Forget the Polar Bears -- The Climate Crisis Is About All of Us

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted December 3, 2008.

A paper by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research shows that if we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance of preventing more than 2 degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and decline by between 6 and 8 percent per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to a complete decarbonization of the global economy soon after 2050. Even this program would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of preventing 2 degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by over 8 percent a year.

Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission reductions greater than 1 percent have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval." When the Soviet Union collapsed, they fell by some 5 percent a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed -- an 80 percent cut by 2050 -- means reducing emissions by an average of 2 percent a year. This program, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least 4 or 5 degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilization across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the U.S. federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on World War II, when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world's energy infrastructure involves "an enormous front-load of fossil fuels," which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people "to make short-term, radical sacrifices," cutting our energy consumption by 50 percent, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10 percent annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10 percent annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system -- even an absolute monarchy -- could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk's proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological solution I favor inhabits the distant margins of possibility.

Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No, we can't.

See more stories tagged with: global warming, climate change

George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

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