Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

We’re still losing the fight against climate change

OPEC may not be the most disinterested source, but their projections are nonetheless disheartening:

In a forecast that will dismay environmentalists – and which questions the theory that oil company reserves will become “stranded assets” – Opec’s annual report significantly revised production estimates upwards. Most of the production increase will come from countries outside Opec, led by explosive growth from frackers in the United States, with China and India leading the increase in demand.

Opec expects global oil demand to reach nearly 112m barrels per day by 2040, driven by transportation and petrochemicals. That is up from almost 100m today and higher than last year’s projection.

Coal will continue to be be burned in record amounts, despite concerns about its impact on climate change. Opec estimates that coal usage in the OECD countries will plummet by a third by 2040, but it will increase by 20% in developing countries to reach five times the volumes burned in the west.

The world’s airlines will be the single fastest growing user of oil, increasing consumption by 2.2% a year on average, to 2040. However, the largest absolute growth is expected to come from road transport.

The number of vehicles on roads across the world are expected to leap from 1.1bn now to around 2.4bn in 2040. In its central scenario, Opec expects just 320m of those to be electric, a number that climbs to 720m in a scenario where battery-powered cars take off rapidly.

In short, knowing what a colossal threat climate change poses, and that the critical behaviour for averting the worst is decreasing fossil fuel use, the world seems set to keep burning heedlessly along, damn the consequences.

Related:

saganangst — fear of nuclear war, and particularly nuclear winter

We live under constant threat of sudden destruction via nuclear war. It wouldn’t take that many warheads falling on major cities to darken the atmosphere — making the consequences of even a regional exchange (or the payload of a single ‘boomer’ sub) global, and potentially a threat to the integrity of human civilization. The control systems carry a frightening risk of malfunction, particularly in a crisis when nuclear-armed forces may be out of communication with higher level command and at immediate risk of nuclear attack.

The only safe option is to disarm as a global community — spare everyone the costs of the nuclear arms complex, while greatly diminishing the total severity of potential wars.

Open thread: shadow solutions to climate change

In the absence of real political solutions to climate change, Stephen Gardiner argues that: “we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.”

One example from today: Build walls on seafloor to stop glaciers melting, scientists say

Another example was back when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested we could adapt to climate change by altering our physiology.

American decline on The Agenda

Steve Paikin’s show on TVO is a video equivalent to CBC’s The Current, in that they both tackle matters of going political importance, tend to get into the substantive matters involved, and feature hosts that press guests to go beyond sound bites.

The recent segment with author Chris Hedges on American decline – “The Collapse of the American Empire?” – is a good use for half an hour:

They also had a good recent segment on Ontario’s Ford government undoing carbon pricing and much of the pro-climate legacy of the Liberal Wynne government: The Cost of Ford’s Energy Shake-up. He tries to press the anti-carbon pricing panellist to go beyond criticism and offer solutions, but the other panelists are pretty effective in arguing that right wing critics are privately content to do nothing about climate change (the representative spouts some nonsense about how we can just adapt, regardless of the severity).

Open thread: climate justice

Both in the literature on fossil fuel divestment and when speaking with divestment activists the concept or worldview of “climate justice” is prominent. A good example is Jessica Grady-Benson and Brinda Sarathy’s paper “Fossil fuel divestment in US higher education: student-led organising for climate justice“. They contend that climate change is increasingly seen as a social justice issue.

As I understand it, the key features of the “climate justice” perspective are the view that climate change is not a distinguishable issue that can be isolated from others like unjust power differentials, poverty, or racism. That analysis helps produce a program of action that emphasizes intersectionality: the efforts of those in one justice-based struggle to assist those involved in others, even if the immediate connection between say, maternal health in low-income countries and environmental policy in European municipalities or conditions in American prisons, is obscure. The conceptual motivation connects to both networking and political pragmatism, through the hope that social movements can be mutually reinforcing and therefore that alliances between climate change activists and those advocating for racial or economic justice will help everyone achieve their policy goals.

This climate justice terminology is comparatively new. In a post back in 2007 I used the term to refer to the question of the fair international distribution of burdens in addressing climate change: a perspective much more along the lines of institutionalist liberal environmentalism which basically accepts the existing order of the world and seeks to make the institutions that already hold power change their behaviour for the sake of their collective longer-term interests.

The liberal environmentalist account sees problems like climate change as techinical, scientific, and with the potential to be solved within existing institutions. Climate change is an unfortunate accidental product of fossil fuel energy that doesn’t automatically carry any moral lessons beyond that. British Comedian David Mitchell has a ‘soapbox’ talk describing this view succinctly.

One relevant consideration concerns motivation. Even if I accept it intellectually, Mitchell’s portrayal of climate change as an accident that nonetheless obligates a response may lack the emotional heft needed to actually produce a change in behaviour. Another key issue is the need to not only adopt decarbonization policies but to maintain them for long enough (decades) to avoid the worst possible climate change effects. Arguably, this requires a political consensus that extends beyond the left or progressives and, in fact, a political program that demands agreement on every progressive cause risks being alienating and ineffectual rather than a path to solidarity and success.

All these questions are intensely contested, and certainly cannot be resolved in a blog post or subsequent comments. On the one hand, the case that climate change is interwoven with other issues of injustice is highly convincing; it’s because some people are privileged over others that it’s so easy to allow unfettered fossil fuel use for the benefits it provides to the privileged while ignoring the harms it imposes on the marginalized, non-human nature, and future generations. It’s also plausible that the climate change movement needs to forge and maintain strategic alliances to succeed. In the end, we can’t know in advance what will work because we have never faced a problem like this before. We may never have the opportunity to do so again, since a sufficiently bad failure on climate change carries the risk of making all other human political projects moot. As such it seems obligatory to me to open up and maintain multiple paths to success, including those that require reaching beyond comfortable networks of people who broadly agree and solutions that consist of behaviours that we largely see as desirable anyhow. Stopping catastrophic climate change will mean giving up a lot, not only in terms of personal comforts and indulgences, but also in terms of comfortable political associations and worldviews.

Conspiracy theories among climate change activists

Climate change activists often (plausibly) assert that “the science is settled” and present themselves as the informed contrast to people whose lack of scientific understanding or manipulation by fossil fuel actors has left them with the false belief that climate change isn’t happening.

At Toronto’s smallish Rise for Climate march on Saturday, I saw at least four people who were trying to convince people that chemtrails from aircraft are actually secret nefarious geoengineering by governments. Along with a large banner with pictures of aircraft chemtrails and frightening claims, they were distributing a colour handout:

It’s a bizarre document. It claims that chemtrails (themselves a conspiracy theory that has been around for many years) are a secret “form of climate change mitigation” via solar radiation management (SRM). It also claims, however, that “SRM aerosol cloud canopies trap more heat than is deflected by SRM programs”, so the supposed chemtrail program actually makes climate change worse. It also claims that along with the chemtrails “associated microwave transmission atmospheric manipulation” is “decimating the ozone layer”. It’s a fever dream re-interpretation of contemporary environmental politics, marrying an old conspiracy theory with new concerns about the real potential technology of geoengineering by solar radiation management. They throw in that the geoengineering chemtrails cause autism, along with allergies and dementia, and claim that the program “was fully deployed immediately after WWII”.

It’s crazy from top to bottom, from the claim that the secret program is somehow “illegal” to the contradictory claims that the program is “officially denied” but also that there are “countless official documents which confirm” it. It’s also a bit ironic given how self-conscious the public conversation about geoengineering has been, including about whether any sort of testing could produce unwanted side-effects and how any geoengineering ought to be governed.

When you lose trust in formal sources of information like governments and scientific bodies, it becomes impossible to have an informed position on climate change. The internet is full of nonsense, as everyone expects, and the environmentalist movement includes many who are highly credulous when it comes to claims that they are inclined to believe, whether those are about health and nutrition or about government conspiracies.

India and coal

One frequent talking point from people who see no problem with continuing to enlarge the bitumen sands is that action by countries like Canada is pointless as long as larger places like India and China continue to build large amounts of coal capacity.

The Economist recently reported (in an issue with a cover story about how “the world is losing the war against climate change“):

Although coal is horribly filthy, India is utterly dependent on it. It generates more than three-quarters of the country’s electricity. Mining it and turning it into power accounts for a tenth of India’s industrial production. It provides jobs as well as power. Coal India, a state-owned coal miner that is the world’s largest, employs, at last count, 370,000 people, and there are up to 500,000 working in the coal industry at large. Far from reining in production, Coal India plans to increase it, from 560m tonnes in 2017 to 1bn tonnes by 2020. The government’s target for national production is 1.3bn-1.9bn tonnes by 2030.

…

Coal’s life will be made harder by increased competition from cheap solar and wind. Because of that, Mr Subramanian suggests that Mr Modi, his solar-evangelist boss, should slow down his roll out of renewable energy. “In my ideal world India should do a bit less renewable and a bit more coal for the next 10-15 years,” Mr Subramanian said in May. Some dismiss his comments as deliberately provocative. Yet he has rubbed salt into the wounds of environmentalists by describing efforts to wean energy-poor countries such as India off fossil fuels as “carbon imperialism”.

Coal’s staying power may be reinforced by India’s sense of immunity from international pressure to clean up its act. India resists the idea that it cannot put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere simply because the rich world, which produced much more per head during its own development, has used up all the available “carbon space”. In fact, the government continues to support coal projects to keep them afloat. A report by the Centre for Financial Accountability, a think-tank focused on India, says that coal projects in India received almost three times as much support as renewable-energy projects in 2017, mostly from government-owned banks.

Dealing with climate change is only possible on the basis of broad and effective international cooperation. States like India which are still building huge amounts of new energy infrastructure have the capacity to make choices that will make avoiding catastrophic climate change impossible. Persuading them to make different choices requires many things, including financial and technical assistance, but critically it requires that countries like Canada be willing to move first and accept what seems like an economic sacrifice for the sake of a better future for everyone. I say “seems” like a sacrifice because in a world with extreme climate change the cash Canada is banking through continued fossil fuel development is liable to be meaningless.

Everyone who has to give something up or adjust their lifestyle about decarbonization seems to raise some kind of ‘fairness’ argument: why should I give up what I feel I deserve? Why should I act when others aren’t doing so? Countries like India where extreme poverty remains widespread have a genuine and convincing case that they should not have to sacrifice important human welfare developments for the sake of global decarbonization. Still, coal is so awful once you add up the health, environment, and climate costs that even the poorest places with the worst problems should not still be deploying it. For Canada and other rich states to credibly encourage that requires both far more aggressive domestic action to stop fossil fuel development and the determination to provide sufficient technical and financial assistance to help states like India decarbonize quickly enough to help us all avoid global catastrophe.

Australia’s climate change vulnerability and inaction

You would think a country where the entire state of New South Wales, responsible for a quarter of their agricultural output, is currently in drought and where water scarcity threatens their long-term viability as a country wouldn’t be such a climate change villain. Their wildfires keep worsening and their most important river is drying up. Alas, as with Canada’s oil-selling obsession, Australia seems more concerned about selling as much coal as possible to China as with maintaining a habitable continent.

Even without factoring in such exports, their emissions of greenhouse gas pollution have been steadily rising since 2013 after a period of general decline going back to 2005. Perhaps that’s unsurprising as they repealed their carbon tax in 2014.

This ties into a frightening possibility: as the most vulnerable rich countries are hit harder and harder by climate change they may not draw the lesson that international cooperation is necessary, retreating instead into self-defeating selfishness.

Explaining climate inaction

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a long and controversial article by Nathaniel Rich which purports to explain why, despite decades of strong scientific consensus about the seriousness of climate change and the action needed to keep it under control, we’re still on track for catastrophic warming: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

The account is disputed, among others by Naomi Klein who questions the idea that ‘human nature’ is to blame: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.

The Economist‘s cover story has a similar theme: The world is losing the war against climate change. I have written before about how inconsistent their coverage is and, in particular, how they have never reconciled their acceptance of the need to confront climate change with the unfaltering priority they accord to continued economic growth.

“Transition” isn’t adequate for what climate change will mean