Our Last, Best Chance?

Canadians have all the proof they need in our own prime minister that the existing approach to slashing carbon emissions cannot work. Trudeau's hypocrisy is embedded in his drive to accelerate the export and production of the world's most carbon-intensive ersatz petroleum, bitumen, under the laughable premise that more carbon today is the key to a green future - eventually, sometime, maybe. That's sophistry on a scale to rival Trump.

Parents often try to impart to their children the wisdom of not putting off until tomorrow what they can do today. It's a valuable lesson that's immediately discarded as soon as those same kids reach high political office. Once securely installed every challenge becomes a can to be kicked down the road. That includes these lofty greenhouse gas emissions cuts so earnestly promised and then promptly shelved.

Leave it to grownup kids like Trudeau or the leaders of most other parties for that matter and our grandkids face the very real prospect of a living hell on earth.

But the Paris climate agreement reached in the heady closing months of 2015 was never going to be enough, was it? Not really. It was all voluntary, well-intentioned (sort of) pap. The jubilant international press was caught in the moment. Few even noticed the caution of Hans Joachim Schellnhuber that, to work, the deal required nothing less than an "induced implosion" of the global fossil fuel industry. An induced implosion as in effective government intervention to shut down Big Fossil. Sort of the exact opposite of what the Dauphin had in mind for Canadian bitumen.

Trudeau's commitment to the fight against climate change comes down to the induced expansion of bitumen production complete with expanded pipelines to get that civilization killing crap to "tidewater." I'm pretty sure that's not what Schellnhuber had in mind.

Canada's approach to climate change isn't well received abroad either. In fact it's been denounced as fatal to the Paris agreement. Let's be honest. We're going to put paid to any hope of not just Canada but all the signatories achieving the Paris objectives. Can't happen, ain't gonna happen.

All of which means a new idea, one that might truly avert runaway global warming, probably won't stand a chance.

On Thursday (23.03.17), researchers proposed an alternative: a "carbon law" obliging all people, cities, businesses and countries to halve their emissions every 10 years. The idea will be presented to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in New York on Friday.

"It's a much simpler and more ambitious framing, because you have huge emissions cuts in the first 10 years, and then it gets easier in the future to reach the targets," the report's co-author Owen Gaffney told DW.

"A lot of the framing around the carbon challenge right now says we need to get to zero emissions some time after 2050. It's hard to see how that will motivate the kind of action we need right now to decarbonize the global economy."
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Gaffney says he and his colleagues got the idea for the alternative model in the summer of 2015 while chatting with Johan Falk, director of the Stockholm IOT ignition lab for computer processor maker Intel.

Falk had told them about "Moore's Law" in the IT industry, which accounts for how processors have been doubling their computing power every two years. Neither a natural nor statutory law, this simple rule of thumb has nonetheless been accepted by the industry for the past 50 years, driving disruptive innovation. Industry leaders believed in it - and it became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
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Currently, no country has plans to halve emissions in the next 10 years - although some small countries plan to come close. The "nationally determined contributions" submitted to the UN by major emitters delay their most significant action until future decades.

Justifying the slow pace, politicians have cautioned that commitments need to be kept realistic, otherwise they are meaningless.

Great idea, truly inspirational, until you realize that we live in a Trump and Trudeau world. Ideas like this Moore's Law notion are and will probably remain non-starters. Saving the world? We're just not into that.