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The Climate Time Bomb
Mel Gurtov
(4/6) Every increment of global warming increase will increase the risks and make them more difficult to manage. "Multiple climatic and non-climatic risk drivers will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions. Climate-driven food insecurity and supply instability, for example, are projected to increase with increasing global warming, interacting with non-climatic risk drivers such as competition for land between urban expansion and food production, pandemics and conflict."
Good News, But Not Enough
As usual, the IPCC report does mention multiple ways in which adaptation and mitigation can affect climate change. All are quite familiar, such as more efficient use of resources, better forest management, carbon capture of fossil fuels, sustainable land use, electric vehicles, and more efficient buildings. There’s never been a problem imagining a net-zero carbon world. Here and there, these changes are being accepted. But for every piece of good news, there’s an "on the other hand." For example:
q From 2035 on, new gasoline-powered cars and most heavy trucks cannot be sold in California, and only zero-emission cars can be sold in New York. That’s two big states, but it leaves 48 others.
q Greenpeace reports that an international group is now putting together a legally binding Global Plastics Treaty. (Worst offender? Coca-Cola.) But only a tiny fraction of plastics is being recycled, and more than 170 trillion plastic particles are found in the ocean alone.
q The soft-energy path is catching on. As the IPCC reports: "From 2010– 2019 there have been sustained decreases in the unit costs of solar energy (85%), wind energy (55%), and lithium ion batteries (85%), and large increases in their deployment, e.g., >10x for solar and >100x for electric vehicles, varying widely across regions." But: "Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation." Any wonder why oil and gas company profits are at their highest level ever? BP, for example, reported $28 billion in profits in 2022, and ExxonMobil reported $56 billion in profits. These companies have, without embarrassment, announced they will be scaling back commitments to move toward renewable energy.
q
The Macron government in France is the first to support a ban on deep sea mining. Will any others follow suit?
The Sky is Falling
This latest IPCC report was approved by 195 governments, and synthesizes the results of countless other scientific reports as well as summarizes its six previous assessments. Yet many people read them (if at all) as just more dire predictions that are either overly pessimistic or best left to future generations to deal with.
Thus, the IPCC contributing authors keep issuing warnings, governments keep making dubious promises, and worsening environmental conditions keep multiplying. We’re approaching a tipping point, but no authority exists to stop our passing it.
This time, the sky really is falling.
Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.
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