BusinessGreen‘s James Murray writes about “Clinging to a climate of optimism” when it comes to fighting climate change:
My point is this: if you are over 45, then you are on track to bequeath the rest of us a pretty scary inheritance. But if you are under 45, then you have a good chance of experiencing some of the more devastating results of our failure to leave fossil fuels in the ground for yourself. You will see first-hand whether we are capable of building a genuinely sustainable global economy by mid-century or not. You will find out if it is possible to support nine billion people in a warmer world. You have a direct stake in this game.
In a way, it comes back to the argument I made last week about the risks of imprecision: climate change has been mentally filed away in the “legacy to our grandchildren” box for the last forty years. But while it’s painfully obvious that something happening “in 2080” is getting closer every year, it’s not quite so easy to continually readjust your perceptions for something which you’ve estimated as “a long way in the future”.
And so we end up in the trap Murray addresses, where even people who were born after climate change first hit the agenda have it wrongly pegged as something they won’t be alive to see. There’s a level of urgency which people understand on an intellectual level, but not on a practical one. That is, someone perfectly happy to talk about “two degrees warming by 2050” still blanches when discussing the Thames Barrier being breached in their lifetime.
What effects could that practical understanding have on our approach to the issue? Murray writes:
Too many environmental debates are akin to arguing in 1940 about whether the allies should build tanks or planes.
We are past the point where we have the luxury of working out what the “best” sort of investment is to fight climate change – and really, we should never have been having that argument in the first place. A carbon-free energy infrastructure would always have a mix of inputs, from wind and solar to nuclear and CCS-equipped gas generation, and while some mixes might work better than others, all of them are better than the status quo.
But you don’t even need to decide which energy mix you want, because with an appropriate policy background you could leave providers to make their own choices. That could be a cap-and-trade system which actually caps, as opposed to just trading, or it could be a carbon tax levied at a high enough level to make a difference, but whatever it is, it needs to be passed sooner rather than later.
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