More of a chasm than a gap
Still going in the wrong direction.
Greenhouse gas emissions have steadily risen for the last decade despite the current and future threat posed by climate change, according to a new United Nations report.
The annual report compares how clean the world’s economies are to how clean they need to be in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change — a disparity known as the “emissions gap.”
However, this year’s report describes more of a chasm than a gap. Global emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses have continued to steadily increase over the last decade. In 2018, the report notes that global fossil fuel CO2 emissions from electricity generation and industry grew by a mammoth 2%.
It’s the tragedy of the commons coupled with the tragedy of that’s tomorrow and we’ll just keep doing what’s more comfortable for today.
“There is no sign of [greenhouse gas] emissions peaking in the next few years,” the authors write. Every year that emissions continue to increase, “means that deeper and faster cuts will be required” in order to keep the Earth from warming more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The Earth is already more than 1 degree warmer than it was before industrialization, and that is driving more frequent and severe storms, droughts, heat waves and other extreme weather. According to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, if global emissions fail to fall in the coming decade, it will slow economic growth and cause serious damage to infrastructure and property in the United States.
But that’s then. This is now. We’re not good at taking trouble now for the sake of then.
Of course most of what politicians try to pass off as climate “solutions” has more to do with creative accounting than actually reducing the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere. But even the most ambitious climate policies being considered anywhere in the industrial world are more or less equivalent to shooting You in the head 11 times instead of 12, throwing You from the 79th rather than the 80th floor of the Empire State Building, feeding You 12 rather than 13 times the lethal dose of arsenic etc. You’re pretty much equally screwed either way, which is what we’ll all be unless a sufficient number of people can be mobilized to go out there and physically prevent our elected leaders from doing what they are determined to do at any cost and cannot be talked out of doing in any way.