Emergency? What Emergency?
(Written in May 2019)
Last week I read that New York City is requiring buildings to be 80% carbon neutral by 2050. St. Paul has stated that they will cut their carbon emissions in half by 2030, and will offset them entirely by 2050. Pittsburgh, Chicago and even Hoboken, New Jersey (!) have also jumped onto the carbon neutral bandwagon, joining cities from around the world towards this goal. Let’s be carbon neutral or mostly carbon neutral by 2050.
But wait: hasn’t the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us that by 2030 the earth is going to suffer irreversible damage? So isn’t 2050 twenty years too late to have any real effect? Why are we giving standing ovations to efforts we know don’t solve the problem?
Such is the case with climate change solutions these days. We have become attached to our prescriptions and our politics, despite the effects — or lack thereof — on the actual climate. We continue to promote the same solutions (i.e., carbon neutrality) and then ignore that they are having a negligible effect on global temperatures.
At this point the math is pretty simple. Going carbon neutral by 2050 just continues our current trajectory, and continues to increase our global temperatures beyond levels recommended by, well, anybody. And as we’ve seen in all of the IPCC models, going carbon neutral has a small effect on global temperatures anyway; all the models acknowledge this explicitly and include huge amounts of carbon removal in order to make the math work. So even the scientists acknowledge that our prescription to the problem is inadequate, and they’ve taken credit for technologies that don’t yet exist at-scale. Just invent new stuff that makes the problem go away — voila!
If the IPCC reports are Exhibit 1 in our climate change trial-of-the-century, Exhibit 2 should be an accounting of our current prescriptions. Over the past 20 years we’ve installed more solar and wind energy into the world than ever before, setting new records for replacing coal plants and retiring outdated infrastructure. We now have more renewable energy in the world than ever. So our global temperatures should be lowering, shouldn’t they?
Nope. Global temperatures have continued to rise over the past 20 years. The simple fact is that more renewable energy has not equated to lower global temperatures. In fact, the opposite has happened.
And yet we steamroll on. The Green New Deal is yet another example of this myopic dedication to misplaced solutions. It’s simply a repackaging of the same old stuff that’s been promoted for decades, with no eye on the temperature reduction prize. So far no one on either side of the aisle has produced a responsible plan to address climate change — to actually reduce our global temperatures — despite all the screaming. And even if the United States comes up with a plan that we’ll somehow afford (highly doubtful), we’re just one country amidst a global quagmire; our effects alone would be negligible, despite the trillions we’d spend.
Now I can almost hear you shouting “well that’s what the Paris Climate Agreement was for!” Except that it wasn’t. It was a political stunt aimed at making us feel better, and now it’s failing because it’s toothless and ridiculous. From the U.S. perspective, it was a global climate apology tour: “hey, we’re sorry for being polluters, so we’ll just pay you all a bunch of money to make up for it. Deal?” Why wouldn’t the rest of the world sign up for that? Proponents of the Accord called it landmark legislation, while naysayers called it a redistribution of global wealth. Whatever you want to call it, it has had zero effect on global temperatures, and it’s no longer an issue for us.
Despite all the bluster, I keep coming to the same place in the climate discussion. What if climate change is not an actual emergency?
I’m sure everyone I’ve ever worked with in solar is swinging at me right now; I get that. What I just said is heresy. We’ve all been immersed in our “take that next hill” mentality for so long, setting coal plants in our sights and high-fiving when we replace each one with a solar farm. Like everyone, I’ve been proud of climbing each hill and finding the next coal plant to replace. We’ve done a tremendous amount of good in mothballing dozens of coal plants around the world, and I don’t mean to make light of that. And yes, we’ve made some money and put food on our family’s tables.
But now, standing atop the next hill, I can’t help but ask the question: are we living our lives like we’re in a climate emergency? If not, why not? Could it be that, deep down inside, we don’t really believe there’s an emergency?
If you had a heart attack, you’d be rushed to the hospital. If you were critical, your family would rush to your side. If the doctors said you needed expensive surgery, you’d open up your wallet and spend your life savings on the procedure. And you would certainly adopt the lifestyle changes your doctor recommended going forward. In short, you would change your life immediately to respond to the emergency. Because it’s a real emergency.
How many of us have done the same for climate change? I can only speak for myself. Out of the last $1000 I’ve spent, most of it has been for my home, food, my children’s college fund, new lacrosse equipment, my anniversary dinner, a dental appointment. Oh, I did buy a homeless man on Higuera Street a sandwich, and I bought some community solar. So I guess that makes me feel a bit better. But I didn’t spend any money to save the Himalayas.
Before you yell at me, did you? Are you saving 10% of your annual income to prepare for the pending climate catastrophe — or did you rush to buy a Volt before the tax break went away and made it less affordable? Have you invested your kid’s college fund into high-ground real estate to protect yourselves from the upcoming global floods — or did you go to Whole Foods to buy organic food? Are you installing solar now, or are you waiting for prices to drop? What did you do this week to prevent Manhattan from flooding?
Probably nothing. When it comes down to it, we’re all making daily, practical, economic decisions. We’re doing what we have to do for our families and our local communities. Does that make us selfish? Of course. We all work towards our self-interests, and it’s naive to think otherwise. Just today you made a decision that benefited you and yours only. So did I. We only have so much money and time to spend on our lives, so we do the best we can with that. If we have an extra 50 cents to save the planet at the end of our days then we will, but if I have to choose between my kid’s college and the Himalayas I’ll choose college every single time. And so will you.
If we truly believed that we only have 11 years left until the world begins its irreversible decline, we’d be acting differently. And when I say we, I’m saying you and I. WE are not acting as we’re in a true emergency, because we’re not. Instead, we’re doing the simple, affordable things. We buy solar systems and electric vehicles and organic foods. We clap when Greta Thunberg scolds Davos for a lack of climate urgency, and we tweet the Children for Climate protests to our social media friends to show we care. By golly, isn’t scaring our children the right thing to do? You betcha! We yell at climate-denying Republicans because, well, we can, and it sure retweets well. It’s easy to blame them because they’re really the problem. And of course isn’t Trump the problem with everything these days?
Meh. Let’s be honest with ourselves. We want the global climate change problem to be solved, as long as we don’t have to make great sacrifices to make it happen. At the end of the day, we’ll sacrifice a polar bear or two in order to put our kids through college. Because those are the real choices we make. The 2019 Davos Conference welcomed 1500 private jet flights into Switzerland to talk about climate change, releasing countless CO2 emissions into the air, but hey, they sure did talk about important stuff. Maybe they felt guilty about it afterwards, but they did it anyway. I sure do want to save the planet, but there is this cool golf trip I’ve been planning…
Maybe the answer to climate change is to tap into our collective self-interests instead of waiting for THE. BIG. GLOBAL. CLIMATE. SAVING. PLAN. We already know that’s never going to happen, so why continue to pretend that it will? Maybe instead we have our governments subsidize research and development into all technologies that could potentially reverse our collective carbon footprints and then give them away for free. Then we could tap into our greedy, selfish selves and deploy it globally. Maybe we just sprinkle the world with carbon reducing technologies and let our self-interests take over. Just a thought.
Maybe instead of climate change being Stage 4 cancer, it’s more like the 10 pounds we gained after Thanksgiving dinner. Is it really an emergency, or just extra weight we have to sweat off before Christmas?
Marc Cortez is a 20-year veteran of the solar energy and electric vehicle industries, and is the founder and CEO of Liquid8, a water conservation startup.
