The Washington Post recently published an interactive article documenting the process of analyzing 1,200 possible pathways for keeping the Earth’s warming below the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius level. That is the level of warming most scientists agree is a threshold for saving many of the world’s coral reefs and the protective ice layers in the Arctic and Antarctica.
The Post piece includes a number of interactive charts and graphics if you’re interested in checking those out. Here I just wanted to provide a summary and some thoughts. The study was in collaboration with experts from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and included data used in a key 2022 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The computer simulations included projections for how fast the economy and human population would grow, how rapidly we will reduce use of fossil fuels, and how quickly climate-change reducing technologies will be developed. Many of the scenarios were originally developed with projections for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2023, but now that the world economy has ratcheted back up following the COVID slowdown, emissions in 2022 are on pace for the highest levels ever recorded. Based on that grim reality all the projections that included significant near-term emission reductions were filtered out. The researchers also filtered out other very unlikely near-term developments like massive deployments of nuclear by 2030. This left 112 possible pathways for keeping temperature rise below 1.5 C in the year 2100. These fell into two narratives, one that has Earth overshooting 1.5 C for several decades before coming back down nearer to 2100 and one that stays under 1.5 C throughout.
The overshoot scenario is unsettling due to potential feedback loops and unforeseen accelerations of ecological collapse during the hottest decades. Only 26 scenarios hold the possibility of keeping Earth’s temperature rise below 1.5 C and these all require rapid phase out of fossil fuels as well as widescale deployment of nascent carbon-capture technologies to remove carbon already in the atmosphere. Researchers then assessed these scenarios through lenses of “reasonable”, “challenging”, “speculative”. When only reasonable and challenging options are considered there were 11 possible pathways to avoid significant temperature overshoot.
Based on all of this research and analysis, the only pathways for avoiding catastrophic temperature increase include a total or near total phase out of fossil fuels by 2050 and a massive scale up of carbon capture and storage through both technology as well as reforestation and agricultural land-use changes.
Two developments this week may reshape, and even offer some added hope for our chances of moving beyond the carbon era with minimized damage. First, the U.S. Energy Department just agreed to commit $3.7 billion to finance projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground. The proposed air-capture hubs will pull at least one million tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year to be stored underground or converted into products. It is expected to take a couple years to get these hubs up and running. Second, as has been widely reported, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have effectively managed to generate fusion ignition for the first time in human history. Fusion ignition means the fusion reaction generated more energy than it took This truly could turn out to be a holy grail energy solution since it is inexhaustible, carbon-free, and does not create nuclear waste. However, there are miles and likely decades to go before this milestone breakthrough may actually be commercially available. Here is a good overview piece from Politico.
Both of these developments land squarely in the center of the divide between those who place faith in technological breakthrough to get out of our mess and those who believe it is going to require actually changing our way of life. For the most part I take a “Yes And” approach. I am wary of running from hard changes by chasing after technologies that create more of a mess than we’ve already created (humanity has a solid history of doing exactly that). However, given the scale of the climate crisis challenge I am hopeful that breakthroughs in energy sources and pollution removal will give us greater chances to reduce our overall harmful impacts on this planet (and therefore our own species). However, clean energy and pollution storage strategies aren’t ever going to be enough by themselves to protect and restore nature. The overall damage humanity is doing to the rest of creation goes far beyond climate change; it includes razing of forests to produce beef, draining of rivers to irrigate crops and cities located in deserts, and burying the planet in plastic trash that comprises most of the products fueling the global, consumption-driven economy.
The pathway to a livable future planet is not just about energy and CO2, it is about humanity’s values and collective behaviors. It will require redesigning the global economy to include an overall reduction in consumption and a redistribution of resources into much more equitable configurations. This is not something world leaders want to talk about and the Washington Post possible pathways piece didn’t calculate any scenarios that included reduced consumption. Quite likely those went immediately into the “speculative” and “unreasonable” trash can.
One of the things that gives me hope even though I focus on challenging and often heartbreaking issues is that I also am immersed in the movement toward economic system change and I know about the momentum and progress there. Part of my intention with this publication is to let me readers know about these positive developments so today I’d invite you to take a look at Proutist Universal, a global network of activists and thinkers inspired by the integral vision and approach of the Progressive Utilization Theory. The Prout model offers an integral approach to social and economic development, including people-centered economics, environmental sustainability, and a new model of prosperity. It’s just one of the many, many components of the burgeoning global movement toward a saner economy and way of being on this planet.
In gratitude for and awe of this amazing planet and extraordinary times.
Cylvia
Thank you for this informative, well research, well written article.
Marcia Mitchell
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
Yours is truly a great mind Cylvia. Many of us are trapped in the vortex of average and small minds, continually reacting to the idiocies which we allow other small and average minds to corrupt us with.
You are not.
Thank you for your loving and defiant leadership.
Now more than ever, it’s essential to listen to those who encourage us to be borne before the winds of essential change. It’s only by watching, listening to and actually hearing logical, rational, insightful, leaders rising above that enable closed, damaged and hardened minds and spirits become opened and channeled.
It would be much easier, and in the near-term more gratifying to the masses to feed and reinforce the retrograde positions of cynicism, defeatism, finger-pointing, and most destructive of all, self-righteous indignation and rage.
While it seems a fantasy to consider that it’s possible to forge solutions with any we so vehemently disagree with and blame, allowing ourselves to be lulled into stubborn inaction by that same indignation and rage guarantees that no solutions will be forthcoming.
Our only hope is to continue to try to open our minds and spirits to the ideas that great mind’s present us, even as our own beaten spirits and increasingly smaller minds blame other small minds thereby exponentially increasing the speed of our own demise.
Keep up the good work. We need you.