Are we all going to die?
I mean, not right away. A dozen years, give or take, before things go off the rails and we start to have to really worry about survival in a way we haven鈥檛 before.
According to a new UN report on climate change, we have as little as 12 years to slash global emissions by 45 per cent, which should head off the worst of a further 1.5 degrees Celsius in global warming.
If you don鈥檛 think human caused global warming is real, well, I really don鈥檛 care what you think. You鈥檙e not helping. Go away.
For the rest of us, this is alarming. Can we slash global carbon emissions by almost half in a little more than a decade?
Yes. It鈥檚 physically possible.
Is it politically possible?
I don鈥檛 know. I fear it isn鈥檛, and that we鈥檒l spend the next decade fiddling while Rome burns (possibly literally) and then the decade after that assigning blame.
And then things will get worse. Most of us who are middle-aged and older will only see the early stages of how bad things could get. Massive droughts. melting permafrost and polar ice caps. A significant rise in sea levels (goodbye, Florida, Bangladesh, and coastal communities everywhere in between). Mass extinctions. Crop failures. Refugee crises, one after another.
To avert this scenario, we have to change our society top to bottom. We have to convert a worldwide fleet of billions of cars, trucks, and buses to electric power as fast as possible. We have to switch generation from coal and oil to renewables such as solar. We have to protect forests. We will have to tax the heck out of carbon emissions, which will make travel and trade much more expensive. And governments would have to invest in expensive, and largely experimental, technologies to extract carbon from the atmosphere.
I don鈥檛 think we鈥檒l do it. I don鈥檛 think national governments will be able to see past their self-interests, I don鈥檛 think voters will pick the survival of their children over a nice truck and cheap gas. I think we鈥檙e doomed.
I hope I鈥檓 wrong. I鈥檇 like to be proven wrong. But what is there in human history that suggests we鈥檒l get out of this one okay?
