Poised on the Brink: A Tale of Hope and Change

The relationship between carbon emissions and Gross World Product (human economic activity)

by Thomas Neuburger

The road to 2°C is steep; the road to 1.5°C is a cliff.
—Robbie Andrew, Center for International Climate Research

Some of my best friends are incrementalists. They see the world, accurately to be sure, as continuing step by step, one day to the next, one year to the next, from one election cycle to the next, marking an endless stream of incremental moves — some large (Obamacare), others smaller (increasing unemployment insurance under the CARES Act) — but none so big as to threaten to "end life as we know it."

Thus there's always time to build the movement from where we are to where we want it to be. Think how far the Fight for 15 has come in the past few years (though it has taken years), or the battle for LGBTQ rights (in the Bush era that seemed impossible), or the normalization of the push, at least, for Medicare for All (but not, to be sure, its implementation).

It this game of Tortoise and Hare, the Tortoise is winning, but slowly.

Never is there a thought of a final whistle, that though we're behind and gaining, we cannot win. Never is there a thought (or rarely, since these are bright people) that Time, the invisible referee, is about to step in and say to both sides, "The next free throw is the last."

Yet if humans want to remain civilized (live in cities, be fed by agriculture) and keep anything close to their current numbers intact, the time to recognize the game clock is ticking down ... is now. When it comes to a climate "solution," one which returns global temperatures to within the civilization-nurturing range we're already outside of, the final whistle is almost about to blow.

The next free throw, if indeed we have one left, may be the last.

The Sweet Seduction

Two factors work against us actual progressives, as we stand here late in the initial quarter of perhaps our last civilized century.

First is the sweet seduction of immediate reward, the drug-like high the masters of our economy (and thus of our politics) get from short-term wealth production and acquisition. The political and cultural momentum of our current governing system — 40 years of ingrained neoliberalism — works against us all.

When faced with problems like climate change, problems that challenge their wealth, the masters of our fate default to "market solutions" in their sleep. Having long forgotten why they first spoke that way (it's because, when you control the market and the government that regulates it, market solutions are always on your side), they don't know how to speak differently. It's like the language they use has even lost the words — save "communist" and its cousins — to describe either market harms or the benefits of their elimination.

As for the people soon to suffer the effects of these problems, phrases like "market solutions" wash over them like water, ingested like a tasteless, colorless food additive they would never consider removing from their daily meal because they don't even know it's been put there in the first place. That market solutions are the only ones worth offering is an idea so common it's invisible as a thought, like "men walk upright" is invisible as a thought. It's so obviously true, why would anyone spend time thinking it?

We'd have to make very big changes to reverse course at this point. And before we could reverse our course, we'd have to reverse our minds, swim against a stream we hardly know we're in. We'd also need a very strong president with World War II power to direct the economy, command the economy, to the benefit of the people — the direct opposite of a "market" (i.e., wealth coddling) solution, in which the economy is commanded only for the rich.

This, by the way, is the argument for a presidential candidate who would be willing to make the greatest possible changes in the shortest possible time. Do we have such a candidate? Not that I have noticed. Even the Bernie Sanders of our minds, the person we imagined him to be, failed to be that person when it mattered. So far, we're still looking.

The World-Historical Clock on the Wall

The second factor working against us is the clock itself, in this case the climate clock. Most of human civilization will be swept away in the tide (literally) if global temperatures reach "just" two degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels.

At 2°C of global warming, we'll end up with the temperature of the last interglacial warming period (the Eemian), the period before the last ice age, during which sea levels were high enough to disappear New York City. Scandinavia was an island during the Eemian. The literal tide of Eemian-size sea level rise — 20 to 30 feet at least — will wipe out every coastal city on earth and many that sit inland on low rivers. It will also take with it critical growing areas like the North China Plain, that nation's primary "breadbasket" and the key to its rapid rise, millennia ago, to a historical global power. The largest national population on earth, 1.5 billion people, lives in China. Most will starve under Eemian-like sea level rise.

Yet to keep the climate to "just" 2°C of global warming requires a cut in global carbon emissions of 6% per year — starting this year (charts courtesy Robby Andrews):

If we delay for another 10 years — just two election cycles — the cut in emissions required will be 10% per year.

A much more livable goal from a "protecting our civilization" standpoint is the IPCC's aspirational target of 1.5°C global warming. If we could hold global warming to under that level, much of what we've made on the earth could possibly be saved.

Yet the rate cuts required to reach that goal look almost like a cliff.

Three points before I close:

• Yes, this is an international problem, but U.S. leadership — real leadership, aggressive, self-sacrificing leadership — is both a requirement for success and a powerful driver of it. Were the U.S. to be run by a person who would take control, and using just the present power of the Executive Branch, turn the ship totally around the minute she took office, we may have a chance.

• That person would not only need FDR's purpose and strength, she'd need his popular mandate. Yet so far (God help us for even thinking this) we see no Great Depression, a tragedy equally shared by rich and poor, South and North, West and East alike on the near horizon. This doesn't mean one won't show up; it just means it hasn't yet.

• The coronavirus pandemic could only serve that unifying purpose under two conditions — if a cure is never found, or if the near-term social and political stress cause an irreversible break in the way Americans think about their government and each other. And even so, there's no guarantee that if that break occurs, it will benefit those seeking real solutions. It could benefit the opportunists only.

Finding Hope in the Hope for Sudden Change

I write surrounded by a world in which many who see what I see, and they are legion, privately think it's over. But since last year was much like the year before it, and 2022 will likely be much like 2021, they don't dwell on this too much and they certainly don't write about it.

Ask yourself, when was the last time a climate scientist despaired in public? Yet almost all of them, to my knowledge at least, hold little hope for answers to the greatest question of our age: How in practice do we stop this roller coaster, paused at its peak, from taking the next great plunge?

What should we, as people, do about this, our poised-on-the-brink existence? Live life; love your kids; work hard for sudden change; and pray that the next FDR, if we find him, finds a nation that puts him in power.

The alternative is despair, a diseased, unhealthy state. Hope is much better — and after all, who knows? The sudden change we work for may show up. If so, by definition, it won't come incrementally, announcing its slow arrival years in advance, but as a complete surprise — coming in a year, hopefully some year soon, when one day wasn't at all like the one before.