The Great Disruption (19 page)

In a 2010 issue of
Nature Geosciences,
two Canadian scientists used existing models to demonstrate that if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, temperatures would stop increasing almost immediately and decrease over time.
2
In summary, the only warming that is truly “locked in” is that we choose to create by continuing to emit. A separate study in
Science
in September 2010 found that if all existing energy and transport infrastructure was used for its natural lifetime, but no new infrastructure emitting greenhouse gasses was created, warming would peak at 1.3 degrees and then start declining.
3
Again, the conclusion is that we can physically do this—we just have to want to do it bad enough.

So if one degree is what is
necessary
and more than this is defined as the “enemy” for our “one-degree war,” what action is required to win the war, and would the required action be possible to achieve? In other words:

1.  Is an agreement to achieve such a plan politically conceivable?

2.  If it were, is it technically and economically possible to reduce global greenhouse gas concentrations to a level that will bring warming back below one degree?

Clearly, agreement to a one-degree war plan is hard to imagine in today's world. However, in both World War II and the recent financial crisis, there are clear examples of how fast things can change and how apparently intractable opposition and resistance can quickly evaporate. In the case of World War II, the speed of response by the United States was extraordinary. For example, whereas in 1940 U.S. defense spending was just 1.6 percent of the economy (measured as GDP), within three years it had increased to 32 percent, and by 1945 it was 37 percent. But the GDP increased itself by 75 percent in that time, making the observed increases even more extraordinary.
4
Similarly extraordinary political decisions were made to direct the economy. For example, just four days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the auto industry was ordered to cease production of civilian vehicles.
5

Gasoline and tires were rationed, campaigns were run to reduce meat consumption, and public recycling drives were held to obtain metals for the war effort. Yes, there was still plenty of resistance, but the political leadership of the day, with public and business support, simply overrode it for the greater public good—because the consequence of failure was unacceptable.

So it
can
be done. But
how
would it be done? It is unlikely that the one-degree war would result from a universal global agreement. The process around the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen meeting shows how difficult global agreements are. This difficulty in reaching consensus is often put to me as evidence that we will fail to act on climate change. My response is to ask, “Can you think of other examples where a major military action or economic transformation was driven by a consensus global agreement?” On what basis did we ever believe such an approach would be possible with climate change, especially when many participants have actively sought to undermine it?

We didn't seek a single global agreement to free trade before any action was taken, for example. If we had done so, we would probably still be negotiating on the preamble fifty years later! Instead we started with consultative bodies like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); we negotiated agreements between individual countries and then expanded them to regions. Meanwhile, very, very slowly, we built the global infrastructure for governance of trade, taking from 1947 with the formation of GATT until 1995 to form a body with enforcement power, the World Trade Organization (WTO). More than sixty years after GATT, even the WTO is still not global in impact, with even China joining only in 2001—that alone took fifteen years of negotiations.

So on climate change, an even more complex economic issue and with significant business opposition to change, it is hard to imagine we would jump straight to a single, legally enforceable, global agreement even in a crisis.

When we do decide to launch a rapid response, it is far more likely that a small number of powerful countries, a kind of “Coalition of the Cooling,” will decide to act and then others will follow. Some will follow in order to align with the major powers, and some will be under military, economic, and diplomatic pressure to join.

In a technical sense, this process is easy. A full 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions will be covered if three “countries” (China, the United States, and the EU-27) agree to act. If we add another four countries (Russia, India, Japan, and Brazil), the coalition will control 67 percent of global emissions.
6
Add a few friends and we soon move to more than sufficient impact to tackle the problem. We saw this start to emerge in Copenhagen, and while it will be messy and will ebb and flow over coming years, there is no doubt in my mind that this is the primary way progress will emerge.

The answer to the first question is therefore clearly yes. When we accept the crisis, we are capable of taking the political decisions required to get to work on the action plan. So is there an action plan that would work?

What our work showed is that based on current knowledge and technology, a one-degree target is completely achievable and at an acceptable cost compared with the price of failure. It would be very disruptive to parts of the economy and to many people, and it would require considerable short-term sacrifice, but it certainly “solves the problem.”

So from both questions, our political decision-making capacity and our technical/economic capacity, the issue is not humanity's
capacity
to act, but the conditions being such that humanity
decides
to act. Identifying this point is simple: When the dominant view becomes that climate change threatens the viability of civilization and the collapse of the global economy, a crisis response will rapidly follow. Then society's framework will change from “what is politically possible” to Churchill's “what is necessary.” Until then, little of real substance will happen except getting ready for that moment.

What would such a “war plan” look like? Can we forecast the likely response that will be implemented when the moment comes? Jorgen and I thought so. In designing our draft plan, we estimated a start date of around 2018, not as a precise prediction, but we needed a start date to model our response and its impact, and 2018 was our best judgment on when this would emerge. Post-Copenhagen, it still seems like a reasonable forecast.

We concluded that at that late stage, four types of actions would be required to take control of the crisis:

1.   A massive industrial and economic shift that would see the elimination of net CO
2
e emissions from the economy within twenty years, with a 50 percent reduction in the first five years.

2.   Low-risk and reversible geoengineering actions to directly slow temperature increase, to safely overcome the lag between emissions reduction and temperature impact.

3.   The ongoing removal of around 6 gigatons of CO
2
from the atmosphere per year for around one hundred years and the long-term storage of this CO
2
in underground basins, in soils and in biomass.

4.   Adaptation measures to reduce hardship and geopolitical instability caused by then unavoidable physical changes to the climate, including food shortages, forced migration, and military conflict over resources.

It is a symptom of the magnitude of the task that even with the dramatic action proposed in our one-degree war plan, warming would continue above one degree until the middle of this century, before falling back to plus one degree centigrade by 2100.

We suggest fighting the one-degree war in three phases:

1.   
Climate War. Years 1–5
. Modeled on the action following the entry of the United States into World War II, this would be the launch of a world war level of mobilization to achieve a global reduction of 50 percent in greenhouse gas emissions within five years. This crisis response would shock the system into change and get half the job done.

2.   
Climate Neutrality. Years 5–20.
This would be a fifteen-year-long push to lock in the 50 percent emergency reductions and move the world to net zero climate emissions by year 20 (that is, in 2038 if we start in 2018). This will be a major global undertaking, requiring full utilization of all technological opportunities, supported by behavior and culture change.

3.   
Climate Recovery. Years 20–100.
This would be the long-haul effort toward global climate control—the effort to create a stable global climate and a sustainable global economy. Achieving this will require a long period of negative emissions (i.e., removing CO
2
from the atmosphere) to move the climate back toward the preindustrial “normal.” For instance, some refreezing of the arctic ice cap will require removing CO
2
from the atmosphere through geoengineering actions, like burning plantation wood in power stations and storing the emissions underground using carbon capture and storage (CCS). We believe humanity can complete the stabilization job in the first decades after 2100.

We tested our suggested emission cuts in the C-ROADS global climate model developed by Climate Interactive, an initiative of Ventana Systems, Sustainability Institute and MIT's Sloan School of Management.
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This confirmed that implementation would deliver broadly the following results:

• The CO
2
e concentration falls below 350 ppm by the end of the century, after peaking at around 440 ppm.

• Global temperature does temporarily rise above plus one degree centigrade in midcentury, then falls below plus one degree centigrade around the end of this century.

• Average sea level rises by 0.5 meters around 2100 and continues rising to a peak of 1.25 meters around 2300. This is still very disruptive and might trigger a tighter target, but 1.25 meters over three hundred years is at least more manageable than current forecasts with good preparation given the longer time frames.

In broad terms, what this all means is that the climate would be stabilized and manageable for global society. There would still be substantial changes to the climate, disruption to the economy and food supplies, and great loss of biodiversity. However, it would be manageable and it would reduce the risk of the collapse to a tolerable level. It would also allow stronger action if the science indicates the situation is worse than expected.

So it seems it is possible to design a plan that would achieve the required reductions. Of course this is just indicative. What is needed is a multiyear detailed modeling and planning exercise on a scale only governments could afford to devise. Our point was simply to show what is possible. So what types of real-world actions does our plan indicate would be required?

We proposed a dramatic and forceful start of the one-degree war, for two reasons:

1.   There is disproportionate value in early actions.
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As the impact of emissions is cumulative, cuts taken earlier in a program save much larger and more disruptive reductions later.

2.   History indicates that successful responses to crises tend to involve urgent, dramatic actions rather than slower, steady ones. This engages the public and breaks the tyranny of tradition.

The one-degree war plan therefore proposes a series of global measures to achieve a rapid halving of CO
2
emissions during the initial five-year C-war, through linear reductions of 10 percent per year. The C-ROADS model indicated that it takes cuts of 50 percent by 2023 to reach our goal. Even then, this cut must be followed by reductions to zero net emissions by 2038 and net absorption, each year for the rest of the century, of 6 GtCO
2
e/year (gigatons of CO
2
equivalents per year). While the initial 50 percent in five years is very challenging, it is certainly doable. Critically, a slower start would make it challenging to achieve the one-degree goal.

The good news is that cutting by 50 percent by 2023 can be achieved with the types of initiatives that studies like those by international management consultancy McKinsey & Co indicate will cost society less than €60/tCO
2
e.
9
(ton of CO
2
e). The bad news is that making these cuts at a faster speed will, by conventional wisdom, increase the cost. This is based on infrastructure having to be scrapped before the end of its useful life and because technologies will have to be implemented before they are commercially mature. If this is accurate, it is the unfortunate consequence of acting late, as we will be. Delaying action would, however, just make that worse.

There is a counterargument that was not possible for us to model, but we were inclined to support, that a warlike mobilization of the global economy to transform our energy and transport infrastructure will not only be affordable, but may in fact trigger so much innovation and economic activity that it ends up being positive economically. This is argued by many analysts in this area, who see renewable energies as so immature that they will inevitably become not just cheaper than today, but cheaper than fossil fuels even without a carbon price. I cover this further in coming chapters.

Certainly the types of approaches proposed in the one-degree war plan would unleash massive innovation and scale, so this would rapidly be proven either way. It is the case in previous wars that innovation drove new industries and great efficiencies because the determination to achieve an outcome forced major breakthroughs in technology and overcame normal commercial development impediments.

This debate is largely of academic interest only, as the crisis then present will dictate that the approach has to occur, largely regardless of the cost. I don't imagine there was much of a cost-benefit analysis done on the Manhattan Project when the U.S. government decided it needed to produce an atomic bomb. So we can safely leave to history the judgment of relative costs of CO
2
reduction.