It is in our nature to search for the silver lining.
When the horizonless cloud of the pandemic unfurled over our heads, we reverted back to this nature. We strained our eyes in search of any hopeful glimmer and found sparkles among the darkness.
One silver lining looked especially bright. Amidst the grounded planes and vacant cars coated in thin films of dust, everyone had joined the fight against climate change. It may not have been by choice, but now we no longer needed protestors to stop us from boarding planes or marching through traffic to tell us to behave. Circumstance forced us to stay behind locked doors, and so we ended up doing more than we had ever planned for the environment.
Sadly, this silver lining is an illusion.
Don’t get me wrong, our cities sighed a fresh breath of relief. The pictures of New Delhi’s blue skies that whizzed around the internet were (mostly) genuine. So too were the pollution readings in Bangalore that resembled a village by the Mediterranean rather than those of an Indian urban sprawl. However, this fleeting relief was for a different type of problem. As the pandemic has taught us, it is the things we cannot see that cause the most damage and, in this case, what we cannot see is the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Despite its transparency, carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise. Even though global emissions were 7% lower in 2020 than the year before, the concentration in the atmosphere rose by another 2 parts per million to 416ppm. Assuming emissions don’t bounce back, which they will, we are barely 17 years away from hitting the 2°C threshold drawn by the Paris agreement.
Although the internet loves an easy solution, locking ourselves down is not the trick to avert the climate crisis. It cost too much and did too little. The estimated cost to the economy of £5 trillion just reduced our emissions by ~3 billion tons (not including the incalculable human cost). At that price tag, it is costing us £1500 - £2000 to avert a ton of CO2. Estimates put the average cost at a fraction of this price tag. At about £40 per averted ton of CO2, we could have done a lot more with our trillions. We could have dodged fifty times the amount of carbon dioxide in 2020 by planting forests, surrounding Britain with offshore wind farms or lining the Sahara with solar panels.
The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet – for example “switch off your mobile phone charger when it’s not in use”; if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra “every little helps” is wheeled out. Every little helps? A more realistic mantra is: if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little – David McKay
In Sustainable Energy without the hot air, McKay wrote ‘if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve a little’. In 2020, everyone did a lot and, when it came to the climate, we only achieved a little.
It turns out the conventional advice – skipping the taxi, switching off the lights, or even opting for zoom instead of a long haul flight – will not turn back the clock on the climate. Sure, we cut emissions by 7% but to stop the never ending pile up of CO2 in our atmosphere, we have to keep that trend going, cutting another 7%, year after year till we halve today’s emissions by 2030. And it’s unlikely that we can lock ourselves up anymore.
Then, how do we achieve a lot?
By throwing money at the problem. Dollars well spent can save us where good habits failed us. The reason is that we live in a society that takes the best of samaritans and converts them into polluters. They make good choices but their intent is tied by the fabric of our society, the threads holding it together contributing to the crisis. Our only hope is investment to reweave this fabric.
Some problems are easy to solve with money. Sick of coal power plants? Replace them. Swap out their tall chimneys with the taller towers of wind turbines. The issue is less about the technology but more about financing infrastructure projects fast enough, which is especially the case in emerging markets. Other problems are harder but money will remain at the core of the solution. For example, with agriculture, we will need to fund an ecosystem of research, drive private sector investments and force green practices on businesses that don’t want to pay the difference. All this will cost money.
The price may sound steep. Over the next ten years, we will need to dig deep into our pockets, wiggling our fingers past the handfuls of debt left behind by the pandemic. But every penny will be worth the pain. For if we don’t act, we may not afford the bill that comes later in the day.