On Climate, Speed is Everything
The most important criteria for climate strategies now is how fast they can scale.
(This is a work in progress. For the first part, start here.)
We live in a world of steepening problems.
We face a host of problems that get increasingly worse, and at faster rates, the longer we shirk the responsibility of action.
It is climate’s steepening aspect that makes early emissions cuts matter more than later cuts.
Climate action is not a future problem, it’s a crisis of the immediate present. Much of the warming we cause will continue to fissure the future for millennia, but how much warming we get will be decided today.
To understand why, imagine saving for retirement.
If a person wants to retire with an annual income, they need to save and invest. Assuming that person has a stable career, with no wild swings of fortune, the best way to save up that money is to start saving while in their early 20s. If he or she waits another decade, the amount they need to save each month will be a fair amount more than it would have been — wait until they’re fifty, and they now must set aside huge amounts each year to get on the same track. Delay too long, and they’ll find themselves retired, with nothing in the bank.
Carbon budgets are no different. The Earth is warmed by the total concentration of greenhouse gasses in atmosphere, so if we’d started cutting CO2 earlier, we could have reduced emissions more gradually and still kept within the limits. If we delay now, we’ll have to cut even faster, and for decades we’ve done little but delay.
Had we begun cutting global emissions in 1970, for example — during the first wave of widespread concern about climate change — climate action would have been a completely different challenge than it has since became. A very rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me we could have cut our emissions by something roughly like 1/10 a decade and still stayed well within the carbon budget for 2 degrees — in fact, we could perhaps have still been using a few fossil fuels for special purposes well into the 22nd century — even while raising humanity out of poverty. [I’ll go figure out the actual numbers at some point here, but I think these are within the right notional ballpark.]
Ten percent a decade sounds like a lot, but the kinds of actions that give you ten percent a decade can be steady, gradual and incremental.
The early 1970s saw a burst of foresighted efforts: developing clean energy; pushing fuel mileage standards for cars, controlling suburban sprawl and promoting transit; insulating buildings; protecting forests; and addressing demographic issues by supporting family planning and sustainable human development. Had the world continued those actions, we would have found ourselves more or less on the right curve. Add in the sort of small-is-beautiful life changes that began to find acceptance then (vegetarian diets, bicycle commuting, simple living) and we could have done it.
Imagine living in a world where climate change felt like a problem we had a grip on.
Reactionary politics made sure we missed that curve. The early 1980s saw a corporate-funded wave of conservative politicians undo much of the progress made, especially here in the U.S. under Reagan (one of whose first acts was to rip the solar water heaters off the White House roof). Humanity not only failed to begin reducing our ecological footprint, powerful interests pushed through policies that doubled down on polluting systems.
After the 1980s binge, though, we could have again chosen a different way. Had we begun cutting global emissions in 1990, we could still have tackled the climate crisis with confidence.
The curve would have been much harder, though, than it might have been in 1970. Again, my sketchy, back-of-the-envelope take is that we could have then cut emissions by something on the order of 1/4 per decade and kept within our CO2 budget. We wouldn’t have had the same long time-frame as 1970 would have given us, but the more rapid transition we needed could have been orderly and measured.
Twenty-five percent a decade, see, would not have been child’s play. We’d have had to dramatically reduce our coal consumption, largely through a program of efficiency and demand reduction (given the state of clean energy technology at the time, using less energy was by far the best decarbonization pathway available). Strong land use and transportation changes would have needed to have been implemented on faster timelines, and more and more fuel-inefficient cars taken off the road. We would have needed bigger changes in farming and forestry, bigger moves in sustainable development. These were all achievable policies. They could have been achieved through better design standards, well-understood incremental regulatory reforms and well-designed carbon trading or pricing systems. All these solutions were proposed at the time (I know because I was there).
Again, though, the curve was missed, most especially in the U.S.. Clinton administration efforts were blocked (through the 1994 fossil-fuel-funded GOP backlash, an election that set in motion what would eventually become the wholesale capture of the Republican Party by the Carbon Lobby). In Europe, the backlash was more about slowing progress — urging time for study and gradual change — but it was still a backlash. And, of course, the developing world — especially China — was encouraged (by the World Bank and others) to entirely discard ecological caution and focus on replicating the prosperity American and Europe had built decades before — smokestacks, tailpipes and all.
As a result, half of all human greenhouse gas emissions ever accumulated in our atmosphere were put up in the sky since 1990.
So, here we are, rushing up on the year 2020. The path now is steep as hell. To have a chance to keep global warming within something close to 2ºC, we must level off our climate emissions by 2020, and then cut our CO2 emissions in half every decade for the next three decades — while ending deforestation and soil degradation, changing animal agriculture and continuing to eliminate super-potent greenhouse chemicals like refrigerants.
The new curve we’re now on demands downright disruptive emissions cuts. When we consider the big picture, though, the action we need may actually be considerably more challenging even than this breakneck decarbonization.
That’s because our planetary crisis is not limited to climate change, and many of our other problems are (if anything) worsening even faster than climate.
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Through I’ve been writing versions for almost 30 years, I hate what I’ve come to think of as the “doom dump.” That’s the long passage enumerating our ecological woes, explaining in chapter and verse what we’re losing and how much we’re certain to lose soon, and how terrible an ecological tragedy the dirty economy has become.
Partially, I hate the doom dump because I think it is not enlightening, but dispiriting. A tale of woes and dire threat, the doom dump — a story of trauma and grimdark hopelessness; a litany of loss — does nothing, I reckon, but overwhelm us with despair. Despair is never good for us.
Nor is it helpful. It’s obvious that the minority who bristle at the call to planetary action will not be convinced by more truth, and most of the rest of us already know things are falling apart. If terror and depression were needed rituals for action, that might be one thing, but long experience shows us people are rarely (if ever) frightened into sustained, bold, innovative action.
So I’m not going to recite the doom dump here — please just trust me that things are much worse than anyone hoped they would get, and let me describe simply and unemotionally where we are now.
Our planet works as one whole system. We live within a balance of cycles, flows and interdependencies — both wild and human. Though human destruction of nature goes back millennia, we have in the last 40 years run amok, rampaging through ecosystem after ecosystem, destabilizing the climate and nutrient cycles and ocean chemistry, producing brittle human developments, using even renewable resources at a rate that has beaten down their ability to renew themselves.
Today, all the impacts of our industrial rampage are magnifying each other. We can no longer assume that staying within our carbon budget is by itself sufficient action. We must build in buffers, diversify our plans, restore ecosystems for the future we’ve set in motion, prepare ourselves for the unforeseeable.
(This planetary instability, alone, is good reason to be extremely skeptical of both negative emissions and atmospheric geoengineering — and to be fierce about achieving the emissions cuts we need through reducing pollution, not hoping to reverse climate change through some as-yet-unknown planetary scale fix.)
Fifty percent emissions reductions per decade means that climate action can no longer be orderly, gradual or even continuous with our expectations — and that’s before we factor in the need to ruggedize human civilization to withstand the massive disturbances we’ve already set in motion. Fifty percent a decade means nonlinear, disruptive change.
Fifty percent a decade means a radically different world, within the lifetimes of most people now alive — a better world, if we fight hard enough, but new and strange, with logics and patterns few of us yet fully understand.
This, to put it mildly, is not what we’re hearing. It is, nonetheless, true.
But fifty percent a decade means something more: It means that what happens next is the most important decision of all.
Remember that point about early cuts mattering most? Well, with the curve we face today, failing to get the cuts we need now — especially the first halving of our emissions in the 2020s — means we will find ourselves on a curve that is too steep to manage. It means a future of catastrophic impacts, worsening conflicts and instability — and carbon austerity. Bold action through the next decade will not see us safely into a stable future by itself, but there’s no getting to a stable future if we fail to make big moves now.
If we fail to cut our emissions in half by 2030 (or at least come close), we don’t get any more curves to try for, we only get sudden changes and dire emergencies to respond to.
The 2020s may well be the deciding moment for humanity’s future, for millennia to come.
We are about to enter the Last Decade.
That is when we are.
