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サマリー
あらすじ・解説
This week we talk about emissions, carbon credits, and climate reparations.We also discuss Baku, COP meetings, and petrostates.Recommended Book: The Struggle for Taiwan by Sulmaan Wasif KhanTranscriptIn 2016, a group of 195 nations signed the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, usually just called the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated the previous year, and which, among other things, formalized the idea of attempting to keep the global average temperature from increasing by 1.5 C, which is about 2.7 F, above pre-industrial levels.The really bad stuff, climate-wise, was expected to happen at around 2 degrees C above that pre-industrial level, so the 1.5 degrees cutoff made sense as sort of a breakwater meant to protect humanity and the natural world from the most devastating consequences of human-amplified climate change.This has served decently well as a call-to-arms for renewable energy projects and other efforts meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and many nations have actually made really solid strides in that direction since this agreement was formalized, dramatically truncating their emissions in a variety of ways, while also laying the groundwork for long-term reductions by installing a whole lot of solar and wind, reviving old and building new nuclear power facilities, reinforcing and expanding their grids, including adding all sorts of large-scale battery storage, and figuring out ways to reduce energy consumption, which has allowed for the shut-down of coal and oil plants.Shorter-term solutions, like replacing more polluting and emitting sources of energy, like coal, with gas, have also put a big dent in overall global emissions, especially for entities like the US and Europe; this isn’t ideal as a permanent measure, because there are still a lot of emissions associated with gas, especially its transport, because of leakage, and gas itself, in the atmosphere, has really significant greenhouse properties, but in the short-term this has proven to be one of the most impactful solutions for some nations and large corporations, and it’s increasingly being seen as a transitionary measure, even by those who oppose the use of any fossil fuels long-term.Things have been going decently well, then, even if progress is still far short of where it needs to be for most countries to meet their Paris Agreement commitments, and far slower than many people who are watching this space, and analyzing whether we’ll be able to avoid triggering those much-worse climate outcomes, would prefer.One issue we’re running into, now, is that those original commitments were a little fuzzy, as the phrase “preindustrial period” could mean many different periods, even if it’s commonly assumed to be something like 1850 to 1900, in the lead-up to humanity’s full-on exploitation of fossil fuels and the emergence of what we might call the modern era—society empowered by things like coal and oil and gas, alongside the full deployment of electrical grids.Throughout this period, though, from the mid-19th century to today, the climate has experienced huge swings year to year, and decade to decade. The evidence showing that we humans are throwing natural systems way off their equilibrium are very clear at this point, and it isn’t a question of whether we’re changing the climate—it’s more a question of how much, how quickly, and compared to what; what baseline are we actually using, because even during that commonly used 1850 to 1900 span of time, the climate fluctuated a fair bit, so it’s possible to pick and choose baseline numbers from a range of them depending on what sort of picture you want to paint.Research from the World Meteorological Organization in 2022 found that, as of that year, we were probably already something like 1.15 degrees C above preindustrial levels, but that it was hard to tell because La Niña, a weather phenomenon that arises periodically, alongside its opposite, El Niño, had been cooling things down and dampening the earth-warming impacts of human civilization for about three years.They estimated, taking La Niña’s impact into consideration, that the world would probably bypass that breakwater 1.5 degrees C milestone sometime in the next four years—though this bypassing might be temporary, as global temperatures would increase for a few years because of the emergence of El Niño.Adding to the complexity of this calculation is that aforementioned variability in the climate, region to region, and globally. The WMO estimated that through 2027, the world is likely to fluctuate between 1.1 and 1.8 degrees C above preindustrial levels—and that at that higher range, El Niño might tip things into the especially dangerous 2 degree C territory the Paris Agreement was supposed to help us avoid.By late-2024, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the world had stepped past the 1.5 degrees threshold into unfamiliar climactic ...