Some years ago I was the lunchtime keynote for an undergraduate student sustainability summit. It was a packed plenary session in a large hall, and I was uncharacteristically nervous.
This couldn’t be my ‘usual’ kind of talk, I realized.
In this talk, I had no need to convince the audience of the seriousness of climate change. These were people who were already aware that climate change and its impacts would be a centerpiece for their generation and that it would more than likely define their livelihoods. They were already deeply concerned. This talk had to go deeper and invite them forward into an uncertain future.
Luckily for me (and ultimately for all of us), we were on the brink of the Paris Agreement.
I used the talk to invite a discussion of thresholds and tipping points.
Yes, we’ve crossed some serious tipping points already in the climate. The seas will keep rising for a long time. Some places that dealt with periodic drought are now just consistently dry places. It’s possible Greenland ice melt and Arctic sea ice have crossed into a new regime of decline, and I definitely worry about crossing tipping points in methane release and on Antarctic ice sheet collapse. The global concentration of carbon dioxide passed 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, and is now at around 419 ppm (from a pre-industrial value of around 280 ppm).
But alongside some of the troubling thresholds we’ve crossed in the physical world, we are also seeing really important tipping points in the social, economic, and cultural worlds that should help us avoid crossing more unpleasant thresholds in our future climate.
The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 marked a tipping point for global cooperation on climate change. While it fell short of some expectations, it created the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the annual Conference of Parties, which has forced us to monitor and report on emissions and national climate action and to continue to increase our climate commitments. Without it, we wouldn’t have had the Paris Agreement - another important step change in our global action.
Renewable energy now delivers 75% of all new power, compared to 4% for coal. The tipping point when solar and wind started beating out coal for new energy was in 2012.
It’s possible we are on the brink of a tipping point in electric vehicles - China’s sales have doubled compared to just last year. Most US manufacturers are rapidly phasing out gas-powered vehicles in favor of electric ones, and we may end up looking at 2022 as year that the deployment of infrastructure to support electric vehicles seriously took off.
Public opinion and acceptance of climate change and support for actions to address it, have also crossed thresholds. Even among the most conservative adults in the US, more than 50% of them agree that human activity is causing climate change. And that becomes over 80% when polling moderate Republicans or the rest of the political spectrum. A significant majority believe that the government should be doing more on climate change. The number of Americans that believe we should continue to develop more fossil fuel production has been in decline since about 2013.
I believe we have reached and crossed a tipping point on climate action and clean energy.
Does it mean we can rest easy now that it’s not such a fight to convince people? Of course not. Our deployment of climate-friendly and climate-adapted infrastructure needs to accelerate many times if we’re to avoid some of the worst impacts still to come.
And there will be some backsliding, of course. The war in Ukraine will both accelerate renewables and force (probably) some short-term reconsideration of coal in Europe, for example. And with indications that authoritarians and far right politics are on the rise in some places, we may see some nations fail to abide by their existing commitments in the short-term.
But the thing about tipping points is that once you cross them, you have entered a new regime, and even though there will be varied progress and sometimes what looks like movement in the wrong direction, it never fully flips back into the old mode. In this case, it’s not even just a clean energy tipping point, it’s a whole new way of thinking about the world.
We are being forced to confront directly, our relationship with the environment and how much we rely on its health in supporting strong and stable human systems, including our economies. This is not the way we thought about it (typically) in the industrialized past. But over the last few decades, we have been moving towards a new understanding of the integrated world we live in.
Optimism isn’t about blindly believing things will work out. It’s about noticing and celebrating shifts and working to accelerate positive change, knowing that it makes a difference when we do.
I’m optimistic.
Brilliant. Well written. And encouraging....