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Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a tragedy in many respects, but one is the stark reminder it serves as to how difficult it may prove to tether every nation in the world to the arduous goal of rapidly reaching net-zero emissions. To the extent that Russia’s President is destroyed by the West. Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich PutinRepublican senators introduce bill banning Russian uranium exports Hillicon Valley — Invasion complicates social media policy Defense & National Security — Blinken details Russia’s possible next steps Continue reading’s economy via sanctions, it should expect little cooperation in pursuing a climate goal that relies heavily on international goodwill.
Russia was ambivalent on climate in the first place, with its mid-century decarbonization goal deemed “Critically insufficient” by one prominent climate referee. Russia has more reasons to believe that the opening of Arctic sea lanes, and the expansion in agriculture on the steppes, will allow it to win as much as it loses in a warmer climate. Moscow should be expected not to join in the painful decarbonization of the global economy, but to preserve its fossil fuel heritage.
Russia is not the only major economy that has failed to address climate change. Brazil set January saw a new monthly record for Amazonian rain forest acreage destroyed since record keeping began in 2015-2016. India has yet not updated its 2030 climate targets as per the Paris Agreement. China is still building, not retiring Coal-fired Power PlantsThe climate pledges of large parts of the global South are contingent upon the receipt of adaptation funds that the north is unwilling to deliver.
Even Europe, which is known for its climate awareness, will likely rethink its pace to net zero in the wake of rising energy prices due to a partial decoupling with Russia. In the United States, Republicans could win the election in 2022 or 2024 and rescind or halt climate pledges made by Democratic administrations.
The unfortunate fact is that despite the increasingly unequivocal and dire assessments emanating from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), humanity is not yet of a single and determined purpose in respect of climate. We are the Titanic — a massive fossil-fuel based global economy chugging at top speed toward a clearly visible iceberg from which we cannot seem to swerve away. It is an inescapable catastrophe that is unfolding in slow motion.
But, just like the looming threat of nuclear warfare, excessive climate change is something we need to pray humanity can avoid. We should be hopeful that the Paris Agreement will eventually reduce and stop our greenhouse gas emissions, despite any conflicts in other areas and some backward steps. It may prove that, in this arena, only loss teaches. Climate damages will need to go beyond the occasional pinpricks that we feel today to severe gashes. But, if the problems get sufficiently serious, we will likely be able to turn the ship around.
Climate change is slow to respond to our efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. This is a problem that many people don’t realize. It is almost as if our atmosphere is being filled with greenhouse gases. The water level will remain at its peak until we turn off the spigot. The natural drain that nature uses to remove CO2 from the atmosphere takes place over a period of centuries or millennia. This means that humanity and the natural world will continue to live with the same high temperature for many generations. Because it is high temperatures that cause climate damage, people born in net-zero years will live their entire lives with maximum floods, droughts sea-level rise, and heatwaves.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter if one believes that we are heading for net zero in a Paris compliant mid-century timeline. This scenario would limit the peak temperature range to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It would also result in moderate climate damage that we could probably adapt with determination. But if the invasion of Ukraine presages a world of continued strife and conflict rather than virtuous convergence, then the achievement of net zero could easily be deferred into the next century, as the “middle of the road” emissions pathway presented in September’s IPCC Working Group I report implies. That scenario suggests that we are likely to experience a temperature anomaly of around 3 degrees Celsius, resulting in massive climate damage for the 22nd century and 23rd.
This pathetic state of affairs would mean that net zero would not be the end to the climate crisis. It would only mark the beginning of a terrible end. Net zero would shut off the climate change spigots and prevent the climate from changing further, but it wouldn’t restore the old climate or quickly cool the earth. For that, we would need to engage in a colossal project of climate repair, which would involve sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere on an industrial scale and burying it back under the earth’s crust — ironically where we got it from in the first place when we drilled for oil or mined coal.
While trees and other soothing “nature-based solutions” could help at the margins, the vast majority of this would need to be done via a huge industrial infrastructure roughly the size of the entire fossil fuel industry. Even at that scale, repairing the climate to a state acceptable to future generations could take a century or two — after all, that’s how long it took us to deploy the carbon into the atmosphere in the first place.
And like the fossil fuel industry, this would entail a huge swath of the global economy — all to remediate the waste dump we are making of our atmosphere today. This will be a worthwhile investment for future generations to restore a healthy climate and natural environment. If the tanks currently encircling Kyiv are any indication, humanity’s Kumbaya moment on emissions reductions may be some years off. If that is true, future generations will be saddled with an enormous environmental debt. They will be able to redeem it once they have stopped climate change and started climate repair.
Wake SmithYale University. Where he teaches on climate intervention. He is author of the new book “Pandora’s Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention”. Smith is also a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. Smith previously worked in several executive roles in the commercial aviation industry, including as the president of the flight training division of Boeing and the COO of Atlas Air.
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