8 Charts to Show the State of Climate at COP26
The history of the climate crisis, where it is heading, and what is being (or not being) done about it
I am wary of weighing in on COP-related issues. First, because there is already a lot of hot air drowning out the very useful (and we will get to who is useful) voices. Second, I am meant to be on holiday. But the allure of the #HustleGrindset pulls me back into the climate ether.
So, rather than provide a half-thought theory of fixing climate change, I reckon it is a better idea to link people to some excellent data visualisation sources that describe the history of the climate crisis, where it is heading, and what is being (or not being) done about it.
The road to net zero gets tougher by the day
As the excellent chart by Carbon Brief shows, if we had taken action to curb rising emissions in 2000, the route to net zero would have been much more straightforward.
In this scenario, any sort of transition could have been gradual. We certainly wouldn’t have to be imagining the same short term future where immense sacrifices are made before ecological security is reached. But the gradual climb of emissions makes the descent all the more disruptive.
Now this chart refers to the goal of net zero by 2030, whereas 2050 is often the date touted by some governments and international organisations. There is debate over the necessity of 2030 vs 2050 (and the difference in outcomes here would be substantive), but the chart still illustrates the point for 2050. The longer you wait to act, the bigger the price you pay when you do act.
This then of course poses a series of important questions. Who is responsible for using up the planet’s carbon budget, and linked to this, who has to pay?
The China narrative is building. It is partially correct and partially wrong
A big theme that I am seeing emerge, from both parts of the right and left, goes something like this. Why should we (insert usually Western country) overhaul our economy in pursuit of net zero when China is driving greenhouse gas emissions?
Evidence of this argument isn’t merely anecdotal. A JL Partners poll found that a whopping 53% of Brits blame China for the climate change crisis.
This isn’t something to sneer at the British public over. On the surface, China holds 18% of the world’s population, is an industrial powerhouse, and to top it off, their President has failed to attend COP!
But the public is fundamentally wrong.
According to Carbon Brief, the UK’s cumulative emissions per capita is more than five times higher than that of China’s. Nations that industrialised much earlier than China are of course greater historic contributors towards emissions.
In the political philosophy of climate change, charts like these strike at the heart of questions over who should pay. If we respect the ‘polluter pays principle’, do we take into account these historic emissions, or should we only begin to create moral obligations for countries once the climate science consensus around greenhouse gases materialised, which was in the 1980s?
That being said, the likes of China and India will begin to form the majority of current emissions very soon, and that does mean that commitments to net zero by 2060 or 2070 from those nations will quite frankly lead to serious problems for all parts of our global economic, agricultural, political, and public health systems.
This is why it is imperative for other nations to scale technological innovation fast, in order to help facilitate technology transfer to nations that understandably would be furious that the developed world is kicking away the ladder that they made the most of.
Eating local isn’t as much of an issue as you may think
Some very smart people I follow on Twitter buy into a strain of thought which lambasts the role of global supply chains in the climate crisis.
Once again, this intuitively sort of makes sense. Transport, particularly in the form of shipping, requires a lot of energy. In a world where we stop importing meat from New Zealand and get our fill from local farmers, surely that must be a more sustainable practice?
Now, it wouldn’t be a chartfest on climate change without involving the work of Our World in Data.
As this decomposed bar chart shows, transport only accounts for 6% of total food emissions. Furthermore, there is a strong claim to be made that supply chains are essential for emissions by preventing food waste. As Hannah Ritchie notes in her magisterial explainer on the environmental impacts on food,
“One-quarter of emissions from food production ends up as wastage either from supply chain lessees or consumers. Durable packaging, refrigeration and food processing can help to prevent food waste. For example, wastage of processed fruit and vegetables is 15% lower than fresh, and 8% lower for seafood.”
This may not chime with the usual aesthetic of ‘ethical sourcing’, but aesthetics won’t matter if your climate system breaks down.
With crop production and land use making up the bulk of emissions, it is clear that focusing on what you eat, rather than where it comes from, is important for reducing your carbon footprint.
Climate anxiety is real, and pronounced amongst the young
It really isn’t a Newtonian insight to point this out. A recent survey asked 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries about their attitudes about climate change. The results were damning.
More than half said “humanity was doomed”; three-quarters said the future was frightening; 55 percent said they would have less opportunities than their parents; 52 percent said family security would be threatened; and 39 percent were hesitant to have children as a result. These attitudes were consistent across countries rich and poor, big and small: from the United States and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Philippines, India, and Nigeria.
This, from Nature, captures many of the morose feelings gripping Gen-Z.
Now, climate change does make me feel many of these things. I am sad. I am anxious. I am certainly angry. But I am also optimistic, something that is markedly rarer amongst those polled.
The fact that over half of those polled thought that humanity was destined for destruction is genuinely quite puzzling to me. As Hannah Ritchie points out in her Wired article, the differing projections for temperature rises do present substantially different scenarios, but we are not talking about an extinction level event.
Perhaps I am being facetious. Doom could still take the form of millions of climate refugees, the collapse of animal ecosystems, and increased prevalence of extreme weather events, all of which are beginning to materialise.
Yet I am still unconvinced by the deterministic alarmism that is exhibited in these surveys. There is a narrative amongst younger people that it is the elderly that are much more susceptible to misinformation. Remember during the start of the pandemic when your relatives would post on Whatsapp silly treatments to COVID such as vinegary water?
But actually it is far more complex than that. Climate information is clearly not accurate on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, where many younger people spend a lot of their time.
In fact, a study conducted by researchers from Harvard, Rutgers, Northeastern and Northwestern university found that Americans under 25 were more likely to believe virus-related misinformation about the severity of the disease and how it originated than those over 65.
Part of this is a question of dealing with online misinformation. But part of this is telling people a story that they can buy into. At the moment, politicians, influencers and leaders are not telling that story.
It is not all doom and gloom
The optimist in me takes courage from the fact that several countries, including the US, are now reducing their per capita co2 emissions. This is being done all whilst increasing GDP. Trends such as these help to (although do not entirely) sweep away some of the more loopy arguments around degrowth.
A common retort to this revolves around the concept of ‘outsourcing’. Sure, the US has managed to reduce its production of carbon emissions, but critics still argue that this is merely because they now ‘import’ emissions from the global south.
The above chart, again from the wizards at Our World in Data, collapses this claim significantly. As you can see, per capita emissions for both production and consumption are falling. The UK, France and Germany amongst others are seeing the same story play out.
Many of the Latin American countries (such as Costa Rica and Bolivia), that degrowthers such as George Monbiot and Jason Hickel hold up as the bastion of environmental management, are not faring so well in this regard. Consumption and production-based CO2 per capita isn’t falling in these countries.
That does not mean we are out of the woods. Not one iota.
As the New York Times showed in a great article earlier this week, neither current policies nor pledges of many of the big players in the climate game are sufficient to ensure that we do not face a 1.5 degree rise in global temperatures.
For that to be achieved, shifts in our approach to renewable technology are absolutely essential.
Solar keeps exceeding expectations
One area that the techno-optimists see as being essential to decarbonisation is solar. Between 2010 and 2019, solar PV costs fell by 82%. It is no wonder that the likes of the intimidatingly well-read Azeem Azhar and Noah Smith are nailing their colours to the mast on it.
But for some reason, international organisations keep on screwing up their estimations on solar’s future. As the above Carbon Brief chart shows, the last decade has seen the International Energy Agency underestimate solar capacity in their annual projections.
By 2021, it seems as if the IEA is getting the picture. As long as costs keep falling in the manner that they do (last year saw a 16% drop), the capacity is only going to grow.
This is all very inspirational. But when you are reminded that just 1.1% of current global primary energy use comes from solar, it is clear that there is a mammoth task ahead. Other clean energy sources are absolutely essential.
Will Natural Language Processors Become the New Planetary Enemy?
Natural Language Processors are a form of AI that enables machines to analyse, understand and manipulate human language. They will revolutionise the way that chatbots work, journalism is carried out and information distributed. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most potentially transformative elements of AI.
However, there is a potential catch.
The accuracy improvements depend on the availability of exceptionally large computational resources that necessitate similarly substantial energy consumption. The upshot is that these models are costly to train and develop, both financially, due to the cost of hardware and electricity or cloud compute time, and environmentally, due to the carbon footprint required to fuel modern tensor processing hardware.
Now, the above chart is slightly misleading, as Luke Biewald points out. 213M parameter transformers are very much at the top end of computationally expensive models. As a result, NLP models are not a big contributor towards carbon emissions today.
But in the future, as deep learning becomes more widely disseminated amongst the economy, and computational models increase in size, NLP emissions will begin to balloon. This throws a potential spanner in the works from a sustainability perspective
A paper by Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh and Andrew McCallum makes some great suggestions on dealing with this, including that ‘authors should report training time and sensitivity to hyperparameters’. The reason this is important is due to the fact that deep learning models are trained over and over again, soaking up big processing costs.
This, in my eyes, may lead to a very interesting fissure developing in the AI ethics community. Good data training is essential for ensuring that algorithmic bias is reduced in Machine Learning models, yet training over and over again clearly has an environmental cost. Therefore, the debate between ‘accuracy’ and environmental efficiency may become an increasingly visible debate within the responsible tech landscape.
Of the Week - My Favourites (COP-themed)
Podcast: Ones and Tooze - A Guide to the COP Climate Summit
Youtube Video: Don't Choose Extinction - UNDP | United Nations | Jack Black | Climate Action
The fact that this is a serious bit of work from an international institution cracks me up.
Song: James Blake ft slowthai - Funeral
Article: Hannah Ritchie (Wired) - Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change