By now, I’m guessing everyone reading this has had their own life impacted somehow by global warming. Whether it be from this summer’s sizzling heat dome, or mega-droughts, wildfires and smoke, and monster storms, or even seeing fewer backyard birds or insects, climate change feels more real, more personal now than ever. These disasters aren’t warnings anymore, rather they are described as the ‘new normal’.
“These are not canaries in the coal mine,” Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies noted. “The canaries died a long time ago.”
Despite the dead canaries, we’re still mining coal. The global coal demand is set to remain at record levels in 2023, the International Energy Agency reported this week. “Global coal demand is estimated to have grown by about 1.5% in the first half of 2023 to a total of about 4.7 billion tonnes, lifted by an increase of 1% in power generation and 2% in non-power industrial uses.”
The IEA projects that the continued increase in coal burning by “China, India and Indonesia [will] more than offset declines in the United States, the European Union and Japan… Whether coal demand in 2023 grows or declines, will depend on weather conditions and on the economies of large coal consuming nations.”
July 2023 will be the hottest month on record and “last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.”
The deadly heatwave that much of the world has been enduring this past month has driven up power plant demand for coal. In the United States, this increased demand is reigniting coal shipments via rail.
“Demand for coal is increasing again. And our customers are asking us to be able to handle more sets (volumes), which we love, and we're doing,” Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz told Reuters.
There should be no new oil, gas or coal development, according to the IEA, but last week in India, the G20 failed to reach agreement on key climate issues. “Despite pleas… to show a united front on climate change as weather records shatter across the globe.”
"We are not able to reach an agreement of increasing drastically renewable energies, we are not able to reach an agreement on phasing out or down fossil fuels, especially coal," Christophe Bechu, France's ecological transition minister, told AFP.
At the root of the disagreement is finding money to pay for global mitigation efforts, especially in poorer nations. “Rich nations have resisted stronger commitments on emissions cuts over concerns about the impact of drastic mitigation on their economies.” But, many of the world’s poorest countries are the least polluting, but most climate-vulnerable.
The average North American emitted 11 times more energy-related CO2 than the average African. Yet variations across income groups are even more significant. […]
The richest 0.1% of the world’s population emitted 10 times more than all the rest of the richest 10% combined, exceeding a total footprint of 200 tonnes of CO2 per capita annually. Within this 0.1% are the billionaires and multimillionaires whose emissions-intensive super-yachts, private jets, and mansions have attracted the attention of climate activists.
We’re headed in the wrong direction. Instead, our vehicles are getting bigger, heavier, and more dangerous, making it deadly to be a pedestrian or bicyclist. This month, the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline and earlier this year, Exxon and Chevron shareholders soundly rejected climate-related petitions. Whaddabout the use of fossil fuels in other countries? Well, CO2 emissions are being 'outsourced' by rich countries like the United States to other nations so we can be ‘greener’. Not only have we exported our manufacturing jobs, we also shipped overseas our greenhouse emissions.
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said this week. Lost in his hyperbole, is the fact the “world is shifting towards a superheated climate not seen in the past 1 million years, prior to human existence.”
The climate catastrophe is already here. “Civilization, which emerged and grew over the past 10,000 years thanks to the temperate climate conditions that allowed for the development of agriculture, is now threatened in ways never before known.”
We have placed ourselves in a feedback loop of our own making. The hotter it gets, the more greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere that traps the heat that will make it hotter. The historic climate initiatives that the Democratic party passed into law with the Inflation Reduction Act are significant, but we must do more.
We are finally noticing things are different: it’s hotter, storms are more intense, droughts are more severe. Climate change feels more real now than ever. “People are no longer talking about climate change in the future tense,” Alex Ruane, a climate scientist at NASA told The Atlantic. “They’re talking about climate change in the present tense.”
“We are damned fools,” James Hansen, the scientist who warned the Senate in 1988 about the perils we face from climate change. Now, we’re experiencing what Hansen and his colleagues warned everyone about for the past 40 years.
“There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts…These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality – we knew it was coming,” Hansen said.
“We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come. Biden must declare a climate emergency,” Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist, wrote this week in The Guardian, writing on his own behalf.
I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take. There has never been a summer like this in recorded history: shocking ocean heat, deadly land heat, unprecedented fires and smoke, sea ice melting faster than we’ve ever seen or thought possible. I’ve dreaded this depth of Earth breakdown for almost two decades, and, like many of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to warn you. As hard as I could. Now it’s here.
And mark my words: it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. […]
Each minute the fossil fuel industry exists, each drilling permit, airplane flight, gallon of gas, fossil fuel ad, lobbyist’s email, takes us further into irreversible heat catastrophe, socially and physically. These floods and fires and heatwaves and crop failures will keep pushing harder against the systems of our society – insurance, real estate, infrastructure, food, water, energy, geopolitics, everything – until at some point, inevitably, the systems will break. Nowhere is safe.
Nowhere is safe. Climate change is an existential global challenge and we individuals cannot save the planet alone. We must change as a society and a culture. Together, we have to stop making it worse just so a few billionaires can have super-yachts, private jets, mansions, private islands, and their own personal space program.
“Your body can build up tolerance to heat,” encourages one billionaire’s newspaper. “Our bodies are well adapted to be able to acclimate to heat under the right circumstances.”
Screw that. Capitalism is killing the planet. Sitting around waiting to boil alive is a stupid plan.