You still can’t name any science based institutions that support you, can you ?
But what does science say about saving the planet with good-paying jobs? Or about whether Trump should be president? Almost nothing. And what does it say about how we should address the climate change problem? Only a little bit more.
First, what Science has taught us: Climate change is a real side effect of humans’ efforts to harness energy—the bedrock of our material well-being—via fossil fuel combustion. We know that there are sufficient fossil fuels around us that, if we were to burn all of them, global temperatures could potentially be raised by more than
10°C above preindustrial levels over thousands of years. We understand that this would be a magnitude and rate of change matched only by catastrophic events like the end-Cretaceous extinction, which caused the demise of the dinosaurs as well as around 75% of all species on the planet.
But we also know that human material well-being is fundamentally tied to the availability and affordability of energy, and over the past several centuries, humanity has found that the combustion of fossil fuels constitutes a particularly effective means of obtaining this energy. In the most extreme hypothetical case of halting all greenhouse gas emissions immediately (i.e., in a matter of weeks or months), we know that global economic production and trade could grind to a halt, and that the basic provision of food, water, and protection from the elements would be out of reach for large swaths of the global population.
Most people would thus agree that we would like to avoid both the consequences of the combustion of all fossil fuels as well as the consequences of eliminating all fossil fuels immediately. There’s a sweet spot, in short, somewhere in the middle.
Climate action advocates often claim that, according to The Science, we have already blown past that sweet spot and that it is therefore necessary to embark on a very rapid transition away from current energy, industrial, and agricultural systems, such that there are net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the globe avoids 1.5°C of warming. In the corporate sustainability world, such goals are even referred to as
science-based targets.
In this worldview, humanity’s apparent inability to fully adopt science-based targets is an indictment of our systems of governance—and of human nature itself. Slower-than-recommended progress on decarbonization must mean that politicians are bought off and that we as a species are selfish, myopic, and rife with science-denialism. But does The Science actually dictate the optimal speed and pathway to decarbonization? It does not.
There is no single entity named The Science to call upon to make such a prescription, and even if there were, it would not be able to objectively and definitively weigh all the pros and cons of various courses of action across different people, societies, and species over space and time in order to come to such a conclusion. Thus, the best we can hope for is what already exists: a messy process of decision-making in which mostly democratically elected leaders—influenced by a variety of stakeholders—try to determine reasonable policies and actions.
