Thread by @SteB777

The problem is not the vagueness of the plan, but it's incoherence. 🧵below.

"And he agreed a pledge for all the biggest economies to achieve net zero emissions was “vague”, after the G20 failed to set a target date of 2050."
independent.co.uk/climate-change…

There are actually 3 clear and separate components, necessary to address the climate crisis, and achieving Net Zero in the immediate future is only one of them. Focusing on only 1 component is leading to serious incoherence as very few people are looking at the whole big picture.

Even if these plans to reach actual Net Zero by 2050 were realistic and likely to achieve this goal, and all the evidence says the proposals are a long way of reaching actual net zero, a massive elephant in the room is being ignored.

To have any chance of even getting close to limiting warming to 1.5C, the Paris Agreement target, means making drastic cuts to emissions before 2030. However, no government is proposing any realistic plan of doing this.
theguardian.com/science/2021/a…

In fact, this UN report suggests that there is likely to be a rise in emissions by 2030, not the drastic reductions needed.
newscientist.com/article/229074…

Keeping warming to below 1.5C is not just an arbitrary figure. Warming above that will have very serious consequences.
theguardian.com/environment/20…

You see there are only so much GHG emissions we can release, and hope to hold warming below 1.5C, and that is called the carbon budget. On current emissions levels, that is only about 6 1/2 years worth of emissions. This is why we need urgent and drastic cuts to emissions now.

Politicians regularly refer to keeping warming below the 1.5C Paris target, but so far they have not even proposed any measures to achieve the necessary drastic cuts in the next few years. They are actually opening up new fossil fuel reserves.

The third component of the climate crisis, which is not even been mentioned in these talks, in the media, is the need to also take action to address the much broader biodiversity and ecological crisis.

In the words of Sir Robert Watson former chair of the @IPCC_CH and @IPBES.

"We cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Yet, once again, no politician I am aware of is even mentioning common measures to address the whole crisis as the science says is necessary, let alone making any policy proposals to achieve this.
un.org/sustainabledev…

The reason politicians don't want to even acknowledge the need to drastically reduce emissions in the next few years and to produce a combined approach to address the whole ecological crisis, including the biodiversity component is very simple - their sums do not add up.

It is impossible for political leaders to keep to their current economic plans, and to drastically reduce GHG emissions in the next few years, along with reversing the biodiversity crisis. Current economic goals will lead to rises in emissions, and continuing biodiversity loss.

Unfortunately, the method of dealing with this serious incoherence, putting our civilization on course to global suicide, is just to not even think about it, to not talk about it, to pretend this problem does not exist.

As I say, the real problem is that to actually address this crisis and to prevent catastrophe, and this is entirely possible, is that it is only possible with major changes to the way our economies operate.

However, it is now crystal clear that our governments, our leaders, vested interests and billionaires i.e. all the most powerful factions in our society, are determined to maintain business as usual.

Yet at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, all the governments of the world, committed to achieving sustainable development. When these governments realised this would mean changing our economic model, they just kicked this into the long grass.
un.org/en/conferences…

Sustainable development is "an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while simultaneously sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend on"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainab…

I created this well received thread asking for discussion of this, dialogue on this. Yet all the media is talking about is this Net Zero by 2050 and the failure to get agreement of it, even though this is only one part of a much bigger problem.

https://twitter.com/SteB777/status/1450558564800532482

When I talk about seeing the big picture. I am talking about seeing all these things and far more, and not just pretending it is only about one component of the problem, and then further pretending if we address this, the problem is solved.

@GeorgeMonbiot @GretaThunberg @ClimateHuman @ClimateBen @JKSteinberger @theAliceRoberts @KateRaworth @ProfSteveKeen

@threadreaderapp Please unroll?