Crisis What Crisis?

Gareth Wyn Jones

 COP 29 has come and gone. The global community gathered in oil and gas-enriched Baku in Azerbaijan to try and agree to slow the growing pace of global warming and climate change caused by our burning the very same oil and gas (and coal).

The prospects of rapid major global cuts in emissions are minimal despite the overwhelming evidence of impending disaster. Baku produced another fudge.

In reality global air and sea temperatures are continuing to rise, maybe faster than anticipated. After 28 COPs, the atmospheric concentrations of the main Green House Gases (GHG)[CO2, CH4 and N20] are actually rising faster than even before.

Despite all the conferences and real world evidence, we are accelerating towards the precipice not slowing. The floods in Valencia, Hurricane Helene, the droughts in the Amazon and southern Africa, the fires in Canada and even the lack of water for ships to pass through the Panama canal are harbingers of that precipice.

Drastic

This year will see a mean global temperate rise of +1.5oC compared with the pre-fossil fuel period. Not the running average admittedly, but there is now no realistic prospect of the 2015 Paris Accords being achieved. Average global increases of between +2.5 and + 3oC  are probable unless improbably drastic and rapid cuts in GHGs are made in next decade.

These global means disguise the fact that temperature increases overland will be significantly higher and in some places, especially near the poles, much greater. We must expect more extreme weather. The sea ice will retreat. The glaciers and ice sheets melt, probably irreversibly.

The former threatening water supplies to major cities. The latter increasing the rate and extent of sea level rise. And now we have the orange cloud of incoming President Trump emboldening the deniers and undermining the little that has been achieved: negating the cuts and promoting GHG technology. Anyone for a gas guzzler - drill baby drill - America an energy superpower!

As I seek to explain in my book, humanity is addicted to energy and specifically to fossil fuel energy and power. The dealers supplying our present addiction and their acolytes are not only happy to oblige but will work ceaselessly in Baku and elsewhere to protect their lucrative markets. Denial has become an emblem of macho-capitalism. Global warming can be discounted and any future problem can be cured by technological fixes - carbon capture and storage and global geo-engineering.

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Zero emissions

Some, including the UK Labour government appear committed to major GHG reductions -net zero emissions by mid-century. Although they remain fixated on energy-dependent, economic growth.  As I’ve explored in Energy and Power: Our perilous Obsessions, there are strong grounds to fear this is a seductive but false prospectus.

We indeed feed off optimism. Humans need rays of hope to lighten our lives. Despair is debilitating, counterproductive. We all hope that better times will be on the horizon if not for ourselves then certainly our children and grandchildren.

This vital spark of immemorial hope has been part of our make-up for tens of thousands of years ago. However, quite recently it has been transformed into and focussed on an assumption of continuing material growth. More stuff. More and better technology, better perhaps bigger and warmer houses, bigger cars, faster travel, more exotic holidays, even longer lives.

We, the better off, want more and more. We call it ‘progress’. This progress is measured in economic growth - in consumerism, in increasing GDP. We vote for it. Politics requires that anyone seeking political office must play the game and promise more but humans overshooting several safe planetary limits, despite the major being dirt poor raises serious doubts.

Is our current version of progress realistic?

Universal cry

Faster economic growth was the Labour’s key promise to win the election as well as the abject failures of the last 14 years. Of course not just Labour in Westminster, it’s a near universal cry.

Growth is seen as a painless way to increase frayed public services and to put money in people’s pockets without upsetting the ‘City’ and the all-powerful financial markets.

The fact that equality and inequity have grown dramatically in the last 50 years especially in the Anglo-American world (to which we are umbilically attached) is accepted. Sometimes with regret but actually celebrated by others as sign of virility.

I would argue that this whole mind set is mistaken and minimises the threats that our addiction to energy as well as the dangers implicit in anthropogenic global warming.

I contend that the more energy, irrespective of the source, we can effectively couple to work and power, the more complex our society will become and the faster everything will change. Both complexity itself and the ever accelerating rate of change pose threaten to destabilise our society and undermine our humanity.

These trends will result in more regulation and are leading to the emergence of new controlling elites. These problems, I would argue, are in addition to the specific threats from GHG emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Humanity is at a crossroads and new thinking is required.

We should prioritize policies and interventions to allow people to live well on less energy so cutting both energy use and GHG emissions.

This approach has a better chance of meeting both our climate/ GHG emissions dilemma and the longer term ‘energy’ problem, on the required timescale, than building new disputed infra-structure.

Yes, we need to develop renewable energy but the lower the total demand the more easily that demand can be satisfied with less dissent.

Nuclear  power, both fission and fusion, are irrelevant in the short time we have left. We must also ask ourselves: do we have right to bequeath to future generation not only the likelihood of catastrophic climate change but also nuclear waste dangerous for thousands of years?

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For a new approach to emerge some factors must be recognised.

As has been said so many times, we must accepted our common humanity and cooperate rather than participate in the geopolitical competition of egomaniacs.

The limits of both the ‘market’ and commercialization and indeed human intervention must recognised. Current hubris reigns. Sadly. the respect for understanding, truth and even science has been undermined.

The really rich

Both anthropogenic climate change and accelerating change and growing  complexity mainly  arise from the activities of the better off and the really rich.

They, but it is to a significant extent, we must not only embrace change but must also be the source of the funds to bring about change—a very tough sell. Global inequality is gross but few of us feel rich.

The really rich have perfected systems to protect their wealth, to use political clout to their own advantage and propaganda to convince the rest of us that without their cooperation all will be consigned to penury.  But the Masters of the Universe are no match for reality.

 Many of you will have heard of King Canute who foolishly and arrogantly in my schoolboy version tried to stop the incoming tide. The real story is different.

The King sat on his throne before the incoming tide and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not to wet his feet and robes. Yet "continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person.

Then the king leapt backwards, saying: 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.'"

He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again "to the honour of God the almighty King".

Imagine an apparently true believer Donald Trump placing his ‘throne’ with the world media in attendance, on the beach near Mar-a-Lago and trying his luck.