Hightor's latest video...
...has a guy making the argument that we are on the path to to a climate future as modeled by RCP8.5.
We are already decreasing emissions in the developed world, and coal use already declining.
In 2021, we expect recovering economic activity to reverse 2020’s decline in coal demand, with a 4.5% increase pushing global coal demand above 2019 levels. The power sector accounted for just over 40% of the drop in coal use in 2020, but the rapid increase in coal-fired generation in Asia sees it account for three-quarters of the rebound in 2021. Gas prices are also expected to rise in 2021, leading to some switching back to coal, notably in the United States and the European Union. The growth of coal consumption in 2021 is a continuation of the rebound in global coal demand that began in the final quarter of 2020. While an exceptional cold snap in December in northeast Asia was partly to blame for increasing coal demand, the rapid growth of coal-fired electricity generation is a reminder of coal’s central role in fuelling some of the world’s largest economies.
You should get your scientific facts from scientists, not from political extremists.
Abstract
Climate simulation-based scenarios are routinely used to characterize a range of plausible climate futures. Despite some recent progress on bending the emissions curve, RCP8.5, the most aggressive scenario in assumed fossil fuel use for global climate models, will continue to serve as a useful tool for quantifying physical climate risk, especially over near- to midterm policy-relevant time horizons. Not only are the emissions consistent with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO2 emissions (within 1%), but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly plausible levels of CO2 emissions in 2100.
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The world has by and large adopted “net zero by 2050” as its de facto climate goal, but two fatal flaws hide in plain sight within those 16 characters. One is “net zero.” The other is “by 2050”.
These two flaws provide cover for big oil and politicians who wish to preserve the status quo. Together they comprise a deadly prescription for inaction and catastrophically high levels of irreversible climate and ecological breakdown.
First, consider “by 2050”. This deadline feels comfortably far away, encouraging further climate procrastination. Who feels urgency over a deadline in 2050? This is convenient for the world’s elected leaders, who typically have term limits of between three and five years, less so for anyone who needs a livable planet.
Pathways for achieving net zero by 2050 – meaning that in 2050 any carbon emissions would be balanced by CO2 withdrawn through natural means, like forests, and through hypothetical carbon-trapping technology – are designed to give roughly even odds for keeping global heating below 1.5C. But it’s now apparent that even the current 1.1C of global heating is not a “safe” level. Climate catastrophes are arriving with a frequency and ferocity that have shocked climate scientists. The fact that climate models failed to predict the intensity of the summer’s heatwaves and flooding suggests that severe impacts will come sooner than previously thought. Madagascar is on the brink of the first climate famine, and developments such as multi-regional crop losses and climate warfare even before reaching 1.5C should no longer be ruled out.
Meanwhile, “net zero” is a phrase that represents magical thinking rooted in our society’s technology fetish. Just presuppose enough hypothetical carbon capture and you can pencil out a plan for meeting any climate goal, even while allowing the fossil fuel industry to keep growing. While there may be useful negative-emissions strategies such as reforestation and conservation agriculture, their carbon capture potential is small compared with cumulative fossil fuel carbon emissions, and their effects may not be permanent. Policymakers are betting the future of life on Earth that someone will invent some kind of whiz-bang tech to draw down CO2 at a massive scale.
The world’s largest direct air capture facility opened this month in Iceland; if it works, it will capture one ten-millionth of humanity’s current emissions, and due to its expense it is not yet scalable. It is the deepest of moral failures to casually saddle today’s young people with a critical task that may prove unfeasible by orders of magnitude – and expecting them to somehow accomplish this amid worsening heatwaves, fires, storms and floods that will pummel financial, insurance, infrastructure, water, food, health and political systems.
It should tell us all we need to know about “net zero by 2050” that it is supported by fossil fuel executives, and that climate uber-villain Rupert Murdoch has embraced it through his News Corp Australia mouthpiece.
So where does this leave us? Stabilizing the rapidly escalating destruction of the Earth will require directly scaling back and ultimately ending fossil fuels. To lower the odds of civilizational collapse, society must shift into emergency mode.
It will be easy to tell when society has begun this shift: leaders will begin to take actions that actually inflict pain on big oil, such as ending fossil fuel subsidies and placing a moratorium on all new oil and gas infrastructure.
Then rapid emissions descent could begin. I believe the global zero-emissions goal should be set no later than 2035; high-emitting nations have a moral obligation to go faster, and to provide transition assistance to low-emitting nations. Crucially, any zero goal must be paired with a commitment to annual reductions leading steadily to this goal year by year, and binding plans across all levels of government to achieve those annual targets. If this sounds extreme, bear in mind that climate breakdown has still only barely begun and that the damage will be irreversible.
Negative emissions strategies must also be left out of climate planning – in other words, forget the “net” in “net zero”. Otherwise they will continue to provide the distraction and delay sought by the fossil fuel industry. It would be beyond foolish to gamble our planet on technologies that may never exist at scale.
Due to the decades of inaction dishonestly engineered by fossil fuel executives, the speed and scale now required is staggering. There is no longer any incremental way out. It’s time to grow up and let go of the fantasy that we can get out of this without big changes that affect our lives. Policy steps that seem radical today – for example, proposals to nationalize the fossil fuel industry and ration oil and gas supplies – will seem less radical with each new climate disaster. Climate emergency mode will require personal sacrifice, especially from the high-emitting rich. But civilizational collapse would be unimaginably worse.
As a climate scientist, I am terrified by what I see coming. I want world leaders to stop hiding behind magical thinking and feel the same terror. Then they would finally end fossil fuels.
Now you can see how it works, this whole climate collapse scenario that writers and scientists have been hollering about for years. In the space of a few short months, the Pacific Northwest was baked by an extreme heat wave, California was (and still is) consumed by wildfire and parched by drought, Tennessee was hit by 17 inches of rain that caused devastating floods that killed 22 people, a major hurricane flattened towns and knocked out power for nearly a million people along the Gulf Coast and then moved north and drowned one of the richest cities in the world. All of this was in addition to battling a mutating virus that has already killed more than 645,000 Americans and may or may not be a preview of a new climate-driven pandemic era.
All this is happening with just 1 C of warming. “This is climate change,” climate scientist Andrew Dessler said in an interview on CNBC. “It’s just a small preview of what is going to happen if we don’t stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We really need to do that, or we are going to look back on this as the good old days.”
Of course, terrible flooding in Bangladesh and China is also climate change, as are heat waves in India and Pakistan. But because this wild summer culminated in a flood of the media capital of the world, it has inspired a lot of media coverage and yet another round of questioning about whether this is the moment that Americans will begin to truly grapple with the future we have created for ourselves by our century-long fossil fuel binge. As Chris Cilizza at CNN put it: “Is this finally the moment we wake up to the climate crisis?”
Fifteen years ago, I was out on a research vessel in the North Atlantic and asked a scientist a similar question. We were drilling sediment cores, looking for evidence of past climates in the shells of tiny organisms called forams that lived in ancient oceans. One evening as we sat out on the fantail of the ship, I asked Lloyd Keigwin, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who was the chief scientist on the trip, what he thought it would take to wake Americans up to the risks of climate change. “When a major hurricane comes along and wipes out a great American city, they will wake up,” Keigwin confidently predicted.
Well, we’ve had Katrina, Sandy, Laura, Ida – I lose track of them all. It’s impossible to calculate how many houses have been destroyed, power lines downed, roads washed away, lives upended and lost.
And what has changed? Yes, we have bent down the carbon-emissions curve enough to make the truly apocalyptic climate nightmares (5 C of warming by 2100) less likely. Clean energy prices have fallen precipitously. We elected a president who now talks bluntly and frequently about the climate crisis and has committed to a zero-carbon grid by 2035. Places like Louisiana have invested billions in coastal resiliency projects. Electric bikes and scooters and cars are proliferating. Media-savvy scientists like Michael Mann, Andrea Dutton, Katharine Hayhoe, and Andrew Dessler are speaking ever more clearly about climate risks. Grassroots activist groups are gaining political power and learning how to use it. Climate warriors like former Secretary of State John Kerry are jousting in the fields of diplomacy, trying, once again, to convince the Chinese to step up and show leadership in the upcoming international climate negotiations.
This is all good. This is all important. But if this is what it means to “wake up” to the risks of the climate crisis, then we truly are fucked.
I recently moved to Texas, which, according to the 2020 census, is one of the fastest growing states in the nation. I moved to Austin for love, not BBQ or to escape paying state income taxes, and there is much to admire about the state. But climate-wise, the view is bleak. It’s highways, strip malls, and big trucks as far as the eye can see. I have visited the big wind farms in the northwest part of the state and there are plenty of venture capital bros driving around in Teslas, but Texas has a governor who is more interested in regulating uteruses and militarizing the border than cutting carbon and preparing for life in a different climate. And just down the road is Houston, the oil capital of the world, where, despite all the talk about economic diversity, fossil fuel still reigns supreme.
And it’s not just Texas. The very day New York City was drowning, Senator Joe Manchin wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, explaining why he would not support spending $3.5 trillion to help slow climate change. This from a politician who reportedly owns millions of dollars in coal stocks and whose state has probably contributed more carbon to the atmosphere than any other. Evidence of cluelessness and short term greed is everywhere: Last year, billionaire investor Warren Buffet pumped $10 billion into natural gas pipelines. South Florida real estate is still booming, despite the obvious risks of storm surge and sea level rise. What writer and futurist Alex Steffen calls “the brittleness bubble” continues to expand.
Most importantly, there is zero accountability for the corporations who have made billions of dollars keeping America hooked on fossil fuels while undermining and distorting the urgency of the climate crisis. What price has ExxonMobil and Shell and BP paid for their years of hawking fuels that they knew very well would heat up the planet and cause wreckage and mayhem for generations to come? None, as far as I can tell. There are various lawsuits moving through the courts and activist shareholders are pushing them to think differently about the future, but basically they trashed the planet and got away with it and their only penance is to run commercials about what good citizens they are and what a good job they are doing “innovating for the future.” Meanwhile, The New York Times, whose climate coverage is exemplary, sees nothing wrong with creating and running ads from Big Oil. As writer Emily Atkin put it: “The NYT stopped shilling for cigarettes. Why won’t it stop shilling for fossil fuels?”
The big problem America faces here in the early years of the 21st century is that we built our world with the idea that we live on a stable, steady planet. The land is here, the ocean is there, and forever it shall be. The rains will come, but they will be rains like we always knew it to rain. It will get hot, but no hotter than it ever has. For 40 years now, we have ignored scientists who were telling us about the risks of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and how it could change everything, creating a different planet than humans have ever lived on before.
Now, as the world floods and burns, the price of our willful ignorance and denial is becoming clearer. Are a few devastated towns along the Gulf Coast and waterfalls in the New York City subway system going to be what wakes us up from that? I hope so. But I fear that just as there is no “us,” there is also no “waking up.” If the pandemic has proved anything, it’s that the reservoirs of stupidity and self-destructiveness in the American mind are deeper than even the most cynical among us could have imagined. So maybe the best thing we can do right now is not pretend we will “wake up” to the monstrous reality of our time like some character in a fairy tale. Maintaining a habitable planet is going to be a long hard fight, and if this summer from hell has shown us anything, it’s that this fight has only just begun.
It’s been a hellish year. Covid, global warming, a summer of megafires and megafloods, rising nationalism, and extremists like the ones in Texas and Afghanistan turning the Handmaid’s Tale from fiction to reality.
None of this is an anomaly. It’s a trend of stagnation and collapse. But what’s driving that trend? I’m going to try to teach you, in the clearest way that I can, why our world seems to be falling apart and it feels like there’s no escape.
Like it or not, economics is destiny for civilizations. A civilization with good economic fundamentals will prosper, and ones with bad economics tend to crash, burn, and flame out — not matter how superior they imagine themselves.
The bad news is that the economics of our civilization now surely and squarely foretells collapse. That’s why it feels like everything you know and hold dear is collapsing — it is. We can no longer afford to live the way we have been and are told to. The good news, or the worse news, depending on how you look at it, is that we have a decade — just a decade — to fix it. Or our civilization will — like so many before us — indeed collapse.
Civilizations make three great mistakes when it comes to economics.The first is consuming more than they invest. The second is investing in things that don’t really create wealth. The third is not distributing that wealth equitably enough for social stability and the virtuous cycle of lasting prosperity to really ignite.
We’re making all three of those mistakes.
The first is that we’re consuming more than we invest. How much more? Three times as much. We invest at 25%, and consume at 75%. Those are ruinous economics. They are why three to five decades of unprecedented catastrophe are now headed our way. The 2030s — the decade when climate change goes catastrophic. The 2040s — the era when mass extinction goes unclear. And the 2050s — the Final Goodbye, when the earth’s great ecosystems finally begin to irreversibly die off. All that will take our civilization’s systems — from secondary ones, like finance, employment, and shopping, to primary ones, like food, air, water, and medicine — with it. Bang! The lights go out.
Why is overconsumption and underinvestment so ruinous? Imagine that you have an orchard of a hundred trees. At our ratio of consumption to investment, you’d chop down seventy five, and plant twenty five. You’re left with just fifty trees. In other words, your wealth has halved. It halves, over and over again, year by year. Sure, you might “make money” — which is income. But your real wealth, what “makes” the “money,” is steadily dwindling. That is what we have done. We’ve chewed up everything from the planet to the animals to our social bonds to our mental health and sanity to our futures to democracy, in the name of “growth,” which is just profits.
I often say that even my farmer father-in-law would understand why these economics are fatal. He’d say: cut down a tree, plant a tree. Harvest a field, sow a field. That is the Golden Rule of prosperity. Not: cut down seventy five trees, plant twenty five. Harvest a field, plant a quarter of a new one. Why is he wiser than every economist under the sun? Perhaps because he’s lived it, not just studied it in textbooks. Whatever the reason, see the logic. Cut down a tree, plant a tree.
Only a civilization with an equal consumption and investment ratio can really survive. Ours is deeply, deeply imbalanced. We’ve chewed up the lungs, limbs, and organs of the planet, not to mention life on it — but we haven’t nearly replaced or fixed the damage we’ve done. Hence, the collapse we’re now beginning to live through. Pandemics, by the way, are one form of these ruinous economics — what happens when we steadily encroach on tropical jungles and forests, instead of replenishing them. There will be more pandemics in our future — just as there will be megafire, megaflood, fascism, poverty, depression, stagnation, political chaos, social despair, and widespread system failure.
Our civilization is based on an especially foolish kind of “growth” — one which only leads to poverty, self-destruction, and collapse. You only have to look to America to see the consequences of it — a “rich” nation where 80% of people live in effective poverty, unable to pay the bills, without any functioning social systems, ravaged by disease, led by a lunatic demagogue. That’s where the path of overconsumption and underinvestment leads. Collapse, American style. Only for the whole world. And that’s the path we’re on now.
How do we fix that?
We need the biggest wave of investment in human history. Or else. It’s lights out. To right our massively imbalanced ratio of consumption to investment. How much are we talking? My estimate is that we need to invest $20 trillion, now. That’s genuinely unprecedented. It’s the size of the world’s largest economy — America. There’s never been anything remotely like an investment wave at the size we need to save our civilization — and we have just a decade to do it.
But while that investment wave must be the size of the American economy, it can’t be like the American economy.
The second mistake that civilization make economically is to invest, but in things which don’t really create lasting wealth. Think of pyramids. Spectacular, sure. But they didn’t exactly do the ancient Egyptians a whole lot of good. If a civilization is going to invest meaningfully, then it must be in wealth-creating things — now think of ancient aqueducts, ancient libraries, the first universities. That is how the virtuous cycle of lasting prosperity is unlocked.
Think of ancient Rome. How did it fall? By making endless, pointless wars. Eventually, the burden of administrating all that conquered territory, of defending it, far outweighed any gains that came from empire.
Now think of America. Why is it falling? It’s spent trillions to build history’s most perfect killing machine — some guy piloting a drone from an air-conditioned office can kill anyone anywhere on planet earth with laser guided bombs. Every conquering general in history, from Caesar to Stalin, would be astonished.
But while America’s built the perfect killing machine, Americans still don’t have decent healthcare, retirement, pensions, jobs, incomes, childcare — anything, really. That’s malinvestment. There’s no point to building history’s perfect killing machine if you can’t provide basics for people — unless, I guess, the killer aliens are out to get us. You’re only malinvesting, and your society will still collapse.
That is what happened to America. Malinvestment at a ruinous, shocking scale. Why is it that billions are poured into delivery and dating apps and whatnot — while Americans can’t get decent healthcare? What the? And it’s also what’s happening to our civilization. Not only do we not invest enough, much of what do invest isn’t in real wealth creation.
What do I mean by that? Think of this juncture in human history. We have a global pandemic. But we don’t have a single global system to ensure public health. Clean water? Nope. Sanitation? Hygiene? Nope. How about even a global system to get people masks? Nope. Vaccines? Nope. How about a system to give every single person on planet earth healthcare? Nope — we don’t have that, and we’re not anywhere close to having it. So of course a pandemic wrecked our civilization at light speed. We weren’t prepared is an understatement — we don’t even know what “prepared” is, because when I say “global healthcare system,” you probably think: science fiction.
But those are the things we need to invest in, now, if we’re to survive as a civilization. Where does that $20 trillion which is the biggest investment wave in human history go? To building the systems that our civilization needs to prevent its collapse. Those are all global ones.
For example. Every single person on planet earth should have decent healthcare — that’s how we prevent tomorrow’s pandemics, and it’s the only way we prevent them. Every single child on planet earth, an education, and a nest egg at birth, too — that’s how we prevent tomorrow’s fascisms. Every single person should have an income — that too prevents fascism and social collapse.
But people are just the first horizon we need to cross. Earth’s great species and ecosystems should all be people, too, with rights, incomes, and guarantees. Hey — corporations are people. How come Amazon, Inc., is a person, worth a trillion dollars, but the Amazon, the lungs of the earth, isn’t? How come Facebook is a person — but the world’s oceans and the fish in them aren’t? We treat nature like our forefathers treated slaves — like beings with no rights.
But of course nature is busy making our air, food, water, medicine. Those corporations don’t “make” it — you’ve been had and don’t even realize it.
So of course nature — from reefs to rivers to oceans to animals — should all earn an income. One which protects it, nourishes it, shields it. It can’t do that until it’s a person.
That’s another place the $20 trillion goes — to making this Great Transformation happen. Training an army of lawyers, execs, economists, and ecologists, to make all that politically, economically, socially real. And creating a few million excellent careers along the way.
That brings me to my third way civilizations collapse. Even when they do prosper for a time, they don’t share the wealth equitably enough. And so dissatisfaction, anger, and unrest grow, socially. Meanwhile, economically — which is more crucial — people stay poor, so they have nothing to invest. And the level of investment can never rise.
You probably think we’re a rich civilization. I wouldn’t blame you — we’re certainly an arrogant one. The truth is that we’re richer than previous ones, but we’re a long, long way from rich in absolute terms. In fact, we’re still poor as a civilization. How so?
If we distributed our civilization’s income equally, we’d achieve an income of just $10K per person. Do the math yourself — it’s 80 trillion dollars divided by 8 billion people, roughly. Sure, American pundits think that’s awesome. But if I asked them to live on $10K a year, they’d cry, and then try to punch me. Here are things you can’t afford on $10k a year. Creature comforts. A vacation. Educating your kids, saving anything for the future, the peace of mind that comes with stability. You are living a life of desperate precarity and poverty on $10K a year.
Sure, if we all lived on that, prices would fall. But not nearly enough to make it possible to live a wonderful and happy life on $10K. That’s because there are absolute floors to prices — how much it costs to really make things.
Now imagine that you’re living on $10K per year, and some bastard like me comes along and says: “Hey, cool, now I need you to invest $2500 in saving our civilization.” That’s what our investment wave of $20 trillion amounts to, per person on planet earth. You’d look at me like I was crazy. Here I am, asking you for a quarter of your income — which is barely enough to live on in the first place.
We’re still a poor civilization. If our income was distributed equitably, we wouldn’t have nearly enough left over to invest in the very things we need to save our civilization. From trees to oceans to reefs to education to healthcare to democracy.
The sad and brutal fact is that we’re still not rich enough as a civilization to really afford to go on living the way that we do. Or at least the fortunate among us do. The rich world, which is 10% of us, is living way, way beyond its means, and the rest of the planet, which is 90% of humanity and poor, can’t afford to invest a damned thing because it’s busy trying to just survive.
We’re a poor civilization. One so poor, that we may be too poor to survive now. We don’t have the $20 trillion we need to invest.
If we’d been wise, and invested thoughtfully, maybe we’d have grown rich enough that we did have it. But we weren’t. Like Rome and America, we frittered our money away on violence and selfishness. So here we are.
Things feel like they’re beginning to collapse because they are.
We’re a poor civilization that’s probably too poor to invest what it needs to save itself from collapse. And we’re a backwards civilization that doesn’t understand the only way out of this mess, too.
If we don’t have the money, just borrow it from the future. Money is just a social fiction. Our grandkids won’t hate us for investing their money — they’ll thank us for it, since they won’t be living Stone Age medieval lives ruled over by fascists. We can simply — wham!! — conjure the money we need out of thin air, and put it work. We do it when banks needs to be bailed out, when hedge funds need money, when generals want more bombs — so why not for…the survival of our civilization?
Maybe, though, a civilization like ours doesn’t deserve to survive. If we’re honest, ours is tainted by the residue of hate, of supremacy, of violence, of brutality. We live in the detritus of ancient hatreds, like America, which never really seem to move an inch. Look at the American Idiot — still making America as backwards as ever. Now look at the world, which is still 10% rich, and 90% poor, and ask yourself: can we even call ourselves a civilization, as in, civilized beings? Maybe, then, our civilization needs to go the way of the dinosaur, so that a wiser, kinder, more empathetic, happier one can finally be born, starting from a blanker slate.
I don’t know about that. What I do know is this. There are three great economic mistakes a civilization can make. Ours is making all three of them. We consume three times as much as we invest, what we do invest is often malinvested, and the result is that what little we do have as a civilization wasn’t equitably distributed enough to have ever kicked off a virtuous circle of stability and prosperity. The endgame? We never became a rich civilization. We remained a poor one — even after chewing through the planet, nature, the animals, democracy, ourselves, and each other.
We’re too poor now to make the investments we need to save our civilization. From three to five decades of imminent, savage, existential catastrophe, which are going to make Coronavirus look like a fond memory, as everything from banking systems to healthcare system to systems food, water, energy, and air eventually collapse, crash, burn, ravaged by everything from megafires to megafloods to rising seas to spiraling temperatures to pandemics to fascists, idiots, and fanatics. That’s why it feels like everything is breaking down, failing, collapsing. Because it is, and it’s going to, for the rest of our lives.
(...) IF IT WERENT FOR CHINA.
Americans still don’t have decent healthcare, retirement, pensions, jobs, incomes, childcare — anything, really. That’s malinvestment. There’s no point to building history’s perfect killing machine if you can’t provide basics for people
but I would put American healthcare in 2021 against most countries... and certainly against any health care system 100 years ago. Wealthy people from Europe and Canada come to America for medical treatment they can't get in their home countries
Americans have very good jobs, incomes and childcare for the upper and middle classes, and even the lower classes in the US are doing better than most other countries (other than a couple wealthy countries in Western Europe and maybe Canada).
Does that mean that you would prefer the German health care system of 1921 to the American health care system of 2021?
The infant mortality rate in Germany in 1921 was about 15%.
Middle class and upper class people who live in wealthy countries are generally pretty happy.
