'Tipping points' are accelerating the climate crisis
A public comment on the Western Cape's draft climate response strategy
Unfortunately, the headline focus on 2050 in the Western Cape’s draft climate response document is beyond dangerous. Talk of 2050 plays right into the hands of the fossil fuel industry, which, apparently hellbent on our destruction, is using 2050 net zero targets as cover for expanding extraction. The past three years have made it clear that the climate crisis is accelerating out of control. If that were not enough, just today, we see the Guardian headline: 'World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds’.
Sir David King, the former UK chief science adviser and chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, says:
‘What we do over the next three to four years, I believe, is going to determine the future of humanity. We are in a very, very desperate situation.’
Cutting global GHG emissions by 50% in this decade must now be the overwhelming imperative. If we achieve that, and we must, net zero by 2050 will probably largely take care of itself. The costs of failure are too great to contemplate.
Policymakers must now understand that:
climate scientists have been unable to fully communicate the extent of the crisis to policymakers and the general public
economists have very badly under-estimated the likely extent of climate damage
we are now multiple decades into the era of uneconomic growth, where the uncounted costs of fossil fuels wildly exceed the profits from their use and extraction
there is no longer any meaningful remaining carbon budget
rapidly scaling up finance for the energy transition to appropriate levels is absolutely possible if policymakers adopt the same seriousness with which they approached Covid, and a small portion of what was spent on Covid could still put us on track to actually meet the ambitions of Paris – but far more must spent, and we must now look beyond climate mitigation and adaptation to climate repair (which I mention in full knowledge of the potential pitfalls of geoengineering).
waiting for other countries to act first is now like waiting for others to jump first off a bus heading over a cliff
The Western Cape should lead the country in banning any expansion in the use of fossil gas, and setting firm targets for phasing it out. There's an emerging methane crisis unfolding alongside the CO2 crisis that we hardly even properly understand – the last thing we should be doing is actively pumping it out of the ground.
We realise you have made many of these points in your draft strategy, but I fear the 2050 framing badly undermines them. We need to start measuring our progress month-by-month and year-by-year, not decade by decade.
Targets for public education on the climate emergency are also absolutely vital. The Presidential Climate Commission has also acknowledged this gap. We can achieve nothing without public understanding, and unfortunately, most South Africans still have only the scantiest grasp of the climate issue.