On April 25th and 26th 1986, the Number 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded causing the death of 30 plant workers and emergency responders, and ultimately the evacuation of over 300,000 people. The radiation poison killed nearly all life within a 30-kilometer radius of the power plant. According to National Geographic, it may take thousands of years for the area to become safe for humans due to the pace of the radiation decay. Yet despite the presence of dangerous radiation in the exclusion zone, nature has abundantly recovered. In David Attenborough’s documentary, “A Life on Our Planet”, digital cameras vividly captured a wide range of wildlife including deer, wolves, horses, and an assortment of birds. A dense vibrant forest has consumed the abandoned buildings of Chernobyl. Our experience with the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster proves the resiliency of nature is boundless.
As we consider the myriad of existential challenges facing modern civilization, we can draw inspiration from how living species were able to adapt and replenish in less than 40 years of the nuclear reactor disaster. As President Kennedy once said, “Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man.” While our problems are many, including severe wealth and income inequality, geopolitical conflicts threatening nuclear annihilation, and unregulated artificial intelligence, in my view our existential challenges are two-fold:
- Resource extraction well beyond our planetary boundaries
- Increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the use of fossil fuels are destabilizing the ecology that sustains current life on Earth
The goods and services we use in our modern economy require the extraction of natural resources. As our economy grows, our extraction of natural resources increases to produce the additional goods and services we consume. The capacity of the Earth to produce natural resources is a function of geologic processes that often take millions of years to complete. Since the industrialized economy is less than 200 years old, modern civilization has benefitted greatly from an abundance of untapped natural resources. Yet as our demand for more and more resources have exceeded the annual capacity of the planet to replenish, we have begun to dramatically draw down on the available natural resources. Global scientists have measured our excess extraction of natural resources by developing a new metric: Earth Overshoot Day1, which “marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year.” The 2023 Earth Overshoot Day was August 2nd, 2023, which means for 2023 humanity consumed 1.7x the Earth’s annual regenerative capacity. The 2024 U.S. Overshoot Day is March 14th, 2024, which means we need 4.9 Earths if all countries consumed as much natural resources as America.
In order for humanity to live within our planetary resource boundaries, all over-consuming nations must significantly decrease the extraction of natural resources until their national overshoot day is December 31st. Dramatically reducing the consumption of natural resources necessarily involves a material decrease in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In order to achieve this goal, we will need a new system of economics because capitalism requires persistent economic growth to produce economic prosperity. Ecological Economist, Tim Jackson, has written extensively about this topic in his two best selling books:
- Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economics of Tomorrow
- Post Growth: Life After Capitalism
Degrowth is an academic and social movement critical of the hegemony of economic growth perpetuated by capitalism, and calls for an equitable and democratically-led downscaling of production and consumption in industrialized countries as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and well-being.2
Degrowth is a transitional process of moving over-consumption nations from the current state to a future state of sustainable natural resource management. Ideally, this transitional period accommodates the need for developing and under-developed nations to increase demand for natural resources in order to modernize their countries. Once all countries are modernized and the global extraction of natural resources are within the annual regenerative natural resource capacity of the Earth, a new economics that accommodates consistent Pareto Optimal conditions will need to be innovated. Pareto optimal is a condition where there are no more improvements that can make any person better off without making some other person worse off.3
The second existential challenge facing humanity is human-induced climate change. The most comprehensive scientific consensus on all issues regarding climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is comprised of the leading scientists from 195 member nations. The IPCC was established by the United Nations in 1988, and releases an exhaustive assessment every seven years based on the latest global research on three primary topics:
- The science basis of human induced climate change4
- Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability5 (of climate change)
- Mitigation of Climate Change6
Each of the major reports of the periodic assessment represents a meta-analysis of the latest global research and typically includes approximately 2,000 pages each. The IPCC summarizes the most important determinations, with level of confidence, in the Synthesis Report – Summary for Policymakers, which upon final release reflect the unanimous concurrence of all 195 member nations. The IPCC released the 6th Assessment reports in 2021 and 2022, and the Synthesis Report7 in 2023.
The following climate change narrative is based on the determinations of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment reports:
Like all planetary phenomena, the climate change story starts long ago…during the last Ice Age. One core characteristic of the Ice Age is highly erratic changes in global average surface temperature, which produced catastrophically disruptive extreme weather events. The Ice Age ended 15,000 years ago as global average surface temperatures began moderating. It took another 5,000 years for the global average surface temperature to stabilize. For the next 10,000 years, global average surface temperature remained stable at approximately 56.9 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus 1.8 degrees (or about 13.8 degrees Celsius plus or minus 1 degree Celsius), which produced predictable global weather patterns. Predictable weather allowed primitive hunter-gatherer communities to use pattern recognition to innovate farming, which produced excess food. Excess food supported increased population growth and provided the surplus used for trade. Trade formed the basis for commerce, development of currency, and the formation of modern civilization. Beginning in the 1800’s with the successful development of the internal combustion engine, fossil fuels became the primary energy source for the new, industrialized global economy.
Fossil fuels, which include coal, natural gas, and oil, emit carbon dioxide (or methane) when burned to create energy. Carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases (GHG) which accumulate in the atmosphere when emitted. GHG in the atmosphere absorb sunlight reflected from the surface of the Earth, holding it in the atmosphere and warming the planet like insulation in a home. Since 1850, approximately 2,400 gigatons of carbon dioxide have accumulated in the atmosphere, which is the most carbon in the atmosphere in over 800,000 years. By 2020, the global average surface temperature had reached 58.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 14.9 degrees Celsius), which reflects an increase in global average surface temperature since 1850 of 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.07 degrees Celsius).
For the first time in 10,000 years, the global average surface temperature exceeded the stable temperature range of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1 degree Celsius).
And to what effect?
Predictable weather patterns started becoming erratic. Since the 1980’s, extreme weather events (defined as events exceeding a billion dollars in damage) have tripled.
In America, attribution science shows temperature rise contributed to the intensity of extreme weather events including Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, Sandy and Ian, and to the proliferation of wildfires and availability of fresh water in the western states. Biodiversity is collapsing globally as the species extinction rate since 1900 is 1,000 times the historical background rate. Since 1970, 75% of global animal species have gone extinct. Sea level rise is threatening coastal communities as the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap is fast approaching an irreversible tipping point.
The most troubling trend is global average surface temperature is increasing at an increasing rate for two reasons:
1. Global energy use is increasing annual GHG emissions
2. Positive feedback loops such as the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap and carbon saturation of the oceans is accelerating the warming.
It took 170 years (1850 to 2020) to increase global average surface temperature 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.07 degrees Celsius), but all future pathways developed by global scientific models indicate it will take less than 20 years to increase global average surface temperature another 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit (37%; or 0.43 degrees Celsius).
Yet there is good news. According to the latest IPCC Climate Mitigation Report, the global transition to a net zero carbon economy while avoiding the worse, irreversible climate related impacts is possible based on current technology. The challenge is harnessing global collaboration to front-load the reduction of GHG emissions by 43% by 2030. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Law, the United States is investing in a pathway that could reduce economy-wide GHG emissions by 40% by 2030. Much more needs to be done in the area of regulation and the development of international treaties to codify the necessary global collaboration.
Climate change is a global phenomenon that can only be mitigated with the active cooperation of all major stakeholders. This is not a time for winners and losers because the losers have the power and ability to push the global average surface temperature well above 2⁰C. In order to keep global warming from increasing past 1.5⁰C, 33% of known oil reserves, 50% of known natural gas reserves, and 80% of known coal reserves must remain in the ground unused. As the failed global trade ban on Russian oil and natural gas after their attack on Ukraine demonstrates, fossil fuel asset owners will always be able to find a willing buyer. Therefore, to meet the challenge presented by climate change, we must obtain the active cooperation of the global fossil fuel industry. One idea that has been used successfully in the electric utility industry, is to offer stranded asset compensation that allows the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy. By tying current industry subsidies to ending fossil fuel exploration and shifting future investment to renewable energy production and innovation, we will be able to encourage industry cooperation.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the global transition to a net-zero carbon economy by 2050 is estimated to cost approximately $131 Trillion dollars. Given the concentration of global wealth in developed nations such as the United States, United Kingdom and European Union nations, the global north will necessarily be required to cover most of the cost of the transition. The intense demand of the global south to cover the growing climate related impacts dominated the latest Conference of Parties (COP) where COP 28 President, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, announced a historic agreement to operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund. The Loss and Damage Fund will assist developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. While the Loss and Damage Fund will help offset the cost of adaptation, mitigation costs tied to leapfrogging the use of fossil fuels to meet the energy needs of developing nations with renewable energy will require a substantial portion of the overall transition costs. The magnitude of the climate related transfer payments will likely break nation-centric budgetary priorities. Further, the absolute need to set aside less important disputes in lieu of the required global cooperation will create the possibility of dramatically reallocating resources from global military budgets to newly formed climate mitigation and adaptation funds.
There are many areas of innovation that will be necessary to successfully complete the global transition to renewable energy in thirty years. Yet the success of the transition will require global distribution of the latest innovations regardless of the capacity to pay. The urgency of the escalating climate-related impacts will therefore break the current business as usual model because unlimited profit seeking, which necessarily creates scarcity, will not be permissible.
The pattern these factors establish is to meet the existential challenges of climate change and natural resource overshoot, humanity must set aside profit seeking and the competition between winners and losers, wealth and poverty, national, regional and cultural distinctions, in order to collaborate for the good of all of us.
Our choice will be increasingly clear: Unite or risk mass extinction.
1See https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/about-earth-overshoot-day/
2“Degrowth: Vocabulary for a New Era” by Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria, and Giacomo D’Alisa
3Per Wikipedia
4See ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_FullReport_small.pdf
5See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FullReport.pdf
6See IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FullReport.pdf
7See IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf