"What Are We Going To Do? Well, The Answer is The Same As Always: We Will Cheat"

[hatrack]

EDIT

We cannot live sustainably within today’s economic system. Yet that is what we are constantly being told we can do. We can buy sustainable cars, travel on sustainable motorways, powered by sustainable petroleum. We can eat sustainable meat and drink sustainable soft drinks out of sustainable plastic bottles. We can buy sustainable fast fashion and fly on sustainable aeroplanes using sustainable fuels. And, of course, we are going to meet our short- and long-term sustainable climate targets, too, without making the slightest effort.

“How?” you might ask. How can that be possible when we don’t yet have any technical solutions that can fix this crisis alone, and the option of stopping doing things is unacceptable from our current economic standpoint? What are we going to do? Well, the answer is the same as always: we will cheat. We will use all those loopholes and all the creative accounting that we have conjured up in our climate frameworks since the very first conference of the parties, the 1995 Cop1 in Berlin. We will outsource our emissions along with our factories, we will use baseline manipulation and start counting our emission reductions when it suits us best. We will burn trees, forests and biomass, as those have been excluded from the official statistics. We will lock decades of emissions into fossil gas infrastructure and call it green natural gas. And then we will offset the rest with vague afforestation projects – trees that might be lost to disease or fire – while we simultaneously cut down the last of our old-growth forests at a much higher speed.

Don’t get me wrong. Planting the right trees in the right soil is a great thing to do. It eventually sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and we should do it wherever it is suitable for the soil and suitable for the people living there who care for that land. But afforestation should not be confused with offsetting or climate compensation, because that is something completely different. You see, the main problem is that we already have at least 40 years of carbon dioxide emissions to “compensate” for. It is all up there, in the atmosphere, and that is where it will stay, probably for many centuries to come. This historic CO2 is what we should be focusing on when we are using our present – very limited – ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, in various projects such as planting trees. But offsetting, as we have conceived it, is not meant to do that. It was never created for us to clean up our mess. Far too often it has been used as an excuse for us to continue emitting CO2, maintain business as usual and meanwhile send a signal that we have a solution and therefore we do not have to change.

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Even if we carried out all of our climate action plans, we’d still be in trouble. Net zero by 2050 is simply too little, too late. There is just too much at stake for us to place our destiny in the hands of undeveloped technologies. We need real zero. And we need honesty. At the very least, we need our leaders to start including all our actual emissions in our targets, statistics and policies. Before they do that, any mention of vague, future goals is nothing but a distracting waste of time. They say that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But what exactly do we do when the “good” not only fails to keep us safe but is also so far away from what is needed that it can only be described as comedy material. Very dark comedy, but still. They say we must be able to compromise. As if the Paris agreement were not already the world’s biggest compromise. A compromise that has already locked in unimaginable amounts of suffering for the most affected people and areas. I say: “No more.” I say: “Stand your ground.” Our so-called leaders still think they can bargain with physics and negotiate with the laws of nature. They speak to flowers and forests in the language of US dollars and short-term economics. They hold up their quarterly income reports to impress the wild animals. They read stock-market analysis to the waves of the ocean, like fools.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/08/greta-thunberg-climate-delusion-greenwashed-out-of-our-senses

[hunter]

1. Raising living standards worldwide is going to require energy.

Hybrid gas/wind/solar power systems will only increase greenhouse emissions if they are universally adopted.

Here's a quote that struck me in the article:

The fact that 3 billion people use less energy, on an annual per capita basis, than a standard American refrigerator gives you an idea of how far away from global equity and climate justice we currently are.

Many alternative energy schemes are promoted as "better than coal." That's not good enough. For any energy scheme you have to calculate what the long term greenhouse gas emissions would be if the system was scaled up to 8 billion people or more.

I believe natural gas is the greatest threat to our natural environment and our civilization itself because people think it is clean or better than coal and it supports their renewable energy fantasies.

A world economy powered entirely by "renewable" energy would look nothing like the economy many affluent people now enjoy and it's doubtful that such an economy could even support eight billion people.

Creative accounting, in other words cheating, isn't simply a problem of the political left or the right. Most people, especially affluent people, are in some sort of denial about the environmental impacts of their fossil fuel use

Very few people are willing to acknowledge that aggressive wind and solar schemes in places like California, Denmark, and Germany have failed and will only prolong our dependence on natural gas, and that this too will destroy the world as we know it.