Climate change is an enormous, overwhelmingly complex problem, but it is also very simple. It is caused mainly by one activity: burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and methane gas. So you would think fossil fuels are always at the forefront of how scientists communicate about the climate crisis to the public. But no. This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2023 Synthesis Report, summarizing the latest scientific knowledge about the climate crisis. For the first time in the IPCC’s history, a headline statement of its summary for policymakers declared that the world already has too many fossil fuels in production to limit global warming to the relatively safe level of 1.5 degrees Celsius. As this global body of scientists put it, “projected CO2 emissions from existing fossil-fuel infrastructure without additional abatement would exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C.”
This finding isn’t new, but its new prominence is a very big deal. The danger of burning fossil fuels has been the open secret of international climate politics. The Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries agreed to that 1.5-degree target, doesn’t even mention coal, oil or methane gas. Instead, world leaders have hidden behind more nebulous reductions of “emissions” — pollution produced by fossil energy combustion along with, to a lesser degree, other human activities, such as mining and agriculture.
This finding isn’t new, but its new prominence is a very big deal.
In this way, these leaders have sustained the fiction that they can support ongoing fossil fuel extraction yet still abide by their countries’ climate commitments. President Joe Biden, for example, signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives tax breaks to clean energy producers and consumers, but he also recently approved Chevron’s application to build enormous oil drills in some of Alaska’s last untouched public lands. The latter project is projected to add 9.2…
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