Don’t imagine the future—it’s already here

Abstract

Popular debate about climate change often imagines future worlds. In this short commentary, I argue the reality is far more evident and urgent; we don’t need to imagine the future of climate change because it is already here. We know the carbon budget we must abide by to avoid dangerous climate change and we are already seeing the reality of extreme weather events unimaginable even a decade ago. We know how climate change ends; we now need to try and rewrite this future.

The good news, I guess, is that our climate future doesn’t require much in the way of ‘imagining’. It’s already there, written down in black ink.

At least that’s how it seemed to me about a year ago (McKibben, 2012), when a team of UK financial analysts produced a new report tallying up how much carbon the world’s fossil fuel companies (and the countries that operate like fossil fuel companies—think Kuwait) had in their inventory (Carbon Tracker Initiative, 2012). When you added up all the coal and oil and gas in their reserves—the stuff they’d reported to the SEC, described in their annual reports, based their budgets on—it turned out to be 2,795 gigatons. A gigaton is a billion tons; they had a lot of carbon.

But to really understand how much, you needed to know another number: how much carbon the planet’s scientists have said we can burn and have some chance of avoiding climate disaster. That number is 565 gigatons—it comes from a variety of computer models and simulations, and it offers no guarantee we’ll stay below the 2 degree warming line that the world’s governments have agreed would be catastrophic. If we stop at 565 gigatons, there’s only an 80% chance we’ll avoid that disaster—so, worse odds than Russian roulette.

The point is, though, that 2,795 and 565 aren’t even close. The fossil fuel industry has five times the carbon needed to break the planet, and they’re clearly planning to burn it. Those reserves are the basis of their share price, their collateral when they borrow money; Exxon has scant real worth aside from those reserves.

So now that we know the numbers we know how the story ends. There’s no longer any room for doubt or speculation or wishful thinking. We will pour far more CO₂ into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can safely deal with; we’ll run the temperature up high enough that catastrophe and disaster and crisis become meaningless words—civilization will just be an ongoing emergency response operation. Already we can see it happening—we’ve raised the temperature a scant 1 degree and that’s been enough to melt the Arctic, to turn the ocean 30% more acidic and to make the atmosphere 5% wetter, loading the dice for drought and flood. Already the insurance companies (the part of our economy that we ask to imagine the future) are flashing their red lights and ringing their alarms. Here’s how Munich Re, the world’s largest insurance company, put it in their annual report at the end of 2010, the warmest year on record:

For instance, globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be explained without global warming. (Munich Re, 2010)

So if you want to know what the future looks like, it looks like that except more so. It looks like 2012 in America—record heat, deep drought, storms the likes of which we’ve never seen before. (Sandy was the lowest pressure of any storm to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras) (Duke, 2012). The future’s impossible. We know that now.

Unless, of course, we rewrite the story. Desperately, and quickly. We somehow have to figure out how to leave 80% of those fossil fuel reserves underground, and how to stop the fossil fuel industry from finding ever more. Step one is to find something else with which to power our lives, and here we have another possible world to imagine. Earlier this year a team from the University of Delaware published a paper showing that, by 2030, if we worked really hard at it, those of us in the United States could be powering our lives entirely from renewable energy (Budischak et al., 2013). Well, not entirely—the 28 billion simulations of weather conditions showed that the wind and sun, in a big enough grid, could give us reliable electricity 99.9% of the time. Nine hours a year we’d have to do without. Which seems … doable. At least compared with the alternative.

But getting there will take government investment in technology. And it will take, even more, breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry that has so far been sufficient to hobble our energy transition. This industry is not just the richest the earth has ever seen (Exxon earned more money last year than any company in the history of money (Hargreaves, 2012)) but they’re also the most politically powerful. Two weeks before the last American election, for instance, Chevron made the largest political contribution in the post-Citizens United era (Blumenthal, 2012). It was designed to assure that we’d elect a Congress that would continue its 25-year commitment to not addressing the biggest problem the planet has ever faced. (And it succeeded—I can imagine many possible futures, but not one in which House speaker John Boehner becomes a champion of action on climate change).

So if we’re to get to where we need to go, we need to imagine something else: a movement big enough and strong enough to challenge the power of the fossil fuel industry. A movement like the one that marked the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million Americans—one in ten—came into the streets to demonstrate. That movement has dwindled away over time, but now it’s starting to reassemble. The biggest American civil disobedience action in 30 years came in the summer of 2011, when 1,253 Americans went to jail to protest the proposed Keystone Pipeline, blocking at least temporarily a huge priority for the fossil fuel industry (Klein and McKibben, 2011).

And now that movement is appearing on college campuses across America—210 at latest count, where students have banded together with faculty and alumni to demand that trustees divest stock in fossil fuel companies (Gillis, 2012; math.350.org). They’re not pretending they can bankrupt those industries; they know instead that they might be able to undermine their image, remove their social license. By year’s end the effort will have gone global—young people from every country but North Korea are assembling in Istanbul in June to plan the next stages.

It’s not clear that this movement has started soon enough, and not clear it can gain the traction it will require, here or around the world. But it is clear, I think, that there’s no other alternative. The end of this story is written, unless we rewrite it. Fast.