Top Quotes: “The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions” — Greta Thunberg

Air

“In short, methane is temporary, while CO, is forever.

When we emit a tonne of methane, more than 80 per cent is removed from the atmosphere via chemical reactions with hydroxyl radicals within twenty years. COz, on the other hand, is not removed by chemical reactions; it has to be absorbed by land and ocean sinks. Forty years after methane has been emitted, virtually all of it is gone, while nearly 50 per cent of the CO, remains in the atmosphere. Some of the CO, we emit today — around 20 per cent — will still remain in the atmosphere 10,000 vears into the future.”

“• First, CO2 is the primary driver of longer-term warming. In future baseline emissions scenarios (for example, where we don’t reduce our emissions) CO2 drives around 90 per cent of the additional twenty-first-century warming.

• Second, reducing warming by cutting methane is a lot easier than it is by cutting CO2. Cutting methane results in near-immediate temperature declines, while cutting CO2 only slows the rate of warming until we get to net zero.

• Third, methane can be cut at any point and have a large effect on temperatures. CO2, on the other hand, is cumulative; waiting to cut CO2 emissions locks in warming in a way that is not the case for methane.

• Finally, the degree to which we should focus on CO2 and methane mitigation depends on short-term versus long-term prioritization. If we think we are close to climate tipping points, methane cuts are a way to quickly reduce warming. If we care more about temperatures in 2050 or 2070, then CO2 cuts today matter more. When possible, however, we should strive to reduce emissions of both.”

“Aerosols are hazardous to humans and animals. They are a main component of air pollution, and a notable cause of premature death around the world. When it comes to climate change, however, they play an equally important role, but with a very different effect to greenhouse gases. When airborne, aerosols function as a thin, wispy cloud. They reflect some of the incoming sunlight back to space and therefore act to cool the planet. Furthermore, if aerosols are present in the air when a cloud forms, the cloud droplets will become smaller and more numerous. This makes the cloud whiter and more reflective, which also means a cooler Earth. Aerosols are therefore doubly efficient at cooling the planet’s surface.

And since we emit a lot of aerosols every year, they do a lot of cooling. Scientists have measured global warming of around 1:1°C since the period 1850–1900. However, as the latest report from the IPCC shows, if greenhouse gases were the only substances we’d released into the atmosphere, this figure would have been at least 1.5°C. The reason for this difference is mainly our aerosol emissions, which cool the climate by about 0.5°C, while also affecting geographical patterns of rain, monsoon systems, extreme weather, and more.”

“Where they are transported from, however, is less well known. We also don’t quite know what chemical reactions they undergo in the atmosphere, the details of how they interact with clouds and rainfall, or where they ultimately end up. And some aerosols even go against our expectations and heat the climate instead of cooling it. These are dark in colour, like the smoke from bonfires. Dark aerosols like these don’t just reflect sunlight but can also capture it, heating the air around them. This, in turn, hinders the formation of rain and can affect both clouds and wind patterns. And if dark aerosols land on snow, they can warm the surface, reducing its reflectivity and speeding up melting.”

“We still don’t know what will happen to the weather if the amount of human-caused aerosols in the atmosphere changes — and that is a problem, because this is exactly what we expect to happen.

Most scientists predict that the amount of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere will decrease over the coming years.”

“Their impact is twofold: on the one hand, clouds reflect sunlight away into space, acting like a parasol to shield the Earth’s surface from solar energy; on the other hand, clouds have a greenhouse effect of their own and trap heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, similar to an insulating blanket, limiting the loss of heat to space.

Which of the two effects dominates — the cooling parasol or the insulating blanket — depends on the type of cloud: for example, the higher the cloud, the stronger its blanket effect. However, on average globally and considering all cloud types, the cooling parasol effect is nearly twice as large as the insulating blanket effect.”

“Recent scientific advances have led climate scientists to the conclusion that clouds are amplifying global warming. Observations and modelling suggest this occurs in two main ways: a decrease in the number of low clouds over the oceans in the tropics, meaning a reduced parasol effect and hence greater absorption of sunlight at the ocean surface; and a rise in the altitude of high clouds globally, implying an enhanced blanket effect.”

“The Arctic is now warming over three times faster than the globe as a whole: the trend line for the Arctic is 0.99°C per decade; for the globe it is 0.24°C per decade.”

Moisture

“The jet stream creates and steers most of the weather systems in temperate latitudes (the zone between the Arctic and the tropics), so anything that affects its strength or path will, in turn, affect the weather that many of us experience. Jet streams exist because of differences in air temperature, such as cold Arctic air butting against warmer air to the south. When the difference is large, jets are strong and tend to flow in a relatively straight path. When the temperature difference is relatively small, jets are weaker and more likely to take bigger swings to the north and south — meanders known as Rossby waves. Because the Arctic is warming so much faster than elsewhere, the north-south temperature difference is getting smaller, which is weakening the west-to-east winds in the jet and increasing the likelihood of wavy patterns. We know that when the Arctic is abnormally warm, pockets of cold air tend to migrate southwards over the continents, creating the so-called warm Arctic/cold continents pattern. Moreover, when the jet stream’s waves are large, they tend to progress eastwards more slowly, which means the weather regimes they generate also move more slowly. The upshot is that we notice weather conditions becoming more persistent — be they hot, dry, wet, cold, or even drizzly.”

“The warming of the planet has also altered the speed at which storm systems move across the Earth (translation speed). For the parts of the oceans where we have data, translation speeds have slowed down. And slower-moving storms mean that more rain can be dumped at any single location.”

“As the temperature increases, the world sweats more. The air demands water from the surface, which yields up its moisture to the thirsty sky. The oceans can easily handle the increased demand. But on land, the water is stored in soil like a sponge. Even in years with average rainfall, the greedy air can suck the lifeblood from the surface, leaving it arid and dead. The North American southwest is experiencing the worst megadrought on record, with more drying to come. Southern Europe, the Levant and southwestern Australia are drying, too, as expected when temperatures rise. Drought is the consequence of a planet desperate to cool itself off.

In the process of evaporation, liquid morphs into vapour: colourless, odourless, but far from weightless. There are 10 million billion kilograms of water vapour in the atmosphere, pushing up and down and to the side, exerting pressure everywhere. Eventually the pressure becomes unbearable, and some of that vapour escapes the sky, condensing back into liquid. The threshold where this happens increases rapidly with temperature: hot air can hold more water vapour. There is a bank of water in the sky, receiving credits of vapour, spending debits of rain and saving a little in reserve. As the temperature increases, the reserves pile up. There is more moisture in a warming sky, a 7 per cent increase for every degree Celsius of warming.”

“Warming tends to diminish the oceans’ ability to act as a sink for carbon dioxide. Currently, the oceans absorb about a quarter of our carbon dioxide emissions, a tremendous contribution, but warmer water doesn’t hold carbon dioxide as well (just try heating mineral water).”

“A much more alarming disruption of ocean circulation looms over the thermohaline circulation, particularly in the Atlantic, where the ocean-spanning system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — sometimes referred to as ‘the conveyor belt of the ocean’ — acts as a major heat-transporting system, bringing warm water from the tropics to the north Atlantic and cold water back to the southern hemisphere towards Antarctica.

The AMOC is the main reason why the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern hemisphere. The massive movement and release of heat makes the northern Atlantic and surrounding land areas — like much of Europe — several degrees warmer than they would otherwise be.

Climate models have long predicted that in the course of global warming the part of the northern Atlantic just south of Greenland will warm only a little, or perhaps even cool, because the AMOC is expected to weaken. Warming, combined with increases in rainfall and meltwater from Greenland, makes the surface water less dense, and, in turn, this water will not sink as deep as it did before. Disturbingly, this is happening now.”

“This is especially troubling because the AMOC is known to have a tipping point beyond which it cannot be sustained and will collapse. The AMOC has collapsed a number of times during Earth’s history, disrupting weather patterns around the globe.”

Energy

“The decision to consider burning biomass as ‘renewable’ was made long before the timeframe set out by the Paris Agreement began, in what has been called a blind spot of the Kyoto Protocol dating back to 1997. This loophole allows you to create lots of very carbon-intensive energy — burning wood releases even more CO2 per energy unit than burning coal — while claiming that the emissions are going down and radical action is being taken, just like magic.

Entire nations’ climate policies are based on this loophole. In the UK, for instance, the Selby Drax power plant is the biggest single emitter of CO2, but its biomass emissions are excluded from the UK’s national statistics. The EU would not stand a chance of reaching its climate targets without a wide use of clever creative accounting like this. In 2019, 59 per cent of the EU’s so-called renewable energy came from biomass.”

“The Batagaika crater in north-eastern Siberia. At half a mile wide (and growing), it is the largest of many lakes and craters formed across the Arctic by the ground collapsing as permafrost laced with buried ice thaws.”

Extreme Weather

“Usually wet, subtropical rainforests burned during winter, incinerating over half of the country’s ancient Gondwana-era rainforests in one fire season. Although eastern Australia’s eucalyptus forests are among the most fire-prone in the world, typically only 2 per cent of them burns during extreme fire seasons. But in 2019–20, 21 per cent of Australias temperate forests burned in a single event, setting a new global record for the sheer enormity of the blazes. This marked increase in the area burned during extreme fire seasons around the world led to the definition of ‘megafires’ to describe an individual wildfire or wildfire complexes that engulf more than 1 million hectares. Australias record-setting megafires burnt a phenomenal 24 million hectares, releasing over 715 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in a single bushfire season; more than all the emissions the country releases in an entire year. A staggering 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by the immense scale of habitat destruction.

Increasingly destructive wildfires have also been observed in the northern hemisphere in recent years. In 2021, the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and southwest Canada experienced extreme heatwaves that shattered historical temperature records. Temperatures in the Canadian town of Lytton in British Columbia soared to 49.6°C on June 29, 2021, before wildfires destroyed close to 90 percent of its buildings. It was the first time such extreme, desert-like temperatures were experienced so far north anywhere on the planet.”

Land

“We project that the Amazon could be transformed into a degraded savannah — or a degraded secondary forest, with fewer species and with more open canopy between 2050 and 2070, and that this transformation would affect 60–70 per cent of the rainforest. If the forest reaches this tipping point, more than 200 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere, making it essentially impossible to reach the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. And the loss of biodiversity would be profound, pushing several thousand endemic plant and animal species to extinction, including the black-shouldered opossum, the pied tamarin and the Kaapori capuchin. And, for the people who call this region home, the Amazon’s transformation into a savannah, coupled with soaring greenhouse gas emissions, would mean a future where, for nearly 50 per cent of the year, daily maximum temperatures would combine with high humidity and exceed the physiological heat-stress threshold of the human body, posing a direct mortal threat.”

“We farm over 30 per cent of land, increasingly intensively; an area equal to the whole of North America and South America combined is used just to produce livestock.”

“Ironically, the species best adapted to pesticides are the pests themselves, whereas thousands of species that could have contributed to natural pest control, pollination and soil fertility are often devastated. These include many wasp species whose larvae literally eat pests alive; the bees, flies, beetles, moths and butterflies that most crop species need for pollination; and the earthworms and many insects such as springtails that recycle nutrients from dead plants to fertilize the soil.”

“In the US, the weight of pesticides applied has increased by 150 per cent since Silent Spring was published, while at the same time new pesticides have been introduced that are much more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson’s day. For example, the neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid is now the most widely used insecticide in the world, despite an EU-wide ban since 2018 brought on because of the harm it does to bees. Imidacloprid is about 7,000 times more toxic to bees than the insecticide DDT which was widely used in the 1960s and ‘70s.”

Animals

“The mountain hare and the willow ptarmigan shed their snow-white coats to match their newly leafy surroundings.”

“Fascinatingly, some species may be adapting to a warming world not by moving but by reducing their body size. All organisms face thermoregulatory constraints — that is, the energy they require to maintain their heat balance. Bergmann’s rule predicts that populations and species in higher altitudes and latitudes (colder climes) have larger bodies (a smaller surface area to body size) to help maintain their body temperature in colder climates. Recent research has demonstrated that body size is getting smaller in bird species in North America as the planet warms.”

Soil

“Globally, the soil contains over 3,000 gigatonnes of carbon, more than two times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and all the plants in the world combined. This vast underground store regulates the global carbon cycle, while contributing to food production, biodiversity, drought and flood resilience, and ecosystem functioning.”

“There are only a small number of processes in nature that could, within decades, cause a vast enough net transfer of carbon from the land or ocean to the atmosphere to significantly accelerate the climate crisis. The top candidates are thawing permafrost and collapsing undersea hydrates — the destabilization of frozen methane — in the Arctic.

Permafrost is a mixture of soil, sediment, old peat, rocks, ice and organic matter that stays frozen throughout the year and is found on both land and underwater. Permafrost in the top few metres of the Arctic landmass holds half of all carbon in all soils globally, containing approximately twice as much carbon as is held in the atmosphere as CO, and 200 times as much methane. An astonishing 60 per cent of the enormous land area of the Russian Federation is permafrost. Until recently, permafrost was believed to be a dormant carbon pool, isolated, ‘asleep’ and not participating in exchange with other carbon pools in the global carbon cycle. However, with temperatures in the Arctic rising two to three times faster than the global average, permafrost carbon pools are now being reactivated.

Hydrates (or clathrates) are frozen methane that have formed over geological time under low temperatures and high pressure in the seabed or deep underground. Over millions of years, they have formed in thick sediment layers on the Arctic ocean floor, generally reaching no higher than 300–400 metres below the sea surface. Some hydrates are also present under shallower waters along the Eurasian Arctic. These would have required much colder conditions in order to form. They first emerged on the freezing ice-age tundra of northeast Siberia, which was then submerged by sea-level rise as the glaciers melted, becoming today’s vast East Siberian Arctic Seas. This inaccessible and severely understudied coastal region, the size of Germany, Poland, the UK, France and Spain combined, is estimated to host about 80 per cent of the world’s subsea permafrost and about 75 per cent of the shallow hydrates on Earth.

This vast reservoir of ancient carbon and methane which spans the Arctic landscape and seabed represents a sleeping giant — and increasingly there are signs that it is being awakened. During our research expeditions over the past two decades across the entire northern edge of the Eurasian continent, half the Arctic Circle and the largest shallow coastal seas of the world ocean, we have increasingly witnessed carbon that is tens of thousands of years old being released from thawing permafrost, and seen methane vigorously bubbling up.”

Heat

“Children born after the year 2014 (which would make them eight years old or younger in 2022) will experience thirty-six times more heatwaves than a person born in 1960 (i.e. a sixty two-year old in 2022).”

“We need the air around us to be cool enough to draw heat away from our bodies. However, we live in environments where the air may frequently be warmer than our bodies. So, we also require humidity to be low enough that we can cool ourselves down by sweating and so continue to draw heat away our bodies. When relative atmospheric humidity reaches 100 per cent, however, sweat ceases to evaporate efficiently and can no longer cool our skin. Temperatures accompanied by 100 per cent humidity levels are known as wet bulb temperatures. A wet bulb temperature of around 35°C is lethal — but it causes serious problems even before that point.”

Disease

“Malaria is shifting towards higher altitudes in Africa and South America as the climate has become more suitable for transmission. Dengue cases are now being reported in countries such as Italy, Croatia and Afghanistan — countries where the disease had never previously managed to spread.”

“Malarias transmission season might increase by up to 1.6 additional months in highland areas in Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and South America by 2080. These are areas where transmission is currently low and so people may be immunologically vulnerable, with public health systems that are unprepared for dealing with the new influx. The transmission season of dengue might increase by up to four additional months in areas in the western Pacific located less than 1,500 metres above sea level.”

“Malaria and dengue may spread into temperate areas such as France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany and the eastern coast of the United States extending from south of Atlanta to north of Boston. If public health systems identify and suppress infections effectively, these shifts might not translate into an increased number of cases. However, Covid-19 has demonstrated how fragile our public health systems are, even in the wealthiest countries. Epidemiological surveillance, monitoring and early-warning systems will need to be put in place in these potential hotspots to prepare.”

“In experiments performed on locations across three continents, my research team has found that staple food crops such as rice, wheat, maize and soy are losing nutrients that play a central role in maintaining human health. We grew crops at a carbon dioxide concentration of 550 parts per million (ppm), the level the world is expected to reach around the middle of this century. We found that crops grown at these elevated CO, concentrations had significantly lower amounts of iron, zinc and protein than identical cultivars of those crops grown at today’s CO2 levels.”

Solutions

“What is truly important in times of crisis is social cohesion — people helping each other — and we have that in droves in Bangladesh. Whenever we are hit by extreme weather, we go out and we help each other. Nobody is left behind. Schoolchildren have drills so they know where they need to go to evacuate in an emergency, and whom to help — an elderly widow living alone will have two children from the high school assigned to go and pick her up. The hurricane still comes, and it still does a lot of damage, but it won’t kill people on the scale it once did. And the primary reason is that we work with each other, we help each other — everybody is in this together. This is not the case in many developed countries. Rich people can lead isolated lives, perhaps not even knowing their neighbours. But working as a community, as we do in Bangladesh, helps to build resilience and the ability to deal with crises when they occur.”

“The Jenesse Center, a domestic violence prevention and intervention organization, serves a primarily African American population of survivors of domestic violence. For years, one of the centre’s biggest expenses was the cost of providing electricity for transitional housing, so they made the decision to move to solar energy. The seven residents then living in the centre’s temporary homes were trained in solar installation and became part of the workforce that installed the new solar electric system. Now, three years later, these former residents are gainfully employed in the solar industry and living independently with their children. Their new career has afforded them jobs and housing security, as well as making them at less risk of returning to their abusers: financial security is one of the reasons that too many remain in harm’s way.”

Climate Refugees

“Today, just 1 per cent of the planet is considered too hot and dry for civilization. But, by 2070, researchers have concluded, 19 per cent of the planet — home to some 3 billion people — might be uninhabitable.”

“Central America is just one more focal point for that change, and an important one. Climate models project that the region will be among the world’s fastest-warming places, experiencing longer droughts, shorter growing seasons and bigger and more destructive storms. The World Bank estimates that Central American nations will see as many as 17 million people internally displaced by climate stress factors by 2050.”

“Hotter locations in the tropics and subtropics suffer more in terms of health and economic opportunities, with annual mortality rates increasing by more than 100 deaths per 100,000 and national income losses of roughly 50 per cent or more. The impacts are milder in temperate regions. Cold places often benefit, since warming can actually improve human health and economic productivity.”

“According to a report compiled by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the number of reported droughts has increased by 1.29 times, storms by 1.4 times, floods by 2.34 times and heatwaves by 3.32 times in the first two decades of the twenty-first century compared to the last two decades of the twentieth century.”

“For decades, researchers in psychology have shown in laboratory studies that humans are more irritable and can be made to act more aggressively by turning up the temperature in the room they’re in. This physiological response is evident outside the lab as well: in studies from around the world, hotter temperatures have been shown to lead to increases in aggressive driving, to increased violence in professional sports and to increases in an array of violent crime, from domestic violence and aggravated assault to murder.

Warming temperatures and more extreme variations in rainfall have also been shown to exacerbate the likelihood of group-level conflict.”

“As floods and fires proliferate, storms intensify and become more frequent, and as temperatures rise, so too will insurance rates for homeowner and business protection against natural disasters. Where they can, insurers will pull out of the most at-risk areas. Without such insurance, most homebuyers can’t get a mortgage, and in those fire and flood zones where insurance rates skyrocket, many owners will try to sell — but to whom, and who will finance the purchase? This would set the stage for panic selling and a housing market collapse more serious than the crisis of 2008 because it would not be a one-off event. As we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate.”

Journalism

“If your objective as a politician truly is to act on the climate crisis, then surely your first step would be to gather accurate figures for our actual emissions to get a complete overview of the problem, and from there start looking at real solutions? That would also give you a rough idea of the changes needed, the scale of them and how quickly they need to be put in place. This, however, has not been done — or even suggested — by any world leader. Or, to my knowledge, even by any one single politician. To me, that would suggest that the sincerity of their ambition to solve this crisis is somewhat limited.

Journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes how she started investigating Swedish climate policies and found that only one third of our actual emissions of greenhouse gases were included in our climate targets and the official national statistics. The rest was either outsourced or hidden in the loopholes of international climate accounting frameworks.”

Geoengineering

“In the autumn of 2021, the world’s biggest direct-air carbon removal plant opened in Iceland. If all goes according to plan and the Climeworks Orca facility operates with no setbacks, it will — according to climate scientist Peter Kalmuss calculations — capture about three seconds’ worth of each year’s global CO, emissions. Carbon capture and storage is a key part of the strategy to which we seem to have blindly entrusted the future living conditions for life on Earth as we know it. Another key part is to cut down trees, forests, crops and other living biological organisms and ship them around the world to be burned for energy while we capture the carbon dioxide in huge chimneys and somehow transport and bury that CO2 underground or in cavities underneath the ocean floor. This process is known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.”

“According to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, global wildfires in 2021 created the equivalent of 6,450 megatonnes of CO2. That is 148 per cent higher than — way more than double — the total fossil fuel emissions of the entire EU in 2020.”

“In the middle of the twentieth century, researchers built the first solar panels — they were designed for use on spacecraft, since it clearly wouldn’t work to burn coal in orbit.”

“United States Senator Joe Manchin, who has taken more political donations from the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in Washington and personally has millions invested in coal, was single-handedly able to rewrite climate legislation in 2021.”

“Great investigative reporting in recent years has proved that the oil companies knew all about global warming way back in the 1970s — ExxonMobil scientists were able to predict with great accuracy how much the temperature would rise by 2020. And they were believed by company executives — they started building drilling rigs higher, for instance, to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming.”

“Consider the nearly billion human beings, mostly in Africa, who still have no access to modern energy at all: the UN now estimates that 90 per cent of them will get their first power from renewable sources, because putting solar panels on the edge of a remote village is so much cheaper and easier than building the conventional grid to these hard-to-reach locations.”

Solutions

“Hydrogen is an electricity source and a fuel which leaves only water behind when used in a fuel cell. However, hydrogen largely does not exist by itself in nature so it must be produced from other sources, mainly methane or water. This process requires more energy than the fuel itself gives in return. The gain is that hydrogen can be stored without losing energy over time.

According to the New Scientist, 96 per cent of hydrogen is currently being made from fossil fuels, which makes it far from being a renewable or fossil-free energy solution today. But it can also be made from water, using renewable energy such as wind and solar in the process. This is called green hydrogen and it can be used as an alternative to fossil fuels in certain circumstances, for example where the energy source can’t be electrified or where the energy needs to be stored for a longer time period than is efficient for a battery.

The problem, however, is that green hydrogen requires an abundance of cheap renewable energy, something that is not likely to be seen in the near future. Making hydrogen through electrolysis using nuclear power is called pink hydrogen, and there is also blue hydrogen, which is made from fossil fuels using carbon capture and storage. But since that technology is also far from being developed at scale, hydrogen as a whole remains a solution with considerable limitations. A Global Witness report from 2022 showed that a ‘first of its kind’ blue hydrogen plant in Canada was emitting more greenhouse gases than it was capturing.”

“Biomass energy creates electricity or heat by burning wood, as well as other plant or animal materials such as crops, peat, kelp, rubbish and slaughterhouse waste. It is considered a renewable energy source, but its renewable status depends upon a sustainable agriculture and forest industry, which doesn’t exist at any sufficient scale today.

Beyond this, it is renewable only over a vast timescale: it can take over a hundred years for a tree to grow, and many centuries for a forest to fully recover after it has been clear cut — if ever. Also, when we replace forests with tree plantations we lose invaluable biodiversity and resilience. The relative inability of plantations to sequester carbon is another negative aspect, as is the fact that plantations are much more vulnerable to fires and disease.

The fact that biomass is considered renewable has sparked large-scale exploitation of this energy source, which is accelerating deforestation and biodiversity loss. This is a human-made negative feedback loop that is currently spiralling out of control in many places. For biomass to be sustainable and renewable, we need to significantly downscale the entire practice.

Burning wood for energy releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than burning coal does, and the fact that these emissions are excluded from our national statistics — and that they are considered renewable — has created a potentially disastrous loophole.”

“Beyond the natural climate solutions discussed above, there is a common plant-based approach known as BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). In BECCS, you gather or harvest plant biomass, burn it to produce electricity (or convert it into biofuels) and pump the carbon dioxide pollution underground to keep it out of the atmosphere. Of all the drawdown or negative emissions technologies, BECCS is the only one that provides energy rather than requiring it (and, done carefully, can provide it close to carbon free). Like all climate solutions at the billion-tonne scale, BECCS has issues: it’s land and water intensive and, as with all underground waste pumping, you have to monitor the reservoir for decades to make sure the CO, stays put. Still, BECCS is relatively cheap by negative emission standards (around $50-$200 per tonne of CO, stored) and facilities already operate commercially today. In 2019, BECCS plants were removing about 1.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide yearly, the largest of them a corn-ethanol facility in Decatur, Illinois. A study from the US National Academy of Sciences put the potential for BECCS at roughly 3.5–5.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removed per year without large adverse impacts.”

“Ships already have a multitude of available options to curb emissions in the short term, such as retrofitting wind-propulsion or cutting ship speeds; in the longer term, a range of new fuels will help alleviate emissions too. Given that fossil fuels are primarily transported by sea, a wider switch to renewables would also mean a decline in a large chunk of shipped trade, which would likely help to reduce shipping emissions.”

“As well as the timescales involved, electric vehicles (EVs) are not a panacea, as lifecycle emissions depend heavily on the carbon content of electricity, materials used and battery production. Over the past fifty years, increasing vehicle weight and power have been reducing the rate of efficiency improvements for cars and vans across the board. The most popular type of car, the large, heavy sports utility vehicle (SUV), made up 45 per cent of all light-duty vehicle sales worldwide in 2021, outselling electric cars by about five to one. This eroded up to 40 per cent of improvements in fuel economy. Due to the pandemic, the International Energy Agency reported that carbon emissions in 2020 fell across all sectors except for one — SUVs. Due to the better margins they make on them, manufacturers benefit financially from selling larger, higher-end cars. The US, for instance, incentivizes large EVs by offering emissions credits. The German government provides direct subsidies for plug-in hybrid electric company cars, many of which are SUVs. Concerningly, many of the statistics published to record the growth in sales of electric vehicles include these plug-in hybrid cars — which make up about a fifth of global EV sales — even though they still rely heavily on, and lock in for a long time to come, fossil fuel combustion. One of the fastest, easiest and most efficient methods of reducing emissions would be to restructure incentives to encourage the sale of lighter electric vehicles and to phase out the use of large SUVs in cities immediately: ban their advertising, and tax their ownership and use.”

“Introducing a motorway speed limit of 130 kilometres per hour (kph) in speed-loving Germany would lower carbon emissions by 1.9 million tonnes annually. This is more than the annual total of sixty of the lowest-emitting countries. Lowering the speed limit to 100 kph would save around 5.4 million tonnes annually — or more than the annual emissions of eighty-six countries, including Nicaragua and Uganda. Yet the debate in Germany has been going on for decades, with no political party in power prepared to implement the policy.”

“Car-restricting policies were crucial for the Netherlands in achieving its world-leading rates of cycling; they made cycling more convenient than driving. Yet even after the success gained by applying a combination of ‘carrots and sticks’ at the local level, average per capita carbon emissions from personal transport in the Netherlands are as high as those in many neighbouring Western European countries because car-restricting policies have not been applied to longer journeys, which account for most of the mileage and thus carbon emissions.”

“The average American home has tripled in size in the past half-century, though families have become smaller. A household in the US contains, on average, 300,000 individual items.”

“To prevent a worse waste crisis — and an associated increase in emissions — we must take immediate action to decouple waste generation from income. South Korea illustrates how this can be done: financial incentives, citizen engagement, legislation and accompanying enforcement mechanisms have led to a 50 per cent decrease in waste generated per capita between 1990 and 2000, and it has remained steady since then — despite South Korea nearly tripling its GDP since 2000.”

“1970, the USA: The growing movement against throwaway plastic has led to protests across the country.

The big food and drink companies are rightly held responsible. Plastic has been available as a mass consumer product for nearly twenty years, and Coca-Cola has abandoned reusable glass bottles which used to be collected, washed and refilled. By embracing disposable plastic, companies no longer have to pay for washing and refilling operations: instead, they have passed all the costs of dealing with single-use plastic bottles on to local government and taxpayers.

The corporations respond to the protests by releasing what is tipped as one of the most iconic advertisements of all time: the ‘Crying Indian’ TV advert. An actor dressed in traditional Native American dress paddles through a river awash with plastic packaging, before shedding a tear as litter is thrown out of a moving car.

People start pollution, people can stop it, proclaims the strapline. It is designed to deflect attention from the companies and instead blame the public for the deluge of waste. The ‘Keep America Beautiful’ lobby group behind the advert is made up of the leading drinks and packaging corporations in the US, including Coca-Cola. As it plays on screens across America, they are busy actively opposing legislation that would require them to switch back to reusable bottles.”

“The Swedish language has produced only a tiny number of words that have achieved international recognition and made it into the global vocabulary, for example ‘smörgasbord’ and ‘ombudsman.’ Recently these words were joined by flygskam, or flight shame. It is linked to the international climate movement and the growing number of people who have given up flying, because frequent flying is by far the most climate-destructive individual activity you can engage in.”

“In 2019 Amsterdam pledged that it would ban fossil-fuelled boats from 2025 and fossil-fuelled motorbikes and cars from 2030. In 2021 the Welsh government announced a freeze on all new road projects, redirecting funding to public transport instead, while the government of France banned short-haul domestic flights for journeys that could be made in under two and a half hours, promoting train travel in their place.

Amsterdam is also leading in editing out the throwaway economy, committing to be 50 per cent circular in the city’s use of materials by 2030 and fully circular by 2050 — starting now, with construction, food and textiles. Such policies send a long, loud, legal message to companies: if you want to stay in business here, get circular. The policy has already spurred local innovation, including clothing companies now repairing, reusing and upcycling fabrics. Meanwhile, from Grenoble and Geneva to São Paolo and Chennai, city governments are banning the ‘visual pollution’ of advertising billboards, literally editing out-of-sight the lure of the advertiser’s message.”

“In Vienna, for example, over 60 per cent of people live in social housing that is owned by the city or not-for-profit cooperatives because the local government decided, decades ago, that housing was a human right and so ought to be kept affordable for all — and the rents are just a fraction of those in comparable European cities.”

The Media

“The media is the engine of persuasion that allows our Earth-destroying system to persist. It has repeatedly misled us about the choices we face. It has distracted us with trivia, and conjured up bogeymen and scapegoats to prevent us from seeing where our real problems lie. On behalf of its wealthy proprietors, it has sought to justify a political economy that allows a few extremely rich people to grab and destroy the natural wealth on which we all depend.”

“To give an example from the UK that will doubtless sound familiar to filmmakers the world over, between 1995 and 2018 the BBC’s channel controllers furiously rejected almost every environmental proposal brought to them, sometimes with a stream of expletives. On the very rare occasions when they allowed an environmental documentary to be broadcast, their terror of upsetting powerful interests drove them to make catastrophic mistakes.”

“Without the media, governments would have been forced to act. Without the media, the world’s most destructive industries would not have been able to fend off demands for change.”

Conclusion

“1. Spend what it takes to win

An emergency, once recognized as such, forces governments out of an austerity mindset. Canadian government expenditures during the Second World War were unlike anything before or since. The country’s debt-to-GDP ratio at the war’s end remains a historic high. When C. D. Howe, then Minister of Munitions and Supply, was pressed about this extraordinary ramp-up in government spending, he famously replied, If we lose the war, nothing will matter. If we win the war, the cost will still have been of no consequence and will have been forgotten!”

Similarly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, federal government spending increased dramatically, with Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio jumping from about 30 to 50 per cent in a single year. Remarkably, almost all this new debt was taken on by our central bank, which for most of the pandemic’s first year was buying $5 billion in federal government securities per week to fund the emergency response.

Government spending on climate action and green infrastructure, however, pales in comparison. It currently amounts to about $12 billion a year. Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern has said governments should be spending 2 per cent of their GDP on climate mitigation efforts, which in Canada would be about $56 billion per year. Our government isn’t merely spending a little less than it should in the face of the climate emergency; it is spending less by a massive order of magnitude.

2. Create new economic institutions to get the job done

During the Second World War, starting from a base of virtually nothing, the Canadian economy pumped out planes, military vehicles, ships and armaments at a speed and scale that is simply jaw-dropping. Remarkably, the Canadian government established twenty-eight public corporations to meet the requirements of the war effort.

During the Covid pandemic, we witnessed governments around the world take on a similar role, creating audacious new economic support programmes with a speed that few would have predicted. These programmes provided populations with testing, vaccination and healthcare services on an unprecedented scale.

If our governments really saw the climate emergency as an emergency, they would quickly conduct an inventory of our conversion needs to determine how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, and so on, we’d need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Then they would establish a new generation of public corporations to ensure that those items were manufactured and deployed at the requisite scale. They would also create an audacious new economic programme to catapult climate infrastructure spending and worker retraining.

3. Shift from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures

The Second World War saw rationing of core goods and all manner of other individual sacrifices. The Covid pandemic has seen our governments issue health orders and shut down non-essential parts of the economy when needed. But for the climate emergency, we have seen nothing like this.

Virtually all climate policies to date have been voluntary. In Canada, we encourage change. We incentivize change. We offer rebates. We send price signals. But what we have decidedly not done is to require change. And our greenhouse gas emissions are not going down, they have merely flatlined.

If we are going to meet the greenhouse gas targets we so urgently need to hit, we must set clear, near-term dates by which certain things will be required. We should declare that it will no longer be legal to sell new fossil fuel-burning vehicles as of 2025. We should mandate that all new buildings will not be permitted to use natural gas or other fossil fuels as of next year. We should ban advertising by fossil-fuel-vehicle-makers and petrol stations. That’s how we make it clear that this is serious.

4. Tell the truth about the severity of the crisis In frequency and tone, in words and in action, emergencies need to look and sound and feel like emergencies.

The Second World War leaders we remember best were outstanding communicators who were forthright with the public about the gravity of the crisis yet still managed to impart hope. Their messages were amplified by a news media that knew which side of history it wanted to be on, and by an arts and entertainment sector keen to rally the public.

None of this consistency and coherence, however, is present with respect to the climate emergency. When our governments do not act as if the situation is an emergency — or worse, when they send contradictory messages by approving new fossil fuel infrastructure — they are effectively communicating to the public that it is not an emergency. Where are the regular press briefings on how the climate emergency response is going? Where is the government advertising to boost the level of public ‘climate literacy’? Where are the daily media climate emergency reports telling us how this fight for our lives is unfolding at home and abroad? If our current leaders believe we face a climate emergency, then they need to act and speak like it’s a damn emergency.”

“In California, in 2020, twice as much land burned as had ever burned before in the modern history of the state, with five of the biggest six fires ever recorded there recorded in a single year.”

“According to a team of researchers including Joer Rogeli of Imperial College, London, just one tenth of Covid-19 stimulus spending, directed toward decarbonization during each of the next five years, would be sufficient to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement and stop global warming at a level well below 2°C. Globally, the total cost of green transition would be half of what was spent on stimulus in 2020, and yet, even in the midst of all that spending, the world couldn’t manage to take the deal, In the US alone, the Wall Street Journal noted, a full decarbonization of the power sector would require upfront spending of between $1 trillion and $1.8 trillion — less than one fifth of the cost of the country’s pandemic relief. But none of the instalments of American pandemic relief put climate spending at the centre. When President Biden finally got around to it, the total outlay was only in the hundreds of billions of dollars — a far cry from the 5 per cent of GDP suggested by Michael Bloomberg and Hank Paulson, no climate radicals, and even further from proposals championed by Senators Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders.”

“In July 2021, the International Monetary Fund estimated that a global vaccination programme would cost only $50 billion and would generate $9 trillion in additional revenue by just 2025 — a two-hundred-fold return on public investment in the length of a presidential election. The upfront cost was small enough that it could have been covered not just by the world’s largest economies, where it would have disappeared on any government balance sheet, but by just one of the world’s largest fortunes. Of course, none of those actors elected to take the bargain, preferring to let the Global South fend for itself against a virus the Global North had at least temporarily decided required a totalizing defence. As a result, the disease festered, mutated and continued.”

“At the same time as the Spanish, French; Portuguese, Dutch and English were expanding their empires across the Americas, Sweden was expanding its borders in a similar way. But apart from attempts to colonize Delaware, Saint Barthélemy and Guadeloupe, we headed north, into Sápmi. This land, stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Rus-sia, is home to the Sámi people, who have lived there for many thousands of years. But the Swedish state claimed it as Swedish territory and began a slow process of expansion and land grabbing. A colonization process that picked up speed as the pursuit of natural resources started gaining traction in the 1800s. Sápmi had vast quantities of iron ore, silver and timber.

So the Sámi people were pushed further and further away. Then came the forced movement of entire communities. Families were split up. Children were taken away from their parents. We tried to take away their language, their religion, their traditions, their culture — their entire way of life. Sweden established a State Institution for Racial Biology which measured their skulls. In the twentieth century came the hydroelectric industry, whose dams took away much of the grazing ground for the Sámi’s reindeer herds. Then came the timber companies, clear-cutting the forests that supply much of the reindeer’s food. Then came the mining companies. Then, in this century, came the wind turbines, chewing away further at the Sámis ancestors’ lands — this time to provide super-discounted ‘green’ electricity for Facebook servers and Bitcoin mining.

And we got away with nearly all of it. Sweden stole the Sámi’s land, we stole their sacred places and artefacts, we stole their religion, we stole their forests and other natural resources. And this theft continues today. As climate change makes the conditions for reindeer herding increasingly difficult, it is becoming harder and harder for the Sami people to maintain their traditional way of life. Many are giving up. New mines are being prospected. Old-growth forests are being clear-cut — forests that cannot be replanted. Any chance of further economic development is always the top priority.

And still Sweden does not in any way consider itself a colonial nation. If you described Sweden using those two words today, most people would probably think that you were completely insane. We tell the story we want to tell.”

“A good place to start is with energy ownership. Right now, a handful of fossil fuel corporations control the global supply and dominate most local markets. One of the great things about renewable power is that, unlike fossil fuels, it’s available wherever the sun shines, the wind blows and the water flows. That means we have a chance for more decentralized and diverse ownership structures: green energy co-ops, municipal energy, community-owned microgrids, and more. Under these structures, the profits and benefits of new green industries stay in communities to help pay for services rather than being siphoned off to corporate shareholders.

This just transition principle is often known as energy democracy.”

“The women of the Green Belt Movement are a good example of this. This non-governmental organization was founded in 1977 by Wangari Maathail to empower communities in Kenya, especially rural women and girls, to conserve their environments and protect their livelihoods. More than engaging with tree planting on our landscapes, the Green Belt Movement invests in ensuring that women understand their connection to the land and the degradation it faces. The women work in groups to establish tree nurseries, taking turns to nurture the seedlings and prepare them for the planting season.

One of the group leaders, Nyina wa Ciru, gathers the women in her group once a week under her mango tree to discuss the condition of their nursery and whether the seedlings are ready for planting. Together, they take turns watering the seedlings, often singing in unison as they work. When the seedlings are 2 feet tall, they decide where the seedlings will be planted — on their farms, in their children’s school compounds, in marketplaces, along a river, or anywhere they feel is in need of trees. Today, because of the partnership the Green Belt Movement has developed with the Kenya Forest Service, the seedlings are also planted in nearby government-run forests.

When the Green Belt Movement was founded, over forty years ago, the women in the movement always planted the seedlings on their family land first: fruit trees, fodder trees, shade trees and trees that gave them firewood for cooking. They noticed that when they planted trees around their farms, forming belts of green, the birds came back, their families had lots of delicious fruit to eat and their homesteads were cooler even during the hottest time of day. Trees, they believed, were the source of everything good.

After they had planted enough trees on each of their farms, they moved on to planting trees on public land. They taught others to plant trees, and the most beautiful part is the joy it brought them. These women became the primary suppliers of seedlings in their communities, ensuring that everyone participated in tree planting and that their farms were covered in green vegetation. It is women like these, women who protect the soil and produce food for the community, who are the landscape guardians and climate activists of our time.”

“In France, in 2018, the government raised carbon taxes in a way that hit rural, low-income households particularly hard, without much affecting the consumption habits and investment portfolios of the well-off. Many families had no way to reduce their energy consumption. They had no option but to drive their cars to go to work and to pay the higher carbon tax. At the same time, the aviation fuel used by the rich to fly from Paris to the French Riviera was exempted from the tax change: Reactions to this unequal treatment eventually led to the reform being abandoned.”

“British Columbia’s implementation of a carbon tax in 2008 was a success — even though the Canadian province relies heavily on oil and gas — because a large share of the resulting tax revenues goes to compensate low- and middle-income consumers via direct cash payments. In Indonesia, the ending of fossil fuel subsidies a few years ago meant extra resources for its government but also higher energy prices for low-income families. Fiercely opposed at first, the reform was accepted when the government decided to use the revenue to fund universal health insurance and support for the poorest.

To accelerate the energy transition, we must also think outside the box. Consider, for example, a progressive tax on wealth, with a pollution top-up. This would accelerate the shift out of fossil fuels by making access to capital more expensive for the fossil fuel industries. It would also generate potentially large revenues for governments which they could invest in green industries and innovation. Such taxes would be more equitable, since they target a fraction of the population, not the majority. At the world level, a modest wealth tax on multimillionaires with a pollution top-up could generate 1.7 per cent of global income, as has been shown in recent research. This could fund the bulk of extra investments required every year to meet climate mitigation efforts.”

“We already have long-standing examples of this ethos at work in real political systems. The Brazilian Workers’ Party pioneered participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in the 1980s, putting city residents in direct democratic control of the use of public funds. This approach has travelled widely since: it is built into all levels of governance in the Indian state of Kerala and is used to effectively manage public spending in cities such as Maputo and Dondo in Mozambique. In Kenya, the Harambee movement has resulted in formal government funds being dedicated to tens of thousands of ‘community self-help’ programmes which force legislators to materially serve the people they represent.”

“Estimates indicate that 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is sheltered in lands under the care of Indigenous peoples. A 2019 report from the United Nations found that biodiversity is declining perilously all over the planet, but the rates of loss are dramatically lower in areas under Indigenous control.”

“Instead of subsidizing air travel, subsidize trains. The low-emitting option should always be made the cheapest by far.”

“Ban high-carbon advertising

The idea that you can legally promote the destruction of our present living conditions and our future is ridiculous. If we are to have even an outside chance of meeting our climate targets, it must be banned. But since we no longer have the luxury of implementing non-holistic solutions, this ban must cover all high-emitting sectors. Otherwise, a ban just on advertising fossil fuels will mean an indirect stamp of approval for things such as unsustainable biofuels, burning wood for energy, and so on.

Invest in science, research and technology

Technology alone will not save us. We have left it way too late for that. Nevertheless, we desperately need it — our lives depend on a scientific understanding of our situation. For instance, farm-free food production — food made from ingredients grown in laboratories — is on the verge of revolutionizing the way we feed ourselves. This — along with perennial crops and no-till farming practices — could open up a game-changing series of positive feedback loops, potentially returning huge amounts of carbon to our soils and forests.”