The Latest IPCC Report How Are We Doing On Mitigation? – Environment

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change released Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate
Change. As all IPCC reports are, it’s a serious piece
of work and not easily summarized at blog length. Nonetheless, here
are some of what seemed to me to be important takeaways:

• Firstly, and most importantly, we’re not doing a very good
  job at mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. I suspect that, if one
  asked the average American whether GHG emissions increased or
  decreased from 2010 to 2019, they would say that emissions
  decreased. Sadly, that’s not the case. GHG emissions in 2019
  were 12% higher in 2019 than 2010. The best we can say is that the
  rate of increase has slowed. (In case you didn’t know,
  that’s not good enough!)

• It is still possible to meet the Paris target of no more than
  1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature, but the level
  of commitment that will be required to meet that target will be, as
  they say, ginormous.

• We’re almost certainly going to have to spend money pulling
  carbon from the atmosphere. I’ve always been skeptical of
  carbon removal technologies, other than land management, but going
  there is probably unavoidable at this point.

• For the first time, the IPCC discusses climate litigation as a
  mitigation tool. My friend @MichaelGerrard describes this as the
  IPCC “saying that we need to deploy all the tools in the
  toolbox, and litigation has definitely become one of them.”
  That may be, but I worry that IPCC discussion of litigation will
  just be used by opponents to delegitimize the IPCC. I think it
  might be better for the IPCC to stick to the science and technology
  of mitigation.

Any way you look at it, the IPCC report makes sobering reading.
The task will be Herculean and time is growing short.

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