Researcher: Climate Change is “Not the End of the World”
“There is a perception that we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie is a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford. Her next book is called “Not the End of the World.”
After the end of a productive U.N. Climate Change conference, the media was full of doom-laden statistics and stories about climate change. “This is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to this crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future,” said Richie.
Richie is 30, and sees the significant progress in areas like deforestation, air cleanliness and the falling costs and increasing adoption of clean-energy technologies. “For a long time, I felt helplessness, that these problems were massive and unsolvable,” Ritchie says.
“It’s true we need to go much faster, but there is a lot of progress to acknowledge. There’s enough data to see it is possible to find a way forward in which the planet will not catch on fire.”
In nature, there is a reaction for every significant action that sometimes looks like doom and gloom. Let’s look at the year 2023, the hottest year on record, which featured intense wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity, and rising carbon emissions. What was done last year to demonstrate that things won’t get worse and shows signs of a turnaround?
In 2023 America’s greenhouse gas emissions fell by nearly 2 percent. This is a permanent drop because burning coal to produce electricity plummeted to its lowest level in half a century. Moreover, United States carbon emissions have fallen by roughly 17 percent since 2005. The initial huge dip has been sustained over the long term, and emissions continue to trend downward as power plant emissions change and more electric cars fill the highways.
Have we reached the tipping point? “Data suggests that in the coming years, we’d expect to see surges in renewable energy deployment and surges in the number of electric vehicles on the road,” said the author of the new climate report. Last year, carbon dioxide emissions from America’s power plants dropped roughly 8 percent.
A five-year effort by a Sierra Club program closed more than a dozen large power plants that burned coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, replacing them with cheaper and lower-emitting natural gas, wind and solar power. According to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. coal-fired generation capacity is projected to decline to about 50 percent of current levels by 2030, and the trend appears to be accelerating.
The shift in renewal energy is also accelerating. While coal plants once generated nearly half of America’s electricity, last year they produced just 17 percent. That’s a lower share than either nuclear or renewable energy. The use of coal for electricity dropped to its lowest level since 1969. Some of coal’s decline is due to the availability of cheap and plentiful natural gas, but renewable energy is on the rise. In 2023, the solar industry enjoyed a record year for installations, wind companies erected significantly fewer new turbines than they did in 2022.
Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, saw a 1.6 percent rise in emissions in 2023. It’s difficult to get Americans out of their cars, as they continue to drive and fly. Although U.S. sales of electric vehicles passed the one million mark in 2023, they are still a small fraction of vehicles on the road.
Emissions from refineries and drilling operations increased last year, in part because of methane leaks from drilling operations. The United States produced record amounts of oil and natural gas in 2023, and some of the excess gas that wasn’t sold for fuel was either leaked or intentionally vented into the atmosphere as methane.
In the short term, methane is up to 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at trapping heat. In response, the Biden administration made cutting methane emissions a major priority. At the U.N. Conference, Kamala Harris pledged that the Environmental Protection Agency would require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane from hundreds of thousands of existing wells, pipelines, and other facilities.
Was the tipping point in global warming last year, when the United States joined 26 other countries whose emissions had declined in recent years? Notice this decline was matched with significant economic growth, according to this study last year. These 26 countries have robust economies: Brazil, Britain, Japan, South Africa, and many European Union members.
No doubt, challenges remain in the emerging economies of over 80 other nations globally to cut carbon dioxide emissions after they soared to record levels last year. These 80 countries include China, India and other fast-growing countries that increased their use of fossil fuels.
Funding for climate-related projects in developing countries will likely be an area of focus at future United Nations conferences. Will we continue the downward trend and see this through? What will it take to realize the glass is still half empty, and make it full again?
Information in this story came from the New York Times.