Tag Archives: livable human future

The Second Most Important Chart in the New IEA Report

1 Reply

This is probably the most important chart in the new IEA report, Net Zero by 2050:

It answers the question I asked when I first read about the report in today’s New York Times: what happens without the “unprecedented” global cooperation the report calls for?

In that likely scenario, the IEA does not see the world arriving at Net Zero emissions until around 2090 — which means we will have missed important targets (including limiting average global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius warming). It also means a much less livable human future.

The second most important chart, to my mind, is this one, predicting  growth in demand for critical minerals such as copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements.

The report breaks it down further:

In a short Twitter thread I wrote this morning, I offered this guess:

 

Hope of a Livable Human Future – Some Context

1 Reply

Hope keeps open a space for agency between the impossible and the fantastical; without it, the small window in time remaining for us to tackle climate change is already closed.

Catriona McKinnon’s 2014 paper “Climate Change: Against Despair” offers some philosophical framing for the totally unscientific liveable human future survey I conducted a while back. Recognizing “the instrumental value of hope in securing effective agency,” McKinnon argues that personal despair about tackling climate change through personal emissions is not justified, whether we take the position that our efforts will not be efficacious (“whatever I do will make no difference”) or the view that “I am unable to make a difference.”

The first of these positions creates a sorites paradox: if climate change is anthropogenic, then some individual acts must have contributed to it; so saying that whatever I do will make no difference commits me to a contradiction, which I ought to abandon. It’s enough for me to be uncertain what contribution my emissions make to climate change, as “uncertainty provides the context for hope rather than despair.”

To then say, as people often do, that whatever I do will not make anthropogenic climate change any worse than it already is, or that my personal emissions contribute imperceptibly to climate change, is only to rehearse the specious argument that “a large number of acts make a morally relevant difference, but each individual act makes no difference at all.”

This line of argument also suggests a way out of the despairing point of view that I am unable to make a difference. If we concede that personal emissions make some difference, or that it’s false that no personal emissions make any difference, “then if a person were to try to reduce her carbon footprint, and not give up, then she could succeed with respect to making a difference on climate change.”

Again, it may be impossible to tell whether my activity will tend to make a difference, or much of a difference, but the important point is that I would be unjustified in saying I am unable to make any difference. So in this case, “what despair amounts to…is the judgement that I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference.” If I am unwilling to do what I can do about climate change, if I am ready to give up, then I should be prepared to argue — I am not sure how — that I am not obliged to do what I can and that personal despair should in my everyday life override moral considerations.