By Chris Davey
I was determined to get well ahead for this month’s piece. I started a couple of weeks ago and managed to tap out 800 words… but I’ve scrapped most of it, because…
Recently we have seen real climate breakdown in action — the horrific scenes of wildfires destroying thousands of acres of land in and around Los Angeles, burning down thousands of buildings, most of them people’s homes, and leaving 25 people dead (at the time of writing – that’s expected to rise).
Photo: Dimple Bhati, iStock. A reminder that when trees burn, huge amounts of carbon are released into the air, which of course is what’s causing the problem. And replanted trees take years to grow and soak it up.
2024 was the first year when the average global temperature reached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels; something that in the Paris Agreement of 2015 we agreed that we must try to avoid, as it is the “guard rail” temperature beyond which things get really bad. We now have five years to cut emissions drastically to avoid 2C — which, guess what, would be even worse.
Following on from the quote from Jonathan Pie last month, also from climatesciencebreakthrough.com, here is the Nish Kumar version: Weather used to be clouds. Now we’ve made it into a sort of Rottweiler on steroids that wants to chew everyone’s head off.
He’s not wrong. As if the storms and floods weren’t enough, a glance at the news footage from Los Angeles shows that, although many of the adverse weather events have so far affected unfortunate people in the global south, we can now see that climate breakdown is coming for all of us, north and south, rich and poor. There is no denying that renewables are booming; wind is now the cheapest form of energy. But globally, carbon emissions are still not falling.
There is no getting away from it; fossil fuels will decline. Eventually, the whole life cost of electrical tech will become lower than fossil fuel-based equivalents, and so economics will once again rule. But it will take time, which means it will take too long. It’s been said before, but it’s still the case: we have to act now.
But why are emissions not falling? The simple answer is because we won’t #StopBurningStuff. Really, it’s a big, complicated question, which I hope to dig into further in the future. But one preliminary conclusion: fossil fuel companies sell you some of their product every day (or at least have largely done so up to now), in a business model that ensures a regular long-term revenue stream. But renewables imply a totally different business model, where once installed, energy from them is virtually free (OK installation costs have to be recouped and maintenance and upgrading done) — some companies are partially embracing the new model, but are manifestly unwilling to give up the old one. (With thanks to one of my go-to climate experts for this insight,*Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester.)
Until somehow, we manage to persuade them to give up the old and embrace the new, emissions will not fall.
I’ve noticed that two local companies have made, and begun to implement, a decision to change their fleets of vans from diesel to electric. One is a food delivery company and the other, heating engineers. So their vehicle needs are rather different, but they have one thing in common. Each is an employee-owned company.
Now a research project that claims any rigorous findings based on a sample of two would not get published, and rightly so. But it just made me wonder whether the employee aspect is significant… worldwide polling suggests that a majority of people are concerned about climate breakdown, so maybe the workers in those two companies have shown their commitment to limiting carbon emissions with these decisions. And that leads me to ponder how we might motivate sufficient numbers of people to insist that our leaders take urgent, serious actions to limit emissions.
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*Kevin is always good value; here in just ten minutes he answers three questions put to him in the 3Q series from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona:
- Why are we facing a climate emergency?
- Are climate scientists transparent when reporting on climate change?
- Will the commitments about carbon emissions be enough?
