4: The unspeakable truth about climate change
01/05/25
We are not going to stop climate change. We aren't even going to significantly limit climate change. All of the things we are doing to supposedly "combat" climate change are in reality just stringing out the finite supply of fossil fuels - delaying the day when we finally stop using them because it has become economically or technically non-viable to continue (i.e. when they "run out"). There is not even any intention to make a difference to the net amount of climate change that has happened by the time humans finally stop changing the climate. “Net Zero” is a rhetorical solution to a very real problem.
In order to see through the fog, we need to think about it like scientists instead of the way politicians and economists want us to think about it. Anthropogenic climate change is happening for one very simple reason: the movement of carbon from fossil sources into short-term circulation. Fossil carbon was extracted from the atmosphere (hundreds of) millions of years ago - during times when both CO2 levels in the atmosphere and global average temperatures were significantly higher. Nearly all of today's climate change is being caused by humans moving that carbon into the atmosphere or to places where it is only temporarily kept out of the atmosphere, such as in trees which will eventually rot or be burned. Planting trees which are subsequently used for fuel makes absolutely no difference to this. Neither does investing in renewables, stopping flying or eating less meat. At best, all these actions can do is slow the rate of climate change, and right now they aren't even doing that, because emissions are still rising.
Don't get me wrong – I'm a strong supporter of both reforestation and everything genuinely renewable. Unfortunately, however positive and welcome these behaviours are, they aren't going to make any difference to long-term net climate change. There are only two ways to do that. The first is to invent a technology capable of capturing atmospheric CO2 and permanently returning it underground. This is not quite impossible, but it needs a technological miracle that looks highly unlikely at the moment (unsurprisingly, the process is too energy-intensive to be viable). In collapse aware circles we call this “techno-hopium”. The second is to leave economically viable fossil fuels in the ground forever, and in this case the problem is political/economic rather than technological. Which country is even seriously considering this course of action? There is enormous resistance to the very idea of it, and if anything that resistance is growing as the general situation deteriorates. Barring another sort of technological miracle (cheap and easy fusion might do it) then this isn't going to happen either.
When I posted the above argument on the Reddit's r/climatechange, the moderators saw fit to ban me for 12 months. I had broken rule 6: No dooming or "nothing can be done". My comments weren't being judged as untrue, but as a socio-politically unacceptable part of reality – as if banning people who speak the truth somehow changes it. I accepted climate change was unstoppable in 1988, and I've been debunking climate change denialism ever since, but now I find myself accused of “climate denialism” myself, because I am expressing a view that has much more recently become popular with people who previously denied climate change was happening at all – those who went straight from denialism to “we can't stop it”. We live in a deeply confused world.
My conclusion is that we are very likely to continue burning fossil fuels until it is no longer economically viable to extract them, and that this will lead to what is currently considered to be the worst case scenario – something in the order of 6 to 8 degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels. This will obviously make quite a large part of the Earth's land surface uninhabitable for humans, and it is very hard to see more than a few hundred million humans surviving the die-off.
That we aren't going to significantly limit net climate change in the long term is just a fact about reality, derived from other facts about reality (some scientific, some socio-political), and it has enormous consequences. But regardless of how enormous they are, this cannot justify the continued denial of the inconvenient facts. It is time to start speaking the unspeakable truth about climate change.
We must deal with reality, or it will deal with us.