Climate Change Thread

[ReluctantSamurai]

Leave it to the Aussie's to come up with a discussion about climate change that even a grade school student can understand:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-...ange/100020944

In Australia we've been talking about climate change for over a century …

As decades go by and emissions rise, the politics has stayed the same. Each time it bubbles up we're told taking action will result in job losses and disruption to the Australian way of life, and we're better off waiting.

But strip away all the politics, and the maths tells a different story: reducing emissions now will buy us more time to get to zero, but inaction dramatically cuts the time we have to act. This is why the next five years are so important.

By the 1980s, scientists (including those who worked for fossil fuel companies) had a pretty clear idea what was going on in the climate, and could start to measure increases in CO₂ and increases in global temperatures. So we knew even then that one day we'd have to stop using fossil fuels.

Coal industry representatives [insert oil and gas representatives here in the US] have fought back strongly against any plans to cut greenhouse emissions from burning coal, saying it would be an expensive move which would undercut one of Australia's strongest export industries.

This opposition was accompanied by familiar framing: "Advocating a moderate and pragmatic response on global warming."

Those reasonable sounding words, repeated by politicians and fossil fuel companies year after year, make it sound like we're gradually solving the problem. But again, strip away the politics, and see what is happening to emissions globally.

So this is where we are now. We're at a point where the effects of climate change [...] can no longer be ignored, and globally the emissions tap has gone from dripping, to flowing, to full bore. The only thing that hasn't changed is the political message.

That century the world had to get on top of this problem has been squandered in a few short decades.

We can't just keep emitting until 2050 and be fine; that date only works if we all start reducing emissions now. If we spend the next five years not reducing emissions, that gives us just 17 years to make that transition.

If you live in a part of Australia that's reliant on fossil fuel jobs, it is easy to see the appeal of the message "we can't turn things off tomorrow". But if we keep following that thinking, tomorrow won't be in 2050 — it will be just around the corner.

I highly recommend reading the Deloitte Access Economics report that blows the doors off the argument by the energy industry that "green energy" will cost thousands of jobs, and be economically ruinous:

https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/page...te-growth.html

What this report reveals is a fundamental flaw in how we are viewing the debate on climate change; we are all missing the point. We view the costs of action against an economic future where the basic assumption is that the economy will keep growing with unconstrained emissions. It is no wonder, then, that any debate about climate change turns up a large cost of action with scant benefits from change.

The economic baseline that we are conducting this debate against is fundamentally flawed. In its place, this report develops a baseline where unconstrained emissions are not consistent with unconstrained growth.