Thread by @Karmageddon67

“a recent report declared that the main strategy of world leaders for tackling climate change won’t work. It’s called green growth, & it’s favoured by some of the largest and most influential organisations in the world, including the UN and the World Bank”
google.com.au/amp/s/theconve…

“Green growth is a vague term with many definitions, but broadly speaking, it’s the idea that society can reduce its environmental impacts and slash its emissions, even while the economy continues to grow and the quantity of stuff that’s produced and consumed increases.”

But the Decoupling Debunked report echoes work by prominent academics in finding that there is no evidence that societies have ever managed to decouple economic growth from emissions at this scale in the past, and little evidence they have the capacity to achieve it in the future

“relative decoupling”, : each dollar of new economic growth has fewer emissions attached to it, relative to each dollar of past growth. But, emissions still rise in absolute terms because the economy is still growing

The rate of decarbonisation that’s needed is huge, & far in excess of anything that’s been seen previously. Ec growth makes that challenge harder, as gains in decarbonisation may be outweighed by incr in production and consumption. But green growth advocates insist it’s possible.

The IPCC’s Special Report, released in October 2018, gives 90 scenarios that would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, while also continuing with economic growth. So far, so good.

But...

...almost every single one of these scenarios relies on a negative emissions technology called Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) that’s completely untested at large scales.

BECSS involves growing large plantations of trees, which draw down carbon from the atmosphere, then harvesting and burning them to generate energy. The CO₂ emissions from this process are then stored underground.

To limit warming to 1.5°C, this technology would need to absorb 3-7 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere every year. That’s at least 2,000 times more than it’s currently capable of doing.

In order to absorb that much C, an area two to three times the size of India would need to be covered with plantations. Think about the difficulty of acquiring that much land, the pressure it would put on other land uses, like food production, & how much habitat it would erase.

Can we really take this risk — relying on unproven technologies to rescue us from the threat of climate change? Given the consequences of getting the gamble wrong, surely the answer is no.

Proposals for green growth that rely solely on technology to solve the climate crisis are based on a flawed idea. This is, that the limits to the world’s physical systems are flexible, but the structure of its economies are not.

This seems entirely backwards and more a reflection of the importance of politics and power in determining what solutions are deemed viable, than any reflection of reality.

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So society should ask, are these global institutions promoting green growth because they believe it’s the most promising way of avoiding climate breakdown? Or is it because they believe it’s simply not politically feasible to talk about the alternatives?

If we can be optimistic about humanity’s ability to develop fantastical new technologies to bend and overcome the limits of nature, can’t we lend that same optimism to developing new economic structures?

Our goal in the 21st century should be creating economies that allow people to flourish, even when they don’t grow

Just a reminder that this is what has happened in the past when bioenergy has been mandated. Massive destruction of ecosystems leading to huge CO2 emissions, and mass extinctions. Next time it will be far worse.

google.com.au/amp/s/www.nyti…

And don’t forget that these trees/plants proposed for BECCS are monocultures.

What happens when they die from drought, floods, the effects of climate change, insect attack, disease? All these scenarios are possible and actually likely.

BECCS is destructive idiocy.

It’s actually also very possible BECCS won’t even produce negative emissions as designed, as this scientific report indicates. It certainly won’t when you look at the big picture, with the massive deforestation required for food crops/BECCS

google.com.au/amp/s/www.carb…