There’s still time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Can we pull it off? Hazel Healy makes the case for conditional optimism.
In 14 March 2019, Cyclone Idai made landfallin Mozambique. It came in as people slept, at a wind speed of close to 200 kilometres per hour; by morning, 90 per cent of the major port city of Beira was destroyed. A video posted by an eyewitness showed a desolatescene, as bodies were recovered from a Catholic church to the sound of keeningthat is hard to listen to. ‘People didn’t stand a chance here,’ he mutters.
Idai was supercharged by warmed seas and heavy rains brought by climate change. It was a starkreminder of what is to come, or rather, what is already here, and the intense vulnerability of those least equipped to deal with it – on a continent that accounts for just four per cent of global emissions.
More tragedies like this one – and much worse besides – are not yet inevitable. It’s true, we’ve known this was coming for at least 30 years and have done nothing to stop it. But that story is starting to change. As the climate breaks down, disruption is shifting calculiin the realmsof science, politics and economics. Alongside this, new visions are defining how we go about preserving a viableecosystem for our children, and the best route to get there.
The shift begins with science, which has described our apocalypticend with terrifying precision – and given us a deadline.
Hard facts
Last February, Joeri Rogelj, a bearded Danish climate scientist, stood in front of a graphic at a public lecture in the Oxford Martin School. It showed temperature anomaliessince 1850, blooming like a flower of doom throwing out ever more red petalsuntil the present day.
He’s one of 91 authors who contributed to last October’s game-changing report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which contrasts the impacts of a 1.5° and 2°C warmed world.
The report delivered a bleakmessage, described in The New Yorker as ‘a collective scream sievedthrough the stern, strained language of bureaucratese’. We have hit 1°C above pre-industrial times sooner than we thought, mostly due to feedback loops in the Earth’s complex carbon cycle; on our currenttrajectory, we may hit 1.5°C as early as 2030. At this point up to 90 per cent of coral reefs die out, heatwaves and wildfires plaguethe planet every year and floods, droughtand disease propel several hundred million more people into food insecurity as yields, animals and fish stocksfall. As the temperature marches on past 2°C, it gets notably worse.
The bruntof these changes is likely to kick in within 20 years and the consequences will persist for centuries. Past 3°C it becomes apocalyptic: vast swathesof the earth rendered uninhabitable by heat, coastal cities and islands submergedby the sea.
Rogelj co-ordinated the mitigationor ‘carbon-cutting’ section of the report, which models scenarios to avoid such an outcome. The central concept here is the ‘carbon budget’, which is a calculation of the amount of remaining emissions we can afford to pump into the atmosphere before locking ourselves into ever higher temperatures. We say ‘locking’ because carbon – which makes up 80 per cent of greenhouse gases – accumulates in the atmosphere, beyond what nature can absorb. So even if we stopped burning oil, coal and gas today, temperatures will stay constant.
Rogelj frames the challenge as ‘extremely hard, but not impossible’. The timescale is tight; to have a decentchance of halting warming at 1.5°C, CO2 emissions must peakin 2020, drop by half within the next 11 years and plummet to ‘net-zero’ by 2050.
Anything less, leaves our future – and that of future generations – hanging on finding ways to suck out billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it underground via unproven technologies such as carbon capture.
To give us a flavour of what we should try for, Climate and Energy Professor Kevin Anderson calculates that in Britain this would translate into a 75-per-cent cut in emissions by 2025 and a fully decarbonized energy system by 2040. Countries outside the OECD – club of rich nations – would have a little longer but it would still need to happen within the next 15 years.
We already know what won’t work. After 28 years of climate negotiations that Anderson categorizes as an ‘abjectfailure’, solutions such as carbon-trading schemes, carbon off-setting, and subsidizingless-polluting coal-fired power stations have proved to be false. They produce the kind of cognitive dissonancethat allows the UK to open a new deep-sea oil platform while positioning itself as a climate leader.
And for all the increased ambition as cities and regions – and business – set zero-carbon targets, overall, they have failed to make a dent. Of the 185 signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement – the non-binding international climate treaty that committed countries to keep the global average temperature rise to below 2°C, and strive for the safer limit of 1.5°C – almost no-one ison track. The fossil-fuel industry has outmanoeuvredscientists and civil society – emissions from shipping and aviationare omittedfrom the Paris targets altogether. ‘I don’t know who’s responsible for them,’ Anderson speculates. ‘It must be God.
Source: Climate Action Tracker
This reality illustrates that incrementalchange will not cut it. With the budget we have left, paradigm shiftsin economics, politics and society are needed – what activists are calling ‘system change’. Deep cuts to fossil fuel use will come primarily via a rapid transformation of our energy systems. We will need simultaneously to scale back demand via cuts and efficiency drives, ramp up renewables (currently just 10 per cent of the energy mix) through an industrial-scale construction drive on the scale of the post-World World Two Marshall Plan, and retrofit buildings like crazy. As electricity is the only sustainable zero-carbon power source, we must electrify heat and transport as fast as we can. Land and urban infrastructure must also undergo dramatic transformations.
But rather than slowing down, we’re speeding up. CO2emissions rose last year and are predicted to rise again in 2019. At this rate, we’ll burn through Rogelj’s painstakingly calculated ‘budget’ within 10-15 years.
History shows us that governments and people are able to act swiftly and at scale when they choose:
World War Two: Britain mobilized to conserve and repurpose energy on a mass scale. Consumption was reduced by rationing – seen as quicker and fairer than taxation – and a powerful propaganda campaign. ‘Dig for Victory’ saw allotment owners more than double to reach 1.7 million by 1943. People reared rabbits and pigs to eat; food imports were halved. Food rationing was seen as a hardship but the diet was nutritious. Consumption dropped 11 per cent but child mortality rates improved over the same period. Household energy use also dropped dramatically, with coal cut 25 per cent. After petrol was withdrawn completely in 1942, car use dropped by 95 per cent.
Post-Soviet Cuba: With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba’s oil imports dropped by half almost overnight. It was forced into a low-carbon transition at punishing speed; Cubans’ calorie intake fell by a third in five years, walking and cycling increased. At the same time, obesity halved, along with deaths from diabetes. Urban agriculture flourished, providing 60 per cent of salad vegetables. The country moved to a more efficient, decentralized energy system; inefficient light bulbs were banned by decree and energy carefully conserved.
Global Financial Crisis 2007-08: Prompted by the potential collapse of the global financial system, vast resources were mobilized almost overnight to rescue the world’s major banks. Between autumn 2008 and the beginning of 2009, states and central banks in advanced economies committed the equivalent of 50.4 per cent of the world’s GDP to the financial sector (through recapitalization, nationalization, repurchasing assets, loans, guarantees, injections of liquidity).
Adapted from ‘How did we do that? The possibility of rapid transition’, 2019, Andrew Sims and Peter Newell. rapidtransition.org.
A world to win
On 15 March 2019, the day after Cyclone Idai struck Mozambique, over a million students around the world walked out of school in protest against governments’ failure to tackle climate change.
In Oxford, the atmosphere was celebratory and sombre. Two boys weighed up whether to turn their Krispy Kreme doughnut box into a placard. One teenager’s sign predicted that her children will ‘die from climate change’.
Walking among the students I recognized scientists from the talk by Danish climate expert Rogelj. ‘It makes you feel like the work you’ve been doing over the years pays off,’ said a smiling Karsten Haustein, who studies extreme weather events. ‘The message is getting through.’
In our current political landscape, ideas move fast. The global school strikes movement has spread from the lone-protest of a single Swedish schoolgirl in August 2018 to over 2,200 cities and towns, in 128 countries. Alongside it, the Green New Deal (GND) movement has emerged in the US, catapulted into mainstream politics by Sunrise, another youth-led movement. Championed by 29-year-old socialist Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, its radical plan – to fully decarbonize the US economy while addressing social inequality and repairing the historic oppressionof indigenouscommunities – has captured the public imagination and transformed the US climate debate. At the last count, 100 Democrats have agreed to co-sponsor the GND resolution, and 10 presidential runners back it.
Another brand-new movement, Extinction Rebellion, has also appeared since October 2018, blocking London bridges, targeting government ministries and firing up a new cadre of activists. Moving in step is the ‘climate emergency’ movement, which has spread from Australia, and works to hold local officials to their green pledges. They join the many thousands already pursuing direct action, lawsuits and climate advocacy around the world.
The desire to build a better society within Earth’s boundariesis reshaping politics. As different constituenciesalign and start pulling together, we can start to tell new stories about the future. This isn’t about looking on the bright side, it’s about seeing where opportunities lie and seizingthem with both hands. We still have an outside chance: from where we stand, to fail would still be a choice. In 2050, we may yet look back and ask, ‘How did we do that?’
Source: https://newint.org/immersive/2019/06/10/habitable-earth
Comprehension questions
- What does the author want to highlight with the example of cyclone Idai?
- Give examples from the article what will happen when the temperature has risen with 1.5 degrees Celsius.
- What does “apocalyptic” mean?
- What is required to halt warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius?
- Give three examples on how the climate negotiations hasn’t been effective up till now.
- What should be done according to the author to combat global warming?
- What is the message of the whole article? Is it a positive or negative article?
Mr Smedjeback's English Class 