Stopping climate change isn’t

enough — we need to reverse it.

by Peter Fiekowsky | Grist | July 23, 2019 | Bit.ly/Grist23July19

In 1850, when Standard Oil was but a twinkle in the eye of John Rockefeller, the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was 285 parts per
million. Today, CO2, the main climate-polluting gas, has jumped to 415 ppm. You
know how we got here: extraction, combustion, emission — repeat. And scores of
government agencies, international consortia, and environmental groups — along
with a gaggle of presidential candidates — say they know how to get us out.

But where, exactly, will all these self-proclaimed climate prophets lead us? Leafing
through global plans to save the climate in 2019 is something like reading a choose-
your-own-adventure novel — with the stakes of, you know, the future of humanity.
At the end of one forking path is an uninhabitable earth, complete with fire
tornadoesand mass extinction, and at the end of another is a climate that can still
sustain life as we know it. Or so we’re told.

With dozens of climate plans on the table, it’s worth interrogating the extent to
which these proposals would actually get us to that livable future (if we can agree on
what “livable future” even means). And if none of these plans live up to the promise,
we’d better get busy changing the climate conversation.

Stayin’ alive

You’re probably familiar with the 2 degrees Celsius threshold — a politically

palatable target for the maximum amount of average global warming we ought to
allow to avoid “catastrophic climate change.” We’ve been talking about that
threshold since Yale economist William Nordhaus first proposed it in 1975. So far,
Earth has warmed about 1 degree above pre-industrial levels.

But last year, scientists released a report laying out the potential effects of just 1.5
degrees C of warming. Even at the lower threshold, we could lose the Greenland ice
sheet, as well as 70–90% of coral reefs and 1.5 million metric tons of fish and
crustaceans caught to eat each year — to say nothing of the effects on human health
and livelihoods.
Does 1.5 degrees qualify as livable? Tolerable? Acceptable? And is it even possible?

The consortium that conducted the 1.5-degree research — the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (the biggest kahuna in climate science, usually referred to
by its acronym, IPCC) — also laid out a series of emissions-reduction scenarios that
could feasibly limit warming to 1.5 degrees C. In most of those scenarios, we
overshoot 1.5 degrees for a time and dial back to 1.5 by 2100. The longer the
overshoot lasts, the more trouble we’re in. In some scenarios, we would see
irreversible damage to whole ecosystems, such as those rooted in coral reefs.

Even the more ambitious proposals start to look rather tenuous when you put them
under the microscope. One IPCC scenario that theoretically limits us to 1.5 degrees
of warming, the so-called P2/S1 scenario (the ‘P’ is for pathway) requires a 95% cut
in CO2 emissions by 2050 (relative to 2010). Assuming our emissions would fall at a
steady rate (they probably won’t, but we’ll err on the conservative side here), and
further assuming atmospheric CO2 levels increase directly in proportion with
emissions, that means under P2, we’ll hit 452 ppm in 2050. Which is… 50% higher
than humanity has ever survived in the long-term.

With that kind of trajectory, we can expect average global temperatures to

overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold by at most 0.1 degrees by mid-century or
so. To ratchet back to 1.5 degrees by 2100, the scenario relies on technology and
techniques that would suck about 150 billion metric tons of CO2 out of the air, with
limited rollout of this technology by around 2040.

Other scenarios require more CO2 removal. Take the P4/S5 pathway, for example,
which assumes the greenhouse-gas-intensive lifestyle of the United States continues
to spread to the rest of the world and we have to rely almost exclusively on removal
to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by 2100. Even under the carbon capture and storage
approach of P4, and given the same assumptions as above, we’re left with 461 ppm
by 2050 and a temperature overshoot closer to 0.5 degrees.

That’s a little worrying. IPCC researchers are the popular girls of climate science.
Their mitigation scenarios reveal a whole host of dreams the rest of us project onto
the world — a certain mainstream consensus about what we ought to be eating and
wearing and, like, keeping in the ground.

But these pathways certainly don’t get us to safe pre-industrial levels of CO2. And
remember, with 1.5 degrees of warming, we’re still left with 80% of Greenland
turning into a puddle and the collapse of whole marine ecosystems.

Let’s get radical

But fine; those pathways came from the cool kids at the IPCC — not, say, the
skateboarding eco-socialists of the climate world. So what about them?

The Green New Deal resolution sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, calls for net-zero emissions by 2030. Applying the
same methodology as above (and extrapolating the proposal to the scale of the
world instead of just the United States), the 2030 goal implies a concentration of
428 ppm — just a bit more than where we’re at now. But certainly not less. There’s
no serious climate modeling consistent with a theoretical worldwide Green New
Deal, but generally, the approach is consistent with 1.5 degrees of warming by the
end of the century, suggesting no great improvement over the IPCC’s latest work in
terms of climate impact. The resolution has 94 House and 12 Senate co-sponsors, as
well as a whole army of nay-sayers, but it might not go far enough.

What about Drawdown, “the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse
global warming,” rolled out by author and activist Paul Hawken and his team in
2017? The story here is more or less the same as P2: net-zero by 2050, suggesting a
CO2 concentration of around 452 ppm and temperature increases of 1.5 degrees
over pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Even the improbable political posturing around climate change in the Democratic
primaries doesn’t bring theoretical concentrations of the gas below where it is today
anytime soon. Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, the self-proclaimed climate
candidate, argues that the global community must heed the IPCC’s warnings and
reach net-zero by mid-century or even earlier: by 2045. Subjecting it to the same
analysis as above, and assuming the world all got on board the 2045 deadline,
Inslee’s plan leaves us with… 446 ppm by 2050. Better than the IPCC pathways; not
quite as bold as the bolder variants of the Green New Deal.
The long and short of it all is that if you’re interested in returning to a natural
climate equilibrium, you’ve got to find a plan that does more than just reduce
carbon pollution. It has to aggressively reverse it, taking the world back to 300 ppm
or lower — the levels the world knew in the pre-Standard Oil days. Not just climate
mitigation: climate restoration.

Back to the future

Is a sub-300 ppm goal really so audacious, given the rest of human history? It has
taken us less than 200 years to get to where we are today. Surely, given the vision,
the technology, and the will, we could wind back the carbon clock.

“Climate restoration is the natural next step on our climate journey, building on the
mitigation and adaptation work that’s been underway for decades,” says Dr. Erica
Dodds, chief operating officer of the Foundation for Climate Restoration. Dodds
argues that a restored climate is not only possible, but morally required of us.
“Today’s youth are afraid for their futures and are planning for a dystopian planet.
Restoring our climate isn’t a philosophical question. It’s a concrete, urgent, moral
obligation.”

That’s the whole paradigm shift in a nutshell: Even net-zero climate plans come up
short unless they pull a trillion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. (Without
aggressive carbon removal, natural reabsorption of extra CO2 would take thousands
of years.)

It’s a curious political frame, that which describes plans permitting 450 ppm as
‘bold’ and ‘ambitious.’ Are plans seeking a proven, safe 350 or 300 ppm merely
laughable? Or are we simply suffering from a failure of imagination — blinded,
perhaps, by the momentum of the status quo?

It’s no secret that politics constrains what’s possible. But we can’t let it constrain
our vision. Until we start thinking seriously about restoration, we’ll be on the road
to a hotter, hellish world. We shouldn’t need to go back in time to find a healthy
climate.
This article is sponsored by the Foundation for Climate Restoration, a nonprofit
partnering with local governments, NGOs, and communities around the world to
launch Climate Restoration projects at scale. Its Healthy Climate Alliance is an
education, networking, and advocacy program to advance these goals.

https://grist.org/article/everyone-has-a-climate-plan-which-ones-get-us-to-a-livable-
future