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The climate emergency is here, and anguish is everywhere. Despite decades of warnings from scientists, CO2 emissions are rising, and the globe is warming at an accelerating rate.
The conclusion most recent of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is quite clear:
Climate change is a danger to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in global action will jeopardize a sustainable future.
Or, to use the words of the UN Secretary General:
Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic folly.
The catastrophe is not caused by the concern that we will fail, but that there will be no real struggle. No awakening. Just a kind of energetic, economic, political limbo in which we will end up to the bitter end.
Yet this is not the time to blow the doomsday trumpets. Pandemics and conflicts have made the climatic match more difficult than ever, but there are still moves to reverse the outcome. Some are idealistic stuff, others extremely practical: together they could make us hear, someday in the future, that this war is over.
1 - Tax carbon.
Ready, go, a tax on fossil fuels. Yes, right now. This is the real painful molar to take off, afterwards we can only get better. The price of carbon affects every corner of the economy. It feeds, in a certain way it forces innovation. It puts a stop to energy dependence on countries, let's call them "unstable". And it removes the veil on all the ambiguities that in many countries of the world are exploited to end subsidies even to obsolete energies.
I know, the word "tax" is suicide for all politicians in the world. But it is an ida that is (slowly) gaining ground anyway. And it will, rest assured: the more the world warms up, the more the drive to give a fair price, a high price to emissions, will increase.
The real question is not whether this will happen, but in what form and how quickly.
How much would that work? A recent analysis from Resources for the Future notes that a carbon tax in the US would reduce carbon pollution about 44% by 2040. Not bad.
2 - All electric.
There are 268 million cars and trucks in Europe. In the US about 290 million. And I only said the West. Add in millions of fossil fuel ovens, gas stoves and more, and the climate omelette is done.
What if we made everything electric? Estimates say that electrification could reduce emissions in most industrialized countries by 80%.
The idea is simple: electric is more efficient than fossil fuels for almost any purpose. The cleaner the network, the better it works. The better it works, the cheaper it is to abandon fossil fuels.
The way is not easy: it is one of the greatest industrial transformations in the history of capitalism.
But the car left. Car manufacturers have already planned investments for 500 billions of dollars. Battery factories are under construction everywhere. Do we want to talk about the increasing micro-mobility on the planet? Its increase can also have a huge impact. As a beautiful lady says while she brushes her smile: go electric.
3 - Solar on a small scale
It is now clear that the future will be sunny in homes, condominiums, shopping malls, parking lots, fast food restaurants, granita kiosks, public toilets (keep it up). Small is beautiful with solar. Unused space can become a platform for producing energy.
Of course, no one pretends to make steel from solar (oh my: somebody yes), or that it is the best way to generate power in any situation, but it is clean and reliable. We will not find it suddenly zero, as in the first blackouts we are already witnessing (last year 11 million Texans in the dark for days, now the same fate for South Africans).
The energy potential of local solar is enormous.
An analysis in Nature Communications found that in the US residential roofs alone (if covered with panels) would amply meet the planet's energy needs. Covering the roofs of supermarkets alone, on the other hand, would power 8 million homes.
The disadvantage? You know him. It is the accumulation of energy.
Batteries are the hitch: bulky and expensive. But this too is changing rapidly. Storing energy in the garage or cellar is possible. And it could become an important part of the core business of many companies that today "just" sell cars.
Yes, the "old" monopolists don't like this. Some companies have been making money from this for more than 100 years, and rooftop solar (with a battery in the garage) is breaking this chain. In the short term the greed of the former "bosses" will slow everything down, but in the long term the "local" solar will win and give us a big hand against the climate crisis.
4 - Tell the truth, the whole truth about the climate crisis
How much will your beach house be worth when you find fish in your living room? And all those refineries what will happen to them when the demand for oil is reduced? 215 of the world's largest economic sectors will face gigantic losses and even greater risks due to the climate. And this now, by 2024, not tomorrow.
The pandemic has made us realize how vulnerable we are to sudden and catastrophic shocks. We need a lot of mental strength, and also ethics. For example, fighting greenwashing relentlessly is crucial. The 25 most important companies in the world (together they make up 5% of total emissions) are not doing much. They promise to reset them by 2050, but at the current rate the reduction will not exceed 40%.
Do they lie? Yes. They lie.
And they take refuge in another "diabolical" system, that of carbon offsets. Instead of reducing emissions, they plant trees or protect forests. Ending up giving credits to forests that would never have been cut down anyway, or that then burn from fires. Truth, clarity, stop compensations.
5 - Fighting on a cultural level
Much has been said about the shortcomings of the big media in covering climate change. It is too often treated as an environmental issue rather than a rapidly evolving planetary catastrophe. Or, simply, we don't talk about it anymore.
Taken by problems (certainly, serious) of "short and medium term", the media have normalized the catastrophe of the world we are sitting on. For everyone, climate change is simply "no longer pulling". Turn the apocalypse into a disconsolate eve? They are doing well.
It is time for journalists to prepare for a much bigger conflict. The climate battle is rapidly evolving into the center of a broader media-led culture war, where science and evidence are irrelevant to adversaries. The next step, whether we like it or not, will be to make the climate talk "obnoxious".
Demonize it, as if it were any "censor" cultural lever, equate it with cancel culture. And this is the most terrible thing at the moment. After 100 years of warnings and 40 years of data, we now know exactly what's going on, and we know exactly what's going to happen.
