This commentary is by Isaac Bissell, a climate activist who lives in South Burlington.
Over the last several years, there has been an increasing awareness of the dire situation we face when it comes to climate change. Among Democratic politicians and nonprofits, there has been an adoption of the language of activists in the use of terms like climate crisis and climate emergency.
A good example of this type of urgency-based language came from a recent commentary by Joe Flynn, June Tierney and Julie Moore, all of whom hold leadership positions within state government. They stated: “The moral imperative to do our piece in driving down greenhouse gas emissions is more real and more urgent than it has ever been. We need to accelerate our actions, now.”
While this statement may be true, the solutions they offer are so deeply embedded in status-quo thinking that they do not even begin to touch the scale of the crisis we face. The inability of those working within existing power structures to speak honestly about the problem we face is deeply problematic and undermines our society’s ability to address the climate crisis at the appropriate scale.
In Vermont, the solutions being offered by those in power generally focus on targets laid out in the Global Warming Solutions Act. These targets are all built around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 determination that we must globally get to net zero by 2050 in order to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate.
The plan that was laid out by the IPCC in 2018 is the plan to decouple emissions growth from economic growth. In other words, its fundamental assumption is that economic growth must be maintained, and that while maintaining economic growth we need to figure out how to reduce our emissions.
The plan they laid out attempts to do just that, and assuming their economic calculations are correct and the yet-to-be-invented carbon-capture technologies materialize, the best-case scenario for such a plan is that we achieve net zero by 2050.
The fundamental problem with this plan, however, is that the climate science on which this plan was based has now been shown to deeply underestimate the pace of climate change. Yet politicians and nonprofits alike continue to promote solutions that are in line with this plan, rather than taking a step back and asking what is necessary now that our understanding of the scale of the problem has improved.
Unfortunately, the unwillingness to address the true scale of the problem does nothing to safeguard future generations from outright climate collapse.
There is a fundamental need to recognize its shortcomings and to propose alternatives. We need to acknowledge that the decoupling plan — which focuses on a transition to electric vehicles and a transition away from fossil fuels in general while maintaining an economy that requires growth in order to remain stable — is deeply insufficient.
We must recognize that net zero by 2050 is far too late, and that more fundamental transformations of our economy and society are necessary. We must recognize that, if we follow the leadership of those who are promoting the decoupling plan, we are damning future generations to a hellish existence.
One of the things that scares me most about the investments that are being proposed by Democrats and nonprofits is their opportunity cost. When we invest in a plan that cannot solve the problem we are facing, we move ourselves further away from solving the problem, not closer.
The investment in electric vehicle infrastructure, for example, is an investment in a future in which we rely on electric vehicles for transportation, rather than a future in which there is not a heavy reliance on cars for transportation. In focusing on short-term outcomes that can be accommodated by our existing economic system, we are guaranteeing that in the long term we fail to address the problem at the appropriate scale.
The sales pitch that comes with these investments likewise obscures the actual scale of the problem we face. When we sell the decoupling plan by saying that the solutions are within our grasp, and that we simply need to find the will to implement them, we are not being honest with ourselves. The problem simply runs deeper than this, and this type of false hope stands in the way of a more honest conversation about transformational change.
No one has the answers to a problem of the scale that we are facing, but any viable answer will have to include a plan to transition away from a growth-based economy.
I will not pretend to be able to offer any sort of firm path forward. All I can say is that the decoupling plan, as identified by the IPCC in 2018, has been proven to fall well short of what is necessary, and shifting away from a growth-based economy must be part of any plan to address the crisis we are facing.
We simply cannot maintain economic growth while addressing the climate crisis in a relevant timeframe. What I am asking is that we have an honest conversation about the implications of what has now been shown to be our fundamental reality.
