It is now difficult to imagine a future where climate chaos won’t be flooding cities, raising food prices, killing humans, decimating biodiversity, and generally wreaking havoc. We will soon experience the consequences of carbon dioxide levels in excess of 450 parts per million and the much-discussed 2-degree-C increase in temperature.
Why?
1) 80% of the CO2 emissions needed to reach 450 are already locked-in. Investors cannot afford to re-tool existing power plants, factories, hot water heaters, buildings, and automobiles until these investments have been used long enough to pay for the cost of buying them. We will have passed 450 by the time we can install green replacements.
2) Political and economic realities in China, India, and other developing nations necessitate continued, rapid economic growth. Billions of people aspire to middle class lifestyles. Reducing poverty quickly enough to stave off social instability and maintain government legitimacy will require lots of cheap energy, which is why thousands of proposed coal fire plants will be built. For those of us who already made it to the middle class, we are on shaky moral ground if we tell billions of our fellow humans they should forego flush toilets, light bulbs, and refrigerators.
3) The revolution of shale gas and tight oil in the USA will provide abundant and cheap fossil fuels, enough to make the USA a net energy exporter for decades. In the short term, cheap gas might decrease USA’s CO2 emissions as gas replaces more carbon-dense coal in electricity generation; but in the long term, cheap energy drives down the competiveness of renewables and delays when they will exist in sufficient quantity to impact climate mitigation goals.
The chaos get’s exponentially worse if temperatures increase much above 2 degrees Celsius, so mitigation strategies are still essential.
Bottom line. We can no longer delay investing in climate resiliency, climate adaptation, and related strategies that blunt the worst impacts of climate chaos.