Breezy Point, New York, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy 2012. The massive storm surge caused billions of damage in New York and New Jersey. Picture: NOAA
Breezy Point, New York, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy 2012. The massive storm surge caused billions of damage in New York and New Jersey. Picture: NOAA
Halting climate change is not impossible, as the new report shows. Technology is a key ingredient that offers us many possibilities; however, naïve faith in technology has also lulled us into complacency and blinded us to the social, political, and economic actions we need to take if we want to kick our carbon habit.
The main reason for rising temperatures is our use of coal, oil and gas as cheap energy sources and the increasing dependency of our systems on abundant amounts of energy. Climate policy has focused on technological development and promotion of cleaner alternatives. We have achieved initial success in the deployment of solar and wind power and electric vehicles, but at the same time allowed energy use to grow. We cannot achieve zero carbon emissions by building new runways and high ways, by continuing urban sprawl and economic growth by the ever-growing consumption of cheap, throw-away junk. We need entirely new models of economic development, social and individual well-being that are fundamentally different from the ones we have pursued in the 20th We must rid ourselves off our dependency on cheap, abundant fuels. Grass-roots groups, urbanists, scientists, engineers, have taken promising initiatives to limit our footprint on this planet, and we cannot allow these to remain a side-show.
While we increasingly observe the consequences of climate change in rising temperatures, sea levels, and severity of storms, floods, and droughts, climate change remains a phenomenon that is primarily understood through science. Scientists observe and model solar radiation, atmosphere, oceans, the biosphere; they observe and quantify the impacts; and they model energy transformations and response strategies. The dominance of scientists in the public debate coincides with a weakness of social movements devising climate solutions and experimenting with the social, political, and economic change that scientists increasingly agree is essential for halting carbon emissions. I do not know whether this weakness of social movements is a consequence of the technical arguments that dominate climate policy debates and disempowers the common citizen, but it prevents the emergence of a politics of climate solutions. Even advocacy groups and think-tanks present themselves as quasi-scientific outfits and aim to gain influence based on the technical and economic merit of their proposals rather than building a ground-swell of support for those solutions.
Possibly because of this lack of a ground-swell of political support for climate action, our governments have been unable to mount the scale of response required. This scale is comparable to the response of governments to the global 2007/08 financial crisis, the response of the US government to the 9/11 terror attacks, or the Chinese government’s one-belt one-road initiative. While the scale is not unprecedented or insurmountable, the speed is slower, the impact less immediate, and a longer-term commitment is required. The threat is not quite as imminent and visible as the collapse of the world trade towers or Bear-Stearns. Several world leaders have shown dedication to the climate cause and have managed to move the needle appreciably, but their actions have often been undone by a shift of priorities or by vicious campaigns of fossil-fuel interests. The weakening of government through globalization, of public debate through social media, of civil society through fragmentation, strife, and the conscious sowing of discord by moneyed and hostile interests, the world’s march on the road to unfreedom, have seriously compromised our ability to mobilize the resources required. We will need to reconstitute our civil societies and political institutions to withstand the rougher conditions of the 21st century, not only to reduce emissions but also to protect ourselves from disease, tyrants, and the destructive consequences of global warming.
When I started my scientific career in the 1990s, one could still make the argument that we did not fully understand the climate consequences of choices we needed to make, that low-carbon technologies were not mature and required further development, that better science and engineering was required. Today, we exactly know what to do, as the 1.5°report reiterates, but our actions remain inadequate. It is time to change that.
