Thinking the unthinkable on climate change
- Conservative Environment Network
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
As the Spanish Armada was preparing to set sail, one of its captains was asked about the expedition’s chances. Foreseeing accurately its failure and his own death, he replied with stoical humour, “We are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.”
That pretty much goes for the struggle against anthropogenic climate change as presently conceived and conducted. The effort to keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5 degrees is now extremely unlikely to succeed. Furthermore, there is also no chance – none whatsoever – that the effort to keep the rise below two degrees can succeed on the basis of existing policies. We urgently need a stronger and different course of action if we are going to tackle this serious existential threat.
However, even before Trump’s election and the European move to re–armament, political pressure on energy corporations to shift to renewables was waning. Fewer and fewer are now claiming that net zero by 2050 is a serious goal. We are already trapped in a ‘feedback loop’, whereby rising temperatures drive increased demand for air conditioning, and therefore for electricity which in most of the world is still chiefly dependent on fossil fuels.
Consider the figures. Between the Paris Agreement of 2015 – the first really serious international agreement to limit carbon emissions – and 2024, annual emissions actually rose from 35.4 billion tonnes to 37.4 billion; and the rise would have been even greater had it not been for the economic downturn produced by the COVID pandemic.
China has pursued a far more determined and comprehensive alternative energy strategy than the West; but it is still falling far short of its declared aim of reducing carbon intensity by 18 percent by 2026. Whilst China is ramping up and investing heavily in renewable energy, it is also still continuing to expand its coal production. India too is greatly increasing its coal–based electricity generation.
Much of the world appears to be expecting that technological developments over the next generation will allow a less disruptive and expensive transition later on. In the meantime however, the resulting build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is creating changes that subsequent reductions in emissions will not be able to reverse.
As far as the West is concerned, this is not a failure of individual governments or countries, let alone the “twenty corporations” that the environmentalist Left likes conveniently to blame for climate change. Our entire political systems, indeed our whole societies and political economies, have proved incapable of rising to this challenge. Our elites are deeply unwilling to make serious and proportionate sacrifices themselves. Not surprisingly therefore, their demands that ordinary people make disproportionate sacrifices have provoked populist reactions. If we are going to succeed in tackling this existential threat, we need to substantially rethink how we build consensus to take the necessary and proportionate action needed.
President Macron has never really recovered from the Gilets Jaunes protests against his diesel tax; the Greens helped ruin the last German coalition with their attempt to mandate the adoption of domestic heat pumps; and the Biden administration’s watered–down Green New Deal did not save the Democrats from defeat at the hands of Trump.
Are we then just waiting for a technological miracle? And in fact, we have already achieved three – nuclear energy, solar panels and wind turbines. Between them, these are technically capable of replacing the overwhelming majority of current fossil–generated electricity production.
Radical change requires an act of will by governments, and this will is also lacking in both authoritarian and democratic systems. In Europe, parties of both the centre–left and the centre–right have openly abandoned the idea of a ‘Green Revolution’ in favour of what has been called ‘Military Keynesianism’, the attempt to rebuild national industries through weapons production. Even the German Greens have gone along with this.
Nor is there any hope of more political oppositions producing change. Prospects of radical change today come not from the Left but the populist Right. Logically speaking, the menace of hugely increased migration, partly as a result of the climate crisis, should lead right– wing parties to recognise climate change as a fundamental menace. In practice, they have exploited and encouraged hostility to climate change action as part of their strategy of appealing to anti–elite resentments.
Of course, this does not mean that we should give up. If we can still keep the rise in temperatures to below 2.5 degrees, that is still a great deal better than three degrees. But every rise in temperature increases the risk that climate change will cease to be incremental and escape from our control altogether; that we will reach ‘tipping points’ whereby a sudden change like the huge release of methane from the Arctic permafrost or the disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC, that powers the Gulf Stream) will create ‘feedback loops’. These would mean that two degrees leads to a rise of three degrees and three degrees to four degrees until civilisation itself collapses.
This, not greater naval activity by Russia and China, is the great threat to Britain from the Arctic. The collapse of AMOC would radically transform the very face of Britain. Long before this however, the collapse of agriculture and states in Africa and South Asia would have set off a wave of migration that would end the existing British political system.
If we want to have any hope of preventing such disasters, we have to think the unthinkable and start planning seriously for engineering the climate to check the rise in temperatures. Geo–engineering must not be a substitute for action to limit carbon emissions. However, if present policies continue to fail, it may have to be utilised as an additional weapon in our arsenal in the battle against climate change.
On a planetary scale, engineering the climate is completely impossible, but also unnecessary. The Arctic is the region that threatens to generate these sudden and cataclysmic changes, and this danger is hugely increased by the fact that it is also the region where temperatures are rising fastest, at nearly four times the global figure.
Whilst still controversial, support for geo–engineering the Arctic is growing as the melting of the ice gathers pace and hopes of adequately reducing emissions fade. In September 2024, The New Scientist called it our “only hope” to prevent disaster in the region. However, the great majority of countries remain signatories to a moratorium on geo– engineering activities “until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.” If the result is to delay geo– engineering solutions until the damage from climate change has already become acute, then future generations are likely to find this a misplaced set of priorities; for after all, climate change, if it escapes from our control, poses not “risks” but certainties of acute social, economic and cultural impacts.
The biggest obstacle to geo–engineering may be the international co–operation required. For while the intrinsic dangers of geo– engineering may well have been exaggerated, it seems certain that if countries engage in their own separate, rival and competitive programmes, the results will indeed be disastrous. Such co–operation will depend on agreement between the other Arctic countries and Russia. At present, three of those countries (Norway, Denmark and Canada) are bitterly hostile to Russia. The Trump administration is seeking reconciliation with Russia, but denies that climate change is even happening. The impacts of climate change in the Arctic are already apparent and yet Western establishments are instead focused on the potential security threat from Russia and China in the Arctic.
The Trump administration’s interest in the Arctic is in getting American hands on the mineral resources that would be opened by the melting of the Greenland ice cap – resources that would have to be huge indeed to compensate for the drowning of New York and Miami by the resulting rises in sea level. The Russian government also believes that on balance it will benefit from climate change.
Given that Britain is especially threatened by climate change in the Arctic and the resulting danger to the Gulf Stream, Britain should take the lead in advocating for more proportionate, ambitious global action to meet the threat of climate change and advancing this agenda. For while an excuse can be found for US Republican denial of climate change on grounds of sheer stupidity, our descendants are unlikely to excuse the behaviour of the Labour government that has declared climate change an existential threat, yet is failing to take action remotely commensurate with that all too accurate statement.
Views expressed in this chapter are those of the author, not necessarily those of the Conservative Environment Network.
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