The damage caused by fossil fuels is becoming increasingly visible: devastating forest fires in Canada, the skies darken as far away as New York; floods in Pakistan are displacing more than thirty million people; extreme rainfall in Greece and the Netherlands and water shortages in large parts of Spain.
Against the background of fossil damage, one voice in the public debate is becoming increasingly noticeable: that of climate optimism. The climate optimist recognizes the existence of climate change but prefers to emphasize positive developments. “We are now living in the best moment ever,” crows the right-wing opinion maker Maarten Boudry. Even optimists are too pessimistic about renewable energy, he said the free boys of De Correspondent. According to Oskar Crane, consultant at Deloitte, despite our denigration, “climate policy is not doing that bad at all.” And climate change is “not the end of the world” in any case, according to Hannah Ritchie in a book that is now worldwide great interest enjoy.
If we dig a little deeper, climate optimism combines one-sided data science with belief in green capitalism, sometimes supplemented with support for (and of) philanthropy of the very rich. So it becomes Our World In Datathe non-profit organization where Ritchie is deputy editor through donations from tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, supplemented with a little bit of crowdfunding.
There is no lack of attention. But do the climate optimists really succeed in injecting some hope into a gloomy debate? Not as far as we are concerned. Because the substantiation of their story is downright weak on four essential points.
First of all, their use of data is one-sided. For example, climate optimists draw attention to the rapid decline in the price of solar panels. That decline is good news. But our rapidly increasing energy demand keeps us going every year also more oil, gas and coal to use. In addition, plays profitability – not just price – a key role in technological change. And fossil fuels are much more profitable than renewable energy sources. Fossil companies are still fully committed on new gas terminals, drilling platforms and coal-fired power stations that will take us far beyond two degrees of warming. Many countries are also still expanding their use of fossil fuels. The Netherlands, for example, is looking for new gas in the North Sea and Wadden Sea and is importing more and more liquefied natural gas from the US – a fuel that even is more polluting then coal. Without government intervention to… organized resistance By overcoming fossil interests, we will prolong the climate crisis for decades to come – an unoptimistic scenario.
Confidence in green capitalism is also poorly substantiated. Climate optimists like to point to countries in which the economy as a whole has grown while emissions have fallen. And yes: there is a select group of rich countries to which this applies. But these countries have all first gone through a very long phase of fossil prosperity development. In addition, emissions there are now falling so slowly that they are average another 220 years need to reduce their emissions towards zero. And you look up global level, then economic growth still goes hand in hand with more emissions. It is misleading to base an optimistic story on a few examples that support your point.
Third, climate optimists shop selectively in science. In this way they celebrate that we are moving from a pre-Paris path of 5°C warming by the end of the century to a 3°C scenario went. While scientific research shows that 3°C is actually the new 5°C: serious climate effects occur earlier and are worse than previously thought. Climate optimists conveniently ignore this progressive insight. There is also little attention paid to the fact that we already… multiple turning points can cause by exceeding 1.5°C. So we approach slowly but steadily a turning point for the AMOC. Countries in Europe would not be able to adapt to the collapse of this ocean current. You can try to stay positive by being nonchalant about climate goals and tipping points – but at what cost?
Finally, climate optimists act as if their belief in the market and innovation is something neutral. Alternative sustainability strategies, such as behavioral change and degrowth, so they don’t have to be taken seriously. The latter is even completely incorrectly depicted by Ritchie as ‘global shrinkage’. The core of degrowth after all, it is about reducing the demand for energy and materials in prosperous countries. This way you can give more space to countries that still desperately need both to work their way out of poverty. The ease with which criticism of the status quo is distorted and dismissed is deeply political.
Too much worry can paralyze a person. But climate optimism is a dangerous medicine as long as it rests on one-sided data, selectively shops in (climate) science and presents a belief in the market as neutral. Then it delays the radical changes that are now needed. Because it plays into the hands of political wranglers, just like transition-delaying companies and opinion makers who want to wrongly dismiss legitimate concerns as ‘doomsday thinking’.
We could use an optimistic story. And cheap solar panels are an important part of that. But above all, according to the IPCC, we need “fundamental changes” “in the way society functions, including changes in underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems and power relations.” It’s great when climate optimism helps people fight for those fundamental changes. But when it blinds them to the need for rapid systemic change, it only perpetuates the destructive path we are now on.