According to a recent New York Times report, the U.N. says that a lag in confronting climate woes will be costly. It suggests that nations have so dragged their feet in battling climate change that the situation has grown critical and the risk of severe economic disruption is rising.
Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies, the experts found.
But…there’s a solution! (Yay). The article goes on to say:
”Delay would likely force future generations to develop the capability to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and store them underground to preserve the livability of the planet…But it is not clear whether such technologies will ever exist at the necessary scale, and even if they do, the approach would likely be wildly expensive compared with taking steps now to slow emissions.” (Boo).
The report said that governments of the world were still spending far more money to subsidize fossil fuels than to accelerate the shift to cleaner energy, thus encouraging continued investment in projects like coal-burning power plants that posed a long-term climate risk.
The warnings come in a leaked draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of climate experts.
In the dry language of a technical committee, the draft outlines an increasingly dire situation. When the final draft emerges, a major finding is expected to be that the food supply is at serious risk as warming continues.
Even as the early effects of climate change are starting to be felt around the world, the panel concluded that efforts are lagging not only in reducing emissions, but in adapting to the climatic changes that have become inevitable.
It is true, the report found, that the political willingness to tackle climate change is growing in many countries and new policies are spreading, but the report said these were essentially being outrun by the rapid growth of fossil fuels.
The report suggests, however, that the real question is whether to take some economic pain now, or more later.
If countries permit continued high emissions growth until 2030, the draft report found, the target will likely be impossible to meet, at least without a hugely expensive crash program to rebuild the energy system, and even that might not work.
If emissions do overshoot the target, the report found, future generations would likely have to develop ways to pull greenhouse gases out of the air. It is fairly clear this will be technically possible. Machinery might be developed that could directly extract greenhouse gases from the air; in fact, early work on such systems has begun. The plan is to sequester CO2 in underground caves.
Who would own these caves, I wonder? And who is going to pay for all this…and how? I’m willing to bet that Wall Street has it all figured out, and it ain’t gonna be the 1%.
We'll deal with it later
Based on the last 40 years, I’d say the plan is to put it off and not really do much.
I don’t see anyone ready to give up their cars or plane trips, and no incentives to do it, either. The massive changes required seem beyond our imagination.
Exactly
“Based on the last 40 years, I’d say the plan is to put it off and not really do much.”
I think that’s exactly the plan: Continue profiting by extracting the earth’s resources until the situation gets so critical that heroic measures are the only viable solution.
Then, present civilization with a nifty new high-tech plan to vacuum the CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it in underground caves (which Wall Street has been quietly buying up when no-one was looking).
The plants will be enormous, both in physical size and in cost.
There will be no alternative.
Meanwhile, these endeavors will be financialized in every way possible. Look for trades, derivatives, investments that we can only dream of.
And, clever strategists will figure out a way for governments to pay private firms to operate these facilities while paying for them with new forms of regressive taxation
My God, how the money rolls in!
(♫.Rolls in, Rolls in ♪♪…My God, how the money rolls in♫)
BTW, the photo is the roller coaster at Seaside Heights NJ during hurricane Sandy
Photo
Oh, I thought that was a picture of Chris Christies chances for a potential white house bid.
Why Don't They Know?
Thanks, Tom for bringing this up.
The talk of global warming & greenhouse gases is almost nil this “cold winter”.
I heard some reporting on NPR a while back that was tragic to listen to.
The gist was that with sea levels rising a lot of Florida homes are going to wash away, but none of the effected home owners knew this was coming. The theme of the piece was “Why don’t they know?”.
The reporter asked this question repeatedly to the audience, but never to a scientist or any kind of expert. He talked to various Florida state officials – emergency management types and zoning administrators and so on, but nobody who could have given him an answer to his very legitimate question.
Oh, and he never mentioned the words “global warming”, not once.
What I wanted to say to the reporter was, “How are they going to know if you don’t tell them? What’s the point of a news report that doesn’t tell the story of our time because somebody is afraid of offending the GW deniers or Fox news or the oil interests?”
For the record, NPR could as well have gone to Hatteras or Cape Cod or anyone of a number of coastal spots that are going to go under water in the coming decades and said the same thing. Do the millionaires on the sand spit that is Cape Cod think about the impermanence of the place? Global warming aside, the sea coast is always moving and in recent winters, Cape homes washing into the sea has been a regular occurrence. Yet the NPR report focused on the poor as if this was an issue of education & income level.
A month later I heard another bizarre NPR story about the mangrove swamps in the south moving north. Mangroves are not frost tolerant, so mangroves moving north means that things are warming, right? “No.” said the reporter. “This is not because of warming, but because cold snaps aren’t coming as far south as they used to.”
That was literally said on NPR. A statement as forehead smackingly stupid as anything I’ve ever heard.
So why don’t they know?
Let’s tune into NPR and find out . . .
NPR (Nearly Portraying Reality)
I heard the story about the moving mangroves, too, and thought the same thing. It’s not getting warmer, it’s just not getting as cold. Right.
A majority of people will act only when all their money is threatened or taken. We won’t do anything about living near California wildfires until our house burns down. We won’t do anything about coastal flooding until our beach house falls in and washes away.
It seems like we won’t really do anything until there’s nothing else to do.
That said, I think most people would do something if their leaders offered them something to do. We haven’t had a president or representative tell us to cut back on anything since Nixon and the energy crisis. He gave people a form of rationing to do, and they did it.
That being so, we can ask why our leaders don’t ask for or propose any significant actions. The answer would be they are financed by people with differing agendas, and they respond to who is paying them.
The “people” really need to get some sort of representation in DC. Everyone else has lobbyists.
Might this be the answer ?
“The “people” really need to get some sort of representation in DC. Everyone else has lobbyists.”
(Quoted from another website):
I hesitate to give any credence to yet another, structured-in- -advance. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SHOW…..DIVERSION. But I must say to all of you what Chris Hedges certainly already knows, and is possibly signing up for right now here today: Bernie Sanders is going to run for the Presidency from outside the two party structure. He is going to do it, and he and his supporters are in fact already in the field and hard at work. Bernie will come on like a freight train and he will be elected. I am sure of this and i’m a very good political analyst. (Chris)Christie and Hillary will not know what hit them. They are both getting hit already if you’ve been following the news over the last week, and I doubt they know where the hits are coming from yet. They are coming from Bernie. And this Hedges piece is I expect just Chris’ job application aimed at the incoming Sanders Administration.
(Hedges piece: [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37358.htm])
Don’t believe me? Copy this prediction and print it out. Pin it to your wall. And put today’s date on it.
Bernie will come on and on as the incessant underdog–but I know better. WATCH! He will gain and gain…you will all once again be AMAZED at it all. And Bernie will be elected.
Meanwhile the deeply and totally corrupt Congress that is owned by AIPAC and the Big Banks, and that only 6 percent of Americans today support , will all be overwhelmingly reelected WHILE WE ALL SIT MESMERIZED BY THIS BULLSHIT.
2LT Dennis Morrisseau USArmy [armor – Vietnam era] retired. W Pawlet, VT 802 645 9727 dmorso1@netzero.net
From what I’ve seen Dennis posting elsewhere, I’m not sure he even likes Sanders. But he seems pretty sure of this prediction.