Why you should celebrate climate change optimism
Climate change may still pose an existential threat to humanity, but as Earth Day 2024 approaches on Monday, some of the people most concerned about the planet aren’t peddling doom: they’re spreading optimism.
There’s plenty to feel good about, they say: huge progress in tackling climate change, decades of work that have averted more environmental disasters – and the reality that hope can help fuel the actions needed to continue to fight the climate crisis.
“People think that in the 50 years since the first Earth Day, we haven’t made any progress. That we are in a worse situation today than in the 1970s, that environmental action is useless,” said Hannah Ritchie, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who studies sustainability in relationship with climate change.
Quite the opposite is true. Climate progress that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago is now commonplace. And three times in the last 50 years, humanity has faced – and solved – massive human-made global environmental problems.
This Earth Day, some climate scientists think climate change could be added to the list.
This reality is still a long way off, but we have made more progress than you think. It’s like humanity having to climb the world’s tallest mountain, said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and distinguished professor of climate science at Texas Tech University.
Wind and solar power are the cheapest electricity on the planet. Heat pumps come up in most discussions about heating and cooling. Electric cars are now commonplace.
Monday brings even more funding for climate-friendly causes, with the Biden administration announcing $7 billion in grants to provide solar power to more than 900,000 homes in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The White House said the president’s actions would save more than $350 million in electricity costs per year, or about $400 per household, over the next 25 years.
“It’s like climbing the highest mountain in the world,” Hayhoe said. “You walk and walk and climb and climb and the summit never seems to get any closer. But when you look back, you realize how far you have come.
Even Al Gore, a former senator and vice president who began warning Americans about global warming in 1981, is feeling a little positive.
In March, he acknowledged to USA TODAY that things weren’t moving fast enough, but said, “We are winning on this, we are gaining momentum and soon we will win on the crisis itself.” »
Three major climate victories in 50 years
Humanity has already won astonishing victories over other major and seemingly intractable environmental problems.
Take DDT, a pesticide initially considered a miracle in the fight against mosquitoes and other vermin when it was introduced in the 1940s. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that scientists made the connection between declining bird populations and this new miracle chemical. DDT diluted eggshells so that nesting mothers crushed their own babies, driving many species, including the bald eagle, to the brink of extinction.
But DDT was banned in 1972, and by 2007, bald eagles had made such a comeback that they were removed from the endangered species list.
Or look at the sky and think about the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet rays. In the early 1980s, scientists first noticed that a hole had formed in this extremely protective layer of the atmosphere. Without it, the fields would burn and it would be impossible to survive outside. Despite the costs and immensity of the problem, countries around the world signed the Montreal Protocol, phasing out the chlorofluorocarbons causing the hole. Today, ozone is recovering and is expected to return to 1980 levels by 2060.
Then there was acid rain, the sulfur-containing byproduct of burning coal. Beginning in the 1950s, it destroyed forests and life in lakes and streams across large swathes of the Northeast, and the public became increasingly aware of its dangers in the 1970s. Clean Air Act of 1990 helped limit sulfur emissions and levels began to decline.
Global CO2 emissions could peak next year
This history is important to remember when considering the grim news about carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere, the root cause of global warming.
Last year, they reached the highest point in human history, 420 parts per million. That’s an increase from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution. During this period, global temperatures rose by about 2 degrees.
But there’s something else going on that doesn’t get as much attention but is very promising. Experts – including the International Energy Agency – say global carbon dioxide emissions will likely peak next year and certainly by 2030, using a scenario based on current policy settings.
This means that 2023 will most likely be the year with the highest greenhouse gas emissions ever recorded and the numbers will only go down from here.
While this won’t make up for all the CO2 that has been injected into Earth’s atmosphere since the mid-1700s, it is an important step that shows how energy change is already well underway.
Last year:On Earth Day, scientists tell us what 2050 could look like. Their answers might surprise you.
“The transition to clean energy is underway around the world and it is unstoppable,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, said last year. “It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s just a question of ‘how soon.’
That said, current emissions levels are a third higher than they would need to be to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees. Global emissions per capita must therefore still fall significantly. But progress is being made, progress that isn’t always obvious to the general public, Ritchie said.
Clean energy is now the cheapest energy
This progress is facilitated by other good news. Clean energy, solar and wind, has become very cheap, much faster than many climate experts expected.
“The world is fundamentally different than it was in 1970. Just ten years ago we were in a completely different position,” said Ritchie, whose book “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the first generation to build a sustainable planet”, was released in January.
Today, solar, wind and battery power are considerably cheaper than they were a decade ago. By 2023, electricity from wind and solar power was significantly cheaper than that from coal, nuclear and natural gas.
The unsubsidized cost of wind power has fallen 66% since 2009, while the unsubsidized cost of solar power has fallen 84%, according to an analysis by Lazard, a financial advisory firm that publishes annual estimates of the total cost of electricity production.
Until five years ago, Ritchie said he was rather pessimistic because the costs of clean energy were very high. This no longer worries him.
“We saw this really dramatic change,” she said. “Solar and wind technologies, by far the most expensive, have become cheaper than fossil fuels. This is a fundamental change that will change the speed at which we move towards low-carbon technologies.
Cost trends are moving so quickly that it’s difficult even for experts to keep up.
“If you’re looking at data from just a few years ago, you’re really behind the times,” Ritchie said.
These changes are not just happening in the United States, but around the world. Although China remains the world’s largest carbon emitter and continues to build coal-fired power plants, it is also moving extremely quickly toward renewable energy.
New solar, wind and hydropower in China accounted for 59% of new global renewable energy in 2023, according to S&P Global.
“In the last year alone, China has deployed as much solar energy as the United States has in its entire history,” Ritchie said.
The International Energy Agency also says demand for oil, coal and gas will peak by 2030, as the number of electric vehicles on the world’s roads increases and China continues to expand. move towards wind and solar energy.
This prediction is based on the current policies of the nations of the world.
This is still too high to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperatures.
But Hayhoe points out that when the first national climate assessment was released in 2000, it was estimated that we could be headed for an increase of as much as 7.2 to 9 degrees by the end of the century. Today, forecasts predict global warming of 4.8 degrees by the end of the century. “And that number gets smaller with every new step we take on the mountain,” she said.
There is hope on the horizon
Ritchie says the work needed to combat climate change may seem overwhelming, but it’s actually not as bad as it seems. “Solutions overlap, so by tackling one problem, you improve others at the same time,” she said.
Keeping this at the forefront can be difficult. The same voices that have denied climate change for decades have added so-called pessimism to their toolbox – claiming that it is too late and there is no hope.
Even those overwhelmed by climate change can remain frozen in inaction, Hayhoe said.
“We have people who are so panicked that they are falling into this very unnecessary cataclysm,” she said.
Meanwhile, Gore is also among those impressed by the progress humanity has made.
“If you had said years ago (that) by 2023, 80% of all new installed electricity generation in the world will be solar and wind, I would have said, ‘Wow.’ That’s great!’ But that’s what happened last year. If someone had said that 20% of all new vehicles sold in the world would be electric vehicles, wow, that’s amazing too,” he told USA TODAY in March.
“I often quote the famous saying from the late economist Rudy Dornbusch, who said that things take longer than you think, but they happen faster than you think,” he said.
Contributor: Michael Collins, USA TODAY
News Source : www.usatoday.com
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