The year is 2024 for a few more hours. It’s cold. The snow is falling on this new year’s eve for the first time in more than a decade. Of course, it can only be a coincidence, but it’s the kind of coincidence that I want to be meaningful. Finally, we’re on the right path.
For the first time this year, the concentration of CO2 in the air has stopped increasing. It’s not much, but if things continue like this, earth will avoid the 500ppm threshold. Most of mankind happened at about 350ppm and we must return back to it.
There will be other deadly storms, droughts and mass extinctions for a couple more decades as we are still slowly understanding the consequences of our reckless fossil fuel consumption. We’re now closing the CO2 Pandora box which had previously been locked for millennia.
It took us decades to figure out that the temperature was growing, that we were the cause of this growth. Finally, in 2017, some misfits, rebels and troublemakers understood that since we did change the climate for the worst, it was actually in our control to change it for the best too. The shy 2015 efforts to limit the growth of CO2 emission now appear both foolish and wasteful:
Members agreed to reduce their carbon output “as soon as possible” and to do their best to keep global warming “to well below 2 degrees C”.
When 2 years later, climate change deniers were sent to the highest offices in the United State, Russia and several countries in Europe, the cause was almost hopeless. And yet, 2017 saw the first hints of real change. The weakest countries, those facing rising sea levels started to act on their own. If the rest of the world was letting them drown by releasing ever increasing levels of CO2, why couldn’t they try something desperate on their own? Some started to massively fertilize their territorial waters with iron. Others tried phosphorus or nitrogen. As expected none of these efforts was tremendously effective and they were at first unfairly condemned by the UN. But these battles were leveraged by carbon emission trading. Not only the investments were quickly returned, but they also eventually created too many turbulence on the carbon markets and disturbed western industries.
At the same time, Elon Musk, after building batteries and solar panels to feed Tesla Motors’s cars started to invest massively in carbon capturing technologies. In 2019, he announced they were working on a home scrubber. The scrubber would use the extra energy from the panels to capture some of the carbon in the air. It will then be sold to companies who can recycle it into plastics and other complex materials.
China also played a surprising role. As the largest CO2 emitter and probably the most affected by pollution in general; it very effectively put all of its growing weight toward a cleaner world. For the Chinese government, exactly like for the small islanders, it was a matter of survival: riots and mass migrations had started and political stability. They started by tightening the norms and forcing their buyers to pay for carbon offsets. Once it became clear that the west had lost its industrial knowledge and that it would take decades to even compete with China, the whole world adopted the news norms.
Every day, the world is more connected. It’s not so much about sending emails or seeing pictures from your friends around the world than it is about facing the same problems. Interdependence is higher than ever and climate change is the first crisis that we can only solve collectively. My hope is that we stop waiting for someone or something else to fix it. We can change climate together. Let’s do it.
