Deep Dive On Climate As Sea Levels – And Wars

It was a strange but premonitory connecting of dots. As Russia invaded Ukraine, I was sitting in a 3-day ‘deep dive’ at Harvard, learning from some of the brightest minds at the forefront of thinking and acting on climate change. Meanwhile, the US National Ocean Service published a new report predicting sea levels will rise a foot by 2050, no matter what we do. We face a tsunami of man-made threats, almost inextricably intertwined, which all have energy at their core.

Extraordinary growth and prosperity were built on a dangerous habit. We’ve spent almost a century becoming fossil fuel addicts. Kicking the habit is going to be harder than any of us quite know how to manage. Nor can any political leader acknowledge the full implications of what is necessary – and hope to get re-elected. War, disasters, extinctions, innovations, geopolitical re-alignments and migrations will be the multiple symptoms of our common illness. They are linked.

Here is a non-specialist’s three takeaways learning from people who dedicate themselves to navigating us through barely charted and unavoidably tempestuous seas.

Energy Defines History

The link between human activity and the earth’s climate may feel like a relatively recent discovery. Yet it has been around a lot longer than many of us think. Back in 1898, Svante Arrherius presciently noted that burning coal would double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and lead to an increase in temperature of 5-6 degrees. He wasn’t far off. In the last 5 million years, there has never been so rapid a change in atmospheric temperatures. We’ve enjoyed a couple of centuries of economic growth and rising living standards powered by fossil fuels. Now, we’re on course to get unpleasantly hot. No one knows exactly what will happen. But we are witnessing magnitudes of change in 100 years that used to take 10,000. For a visual mapping of the science behind our high-speed trajectory, check out the extensive video presentations by the head of Harvard’s Centre for the Environment, Daniel Shrag.

There are two fundamentally hard things in addressing climate change. The global scope and spread of the problem. And its multi-generational timeframe. As the world faces Russia’s attempt to claim Ukraine, our ability to focus on the crisis facing the planet is further strained. “The first and most obvious result of a return to the law of the jungle,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, “would be a sharp increase in military spending at the expense of everything else.”

Many have written that the Covid pandemic could be seen as a dress rehearsal for the kinds of pressures humanity would be under as the climate crisis began to hit. Just as we begin to shed our masks, Helen Thompson’s new book, Disorder, charts the seas we are sailing into, how energy has long been a cause of turbulence, and how Ukraine became a fault line in a bigger picture. “Governments must simultaneously increase energy security,” she writes, “and keep prices down as they attempt to realise an energy revolution unprecedented in human history.” Everyone is blaming the resulting tensions on the weaknesses of an increasingly polarised democratic process. But she accuses us of passing the buck. It isn’t democracy that’s the problem, rather our “collective inability to face just how much Western democracies’ successes had energy histories and why the energy world is now extraordinarily more difficult.” 

Who’s Pain, Who’s Gain?

The climate challenge is global – so no one is in charge or officially responsible. Yesterday’s polluters are starting to clean up their acts but not their cumulative contributions to the current problem. Developing countries have caught up – fast. China has moved into the global lead of emitters, with the US second and India third. Together, these three countries now represent 50% of global emissions – but aren’t aligned on anything much. Not least because, per capita, the USA remains by far the worst emitter. Many of the poorest countries most affected by climate change – and who care about it most – had least to do with creating it. And are least able to solve it. The free-rider problem means countries reducing their emissions carry those who do not, without reaping benefits from the investments they make. While the shift to renewables and a low carbon world brings economic opportunities, the changes needed involve real costs and real pain to real people, on a timescale where the return is more to future generations than to those bearing the costs.

Meanwhile Russia, the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (and one of the highest per capita) also supplies energy to much of Europe. Europe’s need for gas (seen as a less polluting fossil fuel) and its wish to draw Russia into an interdependent trading relationship, led to energy dependence. At the same time, it’s perceived by an increasingly neurotic and authoritarian Russian leadership as a direct threat to Russian regional hegemony.  Ukraine became the fault line between energy-hungry Europe and Russia. Germany danced a dangerous dance, giving up both its coal-fired power plants and its nuclear energy to become reliant on Russian gas. It then agreed to a highly controversial new gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, down the Baltic, threatening to weaken Ukraine’s role in sourcing energy, while increasing dependence on Russia. As Helen Thompson points out Ukraine’s “imagined European identity is irreconcilable with the political reality.” The result is mutual recriminations both between Russia and the West and between the West’s differing interests and perspectives.

Now, tragically, the result is intolerable pain for Ukraine’s people caught in the middle of a geopolitical mess not of its making.

Think Centuries Not Decades

All the costs of climate transition are upfront and enormous, the cure is hard to envisage, and the payoff somewhere in the impenetrable fog of the future. The timescale of decarbonisation is vastly longer than our political and social systems are designed to cope with. Our issue with emissions is not limited to what we emit today but includes all we emitted yesterday. Even were we to halt them all now, a chunk of our collective, global past will be haunting us 1,000 years hence. And while politically unattractive to activists everywhere, the clear message is that we must start adapting to the consequences of our carbon habit as well as mitigating it. Many of the world’s great cities on every continent will be at risk (think New York, London, Dhaka, Buenos Aires, Brisbane, Shanghai and Dakar). This week’s NOAA report says sea levels will rise a foot – no matter what. If we continue emitting at present levels, it could be up to as much as 7 feet by the end of the century. Yet projections of global population growth, GDP and energy usage continue to grow apace.

The arbitrary invention of a two-degree maximum global warming target is both attractive and dangerous. Meant to focus minds and actions, failing to meet it mustn’t cause us to raise our hands and stop our efforts in despair. We will be working on climate for centuries. The only question is when we start to take it seriously – and together. Some think the tipping point may be upon us as investments and minds begin to shift.

One example came from an unexpected source. War is often a time of great technological innovation. Ray Mabus, former US Secretary of the Navy,  described the US Navy’s dramatic shift towards renewables and biofuels, not as a nice-to-have, but with security and flexibility as the priority. Navy ships and submarines can now go much further for much longer than before, and more cheaply. The goal wasn’t so much green as greater strategic security.

Russia’s invasion may unite enough of the rest of the world in the right direction for unexpected reasons. Not to save our planet from self-destruction. But to get Ukraine (and whoever may be next) out of from the autocrat’s asphyxiating grip.

We need to kick the habit to free ourselves from the dealers.