Change or go Bust: What do we need to do to stop Climate Change?
Change or go Bust: What do we need to do to stop Climate Change?
Understanding Mitigation, the first half of the plan to save humankind.
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As if climate science is already not complex enough and climate policy not complicated enough, one of the other biggest challenges of climate change communication has been just getting around the endless jargon that dominates the climate conversation. A person who’s just started paying attention to climate crisis will be hopelessly lost in trying to make sense of both the problem and solution.
Climate activists and scientists keep demanding CLIMATE ACTION. But what exactly is that?
In last week’s issue, we established Climate Action = Mitigation + Adaptation. In this week’s issue, I’ll discuss what’s mitigation and why is it important to stop climate change.
The one thing to always remember about climate change is that extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warm the earth’s surface unnaturally and that causes our climate to change catastrophically, excellently illustrated in the meme above.
And so, logic follows that to stop climate change, we now need to stop greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
If you aren’t familiar with our global emissions breakdown, look at this sleek explainer and also spend some time here - CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, both published by the very resourceful team at Our World in Data[1].
What did the world decide to do about Climate Change?
In 2015, 196 countries came together under the historic Paris Agreement to transform their development trajectories so that they set the world on a course towards sustainable development to avert climate crisis, according to UN.
The Paris Agreement central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius - Read more at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Following this historic pact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) revealed that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.”
Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. - Read more at IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C
To summarise, in 2015 the world decided to collectively act on the threat of climate change and agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. Then, IPCC said you can do that only if you slash greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and emit no more by 2050.
By 2030, the global annual carbon emissions need to fall to about 18 billion tonnes and become completely zero by 2050. However, instead of rapidly falling as planned for in 2015, our emissions rose to 37 billion tonnes in 2019.
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This brings us to Mitigation, one half of the plan to save ourselves!
Mitigation is the fancy name for emissions reductions, meaning the plan to not put anymore carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At the moment, our entire existence and economy is interminably tied in with fossil fuels. Everything from our energy requirements to all industrial production and transportation to food security is heavily carbon intensive, pushing out tonnes of CO2 or other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that ends up overheating the planet. And so, we need to eliminate pumping any additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if we want the planet to continue to be habitable in the coming decades and for the next generations.
There are two ways to go about this.
Stop pumping greenhouses gases into the atmosphere a.k.a Decarbonisation.
Suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere a.k.a Sequestration.
What exactly is Decarbonisation?
Solar Park in Germany. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash[*]
As we stand today, considering the limits of available technology and feasibility of implementation, decarbonisation is the easiest and most effective mitigation tool. Decarbonisation is removing our society’s fossil fuel dependency and replacing it with renewable energy alternatives.
In short, we want to stop burning fossil fuel to produce electricity and run our entire economy, and instead transform our existing energy sources to supply power & fuel from solar, wind, nuclear and other renewable sources that do not emit CO2. As of 2019, over 86% of world’s economy and development is powered by greenhouse gas releasing fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and oil, all of which needs to be retired by 2050 or before. Global energy transformation to clean & green sources is our most promising solution to climate change yet!
And what is Sequestration?
While we try to avoid pumping extra greenhouse gases into atmosphere, we could also try using the existing carbon sinks to our advantage. For thousands of years, earth’s natural carbon cycle kept everything in a balance. Natural carbon sinks are forests, oceans and soil that capture carbon dioxide and release them in limited quantities as required to maintain life on earth. Remember, we need CO2 for life to exist & thrive but like they say, excess of anything is poison. The excess CO2 that us humans put in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is what is becoming our poison today.
Sequestration is the process of capturing the extra and harmful atmospheric carbon dioxide either via natural or artificial systems.
How do we do this naturally?
By using the natural ability of forests and oceans to capture and store carbon to our advantage. These natural ecosystems are already equipped to do the job effectively but we keep cutting down forests and destroying marine ecosystems for the sake of “development”.
Natural sequestration is a part of the overall mitigation strategy because if we protect existing forests and marine ecosystems, and aggressively restore lost or destroyed ecosystems, we will have increased the earth’s ability to absorb more carbon dioxide and that will reduce the overall CO2 put in the atmosphere.
Ergo, protecting existing natural ecosystems must be of utmost priority worldwide. Because, if we keep pushing the button, these natural carbon sinks will turn into carbon sources, by losing their ability to capture or retain carbon and instead releasing all the stored carbon like this, this or this.
Do we have an artificial technological silver bullet then?
Kind of.
Carbon Capture and Storage(CCS) technology has been in the works for years now. On the face of it, this seems like a very promising futuristic fix for climate crisis, where we magically capture all extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either destroy it, reuse it or simply put it back into the depths of the earth, where it is supposed to be. This tech is also what a lot of world’s climate change delayers are pinning their hopes on, that we’d somehow overcome the current scientific and logistical limitations of CCS and will be able to capture carbon just in time before the apocalypse arrives. And we will not even have to change our destructive ways! Would make for a great Sci-fi movie for sure, wouldn’t it?
That’s what CCS is for now, fodder for a blockbuster movie but not a realistic, scalable solution yet.
Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change. But it might fill in a few key pieces of the clean energy puzzle. Read more on Vox
Carbon Capture and Storage as well as Carbon Capture and Utilisation[2] technologies are heavily being invested in right now. Realistically speaking, we will definitely need technological assistance to get to net zero or negative emissions by 2050. But this cannot be our Plan A to save the planet, that would still be transition to clean energy and restoring our natural ecosystems to full potential.
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And that’s it for this week. I hope this quick introduction to climate change mitigation helped you understand what we need for a safe future. In the next issue, I’ll discuss climate change adaptation, the second half of the plan to save ourselves. Don’t forget to share this post with your friends and family, we need all hands on deck!
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