"The rate of decline is also approximately what would be necessary to achieve the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius"
theweek.com/…
omething interesting is happening to greenhouse gas emissions thanks to the coronavirus pandemic: They are plummeting. The world is seeing the lowest oil demand relative to supply perhaps ever, leading to oil futures contracts selling for negative values at several points. The International Energy Agency estimates that this year world carbon dioxide output will fall by a whopping 8 percent. If that pans out, it would be the largest drop ever recorded — some six times larger than the fall during the 2008 global financial crisis.
That rate of decline is also approximately what would be necessary to achieve the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, if maintained for the rest of the decade. Thus the coronavirus lockdown is showing us roughly the scale of what is needed to avoid extreme climate change effects — but an extremely clumsy way of achieving it. The world could have a full employment economy and attack climate change at the same time, if humanity really put its mind to it.theweek.com/...
COVID-19 PANDEMIC COULD LEAD TO FALL IN CO2 NOT SEEN SINCE THE END OF WWII
www.newsweek.com/...
To give the degrowth camp their due, they are certainly correct that the current path of global capitalism is leading us straight for disaster. If nothing is done to combat climate change, we may well witness a chaotic collapse of contemporary society and a much poorer, less populated, and less sophisticated future, as happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
But it simply is not the case that there is no way to reconcile high-tech, large-scale production with climate change. All of the technologies and reforms I mentioned above are either in development, or have working prototypes, or are already being rolled out. And the coronavirus lockdowns, rather than demonstrating the need to blow up the economy to fight climate change, are better seen as proof that humanity can act quickly on a global scale to defeat a common enemy. In the socialist tradition, the way to deal with the injustice and devastating side effects of capitalism is not to abandon advanced production and wealth, but harness it on behalf of all — on a zero-carbon, renewable basis. All that is needed is the political will to enforce a drastic accelerpation of what is already happening.theweek.com/…
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