Scientists have called climate change an existential threat to life on this planet. Instead of being all hands on deck with a laser focus on solutions that can defeat climate change the world's inadequate compromising response is suicidal.
We have been warned for decades about the threat of climate change to life on this planet, particularly human life. The planet is warming at an unprecedented rate and carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has exceeded a point that scientists have warned must not be breached.
According to a United Nations Report "extreme weather caused two million deaths and cost $4 trillion over the last 50 years." Yet a vast worldwide climate change industry has spent hundreds of billions on untold numbers of projects over the last two decades to defeat climate change. Despite these investments, the "war on climate change" is failing. In fact, climate-initiated degradation and catastrophes are greater than when the battle began.
The monumental failure of the war on climate change has prompted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to sound a code red alarm with the frightening warning "We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator."
What has gone wrong?
Tragically, the leading polluting nations in the Paris Agreement have not met their commitments to achieve net zero carbon emissions. The same, "more talk than action," is true for pledges made by major corporations. And no new efforts are in progress that can reliably promise to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Moreover, guaranteeing that net zero will not be achieved, nations are revving up pollution.
While boasting of the biggest investment ever in addressing climate change, the U.S. is currently drilling more oil than ever before-- more than oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Likewise, in a policy reversal, England is granting hundreds of new oil and gas licenses for the North Sea. Elsewhere coal mines are reopening. Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, is bringing back coal to deal with its energy crisis. More alarming, the global use of coal reached a record high in 2022 and remained at that level in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Further weakening the initiatives, concessions must be made to climate change deniers to get funding approval for climate change defeating projects. And when programs threaten to reduce corporate profits the buck always takes priority.
Is it any wonder that poorer nations are balking at demands to travel the moral high road and cut back on oil drilling, reduce their use of fossil fuels, and adopt other conservation measures? Similarly, the Congo is waffling on protecting its vast rainforests (lungs of the world) from economic exploitation.
In response to a plethora of recent climate disasters around the world from extreme weather events, numerous articles and government agencies are calling for better early-warning systems and quicker responses, as well as increased aid for victims. But glaringly missing from their recommendations is a demand for projects that can scale up fast enough to defeat climate change.
Has the world surrendered to climate change? Is the new plan palliative care for the victims of climate disasters while we await the predicted "climate hell"?-- even though victory is possible if we dare to mount a genuine all-out commitment and allocate the necessary resources to do the job?
Surprisingly, Conservative Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana--no fan of abandoning fossil fuels--grilled David Turk, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, with a question that should be posed to all proponents of climate change projects: "If we spend 50 trillion dollars to become carbon neutral by 2050 how much will that reduce world temperatures?" Turk dodged the question and refused to come up with an answer. If projects can't ensure achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 to halt a rise in temperature (and that may be too late) it's comparable to firefighters showing up at a burning house and telling the owner they will be back in a few weeks with hopefully enough water to put out the fire.
A March 31, 2024 article in the New York Times--Can We Engineer Our Way Out of a Climate Crisis?--championed advances in carbon capture technology to halt climate change. While this nascent technology can extract CO2 from the atmosphere, one commentator cited in the article said, "No one is arguing you could solve all our carbon emissions with this." And the enthusiastic promotion of carbon capture, which currently is not scaling fast enough to significantly impact climate change, poses a danger. If carbon capture promises to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, it may give license to fossil fuel producers to "drill baby drill" rather than ending or severely reducing the production and use of fossil fuels.
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