Dreams

Will global heating render our dreams delusions?

A piece of art from Reddit user “TimeLordHun”. (Image source here.)

We all have dreams regarding the future—global heating might render them delusions, though. We face a grim climate-crisis trajectory that will—if we remain passive—leave no space for the visions that inspire us to work hard every day. There are—fortunately—ample opportunities. We can bend the trajectory and make our ambitions make sense.

Rapidly Approaching

A 20 March 2023 CNN piece says: the “world is rapidly approaching catastrophic levels of heating with international climate goals set to slip out of reach unless immediate and radical action is taken, according to a new UN-backed report”; the “‘climate time-bomb is ticking,’ said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in a statement to mark the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s synthesis report on Monday”; the “report draws on the findings of hundreds of scientists to provide a comprehensive assessment of how the climate crisis is unfolding”; the “science is not new—the report pulls together what the IPCC has already set out in a cluster of other reports over the last few years—but it paints a very stark picture of where the world is heading”; and the “impacts of planet-warming pollution are already more severe than expected and we are hurtling towards increasingly dangerous and irreversible consequences, the report says”.

The “biggest threat to climate change action is the world’s continued addiction to burning fossil fuels, which still make up more than 80% of the world’s energy and 75% of human-caused planet-heating pollution”; despite “the International Energy Agency saying in 2021 that there can now be no new fossil fuel developments if the world is to meet climate commitments, governments are continuing to approve oil, gas and coal projects”; the “Biden administration has just greenlit the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska”; once “operational, it is projected to produce enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon pollution a year—equivalent to adding 2 million gas-powered cars to the roads”; “China is planning a huge expansion of coal—the dirtiest of fossil fuels”; and in “2022, it granted permits for coal production across 82 sites, equal to starting two large coal power plants each week, according to a report last month”. 

A 20 March 2023 Guardian piece says: scientists “have delivered a ‘final warning’ on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert”; the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, set out the final part of its mammoth sixth assessment report on Monday”; the “comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages”; in “sober language, the IPCC set out the devastation that has already been inflicted on swathes of the world”; extreme “weather caused by climate breakdown has led to increased deaths from intensifying heatwaves in all regions, millions of lives and homes destroyed in droughts and floods, millions of people facing hunger, and ‘increasingly irreversible losses’ in vital ecosystems”; and “Monday’s final instalment, called the synthesis report, is almost certain to be the last such assessment while the world still has a chance of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which our damage to the climate will rapidly become irreversible”. 

More “than 3bn people already live in areas that are ‘highly vulnerable’ to climate breakdown, the IPCC found, and half of the global population now experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year”; in “many areas, the report warned, we are already reaching the limit to which we can adapt to such severe changes, and weather extremes are ‘increasingly driving displacement’ of people in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America, and the south Pacific”; all “of those impacts are set to increase rapidly, as we have failed to reverse the 200-year trend of rising greenhouse gas emissions, despite more than 30 years of warnings from the IPCC, which published its first report in 1990”; temperatures “are now about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC found”; and if “greenhouse gas emissions can be made to peak as soon as possible, and are reduced rapidly in the following years, it may still be possible to avoid the worst ravages that would follow a 1.5C rise”.

And Robert Pollin says in a 26 February 2023 Truthout interview: “there is a great deal of evidence demonstrating that we continue to move relentlessly toward a climate abyss”; concentrations “of the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—reached record highs in 2021, with preliminary evidence finding that this upward trend continued in 2022”; the “average global temperatures for 2015-2022 are likely to have been the eight warmest years on record”; the “temperature in the U.K. reached 105° Fahrenheit for the first time on record, while three states in Germany experienced their driest summer on record”; average “daily temperatures were sustained at over 110° F during the heat wave in India this past May, while monsoon flooding in Pakistan in July and August inundated about 9 percent of the country’s total land area”; and a “Washington Post article from last July titled ‘India’s Deadly Heatwave Will Soon Be a Global Reality’ reported that” as “‘the climate warms, conditions once experienced only in saunas and deep mineshafts are rapidly becoming the open-air reality for hundreds of millions of people, who have no escape to air conditioning or cooler climes’”. 

Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine led to oil and gas supply shortages, especially in Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian supplies”; these “supply shortages enabled the oil giants to jack up prices and reap unprecedented profits”; “the six largest Western oil companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Equinor and Total—made $200 billion in profits in 2022, more than any previous year in the history of the industry”; the “oil companies, in other words, are feasting as the world burns”; in “addition to Big Oil’s record-shattering profits in 2022, global fossil fuel subsidies also doubled, from roughly $500 billion to $1 trillion in 2022”; this “spike in fossil fuel subsidies came after the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact committed to phasing out these subsidies”; coal “was also revived in 2022”; this “was due in part to the natural gas shortages created in Europe by the Ukraine war”; “the largest increases in coal consumption were not due to the war, but rather to the continued increases in consumption in India and especially China”; and “China now accounts for about 50 percent of all global coal consumption”. 

As for “where can we possibly also see significant positive developments”, we can start “with the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last August”; the law “is mostly a measure to channel large-scale financing into clean energy investments”; “as a result of the IRA passing, clean energy investments immediately spiked in the last three months of 2022 to $40 billion, equal to the total level of such investments for all of 2021”; “most of this new investment money has been flowing into Republican-dominated states, where, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the law”; “a large percentage of the new jobs being created by these investments, including in the Republican-dominated states, are reserved for union members”; “a fundamental new reality could be emerging out of the IRA”, namely “that working people will begin to see how the green energy transformation can be a major engine for creating good union jobs, in red states just as much as in blue states”; this “is a central idea behind the Green New Deal, as has been advanced in the U.S. for over a decade by excellent groups like Labor Network for Sustainability, the BlueGreen Alliance and Reimagine Appalachia”; if “this point does become broadly recognized, it could deliver unprecedented levels of support for a global Green New Deal”; there “have also been major positive developments in Europe over the past year, which responded to the collapse of Russian oil and gas supplies by sharply increasing energy conservation measures and accelerating the roll-out of solar, wind, and other renewables”; “the point should become increasingly evident throughout Europe that the green energy transformation will be an engine for expanding job opportunities and raising working-class living standards—in other words, a clear alternative to the austerity economics that dominates in Europe today”; as “this point sinks in, the level of political support for funding” the transformation “at much higher levels could also grow correspondingly”; regarding the “election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October”, his “election victory needs to now be buttressed by large increases in financial support for forest protection in Brazil and elsewhere, and more generally, for Green New Deal projects in the Global South”; and this “hasn’t happened so far, despite pledges made by rich countries at the most recent November climate summit in Egypt”.

The Choices We Make Now

A 20 March 2023 Toronto Star piece says: there’s “a girl sitting in a Grade 5 class today”; by “the time she graduates from high school, in just seven years, the decisions the world makes around carbon emissions will determine the environment she grows up in”; on “Monday, the planet’s leading climate scientists offered two starkly different glimpses of that future”; one “in which nations realize massive, rapid and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and yank the planet back from the brink of disastrous climate change consequences”; “one in which we don’t”; by “2030, scientists warn, countries such as Canada must slash carbon emissions by almost half to prevent that fifth-grader from living out her old age in a world with increased floods, fires, crop failures, forced migration and infectious disease outbreaks, and to zero by 2050”; that “was the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report”; climate “change may have once felt like something you had to squint deep into the future to see”; and “Monday’s report shows that the choices we make now will profoundly alter the planet today’s children live in”. 

A figure from the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Synthesis Report. (Image source here—credit to Axios for the image.)

The “report is the world’s most comprehensive assessment of the current state of climate change”; the “last synthesis report came out in 2014, and acted as both a major impetus and the scientific underpinning for the historic Paris Agreement, when nearly all the world’s governments agreed to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”; that “goal is necessary to keep the world within 1.5 degrees of warming, a critical guardrail that, if overshot, will lead to increasingly destructive planetary outcomes, some irreversible”; and the “actions pledged by nations so far are insufficient to keep the world within that guardrail, and would result in 2.8 degrees of warming by the end of the century, the UN’s initial assessment found”. 

A 22 March 2023 CNN piece says: the “world is facing a looming global water crisis that threatens to ‘spiral out of control’ as increased demand for water and the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis put huge pressure on water resources, a UN report has warned”; by “2050, the number of people in cities facing water scarcity is projected to nearly double from 930 million people in 2016 to up to 2.4 billion, the report found”; and without “action to address the problem of water scarcity, ‘there definitely will be a global crisis,’ said Richard Connor, the report’s lead author, at a news conference to launch the report”. 

A 13 March 2023 CNN piece says: from “lengthy droughts to severe flooding, the intensity of water-related disasters around the world has increased over the last two decades as global temperatures climbed to record levels, according to new research”; the “study from NASA scientists published Monday in the journal Nature Water found that increasingly frequent, widespread and intense droughts and floods were linked more strongly to higher global temperatures than to naturally changing weather patterns, like El Niño and La Niña”; this “suggests these intense events will increase as the climate crisis accelerates, the study says”; “UN scientists recently concluded” two things; first, “droughts that may have occurred only once every 10 years or so now happen 70% more frequently”; second, “heavy rainfall that used to happen once every 10 years now occurs 30% more often”; while “2022 was not included in the study period, vast swaths of the world saw extreme events last year, including the deadly flooding that submerged a third of Pakistan as well as the severe European drought that caused some rivers to dip to historic lows”; and “California, which has been experiencing a historic megadrought triggering severe water shortages, has been suddenly pummeled by heavy rain and snowstorms over the last few months”. 

And regarding the climate crisis, Noam Chomsky says in a 28 October 2021 Truthout interview: the “basic facts are brutally clear, more so with each passing year”; in “brief, any hope of avoiding disaster requires taking significant steps right away to reduce fossil fuel use, continuing annually with the goal of effectively phasing out fossil fuel use by mid-century”; we “are approaching a precipice”; a “few steps more, and we fall over it, forever”; falling “off the precipice does not imply that everyone will die soon”; “there’s a long way down”; “it means that irreversible tipping points will be reached, and barring some now-unforeseen technological miracle, the human species will be entering a new era”; it’ll be an era “of inexorable decline, with mounting horrors of the kind we can easily depict, extrapolating realistically from what already surrounds us—an optimistic estimate, since non-linear processes may begin to take off and dangers lurk that are only dimly perceived”; and it “will be an era of ‘sauve qui peut’—run for your lives, everyone for themselves, material catastrophe heightened by social collapse and wholesale psychic trauma of a kind never before experienced”. 

I find it incredibly disturbing how we will—if we remain passive—lock in an era of the following things that Chomsky refers to: (1) “inexorable decline”, (2) “mounting horrors”, (3) “‘sauve qui peut’”, (4) “material catastrophe”, (5) “social collapse”, and (6) “wholesale psychic trauma”. 

A Massive Political Struggle

I think that the climate crisis is extremely grim—there’s infinite pain coming our way if we don’t take collective action to change our self-destructive societal course. There are solutions, though. And there’s still time to act. 

People can join various organizations and help move the needle. It’s essential to remember that someone can have a demanding career and also do climate activism on the side—it’s been shown that this is possible, so it’s not like it’s a choice between (A) one’s career and (B) activism.

I want to highlight that we face political barriers—not technological or economic ones. Pollin says in a 3 April 2023 Truthout interview: “purely as an analytic, economic and policy challenge—i.e., independent of all the forces arrayed to defend fossil fuel profits at all costs—it is entirely realistic to allow that global CO2 emissions can be driven to net zero by 2050”; “true net zero emissions—with the ‘net’ referring only to CO2 absorption through afforestation at a level of perhaps 5 to 10 percent of current emissions—is entirely feasible technically and economically”; and “it will continue to be a massive political struggle”.