All climate today in honor of COP26

My go-to source on all matters climate-related is David Roberts, formerly of Grist and Vox, now writing his own Volts substack. Nobody I know of is better at explaining what the human species has done to the climate and what we're up against.

A sample, Roberts' discussion of climate "tipping points":

This is the significance of tipping points: we are playing with fire, pushing Earth systems to the point that there is a small-but-real chance that some of them will break down entirely, entering phase shifts and becoming something permanently less stable and hospitable.

If that happens, we will have consigned all future generations of human beings to inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating conditions. It is a crime worse than any genocide, worse than any atrocity conceived or conceivable, and even if there is only a small chance that we might stumble into committing it, we should be hyper-cautious. We should spend a lot of money to reduce that risk, to insure against it.

But there is also no one else I know who is able to be such a combination of informed and judicious in weighing our stumbling progress toward containing the destruction we are wreaking.

Where but from Roberts would I learn that Illinois had enacted "one of the most environmentally ambitious, worker-friendly, justice-focused energy bills of any state in the country"? Illinois, remember, is a coal-producing state.

And, although there are some economists pushing along the same line, who but Roberts could I trust to introduce me, in a readable way, to climate analysts and engineers who see hope in technological progress? He introduces such thinkers and entrepreneurs as carbon analyst Kingsmill Bond, urging us to take a wider view of developments in clean energy all around us.

Roberts: Bond’s experience and research have led him to the conclusion that the shift to clean energy has become unstoppable and that it will be the dominant force shaping financial markets and geopolitics in the 21st century. He argues that we are on the front end of a massive, precipitous wave of change to rival the industrial revolution — one that will unfold even if policy support is weak and erratic, purely on the strengths of economics and innovation.

We need to update our mental model of climate mitigation, he says. It’s not about pain, about how to distribute extra costs and who will be the most altruistic. It’s about gain, about which countries will benefit most and fastest from the tapping of almost limitless new markets and opportunities for growth.

Bond: What's been notable throughout this debate, for the last 20 years, is that the ceiling of the possible is constantly rising. 

If you go back to how the debate was being held about 20 years ago, you'll see these very fancy letters from the Irish and German grid operators saying that variable renewables could never be more than 2 percent of the system, for a whole series of technical reasons which are beyond me.

But what's happened continuously is that people have come up with new solutions, be they demand-side management, supply-side management, bigger grids, batteries, interconnectors, better software, digitalization, smart meters, so on and so forth. There have been a whole series of different solutions.

... So it's worth standing back for a moment and recognizing that the real limits to growth are with the current system, not with the new system.

None of this means we humans don't have keep struggling against extinction by oblivious growth, most of it inherent in rapacious capitalism, the privileging of a very few to the detriment of the lives of the many. But Roberts' interviews have convinced me that the way out, if there is one, may have to go through rather than back or by swerving away.