“It is very difficult to make predictions; especially if they are about the future.”
The phrase-now now the Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist winner of, sometimes Yogy Berra, a player famous for his disconcerting phrases-applies well to the perspectives of evolution of climate crisis and efforts to overcome.
At the end of July, the president of the American Environmental Agency (EPA) (Endangerment Finding), a 2009 rule based on the Supreme Court, which is the legal basis for the agency’s activity.
The measure will end the EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of light vehicles to heavy trucks, and weaken rules that limit energy plant emissions and control methane by gas companies. In practice, it corresponds not to open the gate, but to overthrow it, allowing the permanent passage of the cattle.
The measure was celebrated by conservative politicians and the oil and gas industry. An independent article on the Wall Street Journal greeted her as the “Liberation Day” of climate regulation, equating it with the announcement of the global elevation of customs tariffs.
A long article by Judith Curry, a climatologist combined with fossil fuels, under the revealing title of “A Criticism of Apocalyptic Climate Narrative,” published in May, well illustrates the industry’s misinformation strategy. The text concludes that if the US pursued a zero reduction policy of their GHG emissions, the effect would be a decrease in global temperature by just 0.2ºC in 2100 – thus doing absolutely nothing.
The bad news for the weather did not just come from. The Guardian newspaper reports that it is offering an area of oil exploration an area of 124 million hectares. The territory, more than half of the country, has 64% primary tropical forest coverage, including natural gorilla and bonobos habitats.
In Brazil, reinforcing the recent change in strategy with reduced emphasis on renewable energy.
The Economist magazine itself, which has been consistently favorable to policies aimed at “net zero”, recognizes the discharge of political resistance and recommends to transform the “target” into “guideline”, reminiscent of bismarck by stating that “politics is the art of the possible.”
All of these recent events reinforce the sense of uncertainty about humanity’s ability to promote coordinated coping with existential danger placed by global warming. It seems inconceivable to our educated minds under the belief in the “triumph of reason” that we have impotent on the repeated non -compliance, signed in 2015 by 195 countries, which made a commitment to achieve climate neutrality in the middle of the century.
Faced with this frustration, we may accept that the fight against will not occur through a coordinated and rational process based on scientific consensus. It will first be the side effect of another transition that, like so many before it, will be marked by disruptive innovations, fierce resistances and conflicting interests.
In the present case, it is the replacement of fossil energy with renewable energy.
The New Yorker magazine has brought in July an extensive report in which it shows, with data and sources, that renewable energy-mainly-has been consolidated in the last two years as the most economically efficient alternative.
The projections impress. In 2026, solar energy will overcome the generation of nuclear energy globally; In 2029, it will overcome water energy; In 2031, it will be the turn of gas and coal; And by 2035, the Earth’s main source of energy has already become.
The report deepens, by demonstrating the declining tendency of the price and viability of the new energy cycle from the point of view of the availability of area and materials necessary for the universal supply. It also advocates, besides the economic convenience, the geopolitical advantages of solar energy, which, because of its abundance and ubiquity, provides greater energy security to the nations individually.
Finally, the evidence indicates that-as the secretary general of, Antonio Guterres said in a recent speech-“the sun emerges over an era of.”
According to this analysis, the transition from fossil to renewable energy has an economic logic that makes it inexorable, regardless of its benign effects on climate change.
It remains to answer the essential question: Is the process sufficiently swift to prevent the elevation of Earth’s temperature to more than 2ºC over industrial prerevolution levels?
It is in this context that the global coordination for the full monitoring and implementation of the Paris Agreement emerges, not as a motivating or justification of change, but as an important catalyst agent of the process, by granting stimuli to renewable energies and encumbrance of GHG emissions.
On the other hand, all the setbacks cited at the beginning of this article should be understood as what they actually are: desperate reactions seeking to avoid, or delay, the inevitable technological evolution, in spite of the obvious climatic losses that the delay entails.
There are many historical examples of changes as inevitable as necessary, morally and/or economically, that they have undergone strong resistance by contradicted interest groups. Among them we can highlight the one, which lasted for centuries after their moral illegitimacy becomes evident, and the lobby of tobacco companies, which resorted to all misleading and delaying measures to promote an extremely harmful habit.
Given this picture, it seems clear to me the way forward. We must make the most of the implementation of the precepts of the Paris Agreement, starting with the coordinated acting and determined in the next November.
As for numerous attempts to undermine the process of reducing emissions, they must be faced energetically – with “certainty in front and the story in hand.”
