This Vision
sounds too optimistic … There are still tremendous and huge challenges.
The way things are now is that we are heading to more than 3 degrees.
Anyway OVOODOCORVO publishes this book review
OVOODOCORVO
‘Air is
cleaner than before the Industrial Revolution’: a best case scenario for the
climate in 2050
The
Observer
Climate
change
The Future
We Choose, a new book by the architects of the Paris climate accords, offers
contrasting visions for how the world might look in thirty years (read the
worst case scenario here)
•
Christiana Figueres, author: ‘This is the decade and we are the generation’
Christiana
Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Sat 15 Feb
2020 17.00 GMTLast modified on Mon 17 Feb 2020 10.56 GMT
It is 2050.
We have been successful at halving emissions every decade since 2020. We are
heading for a world that will be no more than 1.5C warmer by 2100
In most
places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot
like walking through a forest and very likely this is exactly what you are
doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial
Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.
It wasn’t
the single solution we required, but the proliferation of trees bought us the
time we needed to vanquish carbon emissions. When we started, it was purely
practical, a tactic to combat climate crisis by relocating the carbon: the
trees took carbon dioxide out of the air, released oxygen and put the carbon
back where it belongs, in the soil. This, of course, helped to diminish climate
crisis, but the benefits were even greater. On every sensory level, the ambient
feeling of living on what has again become a green planet has been
transformative, especially in cities.
Reimagining
and restructuring cities was crucial to solving the climate challenge puzzle.
But further steps had to be taken, which meant that global rewilding efforts
had to reach well beyond the cities. The forest cover worldwide is now 50% and
agriculture has evolved to become more tree-based. The result is that many
countries are unrecognisable, in a good way. No one seems to miss wide-open
plains or monocultures. Now we have shady groves of nut and orchards, timber
land interspersed with grazing, parkland areas that spread for miles, new
havens for our regenerated population of pollinators.
Drones organised along aerial corridors are
now delivering packages, further reducing the need for vehicles
A major
part of the shift to net-zero emissions was a focus on electricity; achieving
the goal required not only an overhaul of existing infrastructure but also a
structural shift. In some ways, breaking up grids and decentralising power
proved easy. We no longer burn fossil fuels. Most of our energy now comes from
renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro. All homes and
buildings produce their own electricity – every available surface is covered
with solar paint that contains millions of nanoparticles, which harvest energy
from the sunlight, and every windy spot has a wind turbine. If you live on a
particularly sunny or windy hill, your house might harvest more energy than it
can use, in which case the energy will simply flow back to the smart grid.
Because there is no combustion cost, energy is basically free. It is also more
abundant and more efficiently used than ever.
Homes and
buildings all over the world are becoming self-sustaining far beyond their
electrical needs. For example, all buildings now collect rainwater and manage
their own water use. Renewable sources of electricity make possible localised
desalination, which means clean drinking water can now be produced on demand
anywhere in the world. We also use it to irrigate hydroponic gardens, flush
toilets and shower.
Petrol and
diesel cars are anachronisms. Most countries banned their manufacture in 2030,
but it took another 15 years to get internal combustion engines off the road
completely.
What’s
strange is that it took us so long to realise that the electric motor is simply
a better way of powering vehicles. It gives you more torque, more speed when
you need it, and the ability to recapture energy when you brake and it requires
dramatically less maintenance.
We also
share cars without thinking twice. In fact, regulating and ensuring the safety
of driverless ride sharing were the biggest transportation hurdles for cities
to overcome. The goal has been to eliminate private ownership of vehicles by
2050 in major metropolitan areas. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re making
progress.
We have
also reduced land transport needs. Drones organised along aerial corridors are
now delivering packages, further reducing the need for vehicles. Thus we are
currently narrowing roads, eliminating parking spaces and investing in urban
planning projects that make it easier to walk and bike in the city.
While we
may have successfully reduced carbon emissions, we’re still dealing with the
aftereffects of record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The
long-living greenhouse gases have nowhere to go other than the already-loaded
atmosphere, so they are still causing increasingly extreme weather, though it’s
less extreme than it would have been had we continued to burn fossil fuels.
Glaciers
and Arctic ice are still melting and the sea is still rising. Severe droughts
and desertification are occurring in the western United States, the
Mediterranean and parts of China. Ongoing extreme weather and resource
degradation continue to multiply existing disparities in income, public health,
food security and water availability. But now governments have recognised
climate crisis factors for the threat multipliers that they are. That awareness
allows us to predict downstream problems and head them off before they become
humanitarian crises.
Everyone
understands that we are all in this together. A disaster that occurs in one
country is likely to occur in another in only a matter of years. It took us a
while to realise that if we worked out how to save the Pacific islands from
rising sea levels this year, then we might find a way to save Rotterdam in
another five years.
The
zeitgeist has shifted profoundly. How we feel about the world has changed,
deeply. And, unexpectedly, so has how we feel about one another.
When the
alarm bells rang in 2020, thanks in large part to the youth movement, we
realised that we suffered from too much consumption, competition, and greedy
self-interest. Our commitment to these values and our drive for profit and
status had led us to steamroll our environment. As a species, we were out of
control and the result was the near-collapse of our world.
We emerged
from the climate crisis as more mature members of the community of life, capable
of not only restoring ecosystems but also of unfolding our dormant potentials
of human strength and discernment. Humanity was only ever as doomed as it
believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy.
• This is
an edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, published by Manilla Press (£12.99).
To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
•
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac will be in conversation at a Guardian
Live event at the Royal Geographical Society, London SW7, on Tuesday 3 March,
7pm
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