We all know what needs to be done: reduce carbon emissions. But so far, we members of global humanity just haven’t been able to turn the tide. The latest IPCC report documents that carbon emissions are still increasing, despite all the promises and efforts of the past few decades. The report tells us there’s only a narrow (and rapidly shrinking) pathway to averting climate catastrophe. That path requires us to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030, and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. So far, we’re going in the opposite direction.
Why is this so hard? Because it would require sacrifice. Why would it require sacrifice? Let’s walk through the logic:
- Lowering emissions requires reducing our extraction and burning of fossil fuels. But right now, 85 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and energy is what makes the economy go and grow.
- Replacing fossil fuels with low-emissions energy sources like solar and wind would still give us energy, but right now it takes fossil energy to build solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and all the other electrical infrastructure we would need to replace the fuel-based infrastructure we now have.
- Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.
- Again, the only way to reliably reduce emissions is to cut fossil fuel extraction and combustion directly and immediately. As we have seen over the past decades, just waiting for renewables to replace fossil fuels is too slow. Global emissions increased last year despite a record nearly 10 percent growth in renewables.
- So, if more fossil energy will be needed for the energy transition, but we need to extract less coal, oil, and gas overall, that means that, at least over the next couple of decades, much less fuel will be available for non-transition purposes—i.e., for transport, manufacturing, and food production, which are the mainstays of the economy.
That’s why we can’t just do it. That’s why, when governments get to decision points like having to approve or deny permits to drill for oil in Alaska, the decision often goes in favor of more fossil energy extraction.
(By the way: mainstream reporting on Biden’s recent approval of the Willow oil project has missed the fact that the approval probably had a lot to do with declining amounts of oil flowing through the Alyeska pipeline that delivers oil to the West Coast states; if the amount of flow declines much more due to the depletion of older oilfields, the pipeline could freeze up in the winter and become useless, depriving those blue states of a half million barrels a day of crude, which would be hard to replace.)
Our collective impasse in addressing climate change is the fault not just of greedy oil executives. Policy makers want to avoid any decision that would result in economic hardship. So, they punt in favor of business as usual, and as a result the pathway to averting climate doom narrows that much more.
At the same time, our fossil fuel supplies deplete further, giving us less of an energy cushion for building an energy system to replace the current one that relies on coal, oil, and gas.
The best answer is a managed reduction in fossil fuel extraction accompanied by a rationing system that preferentially directs declining fossil fuel supplies toward energy transition projects while distributing remaining fuel supplies to industry and households for only the most essential purposes. Programs would also be needed to offset the impacts of scarce energy on lower income households and countries.
Policy makers may find this unthinkable, because they have built their careers on the assumption that the economy must always grow, and that people must always be promised the opportunity to consume more. Yet until public discussion turns in the direction of managed energy descent and rationing, nothing will happen to avert climate hell.
Which is a shame for two reasons. First, of course, it condemns present and future generations to weather extremes and all the suffering associated with hotter and less stable conditions. Second, it forecloses the possibility of an energy descent in which hardships are fairly shared, along with opportunities for learning to live better with less. And such opportunities could be plentiful if only we were to look for them.
We’re at a crisis point. A sacrifice is needed. Only a sacred cow will do. Economic growth is our society’s most sacred of cows. And guess what? The cow is sick anyway.
Teaser photo credit: By Satinandsilk – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84760746
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The kinds of things you suggest might help a little around the edges, but the core problem is that industrial countries have structured their citizens’ living conditions around high energy flows. How we get from place to place and how expansive the buildings are at the end of our journey determine how much energy we use.
For example, the US has more than twice the per capita energy consumption of Europe, not because the citizens of the US live twice as well, but because everything from the freeway commute to the size of our houses has been set up for high energy consumption. This disregard of energy use has been going on for decades, mostly because energy has been cheap in the US compared to Europe.
But asking Americans or Europeans to live with the energy consumption needed to really make progress on carbon emissions is very difficult, especially in the short term. Even the lockdowns of the pandemic caused only a 9% decrease in energy consumption in the US. To really reduce energy consumption would require a complete overhaul of US buildings and transportation systems.
So in addition to the huge amounts of extra energy we would need to replace fossil fuels with some other sources, we would need huge amounts of energy to rebuild our homes, offices and transport systems. It’s not going to happen. We just don’t have the energy available anymore. Even if everyone started taking carbon emissions seriously, we have waited too long to start over by building a low-carbon civilization.
The only real solution is an involuntary collapse of industrial civilization. That would create a lot of trauma, but so would a Hothouse Earth.
“To really reduce energy consumption would require a complete overhaul of US buildings and transportation systems.”
The average American house size has more than doubled since WWII. Maybe even tripled, or nearly so. Maybe we can put twice as many people in them by retrofitting them for two families rather than one — or something to this effect.
Also, we’re used to heating our whole homes (apartments, houses) in winter. Perhaps we should heat only the bedroom in winter?
As for transportation? I propose stuffing a potato into the tailpipes of cars initially. This will not allow the car to start, and the driver will not know what went wrong.
That’s a start. Eventually, we could pile up as many defunct pianos and shipping crates (etc) as we can muster up into the middle of intersections. But that’d be a problem for emergency vehicles (ambulances, fire trucks), wouldn’t it? So we could just set down in intersections in couches … and move our couches out of the way when we hear the sirens?
Solar radiation management would reduce the efficiency of both photovoltaics and photosynthesis (on which all human food supplies, along with the food supplies of other living things depend). It would probably disrupt rainfall patterns, thus causing famine and conflict. And it would mask the heating, temporarily, but since it wouldn’t actually reduce emissions it would only set us up for an even more drastic rise in temperature when we can no longer pump sulfur of aerosols or whatever into the atmosphere to block sunlight. This is not a solution, it’s just another dodge, a Hail Mary to use technology to repair the effects of too much technology.
A more realistic solution would be the stepping down of fossil fuel use along with rationing to make it fair, as Heinberg suggests. But for the reasons he briefly notes, it ain’t gonna happen–it would require leveling, and the elites would rather see human extinction than lose their privilege. And they still have all the power. Including control of the media, the key power that keeps the public from asserting itself.
I’m all for leveling, and since we are very many and the ‘elites’ are very few in number, I say we impose the leveling upon them through the sheer force of our numbers — by refusing to participate in their game any longer. We create our own economy, our own media, our own culture.
You may say “But, James, that ain’t gonna happen, either.” And you may be right. But that’s sure no good reason not to give it a try! I mean, we’ve all been telling one another “Yeah, but that ain’t gonna happen” since the ’70s. And we’ve been right about that, haven’t we? But did we even try? I mean, really try? No. Instead, we said “that just ain’t gonna happen.”
If we’re really honest about it, we all know that we’d have to eliminate most (or all) automobiles in a very low carbon economy. That frees up roads and streets (at least for a while) for safely riding bicycles and walking … without the fumes, the danger, the noise. So that’s an immediate benefit (reward) for degrowth.
Also, won’t we be needing to grow edible gardens everywhere we can in our towns and cities? That sounds like a wonderful way to live to me! You walk out your door and cultivate the permaculture gardens — which are everywhere!
Everything slows down, it seems to me, in a very low carbon economy. I don’t have much problem with that. It sounds rather nice.
James,
Countries such as Eritrea, Yemen and Tchaad are already experimenting with degrowth, low-carbon economies and such rewards, but citizens are fleeing massively to Europe. How come ?
It’s true. Rapid and radical degrowth of the kind which is necessary will require us to solve the problem of war and preparations for war, because big fat economies enable there to be big fat war machines. And small, slow, simple economies do not allow for big fat war machines.
So there is the fear problem — the problem of fear of “the other” who might invade and skewer “us” and take all of our stuff …. We’re not going to get anywhere without ending that sort of madness.
You’ve brought up a very relevant problem. At a time when we have less time to spare, when we should be reducing fossil fuel use and devoting the fossil fuels we do use to aiding in the transition away from fossil fuels….nations are building up military hardware, armament, and preparing for war. War destroys infrastructure and forces us to rebuild (or more likely end up living in the rubble). We see similar effects from weather disasters. Both are a terrible waste of resources. We aren’t just moving too slowly to make the necessary transition, we seem to be going backwards and faster.
“The only option is to accelerate the transition and incentivize our way of living to shift to a system that is systematically less energy intensive.”
(1) The climate scientists are telling us we must reduce ghg emissions by 50% in the remainder of this very decade, then continue to reduce emissions to something like “net zero” over the remaining years of the century.
(2) Rapid “energy transition” defined as the mainstream environmentalists, politicians and media are presenting it to us, if its energy costs are simply added to energy-economy business as usual, will result in what Richard Heinberg describes as a ‘pulse’ of increased net energy use, 84% of which is presently fossil fuel source energy — thus resulting in a very significant increase in emissions this decade.
(3) This is a complete contradiction of the very intent and purpose of “energy transition” — which ostensibly seeks to reduce emissions.
(4) Proposing that a ‘pulse’ of emissions now is acceptable for lowered emissions in the following decade amounts to yet more of kicking the can down the road and avoiding action on climate.
(5) Since governments are utterly devoted to unending economic growth, it’s actually up to us, we ordinary people, to take matters into our own hands, and not demand that governments change their spots. They will not; and we should really stop pretending that modern nation states in the ‘developed world’ are democratic. They are not. They are instead the ideological playthings of big corporations, who use their power and money (and media ownership) to “manufacture consent”.
(6) Up used to mean up; and down meant down. Left used to mean left, and right meant right. Now even our words become meaningless, because we’re being asked to believe that the way to reduce emissions is to increase emissions.
Yes this is a major problem for us. Even on our farm where we have draft horses, solar cells organically grown food for us and the animals but if we want to at least break even I need to use tractors to get things done faster so I can do things in a timely fashion to get things planted and harvested. It is just a matter of earning enough money to pay taxes and supplies to keep the farm going even though we have no debts or mortgage.We are working to become fossil fuel free but until most multinationals go broke and we become self sufficient and learning to feed ourselves we will continue using fossil fuels.
Richard misses the point which is that if we want to avoid frying from climate scorching, we need to engage in solar geoengineering to directly cool the climate.
Richard does not properly explore the sacrifice argument, while it is very essential. In a human context it is impossible to speak of sacrifice without reward.
The reward for the sacrifice to achieve the higher goal (a better climate) is not only far too vague, but also the time frame is far too long and far away and not on a human scale. This condition makes it impossible to organize intrinsic motivation for a long time in a large crowd for this project.
We will really have to approach this problem very differently.
The elephant in the room is the U.S. military-industrial-think-tank complex, which the federal budget (if nothing else) shows is the real puppet master behind all this. The fact of the matter is that voluntarily ending the era of cheap and abundant fossil fuels is tantamount of unilateral disarmament. I refer the unconvinced to Matthieu Auzanneau’s epic tome “Oil, Power and War: A Dark History.”
How much energy would be saved by ending indirect and direct subsidies to (industrial) animal agriculture?
How much land would be freed up for re-forestation/re-wilding efforts (that sequester carbon)?
It’s beyond belief this dead animal habit.
Thanks for mentioning the decline of the Alaska pipeline. A quibble: I haven’t seen ANY reporting anywhere that mentioned the recent rubber-stamp of drilling permits in NW Alaska (an area approved for drilling in 1998 by the Clinton Gore administration). Not in “mainstream” media, nor “alternative” media nor anywhere else – apart from resilience.org. Maybe I missed a story somewhere …
“We have met the enemy and they is us.” – Pogo
http://www.peakchoice.org/peak-alaska-pipeline.html