By Dauda Abbas
The intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), reports, one of which dropped this week are formidably researched and profoundly important, but they mostly reinforce what we already know: human-produced greenhouse gases are rapidly and disastrously changing the planet, and unless we rapidly taper off burning fossil fuels, a dire future awaits.
“Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits,” said the IPCC chairman, Hoesung Lee. “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all. Among the worst of the excuses for not doing the one thing we must do is carbon capture, which has absolutely not worked at any scale that means anything and shows no sign of so doing on a meaningful scale in the near future.” He added.
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But while it is dangled as a possibility, it creates a justification to keep burning fossil fuel. So does geoengineering, which along with posing many kinds of disruptions is a way to compensate for continued emissions from burning things rather than stop burning them.
These centralized hi-tech solutions seem to appeal to technocrats and beneficiaries of large corporations and centralized power, who perhaps don’t like or don’t comprehend the decentralization of power coming from sun and wind.
But “stop now” means taking dramatic measures to change how we do most things, especially produce energy. The people who should be treating this like the colossal emergency it is keep finding ways to delay and dilute a meaningful response.
Fossil fuel is hugely profitable to some of the most powerful individuals and institutions on Earth, and they influence and even control a lot of other people.
Furthermore to say that, it is grim, but there is also a kind of comedy in the ways they keep trying to come up with rationales to not do the one key thing that climate organisers, policy experts, activists and scientists have long told them they must do: stop funding fossil fuels, stop their extraction, stop their burning and speed the transition away from their use. Moving fast. Step it up now. These bring us back to something that climate organisers have told us for a long time. We know what to do, and we have the solutions we need to do it, so the biggest problems are political. They are banks, politicians, financiers and the fossil fuel industry itself. We do not need any magic technology to defeat them; just massive civil society willpower set in motion. The decision-makers here often seem like a patient who, when told by a doctor to stop doing something tries to bargain. All the vitamins and wheatgrass juice on Earth would not make toxic waste into something nontoxic, and all these excuses and delays and workarounds and nonexistent solutions do not replace what the IPCC tells us: stop burning fossil fuel.
