It’s too late to prevent climate change from inflicting more of the kinds of deadly heat waves, drought and wildfires that have turned much of the American West into an apocalyptic hellscape this summer. There’s still time, though, to avert full-on climate catastrophe, but only if we take decisive action now to end our reliance on the fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis.
That’s the five-alarm warning from the recent United Nations report on climate change, in what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres correctly called “a code red for humanity” that “must sound a death knell” for fossil fuels.
The consensus view of more than 200 scientists and 195 countries, the UN climate report is the most definitive report ever on global climate change. It connects the dots between what we’re reading about in our newspapers — if not seeing out our kitchen windows — and what the science tells us is happening.
The Earth, already hotter than at any other time in at least 125,000 years, will get warmer. Heat waves, droughts and floods will become more severe and occur more often. Wildfires will widen and worsen, seas will continue to rise and the Gulf Stream will continue to slow.
That’s what we’ve baked into our future already by kicking the climate can this far down the road. The question is, how much hotter, how much more severe, and how much worse will all of this be?
The answer to that is entirely in our hands. It depends on whether we finally muster the will to act.
Chiefly by burning coal, gas and oil, we’ve raised the carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere to their highest level in more than 3 million years. We’ve warmed the planet 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), with most of the warming occurring in the past 40 years.
We’re on track to increase the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in little more than a decade or so, meaning the climate crisis is destined to deepen.
What’s critical is that we draw the line there, if we want to inhabit a livable world.
That will require, the report makes clear, that we cut the dangerous carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels in half by 2030 and stop adding it to the atmosphere altogether by 2050. We can’t afford to miss that target. To do so could drive warming up to double the 1.5-degree limit, or higher by the end of the century, making much of the world as we know it essentially uninhabitable.
Again, this is the bedrock truth from the leading climate scientists of the world. Science doesn’t get any clearer than this.
As the nation’s second-largest emitter of carbon pollution — China is the largest — the United States has a unique role to play in leading this global mission to save the world from fossil fuel destruction.
The climate provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda are the place to start.
It provides investments and incentives to help clean up the dirty power plants that account for roughly a third of our carbon footprint. It will help speed the shift to electric vehicles and make a record investment in public transit to confront the transportation sector that accounts for another third. It will help us cap abandoned oil and gas wells, a toxic legacy of the fossil fuels age that contributes to climate change by leaking methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate passed is a down payment on these priorities. Next, congressional leaders must do what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for, and pass partner legislation, with only Democratic support if necessary, to fully enact Biden’s agenda.
The UN report leaves no doubt that Biden’s full climate plan is needed, so we can reach the president’s goal of cutting the U.S. carbon footprint in half by 2030 and set us on track for rubbing out that footprint altogether by 2050.
Fully enacting this agenda at home will strengthen U.S. climate leadership abroad. That’s especially important now, just three months before global climate talks open in Glasgow, Scotland. Formally known as COP26, the UN-sponsored conference gathers nearly every nation in the world around the need for coordinated action to confront the climate crisis.
The Glasgow talks must build on the landmark 2015 climate agreement reached in Paris, where world leaders committed to limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, by providing an action point for the major fossil fuel users of the world to pledge even deeper cuts in carbon emissions commensurate with the rising costs and mounting dangers the climate crisis is inflicting on people worldwide.
The UN climate report also warns of growing global inequity that mirrors the environmental injustice in our own country, where the same low-income communities and people of color who have contributed least to the problem are too often paying the highest price for its consequences.
We must address that in Glasgow, if not before, by ensuring that low-income countries have access to the financing and technology needed to break with fossil fuels and shift to clean energy and the resources to protect their people from the ravages of climate change we’re no longer able to prevent.
That’s what the science makes clear we must do. Now let’s find the political will to make it happen.
Mitchell Bernard is president of NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).