Why I think there's still hope for the climate in 2017

Optimism has always been in short supply in conversations about global warming. Only for the briefest window – after the Paris climate agreement was reached in December 2015 – did the words “climate” and “hope” look reasonable next to each other in headlines. Then came 2016.

A defiant mood has emerged in response to
countless setbacks. Illustration: Sarah Walsh.

And yet, in spite of these past 12 months, I remain optimistic.

Yes, I know that Donald Trump – a man who has dismissed global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” – was elected president of the world’s second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. His actions since his inauguration have only confirmed his intentions to halt progress to reduce the vast emissions produced by the US. 

And I know that in the UK there’s yet more cause for concern. A series of U-turns has transformed the UK from a world leader to a world let-down. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has been scrapped. The country is expected to miss its 2020 climate targets. And the weakening of the European Union, caused by the Brexit vote, may jeopardise climate action across the continent.

These are serious developments, but I’m not convinced they’re big enough to unsettle progress.

Read Adam Levy’s story on The Guardian - “Why I think there's still hope for the climate in 2017.”

Wrestling with an implacable enemy

Climate change is an implacable adversary.

Professor Stephen Howes,
director of the Development
 Policy Centre at the
ANU has a different view.

More than two centuries of doing what it is we do, has left nature a rather angry beast.

Acting with little interest in or care for the consequences, we raided nature’s pantry with abandon and considered warnings about depletion and atmospheric damage caused by the use of fossil fuels as unimportant and not worthy of our interest or further research.

Now, as we tick through the years of the 21^st Century, the legacy of reckless and almost decadent use of fossil fuels has emerged as humanity’s most pressing dilemma.

Many around the world broke into a strange muted applause when it was announced the China and America had agreed, after months of secret negotiations, to each to take positive steps to mitigate and so slow greenhouse gas emissions.

Suddenly, there was joy as the as the world’s two largest economies decided to take positive steps to slow the causes of climate change.

An ABC story headed: “Climate change academics call for Australia to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15pc by 2020” tells us that the U.S. and China decision has increased pressure on the Australian Government to do more.

It says: “But a growing chorus of climate change academics are calling on the Australian Government to concentrate first on what it is doing before 2020.

“They want the Government to lift its greenhouse gas reduction targets from 5 to 15 per cent by then”, the story reports.

However, what is happening and what is needed are contradictory.

Although any move that ameliorates the world’s emissions is to be applauded, any move the falls short of the total abolition of greenhouse gas emissions is sadly inadequate.

To have any real chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions need to be zero by 2050 and then go into a negative stage, meaning we need to be taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Arriving at zero emissions is problematic in the extreme and then achieving a negative stance seems, from here, nigh impossible.

Celebrations about the U.S./China agreement are reasonable, but they must tempered by the reminder that they are only the first of many processes which we don’t understand, either technically or socially.