This is How We Fail

In 2015, almost all countries signed the Paris Agreement, promising to limit their greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions so that global temperature increases since pre-industrial times will be held to “well below 2℃” and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃. In my opinion, we’ve irrevocably missed the 1.5℃ goal; the average temperature increase in 2023 was 1.49℃. The average temperature increase briefly exceeded 2.0℃ last year

We’re failing to achieve the Paris-Agreement goals. Now, when we should be decreasing GHG emissions, on a trajectory toward substantially reducing them by 2030 and eliminating them entirely by 2050, they continue to increase.

The policy we need most mandates a phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050. But we couldn’t even get that phrase into the final COP28 report, due to vetos from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries. Instead, we’re motoring along, pretty much business as usual. GHG emissions from the U.S. declined 3% in 2023, but the U.S. set a new record in 2023 for exporting oil and liquified natural gas, which will cause the same harms when it is burned elsewhere that it would cause if was burned in the U.S.

This is what failure looks like. Scientific reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) acknowledge now that we won’t be able to hold the global temperature increase to 2.0℃ without using carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The machines that have been developed to do this are very expensive, costing much more than it would cost to avoid emitting the carbon dioxide in the first place and they are unproven at anything like the scale that would be required to help with the problem. Relying on CCS is adding a fudge factor to the model calculations to make them balance out eventually to net zero. Our need for this unrealistic fudge factor shows that our efforts to curb climate change are failing.

Scientists have also been saying, in response to the 2023 temperature excesses, that the climate models they have been using to estimate future impacts are underestimating those impacts. As a result, we may be much closer to some of the important tipping points than we thought.

The Economics are Worse than We Thought

A recent economic study, published last week in Nature, finds that the world economy is already committed to a permanent income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years (only 11% in the U.S. and Europe, but higher elsewhere). It’s too late to avoid this economic hit. According to the study, damages by the year 2050 will be similar whether or not we drastically reduce our emissions before then. (Damages by the end of the century depend heavily on emissions reductions we make now, and those damages could go as high as 60% of GDP.) The 19% committed damages greatly exceed the mitigation costs of keeping the average temperature increase to 2℃.

My book Earthling discussed the economics of climate mitigation and damages, concluding that the mitigation cost to keep the increase to 2℃ would be about 2% of global GDP, and that damages resulting from a 6℃ would be 10% of GDP. The Nature-article forecast is much worse than this, and thus very alarming. A fairly crude way to appreciate a GDP decline of 19% is to expect that the income of everyone in the world will be reduced by 19%. Of course, the damages won’t be distributed so evenly. Corporations that are good at managing their risks will avoid most of the damages, and foist of their share on others.

Let’s Be Optimistic Anyway

A recent article in the New York Times, titled “Climate Doom is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism Is In,” says that the new fashion among climate activists is to be optimistic, because pessimism doesn’t lead to effective climate action. The world can be likened to a cancer patient. For climate change, as for severe forms of cancer, pessimism is more realistic than optimism. But optimism is more likely to lead to a better outcome.

I agree we should try to be optimistic, though it may be difficult. We should all do what we can to help with the problem. It will never be “too late to do anything,” because the problem will keep getting worse until we stop burning fossil fuels. Then we’ll have to live with the effects of a hotter world for hundreds of years.

Given that the current dire situation is not motivating much political action to save the climate, I expect that it will take a climate disaster of some sort to focus public attention on the issue, like the heatwave that kills 20 million people at the start of Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-term sci-fi novel, The Ministry for the Future. I’d like to say that I’m optimistic such a wake-up call will come soon, but I can’t wish for a disaster.