The Time has Come

Strong words from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, about the latest document from the International Panel on Climate Change. “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and he added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” 

 Bill McKibben’s latest essay in the New Yorker contends that the time to act is NOW.

 · There is a relation to the war in Ukraine.  Fossil fuel has given Putin the money to finance this atrocious invasion.

· John Kerry called the Glasgow climate talks our last best hope to which Greta Thumberg responded, “blah blah blah”.

·  If the US bans Russian oil – that’s just the beginning. We have to ban oil everywhere.

·  Our species has learned to depend on combustion. Now we have to unlearn it. We’ve focused on the pandemic, but we didn’t note this fact. In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as covid-19 did.

·  What we have forgotten is the fire that we can access from elsewhere without drilling for it – the sun.

·  We have the resources to replace burning fossil fuels. Early predictions of production of wind and solar energy production were pessimistic, but that is changing.  McKibben notes that Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources.

·  Cost matters.  Here is another quote from McKibben. “ By  2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.”

·  People have believed for a long time that the cost of changing from coal is prohibitive.  Since that is no longer the case, it is beliefs and attitudes that have to change.

·  There are huge implications for Canada, according to McKibben. “A third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)”

·  But we have a huge potential for renewable energy from the sky. Do we want to leave that in the air rather than thinking about what we can take from the ground?

·  Much of the world is an importer of coal – and the ships that carry it there do so over and over with fuel to transport it. Wind blades have to be transported too – but one shipment of them lasts for fifty years.

·  We are going to need more electricians.  That’s a retraining decision that has to be made by governments. They will ultimately be well paying jobs.

·  We’re still up against those who want to keep burning things – including one member of the US senate who holds the power to do so while benefiting from coal production. We pretend that natural gas is cleaner, while forgetting that it still involves burning something. Natural gas, McKibben says, is a bridge fuel to nowhere.

·  Wood burning is also seen as an alternative. But wood takes years to replace and all the tree planting in the world can’t keep up.

·  Carbon capture is raised as a possibility – but it costs more than solar power.

·  Utilities will fight hard – charging huge rates for changing systems to discourage changes. Governments need to regulate.

·  After pointing out that those who cause the least energy damage are the ones to suffer most, McKibben quotes Naomi Klein on inequities and the need for environmental organizations to think beyond themselves: “ Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. “

·  The haves of the world have to pay more to the fifty five have-not countries to help them pay for transfers to renewable energy.  So far, these have been empty promises.

·  We need to learn from our indigenous cousins who know the value of using small fires to prevent larger conflagrations – something that they have known for hundreds of years.