Coming to Terms with Climate Change
A case for optimism, and why 'degrowth' is a shortcut to a climate catastrophe.
My first proper introduction to climate change was in 2006 as a teenager when, swept up in a series of unusual events, I found myself at the Embassy Theatre watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ along with half of the then Labour Government, their policy staff, aides, and carefully selected dignitaries.
The Environment Minister introduced the film, emphasising the importance of its message, though warned us of several minor inaccuracies, including a claim that large numbers of climate refugees were already swamping New Zealand’s shores. The mood throughout was deadly serious, though that moment drew a broad laugh from the audience when it came.
The film left me in a state of shock. Whatever direction my life otherwise might have taken, I was now working to address climate change. At the time, the most clearly neglected areas seemed to be the better design of public infrastructure (e.g. more efficient transport and energy systems) and improved public policy. Consequently, I decided to train as a Civil Engineer, and I have spent much of my career working to help mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has received a lot of criticism over the years. Depending on who you ask, it’s too conservative, not conservative enough, and too politically compromised by big business or climate activists. All of this was at one time or another plausible criticism, but thankfully the track record of the organisation has proven to be superb (especially given the large degrees of uncertainty). Here are the basics:
The earth’s surface is warming, and is currently ~1°C above the pre-industrial baseline.
This effect has been caused primarily by an increase in net global CO2 emissions.
This is almost entirely the result of human activity.
Increased surface temperature will likely intensify existing climatic patterns and lead to an additional ~0.5m of sea level rise by 2100.
Higher temperatures will create non-linear adaptation challenges, particularly in the management of drought and flooding.
Unfortunately, most people do not base their climate change views on information from the IPCC.
It’s uncontroversial to suggest that modern media (social and otherwise) often fosters a warped view of reality, even assuming 100% factual reporting. Sensational stories get views, but nuanced reporting of ambiguous meta-studies do not. This problem is amplified for controversial subjects since participants are typically incentivised to signal boost narratives that align with their political goals, regardless of whether they’re true or not.
Public discourse on climate change is highly and increasingly polarised. This creates two problems:
First, and most obviously, having a significant proportion of the population unwilling to accept the facts outlined above makes it difficult to implement durable policy.
Second, and more subtly, since reasonable actors don’t wish to risk association with ‘climate deniers’, we lack a credible ‘loyal opposition’ on the issue, which exacerbates an already sensationalist media environment.
Tracking the reporting of Arctic ice loss is illustrative:
Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'
-BBC headline, 2007
“In 5-10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.”
-Associated Press, quoting NASA scientist Jim Hanson in 2008
Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014
-USA Today headline, 2009
Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe
-Guardian headline, 2014
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero…”
-Forbes, quoting Prof. James Anderson in 2018
You can track Arctic sea ice extent here1. Currently, it’s about 40% below the 1980s average. The trend is obviously concerning; we’re on track to see our first ice-free summer in about ~30 years. However, like many others, I gave these alarmist, and scientifically uncredible2 claims undue credence, which weighed upon me for years.
Similar stories are told across climate change reporting, for example in apocalyptic warnings about wildfires (actually in a decades-long decline thanks to improving management techniques), end-days hurricanes, and catastrophic sea level rise3. Given these dynamics it’s easy to conclude, as I once did, when reading yet another horror story, that we’re inexorably headed for a grim future, or perhaps even near-term extinction.
In fact, most people around the world can have every expectation of their children having a better life than themselves. Inflation-adjusted poverty rates have been in steep decline worldwide. Not long ago, places like Bangladesh were synonymous with poverty, but the income of the average Bangladeshi has increased fivefold since the 2007/8 financial crisis. They now have a similar level of income and life expectancy as the average New Zealander in the mid-80s, with every indication that this trend is set to continue.
Many other indicators have followed similar trends. Global adult literacy rates have improved from 1/3 to 85% in the last century. For most of human history, half of all humans died before age five; a thankfully almost unimaginable statistic for most of us today. Today, the number is a little under 4%, down from 10% in 1990. Almost three-quarters of the globe now has access to clean drinking water.
Neither have these achievements come at the cost of increased emissions. Across the developed world, carbon emissions are beginning to sharply decline4 despite (or actually because of, as I’ll argue) continued economic growth and improvements to well-being. Further, contrary to popular opinion, this is not merely the consequence of ‘outsourcing’ emissions overseas to developed countries. The same trends are evident in consumption-based emissions inventories (i.e. where emissions are accounted for at the end-user of goods and services, rather than at the production stage).
Driving these trends is the ongoing revolution in energy, the use of which is responsible for more than three-quarters of global carbon emissions. The key sectors here are electricity generation, transportation, powering our buildings, and generating industrial process heat. Most of the improvement since the mid-2000s has been driven by the declining cost of more efficient home appliances, cars, and industrial equipment such as electric arc furnaces. New fridges use half as much energy as those of a mere decade ago, and cars are ~10% more fuel-efficient. When heat pumps are 2-3x cheaper to run than conventional heaters, making the switch is an easy choice.
Efficiency improvements are all very well, but will never enable us to meet our emissions targets alone, and are in any case subject to diminishing returns.
The truly exciting trends are the new technologies now entering their exponential uptake phase. Electric vehicles (EVs) are now a fifth of all vehicles sold globally, up 50% from last year. Costs are continuing to decline, but with the total cost of ownership already lower than equivalent petrol/diesel vehicles, it’s no surprise that more than half of all vehicles sold in China are already EVs. Even more excitingly, just as so much of our energy use is electrifying due to lower costs, the generation of electricity is also decarbonising rapidly thanks to the transformational decline in the cost of solar PV:
Supported for many years by research grants and government subsidies, declining costs resulting from improved design, manufacturing, and economies of scale have reached a tipping point. Across the globe, the installation of solar is going vertical, far outstripping even the most seemingly optimistic targets and projections:
These trends are robust - they are no longer dependent on the goodwill of governments, but mere economic reality. Cheap and easily deployable solar energy means not only the decarbonisation of our energy, but an era of energy abundance and prosperity for people across the planet. In the world of cheap energy that current trends suggest, solar PV at $10/MWh would even allow the reversal of climate change through direct air capture of carbon at costs as little as $2.50 per tonne5.
Neither has this progress come at the expense of the rapid depletion of finite resources. Yes, we live on a finite planet, but contrary to the plausible claims circa mid-late 2000s of imminent ‘peak oil’, it’s now clear that demand for fossil fuels will decline long before available supply. Recent concerns about terminal shortages of lithium or ‘rare earth’ elements cutting short the electric vehicle revolution have similarly proven unfounded6. Despite the name, the ‘rare earth elements’ that support our high-tech industries, and are critical for batteries and solar systems are not actually all that rare, just poorly concentrated.
None of this is to say we aren’t causing significant environmental problems, or that even 2°C of warming doesn’t still pose considerable challenges. While the reporting might be sensationalist, there can be no doubt that Arctic sea ice is in long-term decline. On current trends, we’ll see our first ‘ice-free’ Arctic summer in ~20-30 years. Wetter areas are likely to become wetter, drier areas drier, intensifying both flooding and drought. There’s plenty of cause for concern, yet we have more cause for optimism about our ability to adapt than we might suppose.
For one thing, while climate change itself is new, the adaptation challenges we face are not. Whether considering flooding, drought, coastal erosion - each has a precedent and established process in the management of resources and growth.
Take flood (‘stormwater’) management. As cities have grown, entire catchments become covered in hard surfaces (roads, rooftops, etc.), which rather than letting rainwater soak into the ground, collect in small ponds, etc., instead channel that water downstream directly into local streams and rivers, which fill quickly and are liable to flood. We’ve been dealing with this issue since we first settled into cities, but what was once a rough practice involving the drainage of swamps and the disruption of natural processes has become an increasingly sophisticated discipline characterised not by concrete channels and accepting poor water quality, but rather by constructed wetlands, permeable surfaces, and the re-engineering of ‘natural’ processes. We’ve become so good at this that cities like Tokyo, housing some 38 million people in an area 3-4x the size of London, can cope handily with regular typhoons. Adapting to climate change might be expensive, but there are few fundamental problems to solve.
The modern world is built upon a technological, sociological, and manufacturing stack of inconceivable complexity. A world based on fossil fuels is clearly unsustainable. Still, as we’ve continued to develop, our increasingly educated workforce and vast economies have made new technologies (like solar PV, EVs, AI, carbon capture, and malaria vaccines) possible that are of unequivocal benefit to humanity while being perfectly compatible with a low-carbon future.
We know that as countries develop, and their people increasingly have their basic needs met, they increasingly have the desire and the capacity to see environmental values realised. That’s why choosing ‘degrowth’ is to reject this legacy, and instead choose poverty, essentially forcing people to once again burn coal, and otherwise degrade the natural environment in order to meet their needs.
It saddens me that so many young people feel they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They’re constantly being chided about their environmental footprint by miserable bastards because of their desire to have children and live a full and active life. The future seems hopeless, and our popular media reinforces the idea that humanity is a pox upon the earth. No wonder they’re despondent.
Coming to terms with climate change involves rejecting the false dichotomy of climate or progress, and instead embracing optimism. We’ve solved many great problems before, and with a fraction of our current collective knowledge and ability. We’ll solve this one too.
Like poverty, health, and education, climate change isn’t going to simply resolve itself. Mitigating and adapting to a changing climate is the work of billions across the entire global economy - engineers, public servants, and solar panel manufacturers, yes, but also doctors, farmers, and service workers. That is to say: everybody, working individually and collectively, bit by bit, as they see fit, to keep making a better world for themselves and their children.
Digging a little, the predictions made by the quoted scientists are typically not actually suggesting zero sea ice. Rather, they use definitions similar to that in use by the University of Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (linked above), which means less than 15% ice coverage in every 4km ‘pixel’ of analysis. In other words, they were predicting functionally minimal sea ice, not literally zero.
More charitably, what’s going on here is a new scientific model will have some unusual interactions and produce extreme tail-risk results such as a sudden departure from established trends. The media (including social) then reports on this <0.1% chance prediction as “scientists say $extreme_outcome possible”, but rarely bother to state how unlikely the modelling suggests this will be, let alone update the public when after further validation and refinement, the model no longer produces these results.
Contrary to dire warnings about 3-4m of sea level rise by 2100, large scientific studies typically predict between 0.3 - 1m additional sea level rise by 2100. This will be problematic to be sure, but in considering what the Dutch managed centuries ago, we can be generally confident in our ability to adapt, assuming current trends in global wealth and capabilities continue.
Measured on a per capita basis. As this trend continues to accelerate, and global population begins to stabilise or decline, we’ll soon see a decline in absolute emissions as well.
Alternatively, solar at this cost would allow the synthesis of carbon-neutral ‘fossil’ fuels for specialised purposes at a lower cost than it’s possible to produce through conventional means.
The cure for shortages and high commodity prices is… high prices, which incentivise exploration and development of new sources. I think we’ve become so used to the shrinking of the map, that we forget just how vast the planet really is. For all practical purposes, we can expect to have more than enough basic resources until we start mining asteroids or recycling landfills by using abundant energy to superheat the materials
This is a really great article. A balanced and well-researched view of climate change and cause for optimism. Like you, I too was very gloomy about the topic until a few years ago. But progress is being made across the board, progress itself trends toward decarbonization: https://www.lianeon.org/p/decarbonizing-progress
So long as humanity is moving forward, we will overcome the climate challenge.