We are about to go through the most profound shift in the climate debate in 20 years. The result will be the end of the gas industry’s hope of being a transition fuel, a brutal market disruption to the agriculture and livestock industries and the arrival of the climate emergency into public consciousness. This will all be driven by the acceptance of methane as the critical response to the climate emergency.
The Climate Emergency Arrives
As always on climate change, the underlying driver is the science. In this regard, the latest IPCC report was crystal clear. Our climate is changing; we’re suffering severe consequences decades earlier than predicted; the impacts will keep getting worse; we’re facing tipping points which could trigger runaway warming; and we’re rapidly running out of time. By any interpretation we now face a full-blown climate emergency.
While many lament the lack of earlier action, that is typical of how we behave. We wait for a crisis to be underway and then respond dramatically. It’s inefficient, it’s expensive, it’s frustrating and it’s how we always do things. We took this approach in WWII, to the 2008 global credit crisis and to the COVID19 pandemic. It was always going to be like this with climate change.
What we now confront then is kind of good news. Faced with the existential risk of runaway climate change and resulting global economic collapse, we are far more likely to take the action. However, as Professor Jorgen Randers and I argued in our 2009 paper The One Degree War Plan, acting this late requires a profoundly different approach than what would have worked 20 or 30 years earlier. It requires a dramatic reset of assumptions about the pace of change, the type of actions needed and the economic disruption that will result.
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