Tom Friedman and the Great Climate Paradox

 

The New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, has attended most of the climate summits over the past quarter century, Glasgow included. The big change he found this year is younger generations shifting away from governments that invariably over-promise yet under-deliver on averting climate catastrophe. What they're migrating to, however, isn't clear.


When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine? That’s magical thinking, and it demands a realistic response.

...Gen Z — all those who were born between 1997 and 2012 and grew up as digital natives — is now the world’s largest population cohort, 2.5 billion strong, and their presence is palpable at the summit.

They know that later is over, that later will be too late and that sticking to our business-as-usual trajectory could heat up the planet by the end of the century to levels no Homo sapiens have ever lived in.

...Good news, Gen Zers: You won the debate on climate change. And thanks for that. Both governments and business are now saying: “We get it. We’re on it.” The bad news: There is still a huge gap between what scientists say is needed by way of immediately reducing use of the coal, oil and gas that drive global warming and what governments and business — and, yes, average citizens — are ready to do if it comes to a choice of heat or eat.

There are no painless solutions.

Governments will not quit dirty fossil fuels until there is sufficient clean energy to replace them. And that will take longer or require much greater sacrifices than are being discussed in any depth at the summit.

For all his endless greenwashing, our federal government's subsidies, grants and deferrals, on and off-book, greatly eclipse its support for renewable energy.  Remember, this nonsense is coming from a guy who lavished billions of dollars from the treasury to buy a bitumen pipeline the private sector wouldn't touch, a guy who thinks the answer is to at some time cap emissions from bitumen production instead of capping production itself. That, kids, is snake oil.

The final word goes to Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam climate institute.

Mother Nature, Rockström remarked to me, has evolved an amazing tool kit to keep temperatures from fluctuating too hot or too cold and maintain us in this Garden of Eden climate that we’ve enjoyed for the last 11,000 or so years — which enabled us to build civilization.

Our planet can go from a self-cooling, self-moderating system to a self-warming system. If that happens, adaptation will be a daily struggle for survival for hundreds of millions of people.

“We have more and more evidence that the planet is more fragile than we thought,” concluded Rockström. So, it may be hard, it may be impossible, but this is no time to give up on trying to phase out fossil fuels and prevent these tipping points from tipping.

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