31.10.2024
Crunch time for real
Latest UN report shows that we are on course to massively overshoot climate targets. Reaching between 1.9°C and 3.8°C threatens catastrophic consequences for human civilisation, writes Eddie Ford
Making grim reading, last week the UN published its Emissions Gap report titled Broken record.1 This is the 15th edition in a peer-reviewed series that brings together many of the world’s top climate scientists to look at future trends in greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, they are not a bunch of ‘climate hysterics’ and, when it comes to certain things, we should trust experts - it would be absurd to do otherwise, unless you want to live in perpetual ignorance.
The report shows that a continuation of “current policies” would mean that global average temperatures, compared with preindustrial ones, would rise by 3.1°C sometime towards the end of this century. Now this is in the context of the 2015 Paris Accords, which talked about trying to limit global warming to below 1.5°C to avoid disaster. But, the new UN report says, because we are dealing with the future and therefore it is impossible to make exact predictions, there is a range of possibilities - between 1.9°C and 3.8°C. If countries put into action the promises they have already made in their carbon-cutting pledges (which takes a real stretch of the imagination!), then temperatures will rise by 2.6°C to 2.8°C. And stretching things even further to the point of almost magical thinking, if every country puts these plans into action and follows through on their existing net zero pledges, the Emissions Gap report says the rise could be contained to 1.9°C.
The UN’s predictions about temperature rises have stayed essentially the same over the past three years since countries met in Glasgow for the Cop26 climate change conference, and are in line with a projection from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2021, which showed a rise of up to 3.6°C this century under a higher level of emissions. Overall, greenhouse gas emissions rose to a frightening record 57.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2023, despite all the fine words and global pledges to cut emissions. The Gap report highlights a number of new factors that are helping to push up emissions, such as a boom in flying, which saw carbon from aviation rise 19.5% compared to 2022, as passenger travel returned close to pre-pandemic levels. In that sense, Covid was great for the planet! Road transport emissions also rose, quite predictably, while rising temperatures have forced people to resort to more air conditioning. The natural desire in hot countries for cooler homes and offices has had a severely negative impact on climate change, though in a country like Britain we see the reverse phenomenon, with the failure to insulate homes properly leading to rising emissions.
Then we have the much-lauded transition to electricity for vehicles and heating, but it is a fraud, as the increasing number of electric vehicles has the inevitable effect of driving up demand for power - often met, of course, by fossil fuel sources. Then you have the actual batteries: the metals, the glass, silicone, roads, etc. So much for the poster boy of the ‘green’ alternative, which in reality is a great way for capitalists to get even richer and foul up the planet even more, like the despicable Trumpite Elon Musk.
Profit
Obviously, if all that extra electricity is generated by solar or wind power, then it could be a slightly different story - but that is not the case. If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis, we would be transitioning urgently away from the car economy, not making it bigger - which is totally perverse and destructive. Not to mention mass aviation, meat and dairy production, and all the rest of it. But capitalism is driven by the relentless pursuit of profit, an endless cycle that loses all sight of human need and therefore becomes production for the sake of production, accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Put another way: M-C-M'. In fact, if you set out to design an economic system that is deeply anti-ecological to its very core, you could not come up with anything better/worse than capitalism.
The UNEP report came out just a few weeks before political leaders gather in Azerbaijan for Cop29. By a dreadful irony, Baku has no emissions reduction target - the capital city has never responded to the annual global Carbon Disclosure Project survey, even though the CDP has been asking city authorities about their carbon targets since 2018. As for Azerbaijan itself, it is one of about 50 countries to lack a national net zero target, though we are told that the government is “understood” to be working on a new climate plan before Cop starts - no hurry, guys, in your own time.
The report also looks at how much nations must promise to cut greenhouse gases and deliver, in the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions, due for submission in early 2025 ahead of Cop30 in Brazil. Cuts of 42% are needed by 2030 and 57% by 2035 to get on track for 1.5°C, but that bird has flown. According to the report, the estimated global investment needed for a net-zero emissions transition was $900 million to $2.1 trillion each year between 2021 and 2050 - but in theory this would offset the significant costs from climate change, air pollution, damage to nature, human health impacts, and so on. Of course, every year that countries fail to cut emissions would mean even sharper cuts were needed, as the report notes. But developing countries would need finance from the richer nations - a controversial topic at previous Cops and one that is top of the agenda for Baku - but whether anything is agreed will be a different matter.
Positive aspects of the report identified the ramp-up in the deployment of solar panels and wind energy, which could deliver 27% of the total reduction of emissions needed by 2030 and 38% in 2035 - a cheap, proven technology that is “not a gamble to invest in”, to use the words of the head of UNEP, Inger Andersen. The complete opposite of nuclear power - an insane waste of money - or even carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, though, perhaps, the latter may have its uses under certain circumstances. Stopping the destruction of forests could bring another 20% cut, it is estimated, and much of the rest could come from energy efficiency and the electrification, using renewable sources, of buildings, transport and industry, as well as cutting methane emissions from fossil fuel facilities - something that is quite doable with our current level of technology, regardless of what technological and scientific leaps we could make in the future. Andersen also makes the point, which seems entirely legitimate, that it is “misguided” to fixate only on whether the 1.5°C target was kept or not, because every fraction of a degree of global heating avoided would save lives, damage and costs - “Don’t over-focus on a magic number”, as “keeping temperature as low as possible is where we need to be”.
Trying to remain on the positive side of things, at least potentially, Oil Change International also published a report recently, showing that the richer countries could generate $5 trillion a year from a combination of wealth taxes, corporate taxes and a crackdown on fossil fuels.2 A wealth tax on billionaires could generate $483 billion globally, while a financial transaction tax could raise $327 billion. Taxes on sales of big technology, arms and luxury fashion would be another $112 billion, and redistributing 20% of public military spending would be worth $454 billion, if implemented around the world. Stopping subsidies to fossil fuels would free up $270 billon of public money in the developed world, and about $846 billion globally. Taxes on fossil fuel extraction would be worth $160 billion in the developed world and $618 billion globally. Of course, fossil fuel capitalists, to coin a phrase, would resist such measures to the death - they would have to be forced into line.
Possibilities
But whether a 1.9°C or 3.6°C rise, let alone an even higher increase, this would have catastrophic consequences for the world - meaning that it is “crunch time for real”, as Andersen puts it.
There are innumerable possibilities. We could be talking about the Gulf Stream switching off, which would leave a country like Britain having a weather system more like Scandinavia - a logical, but paradoxical, effect of global warming is that some countries could become colder. On the other hand, we could see the desertification of areas of North America. You are definitely talking about substantial rises in global sea levels and the inundation of cities such as Dhaka, Jakarta, St Louis, Houston, Alexandria, Shanghai - the list is long and dangerous. A situation whereby in some parts of the world you just could not go outside to work, as temperatures would be so high. This is the sort of world that we are sleepwalking into, despite all the talk and near endless conferences, but with no real action. In fact, in acts of lunacy, more coal power stations are being opened! Meanwhile, reaching the point of no return, increased global heating is supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods, turning forests into tinder boxes and cities into saunas, threatening the total collapse of the Greenland ice shelves, melting ever more permafrost, causing the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and so on and so forth.
Any idea that the market can come out with a solution to global warming is delusional. But, when it comes to the actual capitalist bureaucratic state, then that might not necessarily be the case, though more in a negative way than a positive one. The capitalist state could institute something along the lines that we saw in World War I or, crucially, World War II - the highest example being Britain in terms of mobilising people for the armed forces and instituting state control over production, managing the entire economy for the single purpose of fighting a war.
There could be the equivalent when it comes another form of war, fighting the impending climate catastrophe - a sort of ‘climate socialism’, in the same way as the German high command during World War I talked about Kriegssozialismus (‘war socialism’). But it was not actual socialism, of course: rather the bourgeois state machine acting to save capitalism by suppressing the law of value as best it can. Yet, as proven so far by every study and report you can think of, there is no evidence of any moves whatsoever in that direction.
Rather than some variant of Kriegssozialismus, however, the most humane and efficient way to actually combat global warming would be through the power of the working class. This is not something that can happen automatically, of course. Mass communist consciousness is required, on a global scale. No-one can deny that, at the moment, a generalised nuclear exchange or a civilisation collapse brought about by climate change look far more likely. We have a duty to change that ... and change it we can.