“A ccording to NASA, if we look back 800,000 years, we can see that carbon dioxide concentration fluctuated between roughly 180 and 280 parts per million and just in the geological blink of an eye, we have sent that parts per million up to just about 400. So we’re getting very close to a doubling of CO2 relative to where it has been for a long time.”
That quote was Max Thaysen, from the Climate Action Network, explaining one of the slides (top of page) shown at ‘Our Fair Share,’ an interactive online climate solutions workshop held in Mansons Hall on Thursday, October 3, 2024.
The event was hosted by the Climate Action Committee.
Max Thaysen introduced emissions targets and the concept of a fair share. Christine Leclerc, from Simon Fraser University’s Climate Research Lab, guided participants through the En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator, developed by MIT Sloan and Climate Interactive.
Max Thaysen: “The other thing I hope they got, especially from playing with the simulator, is we have options. We’re not stuck. There’s actually no good reason, other than the political will and the will of the public, that we can’t do this. The simulator helps to show that.”
“All we have to do is the things that we already know we have to do. We don’t even need magical technology in the future, which a lot of people’s plans rely on. We just have to do it thoroughly and sufficiently. We have to actually do it and that’s the hard part.”
“The overall goal of the workshop was to expose people to this simulator that helps people see the impact of different kinds of changes, different kinds of climate solutions. We’re trying to increase some ambition and attention and energy on the issue of climate change, trying to help us all stop contributing to the pollution that changes the climate in increasingly extreme ways.”
“Half of the workshop was an information presentation with a bunch of slides, charts and graphs, letting people know here’s what the admission levels are right now, what the impacts of that are now, and a little bit about what the impacts of increased warming are projected to be in the future.”
“The piece that I contributed was mainly helping people walk through the process that I went through, of understanding what it means to have a sufficient emissions reduction target?”
“When governments and individuals want to address the role that they play in climate change, they’re thinking ‘how much emissions do I need? How much less pollution should I put up into the atmosphere?’ The only scientific way to figure that out is to determine how much pollution causes how much warming and decide how much warming you’re willing to tolerate, live with, or survive. Then stay within that amount of pollution. That’s called a carbon budget or pollution budget, if you want to put it more simply.”
“We looked at some different opinions about how to fairly share and this is where the title of the workshop comes in. Our fair share is about understanding if we have a global pollution budget, how do we translate that into how fast we need to reduce emissions and that translation requires fairness.”
“When we signed on to the Paris agreement, we agreed to limit warming to 1.5°C, or try for 1.5°C and definitely keep well below 2°C.”
“We also agreed to do that with a strong sense of fairness. In the Paris agreement, they call it common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities. That’s referring to things like historical emissions. How much pollution have you contributed in the past? Well, that might have something to say about how much of the current pollution budget you should have access to. We can all understand that. If we’re sharing a birthday cake and there’s a couple pieces left, we might want to know how many pieces somebody has already eaten.”
“The other piece is who can pay and what kinds of infrastructure they already have. So somebody who is not going to, say for example, starve, or have the lights turned out if they spent a lot of money on emissions reduction. Well, we might expect those people to get their emissions down a lot faster than somebody who might have to choose between transporting food in their community and reducing emissions. We don’t really want people to make that trade-off.”
“Wealthier people disproportionately emit more pollution. There’s a link also between economic capability and the historical and current pollution levels.
“That’s an overview of the workshop.”
“We tried to present it in a way that was fairly digestible. So far, there has been mainly positive feedback.”
“When you go through this experience of how much space there is in a pollution budget, it exposes you to the reality that we have to move really fast and we have to get emissions down very deep.”
“Nobody in the political world right now is able to grapple with that, to have an actual scientific and fairness aligned climate plan. For a variety of reasons, it’s hard to wrap your head around this and the public probably isn’t ready for those levels of emission reduction.”
“We have toxic disinformation, intentional and misinformation, unintentional.”
“So we have some work to make what is necessary into what is politically possible, and then to also make it into what is politically necessary.”
“Some of the work that needs to happen is agitation, volume, education, pressure, mobilizing power of the people.”
Cortes Currents: Where are we at in terms of being able to keep the rise of average global emissions to 1.5 degrees.
Max Thaysen: “What I focused on in the presentation was the global carbon budget. So the pollution budget. There’s a pretty authoritative bunch of folks, that put together the global carbon budget and they update that annually. They’re basically translating the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is the UN’s assembly of climate scientists that consolidate, distill and argue over all of the climate science to get us the best answer as an average sort of thing.”
“They publish a number of pollution space that we can put out that will give us a 50/50 chance of keeping warming to 1.5°C. That’s the main number that I have focused on in this workshop.At the end of 2023, our carbon budget was 275 gigatons of carbon dioxide. This leaves out other greenhouse gases, which are also important, but CO2 is the main big one. It’s also the one that lasts the longest. Carbon dioxide contributes to 75% of the greenhouse gas warming effects. The other gases contribute about 25%. We are spending our current global annual emissions at a rate of 36.8 gigatons a year.”
Cortes Currents: That suggests that we will have nothing left after 2030.
“The consensus science from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that we have very little space in our pollution budget before we breach 1.5°C. We’re already experiencing a lot of impacts from the amount of warming that we already have: approximately 1.2°C degrees Celsius globally.”
“The Canadian average is two or three times that amount of warming.”
Cortes Currents: I’m assuming that’s because we’re of a more northern latitude, but can you explain that?
Max Thaysen: “I have read that Canada is warming faster than the global average and I believe that northern Canada, or the Arctic circle, is warming much faster than the global average. We have already seen six or seven times more warming up in the North than we have seen in the rest of Canada.”
“So we’re not in a good place.”
“We don’t have very much time before we cause warming greater than 1.5°C. A lot of people think that it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to do that because it doesn’t look likely that we’re willing to make changes quickly, so we might head towards 2°C.”
“The current plans that I see around us from the provincial government and the federal government, don’t seem to me to be aiming at keeping warming to low levels. They’re aiming at something like 3°C or more than 3°C, which is very catastrophic.”
“2°C is going to be really tough and is extremely tragic for a lot of people, but probably within manageable conditions for human civilization, but 3°C becomes pretty questionable. 4°C becomes very dicey for anything that we might appreciate about stability, safety and having full bellies and even some of the more modern things that we’ve become accustomed to, like economies, health care etc.”
Cortes Currents: Another question I’ve got is the sources of emission. One of your charts explains it fairly well, but of course, anyone listening on the radio won’t hear that.
Max Thaysen: “The bulk of our climate change problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. We do have a chart here from the global carbon project. It shows that coal, oil and gas are about 80 percent of emissions in 2018. One of the most important things that we have to do is stop burning fossil fuels and we also have to stop producing fossil fuels because the production of fossil fuels themselves is a big source of greenhouse gas emissions, especially in BC where we have clean electricity production. If we’re committed to fulfilling our international agreements, which all governments claim to be committed to, then I think it’s just definitely required that we stop expanding for a start and then start contracting those industries.”
Cortes Currents: Are there other areas where we need to cut back? You mentioned wealthier people emitting more pollution.
Max Thaysen: “A very eminent climate scientist says that if we took the emissions of the wealthiest 10% of the global population and we lowered their emissions just down to the level of the average European – so not shivering in the dark, but having a dignified, respectable, comfortable, dare I even say, pleasant life. If we just lowered those extreme emitters, that would be a third of the emissions reduced and that would not be any real hardship for anybody.”
“I think we should do that.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t like it , but when I think about the trade-offs there between somebody’s luxury emissions and somebody else’s health and safety, it seems pretty morally obvious to me that we should just immediately stop the emissions that are recreational, superfluous and contributed by the minority of people.”
“We’re talking about second homes that are being heated by gas. We’re talking about people using more concrete for their summer cottage than a small village might use, or an apartment building might use. We’re talking about yachts, luxury SUVs, big gas guzzling things where people do not care how much they cost to operate.”
“We already ran out of time for our fair share.”
“So how fast do things need to happen? What needs to happen? It gets really tricky. It depends on who we’re okay with hurting, basically. For what benefit to ourselves is another way of phrasing that question.”
“In my opinion, we should cut out all of the unnecessary stuff immediately until we can do it in clean ways. We should also not prioritize our own clean leisure because there’s lots of people around the world who need to reduce their emissions as well and we should be helping them to do that.”
Cortes Currents: What do we need to do first?
Max Thaysen: “Stop doing some unnecessary stuff. Start cleaning up the things that are necessary and stop building out infrastructure for a future that we don’t want to exist.”
Links of Interest:
- Turning Down the Heat Part 3: It’s Time to Kick Some Ass (ie – Mobilize People Power) – Climate Action Network
- Turning Down the Heat Part 2: Change Your Life Bulb – Climate Action Network
- Turning Down the Heat – Climate Action Network
- A Message for Luxury Yachts Appears at Cortes Bay – Climate Action Network
- On Climate Change, Peak Oil, Overshoot, and the Importance of Relationships: An Interview with Jon Cooksey – Climate Action Network
All images used on this page taken from the slideshow.
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