9. Evaluation of Climate Change: Conclusions from Literature

Conclusions Based in Literature Search:

1. Climate change observed since the start of the industrial revolution (about 1850) is real, and the global temperature is rising based on a plethora of worldwide observations. Current climate change is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in the earth’s atmosphere, CO2 being the primary GHG. The primary source of CO2 is the combustion of fossil fuel. Climate change is anthropogenic not natural.

2. Climate change models are valid, and these models allow for policy-relevant calculations such as the CO2 emissions compatible with a specified climate stabilization target.

3. The health effects of global warming are estimated to kill 150,000 to 250.000 people per year

4. The probability of the US to achieving zero CO2 by 2050 is essentially zero. Given Republicans reluctance to do anything, liberal Democrats unwillingness to consider nuclear power and no incentives for private industry to take on this task; the US is likely to continue to very slightly reduce CO2 emissions with the combination of natural gas, wind and solar replacing coal fired generation and the slow adoption of reduced CO2 transportation.

5. The chances of doing anything at the world level aren’t much better. At the September 2019 UN Climate Action Summit neither India or China indicated they would increase their NDC to meet the 2C target; and Trump continued to show contempt for climate science and continues to withdraw from the Agreement.

6. The targets set by the UN will not be achieved and the world is going to get hotter with the global temperature likely rising by another 0.5C in the next decade. The CO2 reduction contributions of individual nations were known to be inadequate in 2016 with the reductions likely to result in a temperature rise of 2.6-3.1C by 2100.(https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18307).

7. Given this backdrop the EIA International Energy Outlook (IEO) issued in October 2019 (https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2019) provides reasonable forecast of CO2 emissions for the near term with an associated temperature increase of ~3 C by 2100.

8. It is as false scientifically to say that the climate future will be catastrophic as it is to say with certainty that it will be merely lukewarm. Neither is there a cliff edge to fall over in 2030 or at 2C of warming. The rhetoric of deadlines and “it's too late” does not do justice to what we know scientifically about climate change. Climate prediction science is based on probabilistic forecasts which underpin the quantification of risk. There is a range of possible values for future global warming.

9. The rhetoric of climate endings and extinction does not help psychologically or politically.

10. Despite what some activists claim, climate change is not a black and white issue. It has many shades of gray. The fact that humans are altering the world's climate is absolutely clear, the significance of this fact is not self-evident. As many have realized for a long time now, climate change is a “wicked problem”. To believe that there is an absolute truth to be told about what climate change means, or what “it demands” of each of us, is misguided. What climate change means to each person is not revealed truth emerging from some scientific script. The political meanings and individual and collective responses to climate change have to be worked out iteratively and in association with those who think differently to us, sometimes radically so. They have to be negotiated within the political structures and processes we inhabit, negotiations that cannot be circumvented by an appeal to the authority of science being “on our side.” (Although of course this “working out” must also include the possibility of renegotiating some of those same political structures) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.619).

11. In an essay published in 2018, literature PhD student Casey Williams at Duke University reflected on why eco-fiction so often gets climate change wrong. “It's tempting to read worsening disasters as portents of the apocalypse to come,” he wrote, “a preface to some final lethal bang. But this isn't usually how environmental change, and especially not climate change, works. Climate change doesn't describe a single future catastrophe, but a slow and uneven unraveling, a drawn-out apocalypse that began long ago and that will stretch to an end that probably won't feel like much of an ending at all. For most people, climate change is ordinary danger amplified, enduring injustice heightened.” Williams’ perspective provides a useful antidote to the trope of “too-lateness.” (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/earth-day-eco-fiction-climate-change_n_5ad92237e4b0e4d0715ec872?guccounter=1) It is never too late to do the right thing. There is always tomorrow. Even though we cannot undo the past—in fact because of this fact—it is essential for humans to continue to seek out the sources of hope, creativity, respect and solidarity that characterize the human reflex at its best.

12. For those who want to delve deeper, WIREs Climate Change Volume 11, Issue 1 is recommended (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17577799/2020/11/1)

EIA IEO 2019 Projection

Worldwide, CO2 emissions are forecast to continue to increase as “industrialized” (OECD, China, Russia) nations stabilize and slightly decrease their emissions and “industrializing” (all others) nations increase their emissions. This will most likely result in a ~3.0C increase in the global average temperature by 2100 using the ISAM model.

Although population and incomes continue to rise in both OECD and non-OECD countries, energy and carbon intensity are projected to continue to fall.

Worldwide, energy intensity has declined steadily for many years. Carbon intensity declined in OECD countries since 2008 and in non-OECD countries since 2014. Energy intensity continues to decline in both OECD and non-OECD countries because of efficiency gains and gross domestic product (GDP) increases generated from low-energy-intensive services. Carbon intensity continues to decline largely as a result of China and other countries’ move away from coal to natural gas; worldwide growth in the use of non-CO2-emitting sources of energy, such as wind and solar; and improvements in process efficiencies.

World energy-related CO2 emissions grow at an average rate of 0.6% per year between 2018 and 2050, compared with the average growth rate of 1.8% per year from 1990 to 2018. In the near term, energy-related CO2 emission growth is slowed by increases in energy efficiency and a gradual shift from coal toward natural gas and renewable energy sources. In the longer term, broad population and economic growth leads to increased emissions. In OECD countries, projected energy-related CO2 emissions decline slightly (-0.2% annually) through 2050 and are 14% lower than their 2005 levels in 2050 even as their economies gradually expand. Energy-related CO2 emissions from non-OECD countries grow at a rate of about 1% per year from 2018 to 2050, slower than the related growth in energy consumption (1.6% per year).

WHY IS THIS RISE IN CO2 EMISSIONS PREDICTED?

The Paris Agreement is Flawed

(https://opiniojuris.org/2019/10/25/the-paris-agreement-in-the-2020s-breakdown-or-breakup/)

The Paris Agreement was widely hailed as a triumph of international diplomacy. After twenty years of contentious United Nations climate summits that failed to slow the rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the Paris Agreement quickly entered into force and now has near-universal adherence. Over 180 nations have made voluntary pledges to reduce their GHG emissions, with the collective goal of limiting global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In the wake of the 2015 Paris conference, most diplomats asserted that the Agreement’s voluntary structure could succeed. In any case, there was no viable alternative. Paris had to succeed.

Just four years after diplomats drew this line in the sand to limit emissions, it will likely be swamped by a rising tide. As we enter the 2020s, the Agreement has been unable to constrain the world’s emissions growth. Most parties are falling short even of their initial, tepid pledges to reduce emissions, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Global GHG emissions, which flattened between 2014 and 2016, are once again surging to record annual highs.

The UN Emissions Gap Report 2019 (https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/reports.shtml) status of the largest emitters demonstrates this

Climate change politics have turned markedly darker since 2015. In 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Agreement. The announcement dashed hopes that major GHG emitters would be role models for ambitious policies, and global media outlets aptly characterized Trump as raising his middle finger to the rest of the world. Commitments to aggressive climate action are faltering elsewhere.

The Paris Agreement requires, as a binding treaty obligation, that each party submit an NDC and report on progress. However, at the insistence of the Obama Administration, which cited the need to avoid Senate ratification (The Republicans would not have approved the Agreement as a treaty.), there is no legally binding requirement to achieve the goals set forth in an NDC. It is up to each party to implement policies to achieve its NDC, and there is no sanction for failing to reach the target. Seen in this light, the Paris Agreement is mainly a “statement of good intentions.”

The Paris Agreement could easily fall into a downward spiral of dissent, dysfunction, and disengagement. The specific language in the Paris Agreement will not cause a downward spiral, or that tweaks to the language could avoid it. Rather, the destabilizing factors are exogenous to the Agreement and reflect the strategic interests of major powers. The problem is not the treaty’s language. It is that climate change, by its very nature, creates thorny, intractable incentives toward noncooperation and free-riding. Climate change is the ultimate intragenerational and inter-generational prisoners’ dilemma. The Paris Agreement may have papered these conflicts over for a while, but it has not solved them.

The conventional narrative that the Paris Agreement will succeed because parties will pressure each other, in a kind of virtuous circle, toward increasingly deep emissions cuts—the “peer pressure proposition.” Many of the assumptions behind the peer pressure proposition are faulty, and in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal announcement “peer pressure proposition” seems likely to fail. The problem with relying on voluntary pledges, however, is that if the aggregate emissions reductions expected under the NDCs are insufficient to keep warming within tolerable levels, there is no stick to force states to commit to greater reductions as has now been demonstrated in the UN Emissions Gap Report 2019.

The Paris Agreement followed twenty years of frustrating climate talks with little progress, and it has to be evaluated against that backdrop. The shift to a voluntary pledge and review system was the crucial change in policy architecture that allowed consensus to be reached at Paris, surmounting policy deadlock. Now that the Agreement is in its implementation phase, however, the voluntary structure, lack of sanctions, and lack of benchmarks for allocating effort will likely hinder further cooperation and reciprocity. States will continue to submit NDCs that reflect their self-interest, but these NDCs will in all likelihood be collectively insufficient to close the emissions gap and keep the world on a trajectory to avoid warming beyond two degrees Celsius.

Political feasibility of climate change mitigation pathways is small

(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.621?af=R)

There is a wide gap between the real-world climate action and what is required for stabilizing the climate at safe levels. As climate advocates urge policy makers to close this gap before it is too late, a key question for scientists is whether the required policies are feasible. What makes a policy unfeasible are constraints which are outside of the control of a policy maker. Low-carbon energy transitions involve co-evolutionary changes in technoeconomic (energy flows and markets), sociotechnical (knowledge and social practices), and political (policy action) systems. A climate action can be rendered infeasible by constraints within any of these systems: a shortage of resources, lack of suitable technologies, or opposing political interests.

Whether we can keep global warming below 2C mostly depends on political rather than technical factors. Political feasibility is not a question of the political will to undertake a single action but rather a matter of our ability to intervene in the economy in a myriad of interdependent ways. Some of these interventions and their combinations are more politically feasible than others: for example, it is usually easier to expand low-carbon industries which create jobs and economic opportunities than to phase-out carbon-intensive sectors thus hurting employment and stranding assets.

Political feasibility of climate interventions also depends on their geographic and socioeconomic context. It is easier to impose a carbon tax in Sweden, where the electricity system is decarbonized and energy makes up a smaller proportion of household spending than in Indonesia which relies heavily on coal power and where poor people spend much more of their income on energy. It is easier to build a nuclear power plant in China with its established nuclear energy industry than in Kenya which lacks nuclear infrastructure.

Finally, for a climate intervention to be politically feasible, there must be a path for actors to achieve this intervention. This is a function of national economic and institutional capacities as well as international collaboration. Public and private actors in some countries are more capable than others of bearing higher political and economic costs of decarbonization. In particular governments that lead climate action tend to have significant economic resources and are also supported by political systems which make them less dependent on vested interests that stand to lose from rapid transitions.

The most straightforward way to judge political feasibility is by historic examples. If something has occurred in the past it makes it likely to occur in the future. France's and Sweden's rapid expansion of nuclear power in the 1970s– 1980s, Denmark's deployment of wind power since the 1990s, and the recent commitment of over a dozen OECD countries to phase out unabated coal are examples of rapid decarbonization. Yet, the decarbonization required for 2C must occur also outside Western Europe and beyond the OECD. At present, there are not enough actors capable of bearing the political and economic costs of these solutions at the required scale worldwide. Moreover, achieving the 2C target requires solutions beyond nuclear power and coal phase-out: for example, constraining energy demand, carbon capture and storage and potentially deploying negative emission technologies. There is no evidence that any of these solutions are politically feasible at the required scale.

In the future, the costs of climate solutions may decrease and the capacities of relevant actors increase. These changes in costs and capacities mean that at least those solutions that have already been observed historically may become possible for a wider range of countries. However, this shift in the feasibility frontier is not likely to happen in the next decade or so, which is required to stay within the 2C limit without overshoot.

Can the gap between current climate action and what is required to achieve the 2C target be closed? Whether and how soon this gap can be closed depends on why it exists in the first place. If it is the result of low awareness and weak motivation, it could be promptly closed by emphasizing the urgency of the climate problem and advocating for political mobilization. However, experience since the Paris Agreement was signed shows this is not happening. A systematic analysis of political feasibility suggests a different explanation: namely that there are currently not enough actors capable of bearing the costs of required decarbonization in specific national circumstances. This also means that the gap between real-life climate action and climate mitigation pathways can only narrow when the capacities of relevant actors sufficiently increase and/or the cost of decarbonization decreases. Can this happen and if so, would it be too late to meet the 2C target?

The available evidence does not provide assuring answers, especially to the second question. The climate mitigation pathways modeled in IAMs includes actions which fall into three groups with respect to how much we know about their political feasibility. The first group contains solutions which have been already used and analyzed in diverse national contexts, for example renewables, nuclear and pledges to phase-out coal power. The knowledge about political constraints to these solutions is still far from complete but already indicative of the relevant actors, costs and capacities. These solutions will eventually become feasible at the required scale in most national contexts, but the necessary evolution of relevant actors, costs and capacities will almost definitely take more than one or two decades, that is, longer than the time we have to avoid temperature overshoot. The second group contains solutions for which we have best practice examples but no systematic comparative understanding about their implementation in various contexts. These include for example low-carbon mobility, sharing economy solutions, energy demand reduction, and decarbonization of industrial processes. Due to the lack of systematic evidence it is very difficult to judge the political feasibility of these solutions and its role in future developments. There is much to be gained by researching the capacities of relevant actors to implement these solutions in various contexts. The final group of solutions includes those that so far have not been commercially deployed including small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage, electrical grid scale batteries, negative emission technologies and hydrogen-based fuels. Judging their political feasibility would be even more speculative before technoeconomic constraints are resolved.

In summary, the better-known political constraints of solutions which are already extensively used worldwide are likely to prevent them to be deployed on the scale and in time to avoid overshooting 2C. For solutions currently available only as “best practices” or demonstrations, the political constraints are simply not yet known. We also do not know much about the feasibility of implementing several challenging solutions simultaneously as required by decarbonization pathways.

Systematic evaluation of present and future political constraints would help to identify and concentrate scarce political capital on more politically feasible pathways and solutions. Even in the case of overshooting 2C, and maybe especially so, we need to understand the feasibility of various decarbonization options including negative emission technologies. If the evidence against political feasibility of the 2C pathways becomes overwhelming, which is most likely the case, it will also help us understand how warm of a world we need to prepare to live in.