Last weekend was a long weekend, which meant a lot of car trips. My friend went on one and told me how he was sitting in traffic on the I-90 in bumper-to-bumper traffic and started thinking about all the gas being burned just then and just there. And he thought about electric vehicles and how “there’s no way you get all of these people to switch, and have them charging their cars for 40 minutes and all that.”
It’s an interesting observation, mostly for what it shows about how we all still seem to think. As if there’s a choice between keeping things as they are and switching to these (oftentimes safer and healthier) low carbon technologies. But, of course, that’s not the choice. The real choice is between hanging onto our polluting habits with a death grip while the world burns before our eyes (it is happening already and will unavoidably get worse) or changing them now to spare ourselves at least the worst case future. Convincing people to switch is a matter of life and death already and increasingly will be a matter of the life and death of the people causing the pollution.
Of course, there is another side to this. In an interesting study (that I’ve only read summaries of) Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran discuss how “Big Oil” has used “Big Tobacco” tactics to make us shoulder more responsibility for climate change than we are due, so that they can shrug it off. It’s an interesting point that I would like to spend more time thinking about.
But in the meantime, there are big things happening in the corporate and governmental realms, evil PR notwithstanding. Yes, Shell lost a terrific Dutch lawsuit, Exxon’s management was overruled by shareholders who placed some more climate aware (let’s not say friendly) directors on the board, Chevron shareholders passed their own climate resolutions…yes, maybe a future where Big Oil/Petrochemical becomes something else is in sight.
Unfortunately, it’s almost certainly not near enough. The recent climate news that has me most enthused is the IEA Net Zero by 2050 Report that, in a readable, actionable, clear way provides a list of over 400 targets that must be reached if we really want to reach net zero carbon emissiosn by 2050, which scientists say is necessary (but not sufficient) to keep us below 1.5 degrees C warming (which, in turn, is necessary (but maybe not sufficient) to stave off apocalyptic future climate).
Anyway, lots of stuff to think about as we head into the summer months…