Hard Truths about Climate Change

Climate math: What a 1.5-degree pathway would take

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

Op-Ed: The McKinsey I hope the world gets to know

Do we really have any chance to come to grips with climate change? Like many of us, I go back and forth on that one. Some recommend throwing out the whole capitalist system. If that seems a bit unlikely, you’d need to know how to redirect the system and what it would really take to decarbonize global business.

A pretty convincing roadmap for that is provided by McKinsey, the firm some love to hate. The critics hate its high-pressure culture, its stress on process, its success. But the business of America is still business, and McKinsey’s leaders have recently tried to transform their firm’s role to reflect the totally changing world we’re living in. I almost went to work for McKinsey in 2006, which would have been to the delight of my capitalistic forebears, but that didn’t happen and I’m grateful.

Anyhow, McKinsey recently issued a report on Climate Math that challenges business to meet the demands for a 1.5-C degree warming limit. This is very much worth your reading so you can understand in some coherent detail the challenges in achieving that goal.

 . . . With further warming unavoidable over the next decade, the risk of physical hazards and nonlinear, socioeconomic jolts is rising. Mitigating climate change through decarbonization represents the other half of the challenge. Scientists estimate that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would reduce the odds of initiating the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate change.

The report offers five necessary and difficult steps to get to that goal. “The good news,” they say, “is that a 1.5-degree pathway is technically achievable. The bad news is that the math is daunting.”

None of what follows is a forecast. Getting to 1.5 degrees would require significant economic incentives for companies to invest rapidly and at scale in decarbonization efforts. It also would require individuals to make changes in areas as fundamental as the food they eat and their modes of transport. A markedly different regulatory environment would likely be necessary to support the required capital formation.

The report traces five needed interdependent “shifts” in areas that we all know, with varying means and prospects of achieving reform:

    • reforming food and forestry
    • electrifying our lives
    • adapting industrial operations
    • decarbonizing power and fuel
    • ramping up carbon capture and carbon sequestration activity.

Each of these areas plays out in three scenarios the report envisions, not as predictions but as “snapshots” to get where we have to go.

All the scenarios, we found, would imply the need for immediate, all-hands-on-deck efforts to dramatically reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions. The first scenario frames deep, sweeping emission reductions across all sectors; the second assumes oil and other fossil fuels remain predominant in transport for longer, with aggressive reforestation absorbing the surplus emissions; and the third scenario assumes that coal and gas continue to generate power for longer, with even more vigorous reforestation making up the deficit . . . .

Relying so much on reforestation seems to me dubious at best, despite the report’s qualifications. The final pages state in bold type, “It is impossible to chart a 1.5-degree pathway that does not remove carbon dioxide to offset ongoing emissions. The math simply does not work.”

The challenges here are immense and the report does not shy away from them. But finally we are getting serious analysis of how feasible (or unlikely) the 1.5-degree goal is.

Artisanal Martini Wisdom on Climate Change

Elizabeth Warren thinks corruption is why the US hasn’t acted on climate change

 How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades

 Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home

We were drinking freshly distilled artisanal martinis at Ralph’s house (he makes his gin from a small still), and so after a time the subject of climate change had to come up. We also talked about the latest Trump outrage, Rashida Tlaib and Israel, uses of CBD oil, the broken bones in Epstein’s neck. Yet climate seemed to dominate, with several expressing strong opinions as to how the Democrats could approach the issue.

None of us felt the Dems were doing justice to the climate crisis, much less scoring any political points with their “programs.” They have invariably ducked the hard issues of cost and scale and failed to get much media attention. After another martini we generated several brilliant solutions to their problems.

Bryan thought that Elizabeth Warren, the policy maven, needed to make a strong capitalistic pitch.

“She has the brains to come up with a policy that meets some of the challenges but she doesn’t know how to sell it. The economic benefits are what’s going to sell it. The government will prime the pump and money will pour into software development, clean energy companies, biomass, electric cars, agriculture, all of that. Farmers will get rich. People will breathe clean air. The trade deficit will fall. Poverty will decline. The country will come back from its present madness.

“She’s got five climate change plans now. Who knows what any of those are? This is a capitalistic country, for God’s sake.”

Bryan got a round of applause, and Ralph took another approach. À propos my last blog post, which he and others found very depressing, the third martini produced this:

“My bedrock notion is that global warming/climate change can only be moderated with less resource consumption, especially carbon-based fuels. So how do we do this? Unless the global populace really, really lowers its carbon footprint (like taking sailboats to China to visit grandkids [Ralph’s is there]) or escapes materialism in the first place (not a chance—look at India’s buying coal from Australia to generate electricity to sell to Bangladesh), disastrous levels of global warming/climate change are inevitable.

“Other than some wacko techno fixes (like nuclear-powered ice machines on American-owned Greenland), the other approach I think holds promise would be to lower the world’s population—whether as: 1) a policy (China did it actually); or more likely 2) as a result of some as yet unknown and very nasty calamity (e.g., defective nuclear ice machines make all of Greenland melt, and hence the world’s oceans become deadly radioactive).”

We stood and cheered for this ode to climate fatalism. After that, I didn’t feel so bad about writing “The Climate Change Blues.” I wanted to end on a more hopeful note and so talked about Pope Francis’s encyclical of four years ago, Laudato Si’. 

You know, no one else has written anything like it. It is a directive to all of us to wake up and recognize the oneness of life. And it’s really much more than a Catholic document. It tells us that everyone is responsible for the health of the earth; everything is connected; and climate change is both a social and environmental crisis.”

Bringing a religious document into the discussion produced more discussion, of course. But who has a better grasp on reality—the Pope or Bill McKibben?