Crossing Nebraska

Did this title get your attention? I hope so. I intended for it to be provocatively absurd for reasons that will become apparent by the end of the post. I also intended for it to call attention to a fundamental assumption that seems to undergird the thinking of even some of the most intelligent individuals with regard to economic growth and climate change mitigation. Namely, that growth in overall consumption can and in fact must continue, and that we merely have to transition away from fossil fuel use in order to halt and begin to remediate the effects of carbon dioxide on the global climate.   Alright, I’ve already said a mouthful. Allow me to then take a step back and unpack what I just stated by sketching out some basic parameters:   Our world population is projected to grow at about three quarters of a percent per year between now and the year 2050, at which time the earth is expected to be home to some 9.8 billion people. United Nations The U.S. population is projected ...

Our outlook on climate change was so much more hopeful back in 2015. Obama was still President. Science-denying Trumpism was a distant specter. Pandemic was only hypothetical. And by December of that year the United Nations Climate Change Conference resulted in the Paris Accord – 196 countries agreeing to a landmark reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the increase in average global temperature to under 2 degrees Celsius. We’d dodged the proverbial bullet, or so we might have thought at the time. Sadly, we all know what the next six years wrought: Trumpism, our departure from the Paris Accord, pandemic, four of the hottest global average temperatures on record, and a steady uptick in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (now at around 415 ppm – well over the 350 ppm deemed to be “safe”). The good news, however, is that the Biden administration brought the U.S. back into the fold of Paris Accord signatory nations. And the silver lining of the pandemic was that we ...