Planetary boundary 5: climate change
The stated agenda is all about carbon. What’s the real agenda?
As my previous articles highlighted, I don’t see climate change by itself as an existential threat. Human activity across many dimensions has degraded our precious ecosystems for decades, if not centuries, depending on the source of research you read.
According to ChatGPT, from 1967 to 1986, scientists published “some of the most frequently cited scientific studies explaining the greenhouse gas effect” caused by humans contributing carbon (CO₂) to the Earth’s atmosphere. In the last six years, however, ChatGPT tells us the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Earth System Science Data (ESSD) published the leading scientific studies.
An uncomfortable truth emerges from the climate change narrative in 2024. The trajectory of AI and human activity requires more and more energy from fossil fuel and alternative sources. That means more mining, more fracking, and more power plants fueled by natural gas and nuclear.
So why do carbon and climate change remain as the agenda in focus?
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain six goals, each with defined targets, that directly or indirectly address climate change. I hesitate to mention the UN in this article, given the political charge, swirl of controversy, and conspiracy theories surrounding the SDGs. The UN’s work, however, deserves examination. Governments, NGOs, and corporations have shaped their 2030 and 2050 goals to align with the SDGs.
Inspirational words appear in the SDGs: promote, focus, aim, protect, restore, sustainable, resilience. Enough inspiration. I’m interested in two things. One, what actions are we taking to mitigate or stop the environmental harm? And two, how do we measure the results?
Goal 13: Climate Action, Target 13.A, contains a word that I rarely see in the climate change narrative: commitment. And numbers associated with the targets. Specifically, mobilize $100B annually (from Target 13.A language) and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (the Paris Agreement goal). Two simple metrics that measure progress.
The United Nations Statistics Division provides a comprehensive global indicator framework and SDG indicators. Quantitative measures of progress towards implementing the goals. So once again, why has Climate Action received so much focus?
ChatGPT represents that the stated commitment has yet to reach its $100B annual target. The top ten contributors: United States, Germany, Japan, France, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Netherlands. The word “around” prefaces the numbers for 2022, and ChatGPT could not provide specific numbers for 2023 or 2024.
To put this in contrast, again according to ChatGPT: since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States Congress has approved $175B in aid packages, with $107B directly benefiting Ukraine, covering military, economic, and humanitarian assistance; European and NATO allies have collectively committed $85B as of the end of 2022. That’s $260B, and the data in OpenAI LLM appears to be incomplete as well.
That’s just one example where the commitment of funds — if ChatGPT’s responses are based in fact — reveal higher priorities than Climate Action. I’ve omitted further examples, as I had to declare no confidence in the responses. The more I queried, the more suspicious the ChatGPT responses became.
The narrative muddled, and I found myself confused. Information I saw with my own eyes earlier this year was no longer available online. The prompt responses changed from one day to the next. I couldn’t provide a data-driven perspective because I didn’t save copies of what I found on the web, and someone had changed the content on the source website.
The data shouted we have much more important financial commitments than Climate Action and no cohesive plan as a species to address climate change, let alone all the planetary boundary violations.
In the article about biogeochemical flows, I asserted the climate change narrative is all about carbon, and I said I’d address it here. Since I no longer trust the data, let’s examine the narrative.
For the last few years, a typical media discussion of climate change represented our progress with in the form of: installing alternative energy, specifically wind and solar; replacing petrol-powered vehicles with EVs; banning or curtailing fossil fuel production and consumption; shuttering of fossil fuel power plants and adding utility-scale battery storage to add electrical capacity; introducing carbon regulation as pricing, taxes, credits, and offsets; ESG and Green Finance initiatives and tax incentives to motivate and subsidize investment; and more.
I’ll speak to what I know best. The materials necessary to build the global alternative energy infrastructure that promises to solve climate change depend on fossil fuel powered mining. Is there a reliable mathematical model with years of peer-reviewed data that shows the net energy and material inputs to alternative energy outperform the modern and efficient uses of fossil fuels? Not that I’ve found. Is it great for the business interests I’m involved in? Yes, it is. Between the revenues and the tax incentives, our financial future looks bright indeed. Are we taking steps to mitigate the ecological harms caused by those businesses? Yes, we are. And they are harmful. The harm increases with demand.
Can I live with the moral dilemma? I don’t know. It weighs on my soul.
To be honest, it’s all more than I can get my mind around. I loop in a highly emotional state where I can’t see the forest for the trees. Then I go outside into nature to calm myself down, and things don’t seem that bad. Our garden is full of rabbits, bees, and other insects. Squirrels and birds populate the trees. Lush plant life permeates our property. In the distance, I see a cloud of soot over the city, and trails of jet exhaust in the sky. I hear the ever-present low-level grind of tires and engines on the freeway drowning out the sounds of life. Our tap water smells like it has more chlorine than our pool. And the amount of trash our household sends to the landfill and for supposed recycling is nothing short of horrifying, despite my endless efforts and household rants that we must reduce our garbage footprint.
In moments of clarity, it looks simple. If we want to stop climate change, we must change how we live. Again, the data may be suspect, but I read that humanity has consumed more planetary mass in the last six years (2016–2021) than we had in the 100 years previously. Our hunger appears insatiable. How do we change that?
I don’t see how carbon regulation and haphazardly shutting down fossil fuel consumption make any of this work. We’ve built a society that overwhelms nature on every front. Climate action by itself is not the answer. We need a lifestyle change. More ecological protection. Less unbridled consumption. More gardens. Less garbage. Now.
Love, Aventurine
Prompts written by a human (me) to provide insights and supporting facts for today’s article. Where applicable, I’ve cited ChatGPT as the source of information. Try these prompts in GPT-4o to learn more about climate change, the greenhouse gas effect, and other funding priorities:
1. Please list the top ten ways carbon regulation is being implemented. Include carbon credits, carbon offsets, corporate regulation, and government policy, and other methods. List the leaders in implementing these regulations and what they are implementing.
2. What percentage of the Earth’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide?
3. What are the properties of atmospheric carbon that cause that 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere to increase global warming?
4. Please list the peer-reviewed scientific studies most frequently cited to explain the greenhouse gas effect. Output the results in a table that includes the document name, date of publication, and authors.
5. Using the same output format, please list five more scientific studies conducted within the last decade.
6. What are the specific UN Sustainable Development goals that address climate change?
7. What is the latest status, as of May 2024, for the global progress against the commitment stated in Goal 13, Target 13.A?
8. Please review the language of all the SDGs and list each goal and target that contains the word “commitment,” and the corresponding SDG Indicator that measures progress against the commitment. Source: /https://unstats.un.org/UNSDWebsite/.
9. How much money has been committed to implement Goal 13: Climate Action since the UN member nations agreed to the commitment?
10. How much money has been committed between 2020 and 2024 to implement Goal 13: Climate Action? Which countries are the top three contributors of funds, and how much did they provide each year?
11. The top three contributors only account for 30% of the goal. Who are the next seven largest contributors?
12. How much money has been committed to the Ukraine war effort since Russia’s first attack?
13. Between 2020 and 2024, tow much money has been pledged by the United States government, sanctuary states, and sanctuary cities to support migrants establishing a new life in the country?
14. Please list the top 2023 spenders on migrant services and assistance, in order of most dollars spent. Spenders can be US Federal Government, states, or cities. Output the results in a table that includes the spender, amount, and scope of services funded.
15. In January 2024, the UN International Organization for Migration published a call for $1.7T in global funding to support the IOM’s goal. Please list the top ten contributors, how much they contributed, and summarize at the end how much of the goal has been funded.
16. What are the top ten corporations that provide funding to the IOM initiatives, and how much does each contribute.
Aventurine is a fictional character from a forthcoming novel series by Author Jeffrey Griffith.
