On March 20, the IPCC published the sixth assessment report on climate change. The document from the scientific body that advises the United Nations (UN) is a synthesis of other documents that were published in more than a decade. Curiously, the disclosure did not get due coverage in the world press, despite its strong sense of urgency, given the acceleration of global warming.
Once again, the IPCC confirms: greenhouse gas emissions have “unequivocally caused global warming”, and today the global surface temperature is 1.1°C above the average for the pre-industrial period, between 1850 and 2020.
But not only that, in the last 50 years the global surface temperature has increased faster than in the last 2,000 years. Another surprising fact: in the last 30 years alone (1990-2019), 42% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since 1850 have been released into the atmosphere. That is, despite the numerous environmental conferences and climatic events held in these three decades – from ECO-92, held in Rio de Janeiro, to the last COP, held in Egypt in 2022 – there has been an enormous acceleration of GHG emissions into the atmosphere. In 2019, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 they numbered 410 parts per million, the highest recorded for at least the last two million years.
We will overcome the 1.5ºC barrier in the decade and 2030
The report also concludes that the exponential and uncontrollable increase in global average temperature will exceed 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels already in the 2030s. As is known, this was the limit drawn by the Paris Agreement, which recommends limit global average temperature by 1.5°C.
Keeping Earth’s average temperature down to 1.5°C would mean managing climate change a bit more severely than it is today. It should be remembered that, in all its history, humanity has never faced an increase in global average temperature like this. Above 2 °C it could already mean a step towards the activation of breakpoints in the Earth system and could threaten countless coastal cities. An increase of 3°C would already condemn many natural systems of the biosphere to collapse and coastal cities would disappear.
Breakpoints are positive feedback systems. That is, a critical threshold from which a system is irreversibly reorganized, feeding back global warming. The Amazon, for example, may reach a point of no return with the degradation of the forest, spewing out more CO2 into the atmosphere and feeding back the warming of the climate. Another point of no return is the thawing of permafrost, a type of permanently frozen soil that has the potential to release twice as much carbon as currently exists in the atmosphere.
Of all greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide), CO2 is the most worrisome. Approximately ten years after being released, the CO2 it reaches its maximum heat retention capacity and can remain for many decades and centuries in the atmosphere and oceans. This is called the CO inertia effect.2. According to the IPCC, most emissions (79%) come from the energy, industry, transportation, and construction sectors, and 22% from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. In the case of Brazil, the sector that emits the most is the change in land use, that is, the deforestation of our forests and the expansion of agriculture and livestock. Just over 46% of Brazilian emissions come from deforestation, followed by 24% of emissions from agricultural activities, which clearly reflects the country’s semi-colonial condition.
Changes are rapid and widespread
The report acknowledges that rapid and widespread changes are already taking place in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere. The global mean sea level, for example, rose 0.20 cm between 1901 and 2018. Even worse: the average rate of sea level rise has accelerated: it was 1.3 mm per year (between 1901 and 1971). , at 3.7 mm/year between 2006 and 2018.
Half of humanity lives in “contexts highly vulnerable to climate change”, exposed to food, water and housing insecurity. And between 2010 and 2020, the report estimates that human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions, compared to regions with very low vulnerability.
The sixth report further highlights that weather and climate extremes are increasingly driving displacement in Africa, Asia, North America, Central America and South America.
Obstacles to the energy transition
The report does not say it with all the letters, but anyone understands that there is no future for fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) if we do not want to irremediably compromise civilization and the entire Earth system, triggering the points of no return.
According to the IPCC, the installation of new clean energy sources is the only way to limit the temperature below 2°C. But this requires an urgent, revolutionary and unprecedented transformation of energy supply on a global scale, in which global CO emissions2 they would have to be reduced by around 7% each year until 2050. Currently, around 35,000 million tons of CO are emitted into the atmosphere per year2.
The text highlights that renewable forms of energy, such as wind and solar, are becoming cheaper, and maintaining fossil fuels can be more expensive than transitioning to low-carbon systems. He is also emphatic on the need to develop technologies capable of capturing CO2 of the atmosphere to prevent warming above 2°C. However, he acknowledges that they are still unreliable. More often than not, they serve as an excuse for oil companies to explore for more oil and gas reserves.
What the IPCC does not say
The IPCC’s sixth report is perhaps one of the most compelling ever published by the body. Reading it leads to an unavoidable conclusion: in the capitalist world, no climate agreement has worked and cannot work. Everyone is shipwrecked, despite the data that accumulates. Meanwhile, science walks with open eyes in the face of the evolution of the climate catastrophe. The tragic story of Cassandra from Greek mythology is perhaps an appropriate allegory to describe the current situation. Cassandra was the Trojan prophetess cursed by Apollo with the gift of seeing the future and making prophecies. But no one would ever believe them, and when she predicted the fall and destruction of Troy, everyone laughed at her.
The problem is that, under capitalism, the energy transition is nothing more than a farce and will not stop the catastrophe that is looming. We know that the obstacle to this is the enormous subsidies that governments give to the big oil companies. A 2020 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency tracked an estimated $634 billion in subsidies to the energy sector in 2020 and found that about 70% went to fossil fuels and just 20% went to renewable power generation (1 ).
However, the initiatives of the governments of the central countries of capitalism indicate that in recent years there has been (and will be) a greater investment in research on renewable sources, such as photovoltaic and wind matrices, the improvement of research on green hydrogen (H)2V) and the use of biofuels (which is not clean energy, although planners may take it into account).
But this process has been carried out by the central countries of capitalism. The United States, China and Germany are in a race to control this market and obtain some technological rent for the big monopolies. Even the big foreign oil companies are investing heavily in the development of new sources of clean energy. This will not result in an “energy transition” in the short or medium term, but in the creation of an “energy mix”, in which new renewable and clean sources are combined with fossil fuels, something absolutely insufficient to solve the problem of Emissions of greenhouse gases.
In addition, a “green transition” under capitalism is based on an energy matrix that depends on the development of highly extractive industries that increase the environmental crisis. This is the case with electric batteries for cars, homes and other machines, which require the extraction of lithium and other rare minerals (such as cadmium, cobalt or nickel). The “green transition” promoted by a sector of the industrial apparatus of imperialism goes hand in hand with new polluting mining projects that, among other things, put at risk the contamination of aquifers and ecological systems important for human and animal life. In addition, with the development of electric vehicles, there is already a race between the United States and China to exploit lithium in South America, existing in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia (2).
In short: the central countries of capitalism, while intensifying oil and gas exploration, promote the development of new energy sources and an imperialist race to guarantee the supply of raw materials for the very near future.
There is no future with capitalism (3). To stop the environmental catastrophe that is knocking on the door and threatening all civilization, it is essential to overcome capitalism and build a socialist and ecologically balanced society.
(1) Taylor, M. Energy Subsidies: Evolution in the Global Energy Transformation to 2050 – Agencia Internacional de Energías Renovables, 2020.
(2) See at: https://elpais.com/internacional/2023-03-21/luis-arce-denuncia-que-el-litio-de-bolivia-esta-amenazado-por-la-derecha-internacional. html
(3) For projections, see the IPCC Interactive Atlas: https://bityli.com/29InTA
Article published in www.pstu.org.br, 3/24/2023.-
Translation: Natalia Estrada.