Financial Times (Reino Unido) – How to rescue the global climate change agenda / Editorial
The depressing reality about climate change is that we could solve the problem, at manageable cost, but are failing to do so. This failure is due to a mixture of blindness and self-deception. The blindness comes from those, such as US president Donald Trump, who deny the reality of climate change. The self-deception comes from those who accept the reality, but only pretend to solve it. We must do better than this — and very soon. This is no longer a scientific or technological challenge, it is far more a political and social one.
The Emissions Gap Report 2018 from the UN lays out the past failure with brutal clarity. This year will most likely be the fourth warmest year on record since 1880, with the past five years the warmest ever recorded. Worse, in 2017 emissions increased once again, after three years of stagnation. We are still to turn this corner.
Furthermore, notes the report, the "nationally determined commitments" made in the context of the Paris agreement, in 2015, would be insufficient, even if implemented, to keep the increase in global average temperatures to below 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, as most experts think desirable. Instead, states the report, "current NDCs imply global warming of about 3C by 2100, with warming continuing afterwards". Moreover, the shift has to start now: if emissions do not turn down before 2030, it will be too late to stay below 2C.
The NDCs announced so far are inadequate. The climate talks that finished this month in Katowice, Poland, have not changed this in any way. That did not make the exercise worthless. Countries agreed to submit data on emissions to the UN every two years starting in 2024, along with new climate targets every five years. This will make progress (or the lack of it) more transparent. But it does not mean progress will be adequate, particularly now that the US established itself as an egregious free-rider. Yet, even without US backsliding, the commitments so far are inadequate to achieve the goals the world agreed to set for itself.
What makes this so depressing is that — as Adair Turner, chairman of the Energy Transitions Commission, recently argued — a zero-carbon economy is now both feasible and affordable. Indeed, he stresses, this "would be undoubtedly technically possible at a very small economic cost". The core of the transition would be a huge boost to the role of electricity, with a parallel shift to nuclear and, above all, renewable sources of electricity generation. Three other essential technologies will be: hydrogen power, from hydrogen produced by electrolysis; bioenergy, for aviation fuel and feedstocks for plastics; and carbon capture.
Overall, estimates this commission, the economic cost would be just 0.5 per cent of global output by 2060. Yet this transition, feasible and desirable though it is, will not happen on its own. It requires determined policy, to promote the right technologies, set the right incentives and create the right plans, notably for land use. All this will be politically difficult, not least because free-riders must be penalised: carbon-dumping will be unacceptable.
The tragedy is that while the scientists and technologists have won the argument, the climate sceptics and deniers have effectively won the policy debate: we are doing far too little, far too late. It is now essential to transform the discussion from fear of what the carbon-transition will cost to hope for the opportunities it will bring. What is needed now are people and organisations — above all, politicians — able and willing to persuade humanity that a promised land of sustainable prosperity for all is within our collective reach.
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