Earth' Recent CLimate Spiral 2.0

[Leonardo17]

I’m on Chapter 5.13 of “The Climate Book” and I’m going to share some of my notes. The article belong to the Canadian Academic Seth Klein who discusses how a genuine emergency Climate response should look like:

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The author notes that we are still in the “blah, blah, blah” phase of the problem and are failing to address the climate emergency like a real emergency. He notes how during WWII Canada had mobilized all its resources for a period of 6 years to ramp up military production during the war and return to a normal economy when the war was over. He says there are six signs that a government has switched to an emergency mode in the face of an existential crisis:

1) The governments will spend whatever is necessary: during WWII the general approach was “If we lose this war, nothing will matter. If we win this war, no cost will appear to be too high”. That was the approach during COVID. Canadian debt is said to have moved from 30% to 50% of GDP during the pandemic. Canada spend 5 Billion every week during the pandemic to tackle this crisis. The money it currently spends on the energy transition is 7 Billion / Year. The World Bank wants all governments to spend 2% of their GDP on climate change. If Canada did that that would be 40 Billion $ / year.

2) New institutions are Created: In WWII all of the Canadian economy was reshaped to produce the maximum possible amount of planes, vehicles, bombs, munition etc. 28 Public corporations were established to do that. During and after the Covid Pandemic there were similar government programs to tackle the issue. All the non-essential part of the economy was completely shut down for instance.

So if we were in a similar situation now. Governments around the world would have had programs like “How many wind and solar plants are we building this year? How do we electrify the economy now? How are we phasing out all usage of fossil fuel? Etc.” in a way that is similar to all the confinement and mass vaccination policies we had just 3 years ago.

3) Shift from voluntary to mandatory action plans: No part of the Covid action plan was voluntary. When I went to a farmers bazaar during that time we even had cops to make sure that everyone was respecting the “masking, distance, hygiene” policy. I even remember how they intervened on someone who insisted on touching the goods while buying them. Today every action on climate change that is being done is voluntary. There is no requirement and/or deadline on any company or business for instance to go completely electric by the years 2030. And we need like near term dates for that. Today we have countries promising to phase out coal by 2070.

4. Telling the truth on the seriousness of the issue. The media coverage of the issue (since the 1990’s) is thought to be very insufficient and misleading. That’s not what happened in WWII or during the pandemic. I can still remember how Boris Johnson and his staff (or even Donald Trump and his staff with Antony Fauci) were giving almost daily briefing on the issue. On DW we had Mr. Derek William (almost every evening) updating us about the current knowledge we had on the Virus. So instead of lying and wasting our times all serious media channels suddenly got very serious and started telling us exactly what we needed to do. We still don’t have that with climate change.

Final element: No one must be left behind. Just like in wartime, just like during covid. Governments must step in and say that they are going to help all individuals and all small and medium businesses during the ending of our dependency on fossil fuels.

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So all of this seems extremely feasible to me. Instead of doing blah blah blah for the decades to come doing basically nothing. This approach could take us all out of the woods, before the end of this very decade (and perhaps even before that).