Bailing out the planet, a needed “cold shower” on the stats, and how climate crisis is a crisis of being: some earth-centric news
João Fazenda, from New Yorker
We heard the news today, oh boy… A collection of urgent climate-crisis reports below.
This time, we must bail out the planet
"Restoring the status quo after defeating COVID-19 would be like celebrating beating lung cancer by smoking a hundred cigarettes”.
This quote is from a piece by Laurie Macfarlane in Open Democracy, which contains some choice climate-crisis chunks that focus the mind wonderfully.
For example, this graphic shows just how steep the drop in carbon emissions from the current moment (2020) has to be, if we have a change of keeping the rise in global warming to 1.5C by 2040.
Emission reduction trajectories associated with a 66% chance of limiting warming below 1.5C, without a reliance on net-negative emissions, by starting year. Solid black line shows historical emissions, while coloured lines show different pathways to limiting warming to 1.5C. | Carbon Brief
Next, Laurie pours cold water on the idea that Covid has somehow helped the climate crisis by instituting a “great pause” in carbon emissions:
Twelve months ago it looked like 2020 was going to be another record breaking year for carbon emissions. But as COVID-19 rapidly spread around the world, businesses were forced to close, international travel ground to a halt, events were cancelled, and people were told to isolate at home.
Unsurprisingly, this ‘Great Pause’ caused carbon emissions to fall – according to the Global Carbon Project global emissions fell by 7% in 2020. Despite being the largest relative fall since the Second World War, this still pales in comparison to what is needed to meet the Paris targets. If warming is to be limited to 1.5C then emissions need to fall by 14% every year until 2040.
Some have cited these falling emissions as evidence that COVID-19 has helped to “save the planet”. As well being wildly exaggerated, these claims are also offensive: the idea that a pandemic that has caused immense suffering and killed more than a million people should be celebrated is obviously perverse. Pandemic-induced lockdowns do not provide a model for climate action.
More importantly however, those who say the pandemic will help the environment have got things precisely backwards. Like many other infectious diseases, COVID-19 has its origins in the encroachment of human activity into natural ecosystems.
As more and more countries have sought to maximise economic growth, activities such as logging, mining, road building, intensive agriculture and urbanisation have led to widespread habitat destruction, bringing people into ever closer contact with animal species.
As the United Nations’ environment chief, Inger Andersen, put it: “Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people.”
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals. In the case of COVID-19, it is believed that the virus originated in China’s bat population and was then transmitted into humans via another mammal host.
On our current trajectory, while COVID-19 might be the first pandemic many of us have experienced, it will almost certainly not be the last.
COVID-19 is therefore not a random act of God. Like climate change, it is a symptom of accelerating environmental breakdown, which in turn is a product of an economic model that is reliant on growth and accumulation.
Seen in this light, the idea that COVID-19 can somehow aid the environmental crisis is absurd: they are two sides of the same coin. To address both, we need to tackle the root cause.
More here. Laurie goes on to note that, given their size as polluters, President Biden’s green industrial plans, and China’s level of coal-burning to be announced in their next five year plan, represent a crossroads for the planet - making the Glasgow COP 26 summit incredibly important. He concludes:
Some will question if we can afford such an undertaking. But the pandemic has shown that affordability is always a political constraint – not a technical one.
Central banks have created trillions of dollars to prop up economies throughout the crisis – redirecting even a fraction of this towards green investments could put the world on track to meet the 1.5C temperature goal.
With interest rates at record lows, there has never been a better time to turbocharge the green transition. The question is not whether we can afford to do this – it is whether we can afford not to.
In 2008 we bailed out the banks. This time, we must bail out the planet.
Not a call to surrender - but a realistic “cold shower”
In a conversation with Gail Bradbrook of XR this week, we also came upon this paper, ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’. The stats it quotes on biodiversity loss are almost impossible to comprehend - but it outlines a whole range of well-supported indicators that are far worse than even the IPCC assessments, and declares an absolute urgency in political and social responses to it. An excerpt:
Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization (Ceballos et al., 2015; IPBES, 2019; Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020; WWF, 2020).
While suggested solutions abound (Díaz et al., 2019), the current scale of their implementation does not match the relentless progression of biodiversity loss (Cumming et al., 2006) and other existential threats tied to the continuous expansion of the human enterprise (Rees, 2020).
Time delays between ecological deterioration and socio-economic penalties, as with climate disruption for example (IPCC, 2014), impede recognition of the magnitude of the challenge and timely counteraction needed.
In addition, disciplinary specialization and insularity encourage unfamiliarity with the complex adaptive systems (Levin, 1999) in which problems and their potential solutions are embedded (Selby, 2006; Brand and Karvonen, 2007).
Widespread ignorance of human behavior (Van Bavel et al., 2020) and the incremental nature of socio-political processes that plan and implement solutions further delay effective action (Shanley and López, 2009; King, 2016).
We summarize the state of the natural world in stark form here to help clarify the gravity of the human predicament. We also outline likely future trends in biodiversity decline (Díaz et al., 2019), climate disruption (Ripple et al., 2020), and human consumption and population growth to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come.
Finally, we discuss the ineffectiveness of current and planned actions that are attempting to address the ominous erosion of Earth's life-support system. Ours is not a call to surrender—we aim to provide leaders with a realistic “cold shower” of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future.
Jonathan Rowson on the challenge to our being presented by climate change
And finally embedded below, from a great friend of A/UK, the Perspectiva director Jonathan Rowson does a spontaneous video review of Riders on the Storm: the Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being, by Alastair Macintosh. Jonathan is a considerable thinker about climate in his own right - and this is a fascinating encounter of minds.