Off to Never-Neverland

Jeffrey St. Clair

They seem to come with the seasons (what’s left of them) now: urgent dispatches on the unraveling of the earth’s climate system. Each one direr than the last. Each warning met with shrugs and political indifference. It’s not hard to understand why. After decades of prophecies, the climate Apocalypse has slowly and inexorably arrived. We are living it. Being burned and flooded and parched by it. The old nihilism has become the new realism–for anyone paying attention.

What needs to be done? Nothing less than a revolution in the way the world’s economy functions and the fuels that drive it. What can be done? Not much. What will be done? Almost nothing. That’s my read on the latest (and reportedly the final) consensus report from the IPCC, a document reads less like the Book of Revelations than an after-bombing damage assessment. The bottom-line is that the 1.5C warming goal set by the panel in 2015 is obsolete. It’s unattainable. Defunct. Moreover, it’s always been unattainable. The international plans to slow global warming from Kyoto to Paris would not have been able to keep the climate below that threshold, even had they been fully-implemented. Needless to say, they haven’t been fully implemented. Far from it.

Consider this: the average annual greenhouse gas emissions over the last 10 years were the highest in … human history. In 2019, carbon emissions were about 54% higher than in 1990. Sixty percent of all historical emissions were produced in the lifetime of the average American, who is 38. Almost 90 percent were produced since the birth of Joe Biden in November 1942.

In order to get anywhere close to 1.5C, the world needs to cut carbon emissions to near zero by 2050. But that’s not happening. Carbon emissions from currently-operating fossil fuel infrastructure alone exceed the carbon budget for 1.5C. Emissions from planned infrastructure exceed the carbon budget for 2C. The investments in fossil fuels exceed those for those mitigation and adaptation. And this is just the power-generation sector!

Even the IPCC has come to realize that any goals, even the most ambitious, set by treaties are not binding. There’s no mechanism to enforce them. No penalties for not meeting them. Especially for the biggest culprits, who enjoy carbon impunity. As long as there is coal, gas and oil to burned, and the plants to burn them, they will be burned. And there’s still lots of fossil fuel in reserve and a vast infrastructure for consuming it.

The IPCC report essentially throws in the towel on the possibility of radically reducing carbon emissions. (At this point it’s unlikely that their increase can even be restrained.) Instead, they focus on the chimera of carbon-capture and removal schemes that rely on unproven and even dubious technologies that will attract subsidy and tax-credit hungry corporations but do little if anything to keep the planet from blowing past 1.5C and toward 2C.

How many “now or never” reports on the unfolding climate catastrophe do we need to get before realizing we are living in Never-Neverland? Oh, never mind…