Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering. He knows his stuff, and when he speaks, people should listen.
Kalmus calls the calls for Net Zero by 2050 climate procrastination. And he offers proof that some of the most vocal calls are coming from the very industries that are driving the stake through the very heart of our biosphere. He notes that we will all witness action on the climate emergency when and only when the fossil fuel industry feels severe pain.
Kalmus writes in the Guardian:
The world has by and large adopted “net zero by 2050” as its de facto climate goal, but two fatal flaws hide in plain sight within those 16 characters. One is “net zero.” The other is “by 2050”.
These two flaws provide cover for big oil and politicians who wish to preserve the status quo. Together they comprise a deadly prescription for inaction and catastrophically high levels of irreversible climate and ecological breakdown.
First, consider “by 2050”. This deadline feels comfortably far away, encouraging further climate procrastination. Who feels urgency over a deadline in 2050? This is convenient for the world’s elected leaders, who typically have term limits of between three and five years, less so for anyone who needs a livable planet.
Pathways for achieving net zero by 2050 – meaning that in 2050 any carbon emissions would be balanced by CO2 withdrawn through natural means, like forests, and through hypothetical carbon-trapping technology – are designed to give roughly even odds for keeping global heating below 1.5C. But it’s now apparent that even the current 1.1C of global heating is not a “safe” level. Climate catastrophes are arriving with a frequency and ferocity that have shocked climate scientists. The fact that climate models failed to predict the intensity of the summer’s heatwaves and flooding suggests that severe impacts will come sooner than previously thought. Madagascar is on the brink of the first climate famine, and developments such as multi-regional crop losses and climate warfare even before reaching 1.5C should no longer be ruled out.
Meanwhile, “net zero” is a phrase that represents magical thinking rooted in our society’s technology fetish. Just presuppose enough hypothetical carbon capture and you can pencil out a plan for meeting any climate goal, even while allowing the fossil fuel industry to keep growing. While there may be useful negative-emissions strategies such as reforestation and conservation agriculture, their carbon capture potential is small compared with cumulative fossil fuel carbon emissions, and their effects may not be permanent. Policymakers are betting the future of life on Earth that someone will invent some kind of whiz-bang tech to draw down CO2 at a massive scale.
He insists, as does every climate activist, that we need to be in “emergency mode.” The fact that we are where we are today is a direct result of the fossil fuel industry, its many puppets in local, state, and federal government. Looking at you while seething Joe Manchin.
He mentions as an example the much-ballyhooed direct carbon capture project in Iceland. He emphasizes correctly that this technology is nowhere near being scalable to deal with the problem. And he points out how the fossil fuel industry is pushing the net-zero meme. After all, it is a date that justifies kicking the can down the road for the next generation to suffer, just like 2100 was before then. It is a despicable argument that is delusional at best and genocidal at its worse.
He described current deniers and enablers of the climate emergency as pushing a 2050 timeline the “deepest of moral failures to casually saddle today’s young people with a critical task that may prove unfeasible by orders of magnitude – and expecting them to somehow accomplish this amid worsening heatwaves, fires, storms and floods that will pummel financial, insurance, infrastructure, water, food, health, and political systems.”
Nails it. Read the whole piece here.
Elizabeth Weil writes in Pro Publica on the NASA scientists struggles to warn ya all of the absolute horrors of impacts from the current climate crisis that will only intensify every day that fossil fuel emissions enter the atmosphere. In her lede, “A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint”, while the article shines a spotlight on his stress of knowing too much about the impacts that await us all.
Peter Kalmus knows too much about what every last one of us will experience as the climate catastrophe intensifies. His stress and terror are palpable in her story.
Peter Kalmus, out of his mind, stumbled back toward the car. It was all happening. All the stuff he’d been trying to get others to see, and failing to get others to see — it was all here. The day before, when his family started their Labor Day backpacking trip along the oak-lined dry creek bed in Romero Canyon, in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, the temperature had been 105 degrees. Now it was 110 degrees, and under his backpack, his “large mammalian self,” as Peter called his body, was more than just overheating. He was melting down. Everything felt wrong. His brain felt wrong and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on the planet felt wrong, off-kilter, in the wrong place.
Nearing the trailhead, Peter’s mind death-spiralled: What’s next summer going to bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed that the temperature would only rise per decade by a few tenths of a degree Celsius. But those tenths would add up and the extreme temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s big mammal body could handle 100 degrees, sort of, 110 drove him crazy. That was just not a friendly climate for a human. 110 degrees was hostile, an alien planet.
Lizards fried, right there on the rocks. Elsewhere, songbirds fell out of the sky. There was more human conflict, just as the researchers promised. ...
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