Some thoughts: climate alarmism

Believing that the planet is doomed only contributes to dooming it

Wildfires light the sky orange in San Francisco, California. From Harold Postic (Getty Images)

UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing's going to get better.
It's not.

Dr. Seuss, “The Lorax”

Climate change is one of the two biggest issues of the present - the other one is global democracy. Of the two, it is also the one that most frequently prompts people to concede defeat, just throw their hands up and go “well, I can’t do anything about it”. That’s exactly the wrong approach.

Most people reading this are probably familiar with the harrowing stories of a climate disaster future. Natural disasters, like hurricanes and wildfires, proliferating at never before seen rates. Droughts and floods. Famines. Once-in-a-century heat waves every other year. Even nightmare scenarios, like climate feedback loops or freeing primeval viruses and untold amounts of methane from deep-frozen soil are lurking around the corner. Landmark report after landmark report, and groundbreaking advances in climate science have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that climate change is caused by human activity.

The basics of climate change aren’t hard to grasp. Fossil fuels, and a handful of other activities like cattle grazing, contribute enormous amounts of gases (especially carbon dioxide - CO2 - and methane) that get “trapped” in the atmosphere, making the planet hotter. A combination of population growth, economic development, and lackluster preparation led to the development of massive nations in Asia to accelerate the warming.

Unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically curtailed, we’re in for some really bad outcomes. The safe scenario is 1.5° Celsius of warming - which would require us to step up our efforts so radically it might even be impossible. The second best (or least worst) scenario is 2°C, which would result in such disruptions that as many people would die of climate and pollution-related issues as died of COVID-19 in 2020.

Traditionally, we tend to think of climate change as something that happens very far away and in a long time - a “by 2050 there will be no polar bears” type of deal. The present is proving us incredibly wrong: record temperatures, wildfires, floods, the whole deal, rapidly accelerating. Like one viral tweet I cannot find said, we will experience climate change as videos we see on social media from our phones, until the phones recording it are our own.

Many people have responded to such an urgent issue by simply saying “I can’t do anything about this”. 100 corporations, or 6 families, or billionaires, or oil companies are to blame and I have nothing to do with it. Which, fair enough - except for one thing: who’s using all that oil? - they’re not pulling it out of the ground for fun.

Many people tend to consider that climate change is something the grassroots cares deeply about, but politicians simply ignore, because they’re too corrupt, or short-sighted, or cowardly to do anything about it. The truth is the opposite: climate change is a consensus issue for the elites, and regular people don’t care about it. Among American voters, only 26% of thought climate change was “extremely important” in January 2020, and only 42% ranked it as a top issue. Other polling has shown that while 73% of Americans believe in climate change, and 69% are somewhat worried about it, only 57% of them would pay 1 dollar a month to fight it, and only 28% would pay 10 dollars. Meanwhile, Congress is cramming green energy funding in bill after bill, most of them bipartisan - even if at an insufficient scale. Investment banks and tech companies are acknowledging the issue, and at least commiting to doing some of their part.

Okay, fair enough - even if we can actually do something, isn’t it too late? We only have 10 years to save the planet, this one included. Well, that’s just wrong - take it from the guy who actually wrote the report that figure comes from:

So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half-degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5 degrees C, beyond which lie climate dragons.

What about the other interpretation of the IPCC’s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a 1 in 2 to 2 in 3 chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn’t mean we have 12 years to act: It means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.

Even if we don’t make it to 1.5°C, the “good ending”, we can ride it out to somewhere between that and 2°. It wouldn’t be a good option, but it would be the least bad. And there’s reason to be hopeful about the planet not “crashing and burning”: some estimates claim that, of the 12 to 20 trillion dollars spent on COVID stimulus in the past year or so, only about a tenth would be necessary to keep global warming under that target. There’s plenty of reasons to pin out hopes in technology:

The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars. The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the “intermittency” (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015. Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline. Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old fossil-fuel infrastructure. Oil demand and carbon emissions may both have peaked this year. Eighty percent of coal plants planned in Asia’s developing countries have been shelved.

Plenty of countries, like South Korea, the EU, Japan, and China (the world’s largest emitter, with plenty of potential for more) have promised to slash their emissions incredibly ambitiously. The problem isn’t really that evil nefarious plots by shadowy corporate cabals are destroying the planet for a buck - it’s that the government has to steer away people from the bad “choices” that fuel the climate crisis. This will be costly, it will be hard, and it will require lots of political willpower. Consequentlt, the most important thing that people can do is pressure their elected officials to act, support those who promise that they will, and encourage others to do the same.