Technological Climate Salvation...What Is It Good For?

SmogMightTurnToStars

SomedayVille

In my last post I asked what carbon capture and sequestration is good for.

Reader Bruce took the bait, made like Edwin Starr, and answered 'Absolutely nothing!'

However, in the larger sense, bright and shiny faux-fixes like carbon capture may actually be worth, as Declan McManus might say,  'Less than zero'.

James Dyke, from the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, explains:

We are not going to limit global warming to 1.5°C. This means we will soon be entering a much warmer and more dangerous world.

The threshold of 1.5°C was the highest ambition of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. It was arrived at by a realisation that warming beyond this temperature would produce intolerable suffering to those most exposed to global warming.

So what can we make of politicians who continue to argue that ‘1.5°C is still alive’? Are they misinformed or are they simply lying?

I believe many are in denial about the types of solutions the climate crisis demands. Rather than do the – admittedly – very difficult political work of eking out our supplies of fossil fuels while accelerating a just transition to post-carbon societies, politicians are going all out on technological salvation. This is a new form of climate denial, which involves imagining large-scale carbon dioxide removal that will clean up the carbon pollution that we continue to pump into the atmosphere...

The crazy (infuriating?) thing about this is, as Dyke explains in his piece, very straightforward, non-shiny things that can be done right now (e.g. an accelerated shift to non-fossil fuel-based energy production and infrastructure-driven adaptation policies) that will truly help mitigate the situation as the 1.5°C threshold is reached and breeched.

So.

This leads to another obvious question...

If we were to do these non-shiny things as soon as possible, who loses?



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Image at the top of the post from an archived KCET public television piece demonstrating that true mitigation has been done before to deal with the smog in Los Angeles.

Earworm in the sub-header?....This!

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