The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the third and final part of its monumental climate change trilogy: a report on what we can do to avert global climate catastrophe.
The answers won’t please anybody.
Conservative media, naturally, will either ignore the report or dismiss its 3,675-page review of 1,202 climate change scenarios in the same way it dismisses any science it doesn’t like (including climate science): as some kind of liberal plot.
But liberals may not like the report either—because it shows how wrongheaded much of liberal environmentalism has been.
Like many seemingly apolitical acts (wearing a mask, drinking espresso), environmental conservation has lately become a badge of political identity. If you’re a liberal, you save electricity, you cut down on your carbon footprint, maybe you even fly or drive less than you used to.
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This is all pointless—as scientists have said for decades—and the IPCC has said yet again in its report today.
Individual actions, however well-meaning, are utterly irrelevant to stopping global climate disruption. They may express one’s ethical values, and are a perfectly fine way of doing so, but they don’t move the needle on atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs). Worse, individual actions tend to mislead people into thinking that’s the solution to saving the planet—each of us “doing our part” and changing our lifestyles—thus giving a pass to the fossil fuel industry and other large-scale, systemic challenges.
Which is, no doubt, why British Petroleum invented the term “carbon footprint” in 2000: because it lets them off the hook.
In fact, says the IPCC, what must change to mitigate the worst of climate change is our society’s collective reliance on fossil fuels for energy, transportation, agriculture, and industry. We’re not talking about my electric car or you turning off the lights in the bathroom. No one’s footprint matters. We’re talking about the entire power grid, the infrastructure supporting gasoline cars, the government subsidies of fossil fuel exploration, and so on.
There is a cause for optimism here, because, as the IPCC report details, the costs of renewable energy—solar, wind, electric vehicle batteries, etc.—have dropped precipitously in recent years. Moreover, there is now an increasing consensus of exactly which levers need to be pulled in order to make a difference—Project Drawdown is one excellent example of that.
But that optimism should be short-lived, because if making the switch is so easy, why haven’t we (at least in the United States) done it already?
The answer is obvious: the fossil fuel industry, which has spent $452 million on lobbying in the last ten years, and which dictates the political fortunes of the entire Republican Party (and even some Democrats).
Consider President Biden’s climate plan, which would have made exactly the kinds of investments that the IPCC is recommending, while helping those dislocated by the shifts to adapt. After easily passing the House, it came within two votes of passing the Senate, stopped by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who, investigations have revealed, owes his personal and political fortune to West Virginia’s coal industry. Nice Maserati, Joe!
Had just one Senate seat gone the other way in 2020 (looking at you, Maine and North Carolina), the Biden plan would’ve passed and U.S. policy would look a lot like what the IPCC is calling for. That is what matters—politics, not personal principle and sacrifice. (Oh, and kindly inform any friends on the Left who think there is no difference between the two major parties. I’m too angry to do so.) And with the 2022 election looking bad for the one party that at least sort of, kind of wants to do something about this crisis, the most important thing you can do to save the planet is vote, and persuade others to vote, with the Earth in mind.
No amount of individual action will stop climate change. There is no such thing as “doing your part” when we’re talking about one big atmospheric soup. This is why the IPCC’s report has chapters titled Energy Systems, Buildings, Transport, Industry, and so forth: because these are collective issues that must be solved collectively—through enacting policies that the fossil fuel industry has fought tooth and nail for nearly half a century now. Given that climate change is an existential threat to human civilization, this really is all that matters.
A second feature of the IPCC report that will annoy liberals is its belated emphasis on Carbon Dioxide Removal, or CDR. For decades, the mainstream environmental movement has downplayed most CDR methods, under the ominous-sounding term of “geoengineering.”
Of course, everyone likes planting trees, sure, but liberals tended to balk at more significant CDR proposals, like stimulating phytoplankton growth in the oceans to soak up GHGs (known in the IPCC report as “ocean fertilization”) or enabling airplanes to emit a bit more dust in their exhaust to reduce the amount of solar radiation that reaches the earth. Why? Perhaps because of the risks involved. Or because the proposal to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rather than simply reduce our output of it, doesn’t fit with the liberal emphasis on consuming less, zero-waste lifestyles, and other expressions of virtue.
But coral reefs do not care about your lifestyle. They care about mean temperatures rising more than 2 degrees, which would likely wipe out most coral reefs on the planet, and the vast ecosystems they support. And to lower those temperatures, CDR is one arrow in the quiver that absolutely must be utilized.
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To be sure, rapidly reducing GHG emissions is the most important of those arrows. CDR is not a replacement for it. But, speaking as someone who first wrote about ocean fertilization in 1998, it is a huge step forward that the IPCC has acknowledged how important it is to the overall health of the planet. This may irritate some liberals, but it may also save the Earth.
Finally, it’s not just liberals and conservatives who will find this report irritating—anyone under the age of 30 should, as well.
My generation (X) and the ones preceding it have done a lamentable, pitiable, contemptible, and morally evil job at preventing catastrophe in the 21st century. We have lived large, in our SUVs (still not properly regulated as the trucks that they are) and McMansions, in our subsidies of the cattle industry so that the least affluent among us are driven to consume unhealthy beef and corn all the time, and most of all, in our lazy inability to shift our electric grid away from fossil fuels and to renewables.
If there’s one thing this IPCC report makes clear, it’s that this wasteful selfishness cannot continue—not if we want to avoid the mass famines, refugee crises, dislocations, habitat losses, shifts in agriculture, and floods described in the previous part of the IPCC trilogy. (Part one in the IPCC’s series of reports was about the causes of climate change; part two, the effects; part three, what can be done.) Those of us born in the last century have screwed over those born in this one. Our greed and indolence have bequeathed them a world already in chaos, and on the precipice of catastrophe.
Honestly, it’s time for most of us to exit the stage. Anyone who won’t live to 2050 shouldn’t be making policy that affects it. We’ve done an absolutely miserable job so far.
The IPCC report shows us that we can do better. We can cut GHG emissions in half over the next ten years. We can avert the worst of global climate disruption, though not all of it. We can—but we haven’t so far. That has to change.
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