The human imperative of stabilizing global climate change at 1.5°C
science.sciencemag.org
science.sciencemag.org
I'm not sure that we are hoping for the right category of solution. All countries and people in the world uniting and making sacrifices... has this ever happened for anything ever? I am hoping there are examples, I just can't think of any. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I just can't see the 'Unified Earth' solution happening, at least not because everyone just agrees to be that way.
Maybe the right analogy is something like the internet. If you were concerned about tyranny and oppression of free speech in the 1930s, it is doubtful you would ever conceive that the internet could be one 'solution' to that problem. It isn't a perfect or complete solution, and it actually makes the problem worse in some ways, but nevertheless, on that particular issue, the internet has changed the landscape completely. Maybe this category of solution is the best we can hope for. The trouble is that it is very hard to conceive of how it will look or what we should do.
But my money is on nothing getting done, and emissions continuing to rise exponentially for the next 20 years at least. That means probably 6 degrees or more of warming.
I will fight to try to stop that from happening.. but that’s where we’re at.
The real problem is that the worlds fossil fuel deposits and infrastructure represents at least 6 trillion dollars worth of someone’s private property, and they will fight to the end to make sure that that investment pays out. That means using all the worlds fossil fuel deposits, no matter the cost to society.
I agree that achieving those goals, even at the envisioned costs, would be desirable. But the short term pain of much of the necessary measures would be too great to make it politically infeasible. And any "defector" of significant size (China? Russia? US?) would make it even more difficult, politically.
The developing nations will feel a lot of the pressure to cut down on their growing emissions. Which is unfair and would also result in more Human suffering, short and midterm.
I'm hoping for somebody to prove me wrong!
India, Nigeria and Pakistan likely should burn more fossil fuels, as those three countries represent a large chunk of the world's desperately poor - with 1.33 Billion, 200 million and 200 million people respectively. It is hard to argue climate change is the biggest issue when your country has most of the world's people living in abject poverty.
Anyway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... shows that India uses 1.7 metric tonnes per capita, Pakistan 0.9 and Nigeria 0.5. China uses 7.5, so that's about break even for a booming economy. Lets be conservative and say all three countries double their carbon output, and that's an extra 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon in India, and an extra half a billion-ish tonnes for the other two. Lets call it 3 billion extra tonnes of carbon as a nice round number.
It is hard to see where the reductions will come from to cover just that increase. The EU is unlikely to drop much if any, and even The USA, currently at 16.5 per capita with 330 million people, would need to drop 10 tonnes per capita just to break even with India, Pakistan And Nigeria's increases. Dropping over 50% of carbon usage is a huge ask.
I think that the other two solutions need to be proritised, and fast.
We could hope that they have another incentive to use a lower percentage of fossil fuels: It's going to become more expensive over the next decades, not only to buy them, but also to bear the health problems that come with that.
These countries already have a high population density. If they want to meet their demands mostly through fossil fuel, they themselves will be very unhappy long before the climate gets any worse.
Will will be able to do anything at that point is not certain.
And who is going to pay for those infrastructure? Are the rich countries paying for them to be build in the poorer countries?
Invasions for the sake of conquering resources is increasingly rare. And illegal under international war (as much as that's worth). That's why the invasion of Crimea was such a big thing, these kind of things don't happen anymore. Also Ukraine miscalculated the risk of Russia taking Crimea (or was too paralyzed to prevent it) and Putin probably miscalculated the backlash.
On a smaller scale it will be hard to tell why certain militias try to rule/conquer certain regions. Lack of resources may contribute, or not.
I have a suspicion that none of them would want to be the "guilty" party that kept polluting.
Right now, of the three, the US is still the biggest per-capita polluter by far (about 2x more than China).
China is already adopting greener policies, so there is a good chance it will never overtake the US on that metric.
I do think that the US (or Russia, who aren't too far behind them) will eventually follow either China, or one of the European countries leading by example.
Let me preempt something here: I posted a similar comment some time ago, and the response to that was "but total CO2!" - which is a demonstrably absurd way to measure a countries progress on that front. Let's not get into that again.
Russia really doesn't care, they see AGW as unlocking the potential of their great north and screwing their geopolitical rivals.
China is kinda adopting "greener politices" in the sense that their mix strongly includes nukes and renewables. That's in no small part because they can't ramp up production fast enough even firing on all cylinders. And they are much more threatened by AGW: the North China Plain in particular is extremely low lying, and both a major population center and a bread basket. The Yangtze delta has the same issue, Hefei (some 400km inland) is only 37m above sea level. Now the seas are not planned to rise that high (probably), but sea level rise means more saltwater infiltration into arable soil, and more climactic issues reaching further inland.
Plus much of China is dependent on himalayan glaciers for its water.
In my understanding China doesn't care about the climate as much as about the air their people have to breath. Their environmental policies seem to be targeted exclusively at public health issues, and then only the more serious ones.
The bigger, necessary solutions are not implemented anywhere, yet. Those countries who do not participate will leap ahead in industrial development, while those who do may not be able to slow climate change enough.
Public health issues like air pollution. That might be the reason they're investing so heavily in renewables, but it doesn't change the fact that they are. The percentage of renewable energy in China has steadily increased over the years. They are now at 25% vs just 11% in the US.
I'd have to look up their nuclear numbers though.
China has only very little fossil fuel available, and coal tends to be labor intensive (another thing they are running out of) and very dirty locally. So to meet their energy demands and be less dependent on the oil market, they probably should invest in renewable sources. And it doesn't hurt that they can build up the production capacity for such sources through public investment.
They are also building lots of nuclear plants. Which is a lot easier when citizens generally don't feel like objecting much.
Basically, significant parts of the world leadership are increasingly tyrannical, leaning fascist and mostly all from the boomer generation.
Until the boomers, who don't care because they will be dead, are out of power, this won't change.
I would hope it will be similar in the UK. Their current political system needs to be shaken up to produce a new, larger group of leaders in a more competitive environment. Or at least more competitive around policy specifically. However, this "shaking up" is really hard without breaking a lot.