgently needed defense project thus deserving of hundreds of billions of dollars per year in funding. Hey, it worked for building the interstate highway system.
Alas, a company would have to put a meter on sunlight to make that work since I know of a few companies who may not like that with $9billion in profits just lying around.
The timing is right. Europe needs alternate energy sources to now-cut off Russian petrol; go with "alternate energy sources" like wind and solar. Ukraine's energy infrastructure (and all the rest) is being systematically destroyed by Russia: Build Back Better if the violence ever ceases.
Simple enough: all it requires is lots of money and will. (sigh)
So....it's not that emissions have stayed stable over the past 70 years, but the rate of increase has stayed the same (on average).
How does that compare to increases in global productivity and population?
Yeah, I hate the tone of Kevin's post. Looking at world GDP:Fossil Fuel emissions--Then we have made amazing progress if one considers that the world's most lucrative industries have been fighting against ending the use of their product since the 70s.
Yes, the original post is both too optimistic & too pessimistic.
On the one hand, the graph shows that emissions have kept increasing (too optimistic!)
On the other hand, there is a unit problem: it should be billions, not trillions. Our global CO2 emissions are just under 40 Billion With a B tonnes (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions).
Second: constant growth in absolute tonnes actually means reducing growth in percentage terms.
Third: if we zoom in to specific countries, we can actually see signs of progress. The US is actually about 20% below our 2007 peak in emissions. And while some of that is due to the fracking boom (so not a long-term solution), we have actually seen renewables generation shoot up over the past decade - see Figure 6 from the US long-term strategy: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Long-Term-Strategy.pdf.
So I still see hope - not for staying below 1.5 degrees (yeah, that's gone), but stabilizing at something in the 2 degree range seems not impossible...
US surface air temperatures, with baseline set to 1895 - 1900 (which is the earliest available period): https://bityl.co/FKRp
As you know, the phenomenon of polar amplification is the accelerated warming of the poles. The Arctic is expected to warm 2x-3x more than the global mean: https://bityl.co/FKSe
The scenario of halving emissions by 2030 and hitting zero by 2050 means we "overshoot". As you said, we remain unable to cut emissions -- referred to as "current policy". We have not deviated from current policy, per IPCC AR6 working group report: https://bityl.co/FKTL
I'm all in on all-of-the-above approach for practical purposes. But if we're going down that route, we'll have to make policy changes that are more permissive and shorter approval processes. For instance, we can't spend 5 years approving nuclear power projects only to spend another 5 years building them, but if we won't change policy, then we can't depend on nuclear power.
Maintaining existing plants is essential.
Building new ones....not so much.
1. There's a high carbon load from building them--lots of cement. Granted, some of that can be mitigated if CO2 is used in the cement curing process.
2. Droughts mean less water for cooling.
3. We don't know how to deal with the waste.
Periodically there is buzz about new micro-reactors that solve all the problems...but they never seem to get into production. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep doing research and maybe even build test reactors--but bulk of money best spent building solar panels over tomato and coffee plants--or plant shade trees in those fields.
It doesn't matter how power is generated, there's a carbon load during construction. That doesn't mean power generation facilities shouldn't be constructed.
Nuclear reactors can be air cooled, or built in places where there is a reliable water supply; drought conditions don't affect the whole world. Most notably, while Fukushima scenarios need to be avoided, the ocean is a large water supply not affected by drought, and much of the world's population lives close to oceans.
Nuclear waste disposal is a solved technical problem; the remaining issues are entirely political.
Is that "solved technical problem" just "dump it in the ocean" like happened at fukushima? Keeping stores of concentrated toxic materials lying around for hundreds of years is asking for trouble. Shit happens.
Keeping stores of concentrated toxic materials lying around for hundreds of years is asking for trouble.
Fossil fuel energy production likewise produces "concentrated toxic materials lying around for hundreds of years."
As you know, maintaining existing power plants is not easy. As their operating license ends, eg 40 year licenses, the operator must either apply for an extension and go through years of review with the NRC. Once that part is completed, they then spend a few more years making those upgrades/fixes, otherwise close as scheduled.
The complexities and dangers of nuclear power make it difficult to cut bureaucracy for existing operating plants and new (next-gen reactors) designs. Additionally, NRC caps the total number of years a nuclear plant can operate, even after extensions are granted. Which is why I have very low expectations of the future of nuclear power, either existing plants or new.
EIR/EIS of solar and wind farms have significantly lower adverse implications were their requirements cut back. Just saying, if we're serious about replacing fossil fuels, we need to cut back bureaucracy somewhere. If we're willing to do that, the EIR/EIS of solar and wind farms is where I'd start.
Eventually, maybe 25 years into the future, those truck-sized micro-reactors can be part of newly planned developments. Right now, they're still in the white paper stages of pre-application of test reactors with the NRC.
RE: [There is no] evidence that anyone is willing to accept the sacrifices necessary for a "rapid transformation" of society
Is getting the world to halt population growth an impossible goal? No.
If, in 2000, we stayed at 6 billion, CO2 output would be 25% less than today (pop ~8 billion).
If, in 1975, we stayed at 4 billion, CO2 output would be half of today's output,
Why isn't halting population growth on the list of options to pursue? It doesn't have to be mandated restrictions (e.g. China's one-child policy). It could be bully pulpit / moral suasion. So why not do the latter?
You don't even need total collective action (though that would be nice). A subset of countries halting population growth would be beneficial.
Neither Kevin, the Guardian article he linked to, or any people quoted in the article, mention population as a factor - which shows that none of them are really serious about the issue. That behavior fits with the AGW deniers' claim that it's research grant money that's driving the discussion, since a non-grant, partial-but-substantial solution has been excluded.
The world is already headed for population stabilization, followed by shrinkage. As countries urbanize, they invariably reproduce increasingly slowly: the economics favoring large families no longer exist. Japan's already been shrinking for a decade. Russia maybe longer. China started shrinking last year or the year before that. Maybe South Korea, too. And every year more and more countries grow ever more slowly (or slip into shrinkage). Once rapidly growing countries like Brazil, Egypt and Mexico no longer are. And the United States is now growing at the slowest pace in its history—even with immigration taken into account.
Also, the corollary to your point about the year 2000's population is that, had we not experienced the massive slowdown in the rate of global human population growth over the last 40 years, we'd now be nearing 10 billion, and our environmental woes would be considerably worse. So it's not all bad. Indeed, the reduction in population growth is one of humanity's (weirdly) unsung success stories.
Despite all this, it's pretty obvious that Americans will not make any real effort at reducing their bourgeois consumption.
Hey, I still light my house as brightly as ever before; more so, in fact, due to declining vision. But I use LEDs now instead of old Tommy Edison's dangerously hot incandescents. I'm (too) often on the computer, but it's an efficient laptop and doesn't have the big-arse CRT display.
There are, and will continue to be, many ways of "reducing consumption" without having to live in squalor, darkness, and isolation. It's important for government (and industry) to aid in pushing them out to the maximum population.
This will, admittedly, be more difficult since half of the political divide has dedicated itself to opposing anything that's responsible or makes sense. LIBRUL FAKE NEWZ!!
Both wrong and irrelevant. The US is reducing its CO2 emissions, especially per-capita. The big growth in CO2 emissions is from China, India and other SE Asian countries.
An informative graphic would be the trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration, which has been accelerating. In 2000 the global average concentration increased about 1.5 ppm from the prior year; in 2020 the annual increase was about 2.5 ppm, bringing the global average concentration to about 420 ppm in 2021 (data for Mauna Loa Observatory). If average emissions have been constant then the natural processes for removing CO2 from the atmosphere (photosynthesis, ocean uptake, etc.) seem to be decreasing. More reason for concern.
Emissions from the developed world - the US, EU, and Japan - peaked in 2005, and are down substantially since then. The US is down 13%. They're at about 1990 levels.
Those gains have been utterly wiped out by China. It emits more than all those regions combined. The growth in China from 2005 to 2017, 4.1 Gt, is not much less than the entire US output in 2017, 5.1 Gt.
So it's absurd to say that no one has done anything about CO2 emissions. People have done a lot. All the tech is available and cheap. What they haven't done is enough in the low-end economies. Growth in low-end countries has swamped the progress at the high end. They're still building coal plants in China and India, even though it's poisoning their people. Authoritarian regimes know that their hold on power depends on economic success, and so will sacrifice the environment and even health to maintain it.
We (especially France) should be sharing all our knowledge about building and operating nuclear reactors with China and India. Both countries already have nuclear weapons, so proliferation considerations don't apply. I say "especially France" because France gets most of its electricity from nuclear power and appears to do a remarkably efficient job of building and operating its reactors safely and cost-effectively. There are things to be learned from France.
We also need to share storage technology. India especially is semi-tropical with significant areas of desert and so should be able to generate a lot of solar power; however, night. For India, (and Pakistan, and the poorer countries of Southeast Asia) cash aid for decarbonisation would also be in order. China is rich enough that it doesn't need cash aid.
Which recently built power plants did France build safely?
We (especially France) should be sharing all our knowledge about building and operating nuclear reactors with China and India.
China's been bringing a new nuclear reactor online every few months in recent years. They could be dangerous and poorly designed for all I know (is that why you're suggesting France should do more knowledge sharing?). But I doubt they can realistically build out their nuclear energy sector any more quickly...
I love Kevin's idea that geoengineering isn't a giant R&D project. Really, we have a bunch of off the shelf technologies we know will lower global temps?
There's at least one off the shelf technology. It's long been known that fertilizing the mid-ocean with soluble iron compounds will stimulate plankton growth. In terms of carbon sequestration, this gives way more bang for the buck than afforestation.
We haven't actually started the build out of solar and wind. We are just now reaching the point where essentially all new electricity production comes from solar and wind. Now the build out starts as we replace the least efficient coal plants while also moving more uses of energy to electricity. The build out will be slow at first but increasing over time. It will still be 2030 before we feel we are really in the midst of the build out and 2040 before we feel like we've mostly built it out.
We are about to enter an incredibly rapid social transiion. Nearly completely changing our energy sources over the course of the next 20 years is a rapid pace.