This scorching unending summer, the UN published a new climate change report and the news aren’t exactly what we would like to read. Indeed, ” Limiting global warming to 1.5°C remains a cornerstone of the Paris Agreement, yet under current policies and alternative near-term trajectories, exceedance of 1.5°C is now widely assessed as unavoidable.“
So, is all hope lost ? Should we just give it up ? NO ! The worst still can be prevented.
What we have collectively done in the past 10 to 15 years on the global energy transition was a good start. It could have been much better AND we are trending in the right direction on solar, wind and some early wins are taking place on rewilding the planet around the world. So we need to press on !
Indeed, the official UNEP press release states:
Global temperature rise is set to cross 1.5°C, likely within the next few years, pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights, but it is still possible to bring temperatures down and achieve global goals in the Paris Agreement, according to a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.
The report, Limiting Overshoot, identifies an ‘overshoot, peak, and decline’ pathway as the best remaining option to minimize the magnitude and duration of this overshoot and try to return to below 1.5°C as soon as possible.
“This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition” said UN Secretary-General Ant?nio Guterres.
As I was saying in my previous French post on ecoanxiety, both skyrocketing gas and fuel prices and scorching climate change are two sides of the same phenomenon : fossil fuels are killing us and we need to get rid of them as fast as we can.
This will not be easy nor will it be done within a decade. But we have seen it with countless wars, invasions, embargos… There isn’t exactly an alternative. Not ditching oil, coal and gas would be suicidal and lead us all to runaway climate change. We are globally spending 4.5 billion dollars per day on oil just to run our cars and trucks. This can’t last.
Especially now that we have plenty of super efficient and clean alternatives for transportation, heating and cooling, industry… Plus at some point all the somewhat easily accessible oil and gas will have been pumped out and burnt. So, we might as well get ready for peak oil as well. This is just a matter of national and energy security.
Sure, many of us would like to use their cars as much as they have always done. An unknown universe built mostly on relying on electric cars, public transportation and cycling can be scary. The age of private cars could end soon as we need to give back space to Nature so that it can grow and cool down our cities and our beautiful planet. Parking lots shouldn’t be that big.
All in all, I blogged about it earlier, there are so many inefficiencies and wasteful practices around energy, water and food. Just tackling these would slash greenhouse gases emisions and would have massive effects on our collective resilience. (and as a sidenote, of course Donald J* Trump is fighting against such efficiency programs…). This alone is enough to give me precious hope.
To conclude, after the catastrophes of both Brexit and the election and reelection of “that guy”, in the United States I hope we are collectively done electing populists morons that promise everything and deliver nothing but horrendous xenophobia, blatant lies and more money for the super wealthy to the detriment of the quasi totality of people. This is a sine qua non condition to getting back at some point to 1.5 C of warming and below. This alone is a tall order.
* The J there stands for Jenius, or so I have been told…
Image credits : UNEP and José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash
