By Derrick Crowe
December 9, 2018
We need to face some facts about climate change and global warming. Right now there is zero evidence that we are headed for anything but the worst of the climate change emissions pathways because our governments are totally failing us. If we continue to tolerate that, civilization is over.
Four days ago, The Washington Post reported that global carbon emissions “reached a record high in 2018.”
Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes appear to have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent.
The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by a nearly 5 percent growth of emissions in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while those of the European Union declined by just under 1 percent.
If we continue on this road, we are headed to warming in about 80 years at the latest that climate experts have warned is “incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” That’s a very nice way of saying that civilization will rip itself to pieces as temperatures rise 4°C and above in excess of pre-industrial temperatures.
This catastrophe is not even the worst case scenario, even though it is described that way by the IPCC. In fact, as of last year, this is the default. It’s the path we were already on. Here’s a fun tidbit: the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote the report cited by The Washington Post. Here’s what the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, had to say back in 2015:
“The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.”
And just to be super clear: Birol was referring to the urgent need to stop building fossil fuel infrastructure. Her warning was simple: if we don’t stop building new fossil fuel projects by 2017, the extant infrastructure operating on its projected lifespan would exceed the carbon emission budget for keeping global temperatures from increasing by more than 2°C. We did not do that. In fact, we expanded our fossil fuel infrastructure dramatically. IEA’s reports at the end of 2017 showed that the “U.S. is set to enjoy the biggest increase in oil and gas production the world has ever seen.” They go on to say:
“U.S. crude oil production will rise from an average of 9.2 million barrels a day this year to 9.9 million barrels a day in 2018, a new all-time high beating a record set in 1970.
“The IEA said the U.S. will account for 80% of the increase in global oil supply between now and 2025, as shale producers find ever more ways to pump oil profitably even at lower prices. By the late 2020s, the U.S. will become a net exporter of oil for the first time since the 1950s.”
You might be tempted to say, “But, what about the decline of coal?” Alas, no soup for you. In the most recent IEA report, we learn that “higher oil and gas use more than offset declining coal consumption.”
The hard truth is that absent an urgent, deep investment that aims to retire the existing fossil fuel infrastructure ahead of its expected “natural” retirement life cycle, and/or a mind-shatteringly expensive carbon sequestration effort, we are going to breach 2°C temperature increases. Two-degree-plus is what Dr. James Hansen calls a “recipe for disaster” that runs the risk of multi-meter-sea-level rise within 40-50 years. You think we’re having a political crisis over the so-called “migrant caravan”? Wait until hundreds of millions of people are on the move, all at once. That’s what Hansen means when he says, “the planet could become ungovernable.” To be extremely blunt, the future is now fucked unless we unfuck it.
We are getting the lightest of previews right now of that future: California is on fire, of course, but The Lancet also reports that last year alone, global civilization lost 153 billion hours of work to extreme heat.
That preview is probably about to get a lot more extreme. We lost those work hours during a non-El-Niño year. Forecasts project that next year, El Niño will return, possibly bringing with it the hottest year on record. The last El Niño event supercharged global warming for three years straight, starting in 2014, smashing global temperature records and decimating the global sea ice area–which still hasn’t recovered. It’s not out of the realm of reasonableness to say that if we get unlucky in the next few years and the wrong weather pattern moves into the Arctic, a wafer-thin ice cap could be pulverized by wave action, and hello ice-free days at the North Pole.
We are in a serious crisis that is being buried under that avalanche of trash flowing out of the White House. But we are completely out of time to get deadly serious about yanking global emissions down.
What I’m saying is, you need to get behind the Green New Deal and put your shoulder into it. We are the only ones left to stand between the future in the fire. We better act like it.