By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
Humans evolved the panic response as a kind of superpower to avoid being eaten. In certain circumstances and in measured doses, it can be helpful.
Take our rapidly changing climate. The planet could easily set a record-high average temperature in 2023, especially with El Niño kicking in later this year. We have already suffered through the hottest early June on record, with global land temperatures briefly touching 1.5C above the preindustrial average. This spring, ocean temperatures have been the hottest ever according to records going back 174 years.
Many people have warned against panicking over such stunning new highs. It’s still possible to avoid long-term warming beyond 1.5C and all the catastrophic consequences that would come with it, but we must kick our fossil-fuel addiction and stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Judging by how little the world’s policymakers seem to be interested in taking these steps, even a smidgen of panic could be helpful.
Scientists agree the world must zero-out its emissions by 2050 to keep warming to 1.5C, a target set at the Paris Climate Accords in 2015. So far, 95 countries have made net-zero pledges.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the vast majority of those pledges aren’t credible. Current policies and practices have the world on pace to hit nearly 3C of warming by the end of the century. Even the most dependable net-zero pledges would still lead to nearly 2.5C of warming, a recent study found.
The outlook is even worse in the short term. The world must slash emissions by 43% by 2030 to hold warming to 1.5C, by one estimate. Only three members of the G-20 — the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia — have even pledged to achieve such a thing, according to BloombergNEF’s Zero-Carbon Policy Scoreboard. And none have actually implemented policies to make it happen.
One big problem is that significant numbers of net-zero countries have zero plans to stop burning oil, gas and coal, according to a recent study from the Stockholm Environment Institute. Forty-five of the 95 pledging countries talk about continuing or expanding fossil-fuel production in their net-zero pledges. Two countries, Lebanon and Senegal, don’t currently produce oil and gas but listed it as an ambition.
Only five of the 95 countries discuss transitioning out of fossil-fuel production as part of their net-zero pledges.
This attitude is likely to carry into the next U.N. climate conference later this year, COP28 in Dubai, which an oil-company CEO will host.
At a conference in Bonn, where negotiators met to draft declarations that will be considered at COP28, countries couldn’t agree on “minutiae such as whether to say ‘on the basis of’ or ‘informed by,’” BloombergNEF’s Victoria Cuming reported.
“(COP28) may generate the same level of noise as previous climate summits but result in little substantive headway toward implementing the Paris climate deal,” Cuming wrote.
After a week of toxic smoke from Canadian wildfires descending upon Washington, D.C., lawmakers are pushing bills to address forest management, “wildfire evacuation and resilience planning,” public clean air centers and distributing “air filtration units to certain households,” Axios reported this week.
All are worthy efforts, but none tackle the root of the issue: continuing to heat the planet will only make wildfires more frequent and destructive.
Consider how chaotic the climate has already become after just 1.2C of warming over preindustrial levels. Deadly heat waves, droughts and wildfires are more common. Storms and floods are more intense. Millions of people have died, been displaced or developed long-term health effects from such disasters. Species are going extinct en masse.
Following this grim course doesn’t have to be our fate. Governments could decide to not only make more aggressive climate pledges at COP28, but also to adopt the policies that will give those pledges real teeth. Individuals can put more pressure on policymakers to act, reminding them it’s what most voters want.
Full-on panic isn’t an appropriate response, particularly if it leads to paralysis. But neither is the apathy currently on display. Whatever the motivation, if we’re stuck in place while the planet changes rapidly, then we are quickly backsliding.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. A former managing editor of Fortune.com, he ran the HuffPost’s business and technology coverage and was a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal.
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