A few years ago I was chatting to an engineering friend who works in the energy and process industries. During the conversation he said, “I accept that the climate is changing, and that humans are the cause. However, I do not believe that the climate crisis is an existential crisis.”
The conversation moved on to other topics, but I did not forget his words. At the time I ‘sort of’ disagreed with him. Now I believe firmly that his statement is incorrect.
The climate crisis is indeed an existential crisis.
The word ‘existential’ can be interpreted in different ways, but in this context it means that climate change will (not might) lead to a drastic decline in human population and living standards, and the end of modern civilization as we know it. These changes are irreversible, and will affect everyone, regardless of their wealth or location. No one is exempt. Whether this is good news or bad news remains to be seen.
The fundamental crisis is not climate change; that is not the problem. Addressing climate change by itself is treating the symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself.Global heating is a consequence of our need to burn fossil fuels to keep society running and to maintain non-stop economic growth. The root cause of our current dilemmas is Overshoot.
What society will look like after this decline no one knows ― it may be more equitable and more just. It may be the opposite. But it will not look like our fossil-fuel based way of living. It will be far less energy intensive and much less polluting.
COP 21
A watershed moment in the climate change movement was the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in the year 2015. At that meeting, which was held in Paris, leaders from nations of the world signed the ‘Paris Agreement’ ― a legally binding international treaty in which they committed to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A key statement in the Agreement was,
. . . substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold the global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C . . .
This Agreement was met with a wave of enthusiasm. Many organizations, including large energy and oil companies, committed to a ‘Net Zero by 2050’ goal. The idea was that they would achieve zero emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2050. (The word ‘net’ allowed organizations to take credit for carbon capture and sequestration actions.)
We created this site (and the matching Faith in Changing Climate site) as part of that response. Our aim was to identify and evaluate realistic technologies that would help companies achieve their Net Zero goals. Many of these technologies did not address engineering, thermodynamic and project management realities. Our aim was to understand how these solutions ― if they were solutions ― could contribute to addressing the climate crisis, and to reject ideas that would not work, or even make the situation worse.
Fast forward ten years and we see that the situation is grim ― the state of the climate is much worse than it was in 2015. The pledges that were made resulted in very little effective action. For example, one of the goals of the Paris Agreement was to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline by 2030. We have already reached that point, six years ahead of schedule. It is true that there are more solar panels and wind turbines than at the time of COP 21. And there are more electric vehicles on the highways. But the underlying trends to do with greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and loss of biosphere have not changed ― indeed, they may have accelerated.
Tipping Points
We may now have reached a series of tipping points. Once a tipping point is reached, there is no going back ― at least, not on a human time scale.
Our last post ― Whatever Happened to Net Zero by 2050? ― suggested that most organizations have quietly dropped their ‘Net Zero by 2050’ programs. The reality is that they are not going to reach a net zero goal without extraordinary effort and sacrifice. Neither the effort nor the sacrifice is happening. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are heading toward some type of collapse.
A New Approach
If the above conclusions are correct, we need to change the focus of this blog. Up until now we, along with many others, have been working toward two distinct goals:
Reduce emissions so as to avoid a climate catastrophe, and
Replace fossil fuels quickly with ‘green energy’ so that we can maintain non-stop economic growth.
The last ten years have taught us that these two goals are incompatible. As we said in our last post,
We cannot maintain infinite growth on a finite planet. Yet all of our business, financial and political goals depending on maintaining non-stop economic growth. This is a conundrum.
We see this conflict playing out in real time. It’s election season in the United States, so all parties are promising economic growth. Yet we read headlines such as Part of West Virginia in ‘exceptional drought on a daily basis. In spite of daily headlines such as these, the Vice President of the United States devoted just part of one sentence in her acceptance speech to climate change. (The other party rejected the very idea of climate change.)
Themes
At our Faith in a Changing Climate site we developed three themes. They are:
Understand Physical Realities;
Accept and Adapt; and
Live within Gaia.
These themes were directed toward the faith community. But, with some modification, they can be used by the business leaders. Of course, the details will vary from place to place, company to company, and time to time. Moreover, even if the economy is on an overall downward trend there will be many organizations that flourish. But the reality is that Nature bats last.
Understand Physical Realities
The theme ‘Understand Physical Realities’ has been a foundation of the posts at this site. Many proposed solutions do not pass the engineering, scientific or project management red faced tests.
Accept and Adapt
These physical realities will affect our economies. For example, the globalization trends that have defined so much of our economic life during the last two decades may be coming to an end, whether we like it or not. If that is the case then businesses should structure themselves around the idea of smaller communities of suppliers and customers, even if that leads to reverse economies of scale and less choice.
We are already seeing a decline in population in many countries. Not enough children are being born to replace those who shuffle off this mortal coil. The business implications of this trend are profound.
Live Within Gaia
This final guideline lies behind everything that is written here. We humans are not a special people, with special privileges ― we are just another of the millions of species that populate planet Earth.
Conclusion
We will continue to post information to do with technology and how it can address climate change and our other ills. But we no longer accept that ‘Net Zero by 2050’ is achievable ― at least not voluntarily. We will discuss the technologies that help us manage the predicaments that we face in coming years. But the discussion will be rooted in the idea that non-stop economic growth is no longer an achievable goal,
