Bubbles always burst. Confronted with the increasingly traumatic consequences of a rapidly warming world (already a harsh physical reality for many), politicians will be forced into panic policy responses. They will seek to do in a very short time what we should have been doing over the last 25 years, including putting a higher price on every tonne of CO2. And when they do, all those oil, gas and coal assets will first become unviable and then completely stranded, destroying trillions of dollars of economic value in the process.
It’s already too late to avoid that particular Hobson’s choice: either we burn the planet by crashing through the 2°C barrier and on to 4°C or even higher, or the bubble bursts, with very severe economic consequences. But we don’t have to go on making it worse – and we don’t have to further penalise the world’s poor in managing the outfall. As is now well understood, the principal alternatives to fossil fuels (renewables and energy efficiency) are even more important in developing and emerging countries as they are in the rich world.
If ever there was a preconditional imperative, this is surely it. Accelerating climate change, caused by the continuing emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, represents an existential threat to our species – by which I mean it threatens the stability and economic wellbeing of every society on Earth.
This is the “inconvenient truth” at the heart of the global economy today. It is recognised (although often set aside) by a minority of politicians. It remains totally unseen as far as the vast majority are concerned. But if we don’t move very rapidly indeed through programmes of radical decarbonisation in every sector of the economy, increased social justice will become a very distant dream. Indeed, the lives of billions of people will become too horrendous to contemplate.
So can it still be done? I believe it can – which is the main thrust of my new book, “The World We Made”, to be published in October. But debates about whether social justice or biophysical sustainability ‘comes first’ are little more than a self-indulgent irrelevance. Some ‘issue’!
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