We're Making Progress
On the road to 2.0°C
Welcome to The Economic Dispatch - your weekly energy & society newsletter!
Today’s topic: How we’ve actually made a significant course correction within the past 6 years, and how that makes me feel.
Earth, 2024-05-13
1.17 °C | 2.11 °F - temperature rise from preindustrial levels
425 ppm - carbon dioxide
103 mm | 4.1” - sea level rise since 1993
3.7 down to 2.9
Let’s cut to the chase. Look at the two charts below, from Climate Action Tracker. Top is from 2018, bottom is from 2024. Pay attention to the dark blue curves (Current policies / Policies & action).
See what I’m talking about? Just six years ago, we were expecting to end up at a disastrous 3.1 - 3.7°C of warming by 2100. Now, we’re down to a disastrous 2.5 - 2.9°C!
Jest aside, I think I need these reality checks quite often. I feel like I’ve spent so much energy trying to rage against the machine and carve out a path towards a lower carbon future, while it seems that the whole world has been trying to do the same, as well. Maybe climate shouldn’t be treated as a completely insurmountable challenge? Maybe we’re doing what needs to be done?
Climate is so 2022 bro
I gotta say though, I feel like there is a little bit of sexiness associated with being the first to hop on the train towards something like industrial decarbonization, or large-scale direct air carbon capture. It’s tough, it’s new, nobody else has done it, and you’re going to be the one with the grit & skills to see it through and end up on the cover of Time magazine! So the fact that we’re making huge headways to maybe one day achieving our climate targets does make me (only marginally) less interested in the climate problem, and maybe more interested in other parts of the unknown like AI or crypto.
Guess things are only cool to me if I was one to do them before they became popular.
Earth isn’t gonna cool itself
Of course, there is work to be done, and still an unimaginable of uncertainty as to how the next 66 years will play out. These are all still projections. We still need people to work and a) make these projections a reality and b) continue driving down the forecast to a point in line with widely-accepted climate targets like the Paris Agreement.
That’s all I have to say for now — maybe you share the same feelings as myself, and I hope you learned a useful data point or two you can use to inform your climate conversations with your friends.