Climate Change: What if we’re wrong?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that the whole world has agreed there is a climate emergency. The European Union, the United States, India and even China have all decided that a warming world requires immediate action. All the major economies of the world are ready to pass laws and change policy.
(Stay with me here!)
What do they do?
There are a range of actions they could take with varying levels of impact. Project Drawdown has a list of one hundred possibilities ranked by impact. I’m going to assume we start with the top ten.
Number 1: Refrigerant Management. Not the most sexy starting point, or the most obvious, but better managing the refrigerant chemicals in end-of-life air conditioners and fridges could make a massive impact to rates of global warming. To do this will require improving recycling and waste management chains in many countries. Less waste-to-landfill, more resource re-use. Win.
Number 2: Wind Turbines (on shore), Number 8: Solar Farms, 10: Rooftop Solar. Alternative energy sources to fossil fuels would be the obvious place to start, and these are the three that have the potential to make the most impact. The reduction in other air pollution as well as carbon would be significant in some parts of the world, including major cities in China. Rooftop Solar is also seen as a key mechanism for reducing poverty in remote areas.
Number 3: Reduce food waste, Number 4: Plant-rich diet. These are long term goals requiring culture change as well as policy levers. But if we globally made both a priority, we would be tackling global hunger, global malnutrition and the obesity epidemic. Oh yeah, we’d reduce atmospheric carbon, too.
Number 5: Tropical Forests. The other giant ecological disaster of our time is our man-made extinction burst. Protecting and growing forests won’t just sequester more carbon, they’ll also provide refuge for increasing biodiversity. And biodiversity can insulate every ecosystem from shocks.
Number 6: Educate Girls and Number 7: Family Planning. Educating girls and providing access to family planning are the two biggest mechanisms for reducing family size and global population. They also directly impact poverty levels in low and low-medium income economies.
Number 9: Silvopasture and Number 11: Regenerative Agriculture. Silvopasture just means adding trees and tree crops to grazing land. Regenerative Agriculture includes a range of practices which work together to improve soil fertility and farming sustainability. Both diversify agricultural income and help ‘drought-proof’ farms.
I’m going to stop there but you get the idea. If we decided, collectively, to tackle climate change, we’d also improve our disposal of industrial waste, help solve global health problems such as malnutrition, hunger and obesity, bring cheap, clean energy to more of the world’s poor communities, reduce other sorts of pollution, drought-proof our farms, and improve biodiversity in our farmed and wild landscapes. Oh, and don’t forget educating all those girls.
If, in ten years time, we wake up to a sheepish press release from the world’s climate scientists, saying this climate emergency seems to be a giant hoax — what then?
Coal production will have decreased, perhaps at a faster rate than otherwise due to the emergence of cheaper (renewable) energy sources.
We’d have more efficient supply chains, particularly for food.
People in richer countries may well be eating less meat and healthier for it. But whole new markets for protein will be opening up in poorer countries, because we’ve tackled inequality in so many places.
We’ll have slowed our global extinction rates.
We’ll have more resilient, economically sustainable agribusiness.
We just have to start.
