Date: 2025-03-14 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017356
People ... Climate Science
Gernot Wagner
Can the Planet Be Saved?
Peter Burgess
Reason for despair: Climate change. It’s the perfect problem: more global, more long-term, more irreversible, and more uncertain that virtually any other public-policy problem facing us. Climate change is a lot worse than most of us realize. Almost regardless of what we do on the mitigation front, we are in for a whole lot of hurt.
On the policy front, we have now talked for more than 20 years about how we need to turn this ship around “within a decade.” Not unlike the ever-elusive fusion technology, that hasn’t happened yet. Global carbon emissions declined slightly this year—for the first time ever without a global recession—but the trends are still pointing in the wrong direction. Worse, turning around emissions is only the very first step. It’s not enough to stabilize the flow of water going into the bathtub when the goal is to prevent the tub from overflowing. We need to turn around atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. That means turning off the flow of water into the tub—getting net emissions to zero and below. It doesn’t help our efforts that many people seem to confuse the two. A study involving over 200 MIT graduate students faced with this same question revealed that even they confuse emissions and concentrations—water flowing into the tub and water levels there. If MIT graduate students can’t get this one right, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Reason for hope: Climate change. Many signs point to some real momentum to finally tackle this momentous challenge.
The Paris Climate Accord builds an important foundation. It enables transparency, accountability, and markets to help solve the problem. Many governments are moving forward with pricing carbon: from California to China, from Sweden to South Africa, we see ambitious action to reign in emissions in some 50 jurisdictions. Meanwhile, lots is happening on the clean-energy front. That’s particularly true for solar photovoltaic power, which has climbed up the learning curve—and down the cost curve—faster than most would have expected only five years ago. That has also provided an important jolt for sensible climate policy. Then there’s R&D for entirely new technologies. Bill Gates leading an investment coalition with $1 billion of his own money is only one important sign of movement in that direction. The excitement for self-driving, electric vehicles is palpable up and down Silicon Valley, to name just one potentially significant example. In the end, it’s precisely this mix of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and, of course, Washington that will lead—and, in part, is already leading—to the necessary revolution in a number of important sectors, energy and transportation chief among them.
Excerpt from The Atlantic‘s year-end feature on Hope and Despair: “Can the Planet Be Saved?“
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Darrell Prince Darrell Prince 2nd degree connection2nd
Applied Science Analysis of business and legal issues 4y
What is your evaluation of the timeline of necessary change, and how the pace matches up with real efforts?
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Meredith Poor Meredith Poor 2nd degree connection2nd
Software Development Contractor at SafePaaS 4y
'Climate...' hype ',,,is a lot worse than most of us realize.' Did you take chemistry in high school or college? Do you remember any of it?
This entire post is vague. Can you put your finger on effective CO2 sequestration and remediation technologies? Do you know what they cost? Do you keep track of the price of solar and wind power trends? If you paid attention to this stuff, your postings might focus more on specifics.
If I'm sounding like a broken record, it's because I've responded to posts like this over and over, with the same questions.
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Jon A. Weiss Jon A. Weiss 1st degree connection1st
Founder and Executive Director, Lake Climate Group LLC ~ The Global Climate Change Finance and Policy Consultancy ~ Advancing a data-driven means to simultaneously accomplsh #SDGs and #NetZero emissions by 2040. 4y
Always I welcome your expert perspective, Gernot Wagner! Perhaps like you, I can't help but remain at least hopeful for the enormous systemic global changes that are needed right now. One way is simply to incentivize decarbonization. But how? I.e., Via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Sustainability Accounting platforms that can integrate a Shared Value platform for enterprises both large and small. A result: newly created efficiencies that quickly can progress across an enterprise to produce increased profits resulting from less waste, redundancy and consumption, etc. Circular Economies, if you will, that can thereby progress global supply chains integrated with local priorities and preferences! Here's to Big Data merging with Sustainability Accounting -- an IoT technology that already exists! Cheers -jw …see more
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