Global warming — when the low bar showed no chance at all of being achieved —the UN enthusiastically raised it

© 2018 Peter Free

 

09 October 2018

 

 

Angels, pinheads and well-intentioned dreamers

 

The latest in "climate change" politics:

 

 

Today’s report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clarifies how much better off the world would be if warming stopped at 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees.

 

Hundreds of millions of people would be spared extended periods of extreme heat, water scarcity, drought and flooding. Crop yields would not fall as drastically. Coral reefs would have a chance of survival. Countless species would be spared extinction.

 

The world is on a path to reach 1.5 degrees of warming in just 22 years.

 

Slowing that progress and holding the line at 1.5 degrees is possible only if humanity can bring itself to very quickly phase out the use of coal, oil and gas, and in the bargain start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

 

That would be a technological challenge, to say the least, and an even more daunting political one.

 

The best way for the U.S. and every other country to grapple with this challenge is to tax carbon emissions at a rate sufficient to discourage use of fossil fuels and raise demand for renewables.

 

The world’s dependence on fossil fuels has to end, and soon.

 

© 2018 Bloomberg Editorial Board, The World’s Climate Goals Aren’t Ambitious Enough, Bloomberg (08 October 2018)

 

 

The take-away?

 

If capitalistic humanity shows no signs of being motivated enough to reach a lowly placed habit-reforming goal, we should raise the bar impossibly higher?

 

 

The moral? — the Tragedy of the Commons remains the issue

 

Is the United States miraculously going to lead a devolution in living standards, as a nationally self-sacrificing example?

 

Do you foresee anyone giving up cheap fossil fuel soon? Perhaps a stampede to the polls to raise gasoline taxes?

 

Given how capitalism works, the biosphere has no protective army. Absent dealing with that conundrum, nothing noticeably planet protecting is going to happen.

 

It is always capitalism's propaganda that new sources of less damaging profit will drive out more harmful ones. We have seen how "well" (meaning poorly) that actually works.

 

If the process required self-sacrifice (on our part) — can you name one example in which humanity has successfully protected any habitat, or any species, from continually flirting with extinction's edge?

 

We will start seriously dealing with global warming, only if it begins negatively affecting influential members of the Rich World Establishment. And if "we" do, it will be at some economically poor group's expense.