Good news, everyone! If we mandate solutions and spend the time and money, we might not kill ourselves off!
snippets:
Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated. Did we really need another warning of the dire consequences of climate change in this country? The answer, legally, was yes: Congress mandates that the National Climate Assessment be updated every four years or so.
Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse.
And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this.
The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger any more. We’re showing the way to safety.
It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me.
Honestly I am more and more thinking that we are at about peak carbon right now. A lot of the technologies we need to decarbonize our energy system are available and deployed at scale and cheaply. The USA and the EU both have falling emissions and the third of the three really large economies China is likely to have them as well next year or so. Many poor countries are deploying a lot of renewables right now, which means their emissions are not growing or only very slowly. At the same time the global population is not growing as fast anymore. We also had two huge shocks to the energy system recently. The first one was covid causing extremely low prices even going negative. The other one was Russias and the Europes energy war caused by Russias invasion of Ukraine. That created high prices, not just in Europe but across the world.
The thing is that the fossil fuel industry is not dumb. They know what is going on and they are fighting hard to stop it or at least slow it down. The good part is once we are over the top, the power of the fossil fuel industry starts to decline. Even if it is just locally, that helps a lot too. So right now the most important battles are fought in the fight against fossil fuels. However this is likely to still last decades.