The climate crisis is a massive global problem, which we are totally failing to get to grips with. The solutions to climate change are remarkably simple, if only we’d get on with them. Will the United Nations COP27 climate summit in Egypt starting November 6 bring any new breakthroughs? Based on past experience it seems unlikely, but miracles can happen. UN chief António Guterres has warned that ‘we will be doomed’ if nations do not achieve a historic climate pact. Here are steps to get them started.
-
Tell the whole truth about the climate crisis
Most people are living in what I call climate limbo-land. They know climate change is pretty serious, but since almost no government is treating it as the crisis it is, they assume it’s all right to keep on flying, driving a gas-guzzling SUV, eating beef and complaining about the price of oil. If people knew the half of it, they’d be full of climate anxiety and demanding rapid urgent action, just as the young climate strikers are.
The Canadian government, for its part, is generally saying the right things, but its communications around the climate crisis need to have even more urgency. Through their actions, governments should be ringing alarm bells about the reality of the situation.
Alarm bell #1: We’re heading for a world that will be at least 2°C to 3°C warmer by century’s end. The last time it was that warm, three million years ago, sea levels were 16 metres higher.
Alarm bell #2: These climate events – more destructive floods, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts, quick-spreading wildfires and more prolonged heatwaves – will all get worse. And they will cost us. In Canada, losses caused by the climate crisis are projected to cost $2.8 trillion a year by the end of the century under a 2°C warming scenario, according to Queen’s University’s Institute for Sustainable Finance.
Alarm bell #3: By 2050 there could be 1.2 billion climate refugees seeking a safe place to live. So please – tell people the truth!
-
Electrify everything
All our energy except geothermal and tidal comes from the sun, that amazing ball of fire a million times larger than our tiny Earth. For more than a million years, we have used its energy by burning wood grown by sunlight. For 300 years, we have burned fossilized wood, plants and marine organisms that grew from the sun’s energy, in the form of coal, oil and gas.
Today, we know how to use the sun’s energy directly through solar, wind (the sun’s heat creates pressure differentials, which generate wind) and other renewables. Solar and wind are already the cheapest forms of new energy, and renewable technologies will only improve and get cheaper. Battery technologies are improving every year, as engineers develop new ways to store energy that don’t require lithium and other rare minerals. No more air pollution, no more related illnesses, no more tanker disasters, and no more wars over oil. Why hang on to the past? It makes no sense.
-
Stop burning fossil fuels
Around 75% of the climate crisis is being caused by our continued use of fossil fuels. Every time we burn coal, gas or oil, we pour fuel on the crisis, making the future worse. No one is saying “Stop burning all fossil fuels today,” but the climate scientists who understand the alarm bells are saying we do need to stop investing in new oil and gas infrastructure and exploration. The only reason for fossil fuel expansion is to continue to squeeze out more profits for investors, at the expense of our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives.
Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, from fracked natural gas is not better than coal, as its promoters claim, since the process of fracking releases methane, which traps 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 20 years, making its climate impact as bad as coal.
Governments should sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, as the European Parliament recently did. There are a thousand ways for civilization to flourish without burning fossil fuels. Thank you, fossil fuels. You served us well, but your time is over.
-
Spend what it takes on climate change solutions
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, nobody in the U.K. asked whether they could afford to fight the war. They did whatever it took. They borrowed, increasing the national debt to 200% of GDP. (Canada’s debt today is just 45% of GDP.) They issued Victory Bonds. They invested massively to save their very future.
Investments in solar, wind and other renewables will pay for themselves through utility bills. Retrofitting buildings to replace gas with heat pumps and better insulation will require grants and tax breaks. Investments in transit, bike lanes, walkable communities and tree planting will improve our quality of life. Investments in research and development will produce better batteries, new ways to make concrete and steel, and new circular economy materials.
The world’s nations spend US$2 billion a day on direct fossil fuel subsidies, while the oil industry has made $3 billion a day in profits every day for the last 50 years. Imagine what we could achieve if governments were to invest those subsidies in climate solutions, and levy an oil industry windfall profits tax.
-
Stop eating meat
It’s one of those realities we need to accept. The livestock industry, which produces meat and dairy, causes as much climate pollution as the entire world’s transportation. It comes from a combination of rainforests being destroyed to raise cattle, fertilizers and manure producing nitrous oxide, and cattle constantly burping methane. A kilogram of beef generates 63 times more climate pollution than a kilogram of wheat. Pork generates eight times more; chicken six times more.
The belief that if cattle are grass-fed, that “grazing is amazing,” as burger chain A&W claims, is simply not true: the cattle keep burping methane and releasing nitrous oxide through their manure.
Instead of beef and dairy, there’s a whole world of vegetarian and vegan cuisine to explore, full of taste and flavour.
-
Leave no one behind
When French president Emmanuel Macron introduced a new fuel tax in 2018, it was quickly derailed by angry people wearing yellow vests who felt they had been unfairly targeted. Canada’s carbon tax, by contrast, is returned to most Canadians in their taxes as credits or rebates. But we need to go further. We need a truly just transition in which any worker whose job disappears as a result of the reduction of fossil fuels will be assured financial support and training to find a new job (of which there will be plenty). Indigenous people all across Canada must be included in the many opportunities that open up.
-
Restore climate stability
Is all this enough? Alas no, for the climate crisis is caused not by our current emissions, but by our accumulated emissions over 200 years. Before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). In May 2022 it reached 420 ppm, a level not seen for four million years, and it increases by two ppm every year as we continue to burn fossil fuels, destroy forests and eat beef.
To restore climate stability and cease our canter to catastrophe, we need to suck the surplus carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. We can do this by protecting Earth’s forests; restoring farmland soils and wetlands; planting a trillion trees; using the world’s oceans to grow carbon-storing seaweeds, seagrasses and mangroves; making synthetic limestone; and through other means, all of which the Foundation for Climate Restoration is pursuing.
The pursuit of “net-zero” is a delusional folly: it uses nature’s solutions such as these to justify continued climate pollution. We need to do both: to cease pouring fuel on the fire and to bring all that excess carbon back down to earth, where it will no longer trap heat.
So please, leave limbo-land. Come into action-land. We need all hands on deck.
Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible.
