In both northern and southern California, where drought and fire danger now define the very fabric of our communities, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t feel that internal terror that we just at the beginning of a climate tipping point that has the potential to make the state inhabitable within my lifetime.
Despite the fact that the state easily reached its goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, it is en route to falling far short of meeting its next target: cutting emissions by 40% by 2030. In fact, according to research by the think tank Next 10, California, under its current climate action plans won’t reach that goal until 2060.
Despite these findings, The Los Angeles Times reports that the California Public Utilities Commission is considering a mere 25% reduction in power-sector emissions throughout the 2020s. This, despite the consensus among scientists and climate policy experts that the “2020s could be a make-or-break decade.”
Scientists have found that global emissions must fall to zero, or close to it, by 2050 for humanity to have a chance of avoiding the worst effects of a warming planet. Hitting that midcentury target will be much harder if pollution levels don’t decline steeply over the next 10 years.
“If California faltered, global efforts to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions would be dealt a major setback,” Energy Innovation wrote in its January report.
In a poignant and powerful essay in the Guardian this week, Our climate change turning point is right here, right now, Rebecca Solnit writes of the people and wildlife that are dying as our world is transformed by a changing climate.
Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.
- snip —
We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.
Solnit contrasts the wide coverage in the press of the condo collapse in Florida with the media’s less intensive attention to the heat dome over the western US and Canada.
Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.
Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet
Solnit contrasts incremental steps — solar and wind farms around the world and the efficiency and popularity of solar panels — with ‘turning points,’ actions, which offer promise and set examples for what it’s going to take to turn climate change around:
- Oregon’s recent passage of a bill advancing 100% clean energy by 2040
- Scotland currently overproducing renewables
- The ban on fracking in NYS
- The 2015 Paris Climate Treaty (which despite its shortcomings has incentivized countries around the globe towards more ambitious National Determined Contributions (NDCs)).
”The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness,” Solnit writes. “Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.”