Ten billion people: The need to consume much less

At the same time, the global shipping and airline sectors are projected to continue to expand rapidly every year, transporting more of us, and more of the stuff we consume, around the planet year on year. That is going to cause enormous problems in terms of more CO2 emissions, more black carbon and more pollution from mining and processing to make all this stuff.

But think about this. In transporting us and our stuff all over the planet, we are also creating a highly efficient network for the spread of potentially catastrophic diseases. There was a global pandemic just 95 years ago – the Spanish flu pandemic, which is now estimated to have killed up to 100 million people. And that was before one of our more questionable innovations – the budget airline – was invented. The combination of millions of people travelling around the world every day, plus millions more living in extremely close proximity to pigs and poultry – making a new virus jumping the species barrier more likely – means we are increasing, significantly, the probability of a new global pandemic. So no wonder then that epidemiologists increasingly agree that a new pandemic is now a matter of “when” not “if”.

We are going to have to triple – at least – energy production by the end of this century to meet expected demand. To meet that demand, we will need to build, roughly, something like: 1,800 of the world’s largest dams, or 23,000 nuclear power stations, 14 million wind turbines, 36 billion solar panels, or just keep going with predominantly oil, coal and gas – and build the 36,000 new power stations we will need. Our existing oil, coal and gas reserves alone are worth trillions of dollars. Are governments and the world’s major oil, coal and gas companies – some of the most influential corporations on Earth – really going to decide to leave the money in the ground, as demand for energy increases relentlessly? I doubt it.

Meanwhile, the emerging climate problem is on an entirely different scale. The problem is that we may well be heading towards a number of critical “tipping points” in the global climate system. There is a politically agreed global target – driven by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. The rationale for this target is that a rise above it carries a significant risk of catastrophic climate change that would almost certainly lead to irreversible planetary “tipping points” caused by events such as the melting of the Greenland ice shelf, the release of frozen methane deposits from Arctic tundra, or dieback of the Amazon. In fact, the first two are happening now – at below the 2 degrees threshold.

As for the third, we’re not waiting for climate change to do this: we’re doing it right now through deforestation. And recent research shows that we look certain to be heading for a future global average rise of 4 degrees Celsius – and we can’t rule out a rise of 6 degrees. This will be absolutely catastrophic. It will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth will become a hellhole. In the decades along the way, we will witness unprecedented extremes in weather, fires, floods, heatwaves, loss of crops and forests, water stress and catastrophic sea-level rises. Large parts of Africa will become permanent disaster areas. The Amazon could be turned into savannah or even desert. And the entire agricultural system will be faced with an unprecedented threat.

More “fortunate” countries such as the UK, the US and most of Europe, may well look like something approaching militarised countries, with heavily defended border controls designed to prevent millions of people from entering, people who are on the move because their own country is no longer habitable, or has insufficient water or food, or is experiencing conflict over increasingly scarce resources. These people will be “climate migrants”. The term is one we will increasingly have to get used to. Indeed, anyone who thinks that the emerging global state of affairs does not have great potential for civil and international conflict is deluding themselves. It is no coincidence that almost every scientific conference that I go to about climate change now has a new type of attendee: the military.

Every which way you look at it, a planet of 10 billion looks like a nightmare. What, then, are our options?

The only solution left is to change our behaviour, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more. To accomplish such a radical change in behaviour would also need radical government action. But as far as this kind of change is concerned, politicians are currently part of the problem, not part of the solution, because the decisions that need to be taken to implement significant behaviour change inevitably make politicians very unpopular – as they are all too aware.

So what politicians have opted for instead is failed diplomacy. For example: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it has been for 20 years to ensure the stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Failed. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification, whose job it’s been for 20 years to stop land degrading and becoming desert. Failed. The Convention on Biological Diversity, whose job it’s been for 20 years to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. Failed. Those are only three examples of failed initiatives. The list is depressingly long. 

And the way governments justify this level of inaction is by exploiting public opinion and scientific uncertainty. It used to be a case of, “We need to wait for science to prove climate change is happening”. This is now beyond doubt. So now it’s, “We need to wait for scientists to be able to tell us what the impact will be and the costs”. And, “We need to wait for public opinion to get behind action”. 

But climate models will never be free from uncertainties. And as for public opinion, politicians feel remarkably free to ignore it when it suits them – wars, bankers’ bonuses and healthcare reforms, to give just three examples.

 

The final part of this three-part series will appear in tomorrow’s edition.