Climate fight will take everything we have

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/05/2024 (505 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It sounds like something out of Looney Tunes, but at this point, anything is worth a try when it comes to fighting climate change.

Earlier this month, CNN reported Swiss company Climeworks opened a new carbon-capture plant in Iceland. In a nutshell, it’s a great big vacuum, sucking in air and chemically stripping the carbon from it, before returning the air to the atmosphere and storing the carbon safely in the ground, or turning it into other products. Better yet, Iceland’s plentiful geothermal power means the plant can run without contributing to the problem itself. The plant is the largest of its kind, according to Climeworks, and is expected to take 36,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere once it’s operating at full capacity.

This ‘direct air capture’ technology is quite new and not without its risks. It’s unproven and energy-intensive.

But, anything is better than nothing. If the technology can be operated free of fossil fuels, any dent it makes in the problem of Earth’s building greenhouse gas problem is a good dent and it can take its place alongside less Acme-Inc. solutions to the problem — namely, cutting our use of fossil fuels and investing more in nature’s most tried-and-true carbon-capture method: trees.

Unfortunately, those straightforward solutions have been difficult to manage: governments signing on to emissions targets often struggle to meet them and voracious worldwide consumerism is doing little to help with problems of deforestation and growing mountains of garbage in landfills. That being the case, it’s easy to be impressed and perhaps encouraged by novel, high-tech solutions to climate change which theoretically help to alleviate the problem by stripping it away, bit by bit, after the fact.

And we are very much at the point where every little bit helps. Climate scientists are now sounding the alarm that global temperatures may rise to 2.5 C above pre-industrial levels, if not more. That’s far worse than the internationally agreed-upon number of 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures, a change which we could manage a little better. At 2.5 C above, humanity’s situation becomes perilous, with ever-worsening storms, food disruptions and mass migration, along with all the conflicts likely to result from those problems.

“I could not feel greater despair over the future,” Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian. She also said she foresaw “major societal disruption within the next five years.”

Younger scientists surveyed by The Guardian believe an even worse outcome is on the horizon, with 52 per cent of those under 50 expecting us to hit 3 C above pre-industrial levels. Only 38 per cent of scientists over 50 predicted the same. Most experts surveyed — around three-quarters — pinned the problem on a lack of political will (not hard to argue, given the circumstances).

If those temperatures are reached, it won’t be the end of humanity, necessarily. But it will become extremely difficult for our species to carry on, although difficult sounds like too sanitized a word. It will, according to predictions, mean a great deal of suffering.

So it seems obvious, then, that we need to use everything at our disposal. Yes, we need to change our consumption habits. We need to get off fossil fuels. We need to reforest our world after many, many years of ferocious logging. And yes, we need to employ unusual new technologies which can help us undo or at least manage this damage, bit by bit.

We know what we have to do. Now is the time to do it.