Something I was wrong about

Hey there,

As much as I sometimes get the urge to run from responsibility, I also occasionally hop on a call with enthusiastic readers of these pages or meet them in person. When I do, I’m reminded that what I say and write about matters plenty to some. Hence, I’m also reminded it’s my responsibility to update things I was wrong about, or even was simply a bit too dramatic or dogmatic about. Today I’ll offer one such reflection and revision.

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REVISIONS AND REFLECTIONS

Something I’ve almost certainly been too cavalier about in past opinion writing is the idea that the way the world at large has communicated about climate challenges hasn’t worked well. That’s not to say that my usual, secondary conclusion—namely that there are massive opportunities for communications making the case for even more concerted sustainability efforts to evolve—isn’t one I still believe in. I very much still believe that. But it’d be a disservice to the progress the world has already made in mitigating drivers of climate change and cleaning up other sources of pollution to lambast the efforts of the past repeatedly and to say they have definitely, holistically fallen short.

No, the world will almost certainly not hold global warming to the 1.5˚C or even 2˚C that were, for so long, and often still are, held up as essential lines in the sand we shouldn’t cross. But that doesn’t mean that predictions for the warming the world will experience in the coming decades and centuries haven’t already been reined in significantly by progress the world has made in bending the curve of global emissions growth (as well as likely driven in part due to more accurate forecasting and scientific understanding). They have.

Specifically, forecasts for 4˚C or even 5˚C of warming were not uncommon in the 1990s or early 2000s. Ten to fifteen years later, as Zeke Hausfather outlined in this Breakthrough Institute article from 2019, forecasts were trending downward toward 3°C. Hausfather also outlined causes of these revisions, which included improvements in modeling (though uncertainty still abounds, as we discussed last week) as well as veritable progress in reducing the rate at which global greenhouse gas emissions have grown. Compare, for instance, the emissions pathways outlined in the grey below versus the orange that scientists and modelers are now more confident we’re on pace for:

Here’s a full quote from the above-referenced article for further context:

The SSP5-8.5 that Hausfather alludes to is one of the five “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs), which represent possible future global developments based on assumptions about population, economic growth, technology, and policy. While still referenced in many modeling exercises and studies, SSP5-8.5 is the most severe of the five main scenarios—i.e., the one that predicts a future with the most continued reliance on fossil fuels—and is increasingly seen as an unlikely scenario. An emissions trajectory that maps to SSP5-8.5 would likely translate to ~4˚C+ of warming if realized. We can be very glad it’s not seen as probable anymore, though scientists like Hausfather take pains to communicate that it isn’t impossible, progress in climate mitigation notwithstanding.

Further, beyond greenhouse gases and global warming, the world has also made massive leaps in improving air quality and scrubbing other air pollutants from their emission sources. As much as I, too, chuckle when certain people harp on and on about “clean coal,” it’s not entirely inaccurate to say coal, as well as other technologies, like the combustion engine, have gotten cleaner. In fact, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point out in Abundance, which I finally got around to reading:

The same is true of coal plants as of cars, though to a lesser magnitude. Sulfur dioxide emissions from coal power plants are down 50% globally since 2005 alone, and more than 90% in the U.S. since 1990, a success driven by policy initiatives and pollution scrubbing technology used in and on power plant flue stacks, specifically flue gas desulfurization (“scrubbers”).

Disambiguating what has worked

Attributing to what degree certain measures have helped slow growth in greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the specter of more catastrophic warming is difficult, whether from technology and policy perspectives or communication and coordination perspectives. That said, we can safely venture a few conclusions. For example, we can be pretty sure that the rate at which countries have cut back on plans to expand coal use and the size of their coal power plant fleets has helped. I’ve often written about how coal use and greenhouse gas emissions are still at all-time highs, but that can be true alongside the fact that both could be much higher. We can imagine, for instance, in which advances in renewable energy and availability of natural gas hadn’t given countries ample alternatives to expanding coal in their power generation plans. In fact, we don’t even really need that much imagination; even just a decade ago, that was a trajectory we were still on.

For a visual illustration of the above, the below shows just how dramatically many countries’ plans to develop coal plants have been reigned in in recent years and decades:

Suffice it to say that while cleaner energy alternatives haven’t led to a reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions globally, they have helped stave off considerably higher highs, a fact that’s similarly underscored by analyzing the extent to which renewable energy now dominates the majority of annual energy generation additions worldwide.

It’s similarly not easy to disambiguate what exact communication and coordination tactics got many countries and citizens globally to take climate change seriously and to make concrete plans to temper emissions growth. That said, I dare say we can safely assume that the world would look pretty different, and pretty damn frightening, had there not been consistent, vocal campaigns to catalyze global climate action since the 70s and 80s.

Finally, it’s also worth remembering that what the world has already accomplished is the product of considerable hard work, technical ingenuity, and concerted policy and communication efforts. As I often remind myself and others, energy transition work is really difficult! Knowing we’re not headed for 5˚ of warming is a big achievement in and of itself, one that should offer us comfort and courage. We’ve certainly reduced the risk of extreme overshoot, even if the risk of serious overshoot is still very real, readily appreciable, and requires a lot more work, alongside new strategies and innovation.

Without getting too philosophical, I find the writing of Slavoj Žižek useful with respect to the evaluation of hypotheticals and the extent to which it’s always true that things could have ended up very differently. In both his lectures and writings, particularly in "Against Progress," Žižek goes to great pains, invoking quantum physics at length, even, to describe how failing to appreciate alternate timelines or hypothetical past trajectories is a fundamental mistake in how we think about history and progress. With respect to history, he argues that rather than view it as a single, linear path, there are always multiple possible trajectories that exist simultaneously, none of which are or were guaranteed to unfold. Failing to appreciate the alternate trajectories makes for incomplete arguments.

As it pertains to the subject matter we discussed today, I’d argue that just because climate change still represents a significant threat to the world doesn’t mean we haven’t already made a lot of progress in making the threat less dire. Said differently, actions that helped prevent a worse future, that then didn’t come to pass, are easily underappreciated for the simple reason that they negate the realization and lived experience of that worse future. The benefits of making sure a worse future didn’t come to pass, go underappreciated simply because they ensured that that future didn’t come to pass. It’s rarely easy to appreciate or assess “progress” as a result.

Communicating these ideas alone isn’t easy either, as evidenced by my not being sure whether the above will make sense. It can be similarly maddening to try to get people to appreciate that no, the world today isn’t necessarily worse than in the past. In fact, measured by many criteria, it’s almost certainly better. And it could still be a lot better!

It’s exceedingly difficult to remember and appreciate that even as the present remains fraught with challenge, that alone doesn’t mean we don’t live in a preferable timeline to many others that could have transpired. But we should and must remember that we do. Of course, none of that means we should be complacent, or that we shouldn’t ardently yearn for and try to help create an even better, less risky future. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. But as we evolve climate communications and mitigation and adaptation strategies for the future, perhaps the refrain should sound more like “let’s continue the momentum and make damn sure we don’t mess Earth’s climate systems up irrevocably,” vs. “nothing has really worked and we need to go back to the drawing board completely.” I certainly don’t believe the latter, and hope I never confused you too much.

Never doom,

— NVO