A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report. By now, you may have seen some of the key takeaways highlighted in international headlines. Greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2025 and then rapidly decline in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). (See the Stat of the Week below. That means 1,000 days from today.) The task is absolutely within our reach—we have all the technology we need—but time is running out.

 

The message landed with maximum dissonance amid a news cycle of politicians doubling down on fossil fuels. President Biden announced a plan last Thursday to release one million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to lower gas prices, while putting pressure on oil companies to drill more, potentially even imposing fees on wells left unexploited on public land. Climate advocates such as Bill McKibben, meanwhile, have been saying for weeks that a more climate-friendly response to the war in Ukraine and ensuing gas price spike might involve immediately invoking the Defense Production Act to send millions of heat pumps overseas, which would lower the amount of gas needed to heat Europe. Gas relief payments of various sorts could also be a short-term option for domestic relief.

 

But there’s also some dissonance in the report itself—specifically, between the frank assessment offered in the full report and “Technical Summary” versus the much more fossil fuel–friendly “Summary for Policymakers.” Climate reporters such as Amy Westervelt have pointed out that both the full report and the Technical Summary not only urge countries to get off fossil fuels yesterday but show that it is possible to transition off fossil fuels while maintaining standard of living. These parts of the report also indicate problems with politicians’ and fossil fuel companies’ favorite so-called climate “solution”: carbon capture and sequestration.

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As Genevieve Guenther wrote in Apocalypse Soon this week, the assumption that “we need carbon dioxide removal” is quickly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as politicians and CEOs continue to use the prospect of carbon dioxide removal down the line to greenlight further fossil fuel development. In reality, we probably can’t keep up with the large-scale carbon dioxide removal necessary if we keep going down this path. 

 

“To remove 10 gigatons of CO2 a year from the atmosphere—about a quarter of global annual emissions—we would have to grow grasses on a land area about one and a half times the size of India,” Genevieve writes. “Direct air capture has problems, too. The [National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine] estimates that running enough DAC to capture 1,000 tons of CO2, less than one second of current annual emissions, would require so much energy that we would need to site both methane-gas plants and solar panels on anywhere from 1,355 to 2,450 acres.… All this land to capture less than one second’s worth of current annual CO2 emissions.” And that’s before you get to the fact that carbon capture equipment does not have the best track record of performing up to promised targets.

 

TNR’s Kate Aronoff also wrote about the IPCC report, looking at the disconnect between the full report and the summary. Why are these two documents so different in what they emphasize? As she explains:

Like energy policy in the U.S., the IPCC’s summaries for policymakers are subject to political pressures from fossil fuel interests. Summaries are initially drafted in bite-size 300-word increments by subject-area experts who then fight for space about what can be included. In the two weeks before the report is released, governmental delegations go line by line through that text and negotiate over what gets included and what doesn’t. As a result of haggling by some of the world’s biggest polluters, the most recent summary presents a broad and euphemistic menu of routes toward a “substantial reduction in fossil fuel use,” many of which involve technologies that remain infeasible.

 

Kate talked to a source involved in the drafting process, who said some of the governmental delegations, including Saudi Arabia’s, pushed to “excise clear language about phasing out fossil fuels and criticisms of carbon dioxide removal” from the policymakers’ summary.

 

But that’s not the only reason the public—and policymakers—might be getting the wrong idea about what the full report actually says, Kate writes. “Some Working Group III authors and editors are directly employed either by industry-friendly groups or actual fossil fuel companies, like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, and the International Chamber of Commerce,” she notes. “But required conflict-of-interest disclosures don’t preclude industry funding for academic research, which can inform both authors’ perspectives and the research compiled in the report.”

 

It all adds up to a complicated picture: The world has the technology it needs to transition off fossil fuels and avoid the worst of the climate crisis, while still meeting energy needs. For largely political reasons, however, we’re not making use of them. It’s well established at this point that fossil fuel interests are a big part of the reason politics are stuck on this issue. And if you doubt the power of those interests, just look at how much influence they’ve managed to exercise over summarizing an international climate report—a report that’s otherwise very frank about the state of emergency we’re in.

 

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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