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Will humanity take these decarbonizing steps this year? The Lynas choice
Today, July 15th, the Sunrise Movement is organizing a national action in the United States. Its aim: to pressure the Biden administration to take more serious steps about the climate crisis.
In line with that call, I’d like to pose a question about the climate crisis.
I’m reading Mark Lynas, Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency. (2021) The bo0k offers a series of visions of the world after global warming, with one chapter per degree rise by 2100. Naturally each additional degree makes things worse.
But early on the book pauses to point out a strategic choice that the human race has access to right now. Lynas offers one list of things humanity can do to try reducing the chances of seriously terrible global warming, and I’d like readers to consider what’s involved and how likely they could occur. The precise goal of achieving the actions in this list is to “keep… to the Paris target of staying below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” (271)
In the list are two main items:
- canceling the development of all planned carbon-burning (coal, oil, gas) power plants
- “stop[ping] selling cars and trucks straight away — anything with an internal combustion engine in fact — as well as home…
