The Up-and-Down Road Beyond 1.5 °C

A longtime climate and carbon researcher and practitioner offers some sober comfort around a passed climate threshold

Overshoot is a word to get comfortable with.

If you missed my conversation with a batch of climate scientists who recently wrote a paper pushing back against misuse of “tipping points” and “1.5 degrees C,” please click back here.

There’s nothing magically definitive about this and many other numbers tossed around for decades in climate policy and scientific discourse but it can serve as a decent milestone on humanity’s climate journey.

Then read

Julio Friedmann

’s refreshing fact-based and honest appraisal of what to do about the reality that this much highlighted number - 1.5 degrees Celsius above the world’s average temperature in the mid 1800s - is already in the rear-view mirror (climatic and societal momentum are harsh realities) even as it can still be humanity’s ultimate destination.

It’s hard to find a human enterprise in response to an emerging threat that doesn’t involve “overshoot.” (There are some, like the response to the damage to the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer, and the threat of nuclear war - at least so far.) And overshoot is not always something you can recover from. More than a few species extinctions testify to this.

Here’s Friedmann:

Read the full post here

1.5 °C in rear view window.

There is no upside to this.

We know some facts. Emissions are still rising, in large part because coal, oil, and gas demand are up. Predictions of plateaus in any of these have repeatedly proven premature – or just wrong. Although there is some progress in OECD nations, including increased EV uptake and decreased coal demand, it’s not uniform and has been locally reversed. Demands for fossil fuel abolition will remain unrequited.

A corollary fact: even simple challenges are proving difficult. The increase in US electricity demand (driven by industrialization, electrification, and hyperscalers) can’t be easily met with clean supply. A new study by Lawrence Berkeley Lab shows the persistent and growing challenge of the interconnect cue, with roughly 80% of clean energy projects withdrawing.

Friedmann goes into an explanation of recent measurements showing that there’s still basic scence to do to understand feedbacks and dynamics related to the last couple of years of unpredicted heating. He then describes what WAS well predicted - that humans wouldn’t be able to avoid passing 1.5.

Nothing about the energy transition is cheap, easy, or inevitable.

This outcome was predictable and predicted – long ago. In 2009, while I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, our climate scientists and though leaders like David Keith concluded there was a high likelihood of blowing past 1.5 C. The carbon budgets were too limited, given the increasing growth of emissions and the combined inertia and costs in the system. A number of us, including myself and Roger Aines, began working on CO₂ removal then, driven simply by the climate arithmetic. We believed climate change represented a national security threat, echoed then by the US Dept. of Defense.

Then he gets to the important part - what do do faced with CO2 “overshoot” realities.

Although politically useful, most notably in the drive behind the Paris Agreement, the simplicity and clarity of 1.5 °C was never scientifically or operationally useful in managing climate change. Quite the opposite: it led to counterproductive outrage, fatalism, and ultimately political rejection in the US and Europe.

Ultimately, what is useful to The Work remains useful, even after reflecting the additional implications of this climate milestone.

The substrate for climate mitigation has not changed. President Obama called [for] in 2014 – we need “All of the Above” progress, including efficiency, expanding renewables, electrification, nuclear buildout, carbon capture and storage, and clean fuels (like green hydrogen and SAF). Mobilizing this in advanced and developing economies has not changed. Focusing on emissions reductions remains important.

The same is true for energy access, adding infrastructure, adapting to extreme heat & weather, and preparing for sea-level rise, mass migrations, and wildfires.

Ultimately, 1.5 °C overshoot adds new focus to this work.

• CO₂ removal: Over 1.8 trillion tons of CO₂ (490 Gt C) remain in the air and oceans. We must urgently prioritize developing, fielding, and deploying robust CO₂ removal solutions ASAP.We should make those as durable as possible, to get good climate benefit from the investments. There would be upsides from this as well – a recent study by Rhodium Group estimates 130,000 new US jobs from scaling CDR to 100 million tons/y – roughly 2% of US emissions today.

• Clean manufacturing: Since progress in reducing industrial and agricultural emissions has been slowest, making clean products demands new commitment and investment. The European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is durable policy that provides solid economic rationale to clean manufacturing (demonstrated by Japan’s formation of the GX League). Making clean goods prepares for the long arch of climate mitigation and could break us out of a punitive stance to a productive one.

• Climate Diplomacy: China alone emits 31% of global emissions and their emissions continue to grow. (more on China soon). Although there are forecasts of a plateau before 2030, that may not occur. Even if it does, emissions reduction, notably through decoalification, will be very slow. China, the US, and the EU must work together, or it’s game over. That’s not exactly where today’s geopolitics sit.

For these reasons and more, the milestone of 1.5 °C should prompt a new philosophical framing for the coming decades of The Work.

Be ambitious.

Be Humble.

Be generous.

Ambitious: Because we have a long, long way to go and the way is hard.

Humble: because regularly, many economists, environmentalists, and politicians have proven categorically wrong.

Generous: because success will require more goodwill patience, and money than most realize, and generosity is needed for all three.

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