30 new york | september 16–29, 2019
“I HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING THAT’S worthy of the word
plan,” Bill Gates told me in early August when I asked him whether
he saw any path forward on climate that would allow us to stay be-
low two degrees of warming.
“It’d be great if we could stop at two degrees,” Gates said. “Unless
there are huge surprises on scientific advances, I just don’t see it
happening.” As for the U.N.’s stated goal of 1.5 degrees? “We’re not
in that universe, period,” he said. “Unfortunately, the general litera-
ture, because it’s done by scientists, understates these things by
quite a bit,” he went on. “I think of India as paradigmatic because
it’s big enough to count and it’s poor enough. They deserve to have
air-conditioning. They’re getting very high wet-bulb temperatures.
Jesus Christ, by 2070 there could be just a massive number of
people dropping dead in the streets.”
Gates is, famously, a techno-optimist. In recent years, the Gates
Foundation has focused more on climate change, and he is, as an
investor, behind a lot of the most ambitious work being done on
next-generation nuclear power (critical to making new plants
affordable), battery storage (critical to making intermittent renew-
able sources like wind and solar truly scalable), and carbon-capture
technology (critical if we hope to take enough carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere to bring carbon concentration back under cata-
strophic levels). But on innovation he cites more pessimistic think-
ers. “The greatest expert on energy is Vaclav Smil,” Gates said, echo-
ing praise he has offered elsewhere for the iconoclastic Canadian
academic and author of Energy and Civilization. “Whenever you
spend time with Vaclav, he’s like, ‘Oh yeah? You’re going to do what
in 20 years?’ ”
I called Smil. His new book, Growth, closes with the line “The
long-term survival of our civilization cannot be assured without
setting ... limits on a planetary scale.” When I put the question of
two degrees to him, he literally laughed: “To make that happen, you
are talking about billions and billions of tons of everything. We are
mining now more than 7 billion tons of coal. So you want to lower
the coal consumption by half, you have to cut down close to 4 billion
tons of coal. You have to get rid of more than 2 billion tons of oil.
These are transformations on a billion-ton scale globally. They can-
not be done by next Monday.”
Naomi Klein, the leftist and climate activist, was more hopeful
but still called the goal of staying below two degrees “a moon shot.”
When I asked Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the lead policy author of the
Green New Deal, whether it was possible to decarbonize on the U.N.
timeline, she said, “This is going to sound very dark, and I should
preface it by saying ‘I am a depressive,’ but a lot of life is pain. And
one of the best things you can hope for is that, in life, you have the
privilege to pick what kind of pain you want.”
In dozens of conversations like these in the months leading up
to the U.N. summit, not a single climate leader expressed great
confidence to me that we would manage to avoid two degrees of
warming. That may seem like a rebuke to the clarity of purpose
embedded in Greta’s goals—and indeed to the whole U.N.-supported
climate apparatus targeting, as she does, a safe landing at 1.5
degrees. And it does probably signal the arrival of a new era for
climate politics, the post-two-degree phase, when we may stop so
single-mindedly chasing quixotic temperature goals and debating
how many angels have to dance on the head of a pin to get there.
Instead, we can begin designing ways to limit warming beyond
that level and designing ways to live best amid those conditions,
which once seemed unimaginable. As nearly all of my interlocutors
pointed out, by any rigorous logic, the faster arrival of catastrophic
impacts argues not for fatalism but for more ambition in response,
deployed more quickly and more widely, especially to protect those
already suffering. Gunn-Wright told me she hardly ever thinks
about the technical question of whether the U.N. timeline is plau-
sible, so focused is she on the work of preventing more warming
and more pain at any temperature level. As Klein put it, “I don’t see
this as either we do it all or we should all just give up and drink
ourselves to death. I think it all matters because every quarter-
degree is hundreds of millions of lives, if not more.” Then she added,
“The rockier the future is, the more important it is that we become
a decent society. Which we’re not right now.”
Here is why everyone is so pessimistic: Emissions are at an all-
time high, not moving too slowly in the right direction but still
moving in the wrong direction, last year reaching a new peak partly
because of increased energy demand arising from growing air-
conditioning use for relief on all the additional punishingly hot
days; staying safely below two degrees, the U.N. says, requires halv-
ing emissions globally over the next decade; those modeled path-
ways also require such rapid deployment of technology to remove
CO 2 from the atmosphere that by the end of the decade, we’d have
to have built from scratch a carbon-capture industry at least twice
and perhaps four times as large as today’s oil and gas businesses,
which took more than a century to develop; and they also require
expanding nuclear power probably by at least 150 percent, perhaps
by as much as 500 percent, by just 2050. There are other paths to
climate stability than the ones drawn by the IPCC, of course, but
those that feature less nuclear and less carbon capture require
decarbonization to come even more quickly—perhaps, one IPCC
scenario suggests, by adjusting our policy priorities away from eco-
nomic growth. Even the slower, more manageable path to two
degrees requires, the U.N. says, a global World War II–scale mobi-
lization. Secretary-General António Guterres, who met Greta last
December, says it needs to begin this year.
2019 has been, yes, a remarkable one for climate, with all those
protests and town halls, rising poll numbers for concern about cli-
mate change (ten points in a single year in the U.S.), and wind and
solar power expanding around the globe (now cheaper, in many
parts of it, than dirty energy). But even a climate optimist would tell
you this progress isn’t enough, not nearly. The rosy view is: With
exploding political energy and skyrocketing policy pledges and
astonishing progress with renewables, everything is moving in the
right direction but time. The bleaker perspective is: We haven’t even
begun to dent the centuries-long trajectory of global emissions
growth, and, in the form of Category 5 hurricanes stalling for days
over low-lying islands and record heat waves broiling Europe three
times in a single summer, the impacts are already unprecedented
and beginning to overwhelm us.
The politics show it, growing only more jagged. It has been just
three years now since the historic signing of the Paris climate
accords, which formalized the two-degree goal, and here is what
has happened in the meantime: Donald Trump was elected presi-
dent of the United States, pledging to boost coal, kill wind power,
and roll back environmental regulations so aggressively that the
industry groups he was theoretically appealing to have objected;
Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, promising to defor-
est the Amazon at such a rate that scientists of his own country
estimated the impact would be, over the course of a decade, equal
to adding a second China and a second U.S. to the global carbon
footprint, if only for a year; and Xi Jinping appointed himself
president for life of China, a booming autocracy that has, just this
year, proposed new coal plants to single-handedly push us past
the Paris goals.
What this means is that while Greta can look like a refreshing
vision of a green future, in other ways her protest embodies the cli-
mate politics of the era now ending, when the forces of denial and
delay so shaped the boundaries of political discourse that simply
advocating for action and demanding we respect the science could
sound, at first, like a radical gesture and perhaps sufficient. Greta
knows it isn’t, not anymore, which is why she has pointedly said that
what she wants now is “a concrete plan, not just nice words.”