From our diets to the ways we live and get around, our lives must change to meet the existential threat
By David Steele
Pay attention! Please!!!
The hour is late and – unless we act powerfully and quickly – we face catastrophe on a scale humanity has never seen. We must deal with the world climate crisis and we must deal with it now!
Global warming is accelerating and we’re shockingly ill-equipped to stop it. It’s not as if we didn’t have plenty of warning - Arrhenius first sounded the alarm way, way back in 1895; scientists, noticing the rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, have been sounding that alarm ever more loudly since the 1980s. Had we heeded the warnings, we could have made a fairly smooth transition to the society we must become - but we didn’t listen, so here we are.
As you’ve almost certainly heard, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report, Global Warming of 1.5 °C, in October. It paints a truly dire scenario of our world just a few decades hence – with wildfires rampant and massive droughts ever more widespread – if we do not almost immediately wean ourselves from fossil fuels. In no uncertain words, they tell us we must keep global warming to no more than 1.5o C.
There is no new science in this report. It is simply a summary of what we already know – and a call to act before it is too late. As the report loudly blares, we’ve got only about 12 years to pull it off. That’s twelve years to completely remake the way we power our lives.
Over those twelve years, coal, oil or tar sands and even natural gas must mostly fade from the scene – what we do use them for will have to be only for the very essentials – things like making the fertilizer we need to feed ourselves, or making what we must (e.g., steel) to facilitate the conversion of our manufacturing capacity to the likes of wind and solar. We must create efficiencies in every aspect of our lives and economies. Indeed, as the IPCC scientists tell us, we must restructure our societies on a scale that “has no documented historic precedents.”
Reasons for hope
It sounds scary – perhaps even crazy to some, but there is reason for hope. There are examples of action elsewhere in the world. Over the last 30 years, for example, European countries have slashed their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – and now average less than 10 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. China - in absolute terms the world’s largest GHG emitter - is making a massive move towards powering its society with incoming solar energy. Countries like these are at least on the road to where we need to be. Canada, unfortunately though, is not on that road.
Canada’s CO2 emissions have risen dramatically over that same 30 years. Per capita, we are among the biggest contributors in the world (by some estimates, actually, the highest in the world) – averaging over 20 tonnes per person. Alberta and Saskatchewan are in a league of their own – over 66 tonnes of CO2 are emitted per person in those provinces each and every year! The best we can say of late, is that our emissions have started to level off.
To put that all in context, consider this: The IPCC target for 2030 amounts to roughly 2.8 tonnes per person, 45% below even the current worldwide average of 5 tonnes. By 2050, GHG emissions must average less than zero. And, tragically so far – as we saw in the toothless statement after COP24 in December – governments seem loathe to take the actions that they must take if we are to save ourselves.
Governments of the past have responded as they must respond now
So, what are we going to do? The magnitude of the change we need looks overwhelming!
A look back at history provides some hope. We have mobilized on a similar scale before. We just have to do it again. We need a WWII-scale mass mobilization. Governments in that era remade our whole economies to deal with the threat we faced. They mobilized our people and resources to maximize our probability of success. The disaster was horrific – and the crimes even worse – but the threat was stopped. To boot, the economy (at least here) was revitalized; in the aftermath we became a far richer society than we had been before.
The crisis we face today is unprecedented, but it’s of the same basic ilk as we faced back then. We simply need to rise in the same basic way as we did back then – but this time, not with violence but with positive, massively world-improving action.
Just look at just a few of the realities that the science indicates we’ll face if we don’t limit global warming to 1.5o:
* Storms, heat waves and droughts of unprecedented strengths and extents will become common; our food supplies could collapse as a result.
* Sea level will rise dramatically. Coastal cities will be inundated. If even we let the warming go to 2o, we can expect an additional 10 cm in sea level rise over the next 80 years.
* Wildfires, already the scourge of our west and of Australia, too, will become more common and more widespread.
* Potentially catastrophically, the risk passing ‘tipping points’ from which we will be unable to recover will substantially increase; mass release of methane, e.g., from Arctic permafrost or from clathrates beneath the sea could cause global warming to exceed 6o or 8o or even 10o . Tropical regions of our planet could become too hot for humans to survive.
To be candid, the IPCC authors are not optimistic. Jim Skea, co-chair of one of the IPCC working groups, put it this way: "Limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes." “I am overwhelmed by challenge we face. I had a good cry on plane home from exhaustion and thinking about implications of report,” said Diana Liverman, another author of the report.
But change we must. The alternative is too bleak. We must make it our job – to the very best of our abilities – to see that the desperately needed changes come to pass. “If action is not taken, it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future if we compare to what has happen in all of human evolutionary history,” is how lead author Hans-Otto Pörtner put it to Grist magazine.
There is hope. We must make it so. And, if we succeed we’ll be part of a massive worldwide, extremely positive transformation. Contrast that to the dystopia we face if we don’t. And unlike our situation in WWII, we don’t have to kill and destroy to save ourselves and others. We can transform our world and build for the better. We can create a society that can support us well and, in principle, that can be sustained for millennia.
We can save ourselves
So just what must we do?
First of all, we must lead by example. We must make it very, very clear that we are very, very serious. We must show in our words and actions that, to the very, very best of our abilities, we are willing to make the personal changes needed to save this world. And we must make them. The world needs examples fast, and politicians need to see that the people have their back – that we, the people, will elect or re-elect them if and only if they will act boldly to end this crisis.
We must be examples. We must abandon our cars to the full extents that we can. If we must use them, we must use them the very least we can. We must abandon flying. We must be as energy efficient at home as we possibly can. Turn down our thermostats; use electronics sparingly. We must minimize our purchases of newly manufactured items. And, as the IPCC report also highlights, we must transform the way we eat: we must rapidly move away from eating animal products and very much towards getting our nutrition wholly from plants. Indeed, almost coincidentally with the IPCC report, a study was published in Nature that demonstrates quite clearly that we in the West need to slash our beef consumption by 90%, other animal products to a similar extent if we’re going to be able to feed ourselves just 30 years hence.
We need to do all of these things.
We must vote and we must lobby our governments. Wow, do we need to lobby governments! Only they can impose the necessary regulations on our society to make this transformation possible. Only they can provide the means for our society to so rapidly change the ways we heat and power our homes and run our economy. The market cannot do it in time. Nowhere close. Most of us can’t afford to retrofit our homes, e.g., but retrofitted those homes must be. We didn’t leave the transformation of our society to meet the threat in WWII to the market and we can’t leave it to the market now.
So governments must be forced to act. Our electoral system sure doesn’t help – but that a government can be elected on a little over a third of the vote in our country could be a boon. Enough of us mobilized behind a responsible election campaign could turn things around quickly. Of course, that same system of ours could also be a terrible impediment – as is all too clear in the election of people like Doug Ford and, south of the border, Donald Trump. A minority can and does elect people anathema to our long term survival. We must become, at the very least, a bigger minority. It is a very bad sign that even modest carbon taxes meet stiff resistance. We must educate those around us; we must make those taxes, and all the rest, as popular as we possibly can.
Remember, we are on the right side of history. Our quest is to remake this world so that all can live. The alternative is a nearly literal hell on earth. So lets get to it. Let’s organize. Meet in community centers. Talk to whomever we can. And be examples for all of those around us. For we, we who act as we must, are humanity’s last best hope. We must succeed.
A version of this article appears in the Winter 2018 issue of the Aquarian (Winnipeg).