Faint Hope

These days good news on climate change is hard to find.  Yet recent progress by major emitters, specifically China, give hope that the world might just meet the Paris Climate Summit goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Over the past half-century, growth in the global economy and carbon pollution have been tied together. When the global economy has been strong, we’ve consumed more energy, which has translated into burning more fossil fuels and releasing more carbon pollution. But over the past four years, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions have been decoupled. The global economy has continued to grow, while data from the EU Joint Research Centre shows carbon pollution has held fairly steady.

China’s shift away from coal to clean energy has been largely responsible for this decoupling. Due to its large population (1.4 billion) – more than four times that of the USA (323 million) and nearly triple the EU (510 million) – and rapid growth in its economy and coal power supply, China has become the world’s largest net carbon polluter (though still less than half America’s per-person carbon emissions, and on par with those of Europeans). But as with the global total, China’s carbon pollution has flattened out since 2013.

The good news of a slowing in the growth of man-made carbon dioxide emissions is tempered by the warning that we still face the Herculean chore of rapidly abandoning fossil fuels after 2020. We have a chance, if we're prepared to decarbonize our economies and our societies within the very near future. And the way that can be done isn't easy. It requires what Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told delegates at Paris in 2015 is essential, the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.  That means governments intervening to force the closure and abandonment of the oil and gas wells and the fossil fuels mines.

We pride ourselves on being a really progressive country that wants only the best for the world. Can you think of a Canadian leader, not only Justin Trudeau but his predecessors and his rivals today, who would padlock Athabasca or force the closure of the gas and oil wells of western Canada?

Let's not kid ourselves. In order to decarbonize we're probably going to have to endure an economic collapse. That's because the fossil energy giants have us by the - cojones. They have an estimated $27 Trillion dollars of proven fossil fuel reserves subscribed on every stock exchange and bourse around the world. 27,000,000,000 dollars from banks, institutional investors, pension funds and ma and pa punters are floating around in today's Carbon Bubble. That's an enormous amount of wealth to simply wipe off the books of the global economy. Bursting that bubble is going to leave lasting scars.

Freedom from fossil energy will take a concerted global effort. We've been lucky so far. Renewable energy costs have been falling to the point where they're sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. What will fossil fuels cost when that Carbon Bubble bursts?  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Especially if we revert to pre-globalization, slave labour rates in the Third World.

My point is that getting off carbon energy is going to cause enormous economic upheaval of the sort that can readily destabilize vulnerable nations, even entire regions. How do you maintain that concerted global effort to decarbonize in the midst of that sort of dystopian-lite upheaval? Are we prepared for a global sharing economy in which wealth is voluntarily transferred from the haves to the have nots for the sake of global stability? The developed world's record of dealing with growing inequality within their own economies doesn't offer much cause for optimism.

And then there's the real stumbling block, the synergy of climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of very finite resources. Jared Diamond illustrates in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," drives home the point that, when you have these interwoven, synergistic, existential threats you either resolve them all or you'll solve none of them.

Am I suggesting we simply throw in the towel, give up, wait to die off? Of course not. We have to resolve our entirely man-made predicaments.  The overpopulated have to slash their populations. The over-consumptive have to slash their consumption. Everyone, but particularly the big emitters, have to slash their emissions and move off carbon energy. We have to build a new, post-carbon economy first nationally, then regionally and finally globally.

We must give up our illusions that carbon taxes and solar panels will solve our problems. That horse left the barn sometime in the early 1970s.

We have to revert to the past when we lived within the bounds of our environment. We're simply too big for our planet, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. It's time we had a serious discussion about sustainable retreat.