Rav Casley Gera

The argument about climate change has been for so long about whether it’s actually happening, we’ve got badly behind on discussion of what to actually do about it. Consideration of what carbon emission targets should be included in any successor treaty to Kyoto, which expires in 2010, needs to begin in earnest now. But the very mindset that the green movement has had to create to get its point across makes it hard to transition to practical thought about solutions. For years, we’ve been repeating and repeating the mantra that climate change is real, is serious, and poses a real threat to civilisation and millions of lives. Now the public and politicians seem finally to be accepting the consensus, it’s a jolt to switch from doom-mongering to planning.

But switch we must. Ask anybody about the steps needed to combat climate change, you’ll hear guilt over obvious infractions like cheap flights, but no real sense of roadmap to change. Or, you’ll hear politocultural prejudices mapped onto climate change: the crisis as evidence that globalisation / meat consumption / global inequality is unsustainable. In short, most people either don’t grasp the magnitude of the task in hand, or want to use it as a platform for radical changes in lifestyle which, however attractive they may be, can hardly form the core of an international governmental consensus on what to do next.

Part of the problem is that, for such a scientific issue, the climate change discussion has been discussed in the media in an almost entirely unquantified way. Do you know how many centigrades the climate is expected to increase by? How much our carbon emissions need to decrease? Without these numbers in the public debate, it’s impossible to fully grasp the scale and shape of the challenge, and therefore to be able to visualise a solution.

So let’s see if we can crunch the numbers a little, just to get a sense of the task ahead of us. Jeffrey Sachs, in his recent speech at St. Paul’s and again in his recent Reith Lectures on the BBC, offers some useful UN statistics.

Right now, the world population is just over 6 billion. By 2050, UN estimates predict an increase of 50% to 9 billion. If the level of energy consumption per person remains static, therefore, that’s a 50% increase in our energy needs by 2050.

But energy consumption is unlikely to stay static. Economies all over the world are growing fast. The average income of people on Earth is expected to increase by four times by 2050, fuelled largely by massive increases in China and India. This is wonderful news for those enjoying increased quality of life, but obviously compounds the climate problem. 1.5x the population times 4x the income equals 6 times more economic activity on Earth in 2050 than now. Assuming the amount of energy required increases with income - that each dollar of income costs the same in energy consumption in 2050 - we’re looking at a six-fold increase in our energy needs. Assuming energy production produces the same amount of carbon as it does now, we’re looking at - you guessed it - a sixfold increase in our carbon emissions.

Scared yet? Let’s really put ourselves on the ghost train. How much over safe limits is our current carbon use? It depends partly on how much hotter we’re prepared for things to get. The European Union has accepted as its climate change goal limiting change to a 2-degree (centigrade) increase. 2 degrees is still pretty scary, but it’s liveable without mass death in developing countries. Crucially, it should avoid triggering ‘vicious circle’ effects where climate change becomes self-reinforcing.

The IPCC estimates that, to keep the increase down to 2 degrees, atmospheric carbon must stabilise at around 450 parts per million. Right now, it’s about 425 parts per million. So the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, right now, is within the zone of acceptability. But, of course, it’s increasing. It’s increasing because emissions are too high. The fact that the atmospheric level is currently acceptable doesn’t mean that current levels of emissions are.

Let’s say the atmosphere is like a sink, and it’s filing with water - carbon. There’s a safe level of water - the capacity of the sink. And there’s a plughole, where the water drains away, and there’s a tap, pouring water in. But the tap is putting water in faster than it can drain away. And the sink has been filling up, slowly, and you know in a few minutes it’s going to be full and water is going to start spilling over the sides and flooding the room. But here’s the thing: somebody keeps turning the tap on, opening it more and more.

So first of all, we need to stop the guy who’s opening the tap more. But that’s not enough: the tap’s current flow is still too much. We need to start moving the tap towards “closed”. So what’s the acceptable level to aim for? Here’s realclimate.org:

Humankind is releasing CO2 at a rate of about 7 Gton C per year from fossil fuel combustion, with a further 2 Gton C per year from deforestation. Because the atmospheric CO2 concentration is higher than normal, the natural world is absorbing CO2 at a rate of about 2 or 2.5 Gton C per year into the land biosphere and into the oceans, for a total of about 5 Gton C per year. The CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is rising because of the 4 Gton C imbalance. If we were to cut emissions by about half, from a total of 9 down to about 4 Gton C per year, the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere would stop rising for awhile.

OK. So that’s the target: half of current emissions. Half of current emissions times six times the energy consumption (see above) means we’ve got to get the level of emissions associated with each unit of human economic activity down to one-twelth its current level.

Yeesh.

And yet, while the task sounds massive, it also sounds at least theoretically achievable. The problem can be tackled in several ways.

1. Reduce population growth. 9 billion is prediction, not a prophecy. Mass provision of contraception in poor countries could speed the demographic transition from a high-birth, high-mortality society to a low-birth, low-mortality society. This happens naturally with economic growth, but factors like disease have stalled the trend in parts of the developing world, like Africa.

2. Reduce economic growth. This is essentially the response of those who say we need to turn our back on many aspects of ‘progress’ and return to some kind of more agricultural lifestyle. However, it’s not limited to hippies: even the economics editor of the Guardian believes climate change may mean the end of economic growth as the world’s governing paradigm. The problem is that while we in developed countries have a standard of living where we could probably stop growing quite happily, developing countries do not. Growth-stoppers suggest promoting alternative ideas of development without the focus on industrialisation, based on local trade and subsistence. However, there is no evidence that life expectancy, nutrition and democracy can develop to Western levels without economic growth; in practice, it’s widely believed this vague ideal of rural living amounts to telling developing countries not to develop.

3. Reduce the energy requirements of economic growth. This is where insulating your roof comes in. Increasing economic activity can be mitigated if the energy use for each dollar made is reduced. This covers most energy efficiency drives, like buying local produce, taxing cheap flights, or encouraging public transport. It also covers some technological improvements, like TVs that don’t have a standby mode or decreases in petrol consumption.

4. Reduce the carbon emissions involved in energy production. This is the other key role of technology. Renewable energy, coal sequestering, nuclear, and even the humble Toyota Prius all fit into this category.

Idea one, while attractive, is difficult technically and politically (the chances of the Bush administration sponsoring a mass drop of condom kits on Africa is, go figure, not high). Idea two is radical and attractive on paper, but, in practice, very problematic. There’s a blurry line between points two and three, too - if I work from home instead of travelling to the office, I’m reducing the energy cost of my earnings, but am I also reducing my total economic activity by eschewing the transport industry? Maybe I am, but it’s still a far cry from us all running off to live in mud huts. We don’t need to grow less, I think, just better.

Either way, most mainstream suggestions for tackling climate change, from public transport to nuclear power, come under points three or four. It’s worth thinking about which category ideas fit into when you consider them. There’s a tendency to see them as mutually exclusive, which is just crazy. “We need cleaner energy!” “No, we need to use less energy!” Shut up, idiots. Patently, we need both.

These ideas are all about reducing emissions, that is to say, the flow of the tap. But there are other options.

What about climate change mitigation? The likes of Bjorn Lomberg think we need to focus less on reducing carbon emmissions, and more on reducing its effects. In the sink scenario, this is the equivalent of thinking about how much water spillage we can manage to mop up. The point, though, is of course that we need to do both. The 2 degree target still brings with it some pretty nasty effects, including sea level rises deadly heatwaves across Europe every summer - some water on the kitchen floor, as it were. We’re still looking at big changes - and this is pretty much the best case scenario, emissions-wise. So it’s hard to take seriously the idea that improving the emissions situation isn’t a big part of the solution.

And, what about planting trees? “Offsetting” has become a key part of the climate-change response of well-off liberals, as it’s one of the few ways you can simply buy off climate guilt. In our climate change kitchen, this is the equivalent of unblocking the sink - undoing some of the damage we’ve done to nature’s ability to absorb the carbon we produce.

The central challenge - to reduce the carbon emissions associated with each dollar of economic activity on Earth by one-twelfth - is indeed scary. But it doesn’t sound infeasible. Neither energy efficiency nor cleaner energy alone can do it; neither can mitigation or offsetting alone make it unnecessary. But if we do it all - the electric car and more public transport, more renewable energy and more energy efficient homes and workplaces, we might, i reckon, have a chance. Let’s run a quick thought experiment, as economists say (”wild speculation” to you and me”):

Let’s say we do manage to shower Africa with condoms, and instead of 9 billion, we get the Earth’s population stabilised at 7.5 billion. I have no idea if this is considered possible, but hey, impossible is nothing, as those annoying mountaineering boys point out in the Adidas advert. That takes us from a 1.5x population increase to a 1.25x increase. That means instead of a 12x decrease in carbon emissions per dollar economic activity, we now just need a 10x decrease.

Next let’s assume that by a combination of energy efficiency technology and lifestyle changes, we can reduce the energy required to produce a dollar’s economic activity by two-thirds. Sounds ambitious? I know. But think about it: cut all those extra flights, work from home, more multiple accomodations, more locally produced food where it’s clearly more energy efficient. It’s imaginable, at least. One-third the energy needs takes us from needing a 10x decrease in emissions per dollar of activity to needing a 3.33x decrease.

Then, imagine we reduce the carbon emissions involved in producing a block of energy - a kilowatt hour, say - by two-thirds as well. This is not too hard to imagine - a bit of nuclear there, a bit of renewable there, a bit of carbon sequestration there - it’s doable. That gets us to 1.11x - within a sliver of the target.

I’m not saying these numbers are achievable now. And they’re all subject to disagreement. But they demonstrate that’s it’s at least possible to imagine a solution. And the great thing is, these numbers take into account all the common objections. What about China and India? These numbers have accounted for that. What about the melting of the ice caps reducing light reflection? The 2-degree target bears that in mind.

Climate change has become a chorus of misery, with new problems popping up all the time. And the result has been an equally messy chorus of solutions. Nuclear is the answer! Energy-saving lightbulbs are the answer! Banning cheap flights is the answer! We badly need to start thinking about the problem as a whole, and putting together plans for solutions that encompass the categories we’ve outlined here. Despite the scariness of the challenge, knowing these figures makes me feel more, not less, confident that we can, actually, get through this. Sachs keeps quoting Kennedy, and it does seem appropriate in the current climate of fear:

Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

UPDATE 28/05/07: George Monbiot crunches the numbers slightly differently and comes to a more pessimistic conclusion.