Feels like 40 degrees – Let’s get a Ministry for the Future

We are also experiencing a bit of a taste of what is being called a “termination shock”. As we reduce fossil fuel usage -or use technology to reduce pollutants, anthropogenic aerosols are reduced. These have a short term cooling effect, both direct, and indirect, as aerosols act as CCN (cloud condensation nuclei). These make clouds whiter by increasing the number of small droplets, which increases the reflectivity of clouds. So the cooling effect which was partially masking the heating from green house gases is reduced.

Obviously burning enough fossil fuels to fully mask the cumulative effect of greenhouse gases is not sustainable. However the usual suspects will happily use the argument as an excuse for further delay.

” we must also redouble our efforts on climate mitigation”

“as we reduce fossil fuel usage”

To quote Tonto, “who’s “we”, paleface?

While in the West we’re reducing fossil fuel usage, and watching our factories close, the rest of the world is burning the stuff at record levels, which may account for our melting glaciers and sweaty bedrooms.

China is burning 5 billion tons of coal a year, 20 times what the UK burned in its biggest coal using year around 1913.

https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-mid-year-update-2025

“Coal’s role in the global energy system today remains significant. Over the past decade, the world’s demand for coal has stayed relatively stable, apart from a temporary drop during the Covid-19 pandemic and the rapid rebound that followed. Today, global coal consumption, power generation, production and trade are all at record levels.”

So much for “yesterday’s fuel”.

Some right-wing politicians keep downplaying these explanations, saying we should enjoy the lovely weather with a cool beer by the pool, but I think reality is hitting too hard for that kind of ideological nonsense to have much influence very longer.

I would like to see a study on the connection between right-wing political views and a recreational preference for burning one’s skin of in an alcoholic stupor. I’m thinking of noted headbangers like Tommy Robinson as well as various boomer pundits and acquaintances. Paging Jonathan Haidt?

“the biggest emitters – which in fact are not Europeans but Americans, Canadians, and others ”

On what planet is Canada one of the biggest emitters? Asia including China and India are the regions with the highest growth in emissions, and China’s actual level is 3X the US’s.

You can pretend that the solution to global warming is getting the US to reduce emissions, and of course it would help. But unless Asia and India get their emissions under control, they’ll absorb any improvements we make.

Everyone needs to reduce GHG emissions (not merely those from coal), including China, India, Europe, and North America (I don’t think that’s particularly controversial here). It is, therefore, not a choice between reducing emissions in North America and Europe or Asia – climate change is driven by the sum of global emissions, so the only coherent answer is ‘both’.

I would suggest that it is important to avoid choosing whichever accounting system best absolves ourselves of responsibility. Territorial emissions tell one story; consumption-based emissions tell another (a significant share of China’s emissions comes from manufacturing goods consumed elsewhere). That doesn’t absolve China of responsibility, of course, but it does mean the consumers of those goods bear some too. Similarly, focusing only on current annual emissions ignores cumulative effects, while focusing only on cumulative emissions ignores where future emissions are coming from – both perspectives matter. The useful conclusion isn’t to apportion all the blame to one region or another, but to recognise that high-income countries still have some of the world’s highest per-capita consumption emissions, while China is by far the largest emitter in absolute terms.

Ultimately, physics doesn’t care about the nationality of the emitter, nor the social, political, cultural or economic reasoning behind the emissions—only that greenhouse gases are emitted. Unless our global civilisation starts to address this seriously (something the world’s political and economic leadership has conspicuously failed to do), then we are, as the kids say, cooked (quite literally).

Oversimplifying the accounting to make our own responsibilities disappear may be politically convenient or personally satisfying, but it doesn’t help solve the problem.

Actually Canada is just below Germany in terms of CO2 emissions and way worse in a per capita basis, but yes, the biggest problem is China, then USA, India and Russia, although probably if you sum all EU countries (and the UK as a bonus) it would be worse than Russia, around the same level of India.

I’d respectfully disagree that per-capita emissions are something to be “wary” of – they are merely a specific metric to answer a specific question. I don’t think they imply that China’s emissions “aren’t so bad”, any more than total emissions imply that UK’s emissions are irrelevant. They’re simply different metrics answering different questions.

Simplistically, total emissions tell us where emissions are coming from; per-capita emissions tell us how emissions-intensive the average person’s lifestyle is; consumption-based emissions tell us who ultimately benefits from those emissions; and cumulative emissions tell us who has contributed most to the warming we’re already experiencing. Fundamentally, climate policy has to grapple with all four questions.

Ultimately, of course, the atmosphere doesn’t distinguish between a tonne of CO? wherever it comes from. The challenge is enabling development without repeating the fossil fuel-intensive trajectory that today’s wealthy countries, and more recently China, followed. That requires action from all major emitters, not just a subset defined by whichever metric is being used at the time.

Energy equality, alongside improving living standards, does not necessarily have to correlate with dramatic increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, we have a strong framework from which one could plan to avoid this. The challenge is, therefore, not to prevent energy use from increasing, but to decouple that increase from greenhouse gas emissions, a challenge which I’m increasingly convinced is less technical than political.

To give the UK its due, it has made genuine progress regarding decarbonisation. Equally, it is not currently on track to meet all of its legally binding carbon budgets without additional policy action (and the UK’s own statutory climate advisers have repeatedly concluded that current policies are insufficient). Given that (and broader trends across North America and Europe), what I would be wary of is making any broad statement other than “everyone needs to do significantly better than they currently are”.

Comparing totals per country without regard for population size is nonsensical. Pointing out that moral consistency would either be catastrophic for the planet or strenuous for today’s Westerners doesn’t seem like a very good argument against moral consistency to me. Ymmv.

The old backpacker joke that Canadians are Americans with maple leaves on their backpacks definitely applies to lifestyles and carbon footprints afaics.

“China is burning 5 billion tons of coal a year, 20 times what the UK burned in its biggest coal using year around 1913.”

UK population in 1913 was 42 million, China’s population is 1405 million. Very valid comparison.

“While in the West we’re reducing fossil fuel usage”

If only. Coal use has been reduced in the West but oil and gas are still burnt at close to record levels. I recently checked the numbers and found that all of 4 % of the 50 million cars running in Germany are electric. The situation isn’t better in the US and other European countries (with minor exceptions). China is way ahead of us in that department, they are making much more of an effort to decarbonize than we are. So you better shut up. We haven’t even come close to doing what both justice and self-interest should compell us to do: namely stop burning the planet.

The fact that China and India are now doing what the West has been doing for centuries doesn’t give us permission to deflect blame, and anyway what kind of argument is this supposed to be: “why can’t we continue destroying our own basis of existence if the Chinese are also doing it”?

@ Laban

Dude, the factories in America did not close because their owners were nagged out of burning coal. They closed because parts and labor were cheaper overseas and also, perhaps more importantly, because the perception, justified or not, was that the American worker had gotten too far above himself and kept waking for too much. Please.

Just to shut down l’affaire du Canada

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Pretty striking, eh?

… how we can make the biggest emitters – which in fact are not Europeans but Americans, Canadians, and others – care about the effects on the most vulnerable in the Global South. Let me know if you know, because I don’t.

I have unfortunate news. A lot of Americans care about what happens to vulnerable people elsewhere. But American leadership is dominated by sociopaths, because that’s who gets put in charge of large business enterprises in a well-developed capitalist system. Keynes pegged the thirst for unlimited wealth as pathological a hundred years ago and expected we would have addressed the problem by now, but instead we worship the twisted creatures as paragons of success.

I try not to be bleak but when Ministry for the Future comes up, I recall that its baseline scenario was the successful implementation of the Green New Deal in the US. So we’re already well behind the pole position that the novel’s characters had.

Up until the 1980s, the consensus was that we were in an interglacial period and the climate was likely to get colder.

“It was partly through their attempts to understand what caused and ended previous ice ages that climate scientists came to understand the dominant role that carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate system, and the primary role that human-produced carbon dioxide is playing in current global warming”

By the end of the 80s we were all well aware that dark satanic mills might have other drawbacks than loss of beauty. And indeed since 1990 the USA and Europe have reduced their CO2 emissions. Since 1990 China has quadrupled hers. They can’t plead ignorance, which was certainly the UK situation.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region

If the leaders of rich countries make a concerted effort to reduce their countries’ levels of emissions significantly from where they are now, it may help.

If the leaders of poor countries make a concerted effort to reduce their countries’ levels of emissions significantly from where they are now, it may help.

If the leaders of one group of countries say to the leaders of another group of countries ‘It’s up to you, we’ve done as much as can be expected of us’, it won’t help and is likely to be positively harmful.

If we here sit around arguing about how responsibility is shared, it also won’t help although I don’t suppose it can do any harm.

Insofar as anybody here has any capacity to influence what any country or its leaders do, our influence is, for each of us, in our own country. I would hazard a guess that most of the people here are from rich countries.

@ Laban

I would suggest we stick to comparison of GHG emissions rather than specific energy sources, since for climate outcomes it is the aggregate that matters.

Again, I don’t think anyone disputes that China’s total emissions are large or that global reductions are necessary – yet we can see that on a per-capita basis, China’s consumption emissions are not dramatically higher than the UK and are significantly lower than the US. So different emissions metrics clearly describe different aspects of the same system, but they do not by themselves determine a single ordering of responsibility.

What I am still missing is your argument for how these metrics map onto responsibility allocation – without that, it is unclear how your conclusion about relative responsibility is being derived.

“our own renewable budllup” buildup