SETH W. JAMES

Humanity’s Choice

April 2, 2023

By Seth W. James

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its newest report, AR6, on Monday, March 27 2023, reiterating in unequivocal terms that Humanity is killing itself.  The report enumerated the irrefutable human causes of climate change and warned that the goal of limiting global mean temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set by the Paris Agreement in 2015, is now impossible without radical action on the part of the world’s wealthiest—and most polluting—nations.

AR6 is not, of course, the IPCC’s first report, having delivered studies warning of the increasing dangers of climate change since 1990.  Despite these warnings, since that year, more than 40% of the carbon emissions that are destroying the planet’s ability to sustain human life have been produced.  As CNN characterizes it, “[t]he biggest threat to climate change action is the world’s continued addiction to burning fossil fuels, which still make up more than 80% of the world’s energy and 75% of human-caused planet-heating pollution.”  In order to meet the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, AR6 finds that global levels of planet-heating pollution must fall by 60% by 2035.

As The Washington Post reported, “[b]oth the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.”  And yet, despite this desperate need having been raised for the last 33 years, The Post continues, “[t]he Biden administration has just greenlit the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Once operational, it is projected to produce enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution a year – equivalent to adding 2 million gas-powered cars to the roads.”  On the other side of the planet, China granted permits in 2022 for coal production across 82 sites, the equivalent of commissioning two large coal power plants per week.

I have written before about the myriad effects of climate change, ranging from the destruction of oceanic food webs to increased frequency and destructiveness of weather disasters to the unprecedented growth of infectious disease outbreaks.  With flooding in the North West, drought in the South West, tornados across the Midwest and South, all combining with catastrophic train derailments, toxic spills threatening drinking water, and unnavigable river emergencies—and all of it in the same week that AR6 was released—we are seeing a stark preview of what is to become our new normal.  Our infrastructure and, indeed, our very way of life has already demonstrated perilous vulnerability to the proportionately minor climate change we have experienced thus far.  How will Humanity cope when the number of storms, famines, heat waves, and the desperate migration to escape them grow by an order of magnitude?  That’s what exceeding 1.5C means.

AR6 also clearly laid out the underlying cause of Humanity’s inaction on climate change: it is, as it has been throughout our long history, the haves killing the have nots.  The wealthiest 10% of Humanity generate three times the pollution of the poorest 50%, the report stated.  And despite the plummeting costs of solar and wind energy and the opportunity it affords to reduce inequality and improve the lives of the 700 million people suffering from what the report terms “energy poverty,” which would not only reduce carbon emissions but would also mitigate the causes of migration, the wealthiest among us still cling to the power sources of the past, dooming the rest of us who do not have the means to seal ourselves away from the fallout of their choices.  As the IPCC’s Chair, Hoesung Lee, said, “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”  To choose inaction is to choose the death of Humanity.