Massive changes? Where’s the fun in that?
After a contentious approval session where scientists and government officials went through the report line by line, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now published its guidance on what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future.
First, the bad news – even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments had put in place by the end of 2020 were fully implemented, the world will still warm by 3.2C this century.
This finding has drawn the ire of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
I find it pretty annoying myself. I won’t be here for the worst of it, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it, oldies remaining cheerful because it won’t bite us in the ass, at least not as hard as it will bite people who will still be alive in 2040, 2060, 2080. The people who could do something are the ones who won’t still be here, and the people who can’t do anything are the ones who will pay the price. It’s grossly unfair.
The good news is that this latest IPCC summary shows that [keeping temperatures down] can be done, in what Mr Guterres calls a “viable and financially sound manner”.
But keeping temperatures down will require massive changes to energy production, industry, transport, our consumption patterns and the way we treat nature.
And we’re not making those changes. We’re making some small ones around the edges, but we’re not even giving up luxuries like gigantic cruise ships.
As we know, the negative effects of a climbing temperature don’t wait until the temp has peaked. They happen now. Droughts, floods, acidified oceans, etc and migration and war. Conflict over arable lend and the defense of the “homeland,” often can be traced to environmental pressures.
People tend to not like starving nor drowning, and so they seek to move to where they might not do so.
I have long been at stage the where my heart sinks into my chest at the news that somebody I know is expecting children. More recently whenever I hear that someone has died, there’s a voice in my head that whispers “another one who got out in time”
After wasted decades of inaction, and the dire state of politics in the U.S., making the necessary changes here would cause mass rioting if not a revolution.
Bruce:
‘Twas ever thus, I’m afraid. Most of us are a mixture of radical and conservative, wanting change in some domains of life but not others. ‘Conservatives’ want to keep the status quo mostly intact, while radicals want to change far more of it.
But whether we like it or not, we have all inherited a fossil-carbon energy source that 198 scientific organisations worldwide agree is slowly cooking the planet. These outfits include the AAAS, the Royal Society and Australia’s CSIRO. In the mean time, more wild weather and the odd local tornado (maybe every other week) will be the likely result. And it is complicated by the fact that the private owners of all the fossil-carbon want it mined, put through the furnaces and so converted into $$$$ in their bank accounts without delay. Those $$$$ also get them the ear of the media barons and all the politicians money can buy.
It’s even the little things that we don’t often notice, that we can change. Small changes, by enough of us, can have a big impact.
Supermarket shopping today – BBQ Sauce shipped from Poland to Australia. Tinned tomatoes from Italy. Most pork products are from Canada. Crisps (chips) from Malaysia. And it’s not like we don’t have local suppliers of these.
Food miles seem to be such a last century concept.
Rev, we do what we can, but little changes we do don’t add up to enough unless the people and institutions in power decide to enact massive changes.
My company has “green initiatives” for office spaces and recycling, but they build huge office spaces in far-flung from the city center campuses, among other campuses, where thousands of people work surrounded by green grass that has to be watered (sometimes in the desert.) People have to commute to reach them, and the mass transit takes hours from many locations, so people either drive, or move into new housing developments nearby from “reclaimed” desert land. All the good meaning that they have in not funding carbon industries in their stock plans is nullified in their damage done to the eco by locating there. And they are among many companies that do this.
It’s important to source locally and cut down shipping, but somehow, these companies need to learn to think in terms of consequences of what seem like innocuous decisions such as location on cheaper land.
Mike, my employer has a sustainability coordinator, who spends all his time on pollinator gardens. Why? Because with the previous sustainability coordinator, we quickly discovered that anything else will generate outrage. Even getting new recycling bins (which we didn’t need, and cost enough to hire numerous instructors and pay them for several years) caused screaming – especially by me, because they were overpriced, unnecessary (we already had recycle bins in most buildings, and could just have gotten more from the recycling center for other buildings), and give everyone the idea they’re really doing something, even though our recycling is put in the trash because we don’t have a contract to have our recycling collected.
Meanwhile, the changes we need to make aren’t even mentioned. Just making students park and walk to their classes, rather than drive from building to building (on a very small campus, where all the buildings are easily walkable by a 60 year old woman with arthritis) could make a difference, but they will not do it. No parking reserved for students, teachers, etc, like most campuses have. We are five miles outside of the city, which isn’t bad, but a lot of our students drive in from elsewhere, sometimes two – three hours away. Meanwhile, instructors who teach ONLY online are required to drive to campus every day, and do their hours on campus even though all they do is sit in an office and work online. We do everything possible to MAXIMIZE driving, and our parking lots are full of SUVs and monster trucks. Compact cars? No, those are for sissies (like said 60 year old woman with arthritis who believes these things matter, but has few other options for getting to work).