Milton – Paradise Lost

The Head of the IPCC has just said the Paris Agreement target of 1.5C is blown, 2C is dead without a miracle, and the world is heading for 3C in the lifetime of our children today, and we would possibly hit 4C.


Storm Milton is heading for Florida. It’s dark irony for those who elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who, only in July this year signed legislation that erased references to climate change from state law. The year before he approved climate-denial videos for schools in Florida.

It’s a tragedy for the people of Florida, and more importantly for the people of Mexico, whose plight has been largely ignored but are going to receive a much more brutal wind-speed than the Florida coast with potentially deadlier consequences. But this story is also the climate condition reduced to its essence: politicians actively spreading disinformation and lying to our children, and, ultimately the raw consequences coming to batter them with reality. It is also now, in real time, this is NOW.

Tampa is being evacuated.

Two great icons of American make-believe are in peril: Disney World and Mar-a-Lago. Let’s just hope to god that nothing serious happens to Donald’s favourite golf course.

Of course all of this is spooling out as the US elections reach a crescendo of idiocy. It’s an election in which the climate catastrophe has been barely mentioned even as Storm Helene devastated North Carolina and Storm Milton threatens looms on the southern sea-front of Florida. It’s almost as if the carefully curated Fantasy World’s of American privilege are about to be reclaimed by a reality denied and put-off for so long …

Back home we have nothing to laugh about, nothing to feel smug about as the British government announces the new £22b CCS project to a chorus of anger and dismay. As Dave Vetter, a writer for The Carbon Laundry writes: “At the heart of the UK govt’s £22bn CCS plan is a huge new gas power plant being built by BP and Equinor. According to the project’s own claims, even if the CCS tech works as planned, the plant will still emit 20 million tons of CO2. The Net Zero Teesside project is aiming to capture 95% of the CO2 produced in the course of operation. This level of efficacy has never been achieved anywhere in the world. Skeptics are rightly asking: what if BP and Equinor don’t pull it off? What if, frankly, they don’t intend to? Would any rational person be surprised? What recourse would we have?”

None is the answer. None. And there goes a £22b opportunity up in smoke. There is a fear, long held by many that this is Paradise Lost. Jim Skea, the chairman of the IPCC (and chair of Scotland’s Just Transition Commission) has just declared humanity has missed its chance of keeping global warming below 1.5C and it will take “heroic efforts” to stay below 2C this century.

Skea was speaking at a summit organised by the Zemo Partnership, where he said a failure to sufficiently curb carbon emissions had left the world on track to warm by 3C by 2100. This average masks variations between land and sea, with western Europe and the UK facing even greater warming – perhaps as much as 5C by the end of the century.

“We are potentially headed towards 3C of global warming by 2100, if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment,” said Skea.

“Obviously temperature rises over land will be higher than over the ocean. We don’t know how warm it will get [over land] but I know it may be more than the global average.”

Hilariously, the Telegraph’s Jonathan Leake cites the CSS project as a solution with absolutely no references to the criticisms of them:

“Last week, Sir Keir Starmer headed to Liverpool to announce plans to invest £22bn of taxpayers money into a carbon capture programme as part of efforts to limit the level of harmful emissions into the atmosphere.”

Leake writes: “His warning about humanity’s failure to stop the world getting warmer comes just weeks before Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, will lead a UK delegation to Azerbaijan, this year’s host of the United Nation’s annual COP climate negotiations.”

Continuing: “These UN meetings are widely seen as the world’s best hope of preventing runaway climate change. The Paris Agreement, struck at the 2015 meeting, was effectively a pledge by the 195 signatory countries to slash emissions and keep the global temperature rise below 2C – when compared to pre-industrial levels – and ideally below 1.5C. ”

Before admitting, without explanation: “Few signatories have kept their promises and instead emissions have continued to rise, equating to about 60bn tonnes of CO2 a year.”

So the “world’s best hope” is a complete failure? Gotcha. Best not to go into that too much.

So where are we?

The world’s most powerful nation is weeks away from electing its new president, in which one of the candidates represents a slew of fossil fuel interests that will be unleashed on the world should he re-gain office which will make previous Disaster Capitalism look like play-time.

On the other side of the world our own newly elected PM is announcing billions of pounds invested in failed technology, as De Smog outlines here ‘Fossil Fuel Companies Made Bold Promises to Capture Carbon. Here’s What Actually Happened‘) and Drilled outlines here (‘Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution‘).

These are not solutions these are the result of corporate capture (never mind recent Cayman Island donations). De Smog again: “The UK government’s move to award £22 billion in subsidies to carbon capture projects followed a sharp increase in lobbying by the fossil fuel industry.  Oil and gas giants such as Equinor, BP, and ExxonMobil attended 24 out of 44 external ministerial meetings to discuss carbon capture and storage (CCS) in 2023, according to official transparency records.”

“That represented a surge in activity relative to 2020-2022, when ministers held about half as many meetings to discuss the technology, and oil and gas companies would attend seven to 10 of these discussions each year.”

Is there any hope? Precious little, other than perhaps as Labour’s live disintegration continues and storms Helene and Milton and Kirk (next up) land on the southern coast of America, maybe the politicians will be embarrassed into admission or better still, simply washed away on a tide of their own hypocrisy and lies.

 

* Correction – I stated that Jim Skea was the chair of Scotland’s Just Transition Commission – he has since stood down from this post.

Comments (10)

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  1. Cathie Lloyd says:

    Sharing your despair Mike. I read Threads posts from North America which are rightly apocalyptic. Whether it will make any difference is a remote hope. What will we be able to do as the continuing damage to the environment / climate appears inevitable? So far we have been sustained by a modicum of hope. Learn to live without?

  2. Mary MacCallum Sullivan says:

    Let’s face it: without a global democratic revolution, very little will change. It’s the corporate and the billionaires who are in charge. Politicians the world over are passive in the face of ‘the Emperor’s’ power. They are but servants.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/the-phony-populism-of-trump-and-musk/680186/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20241007&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=The+Atlantic+Daily

  3. SleepingDog says:

    Is Disney worse at portraying our global polycrisis than the BBC?
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/barbie-oppenheimer-oscar-hollywood-box-office-awards-film-industry#comment-166204453
    For all their faults, can we British really hold up our cultural reckonings against the better recent USAmerican products in this? There’s even a tiny trend towards ‘all-peoples-must-unite-against-a-common-existential-threat’ with a biocratic basis that I don’t see in British mainstream storytelling. We share a poor cultural representation of collective action with the USA, but I suspect ours lags behind.

    1. SleepingDog says:

      Although I loathed the Lion King, a fawning royalist-hierarchical travesty of animals and mockery of politics. In either incarnation so far. Also, isn’t it a bit racist to keep portraying Africa as the one place you cannot escape ‘primitive’ hereditary kingship? Goes for Marvel too…

  4. John says:

    The rich and powerful institutions are the people with the biggest carbon footprint. Many of them resist the type of change required for a ‘fair transition’ because they think they will lose most financially. They are selfish, fools because it is the poor and impoverished who will suffer first from climate change unless radical action is taken.
    The rich and powerful are now using all their power and influence through press and politicians to oppose the actions needed to mitigate climate change because as they have biggest carbon footprint these mitigating actions are bound to affect them most.

  5. Cathie Lloyd says:

    We need hope. Could it be coming from an unexpected source? If so what are the implications for democracy? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/09/china-to-head-green-energy-boom-with-60-of-new-projects-in-next-six-years

  6. Wul says:

    The money-machine is just rolling over us all now. Feels like nothing can stop it. Hope that’s not true.

    Be nice to see Mar a Lago ripped up and dumped into the sea like a lost wig in a hurricane. (without loss of life or harm to any beings)

  7. Wul says:

    How much land could one buy, and how many trees could one plant (or allow to naturally regenerate) with £22bn?

    1. SleepingDog says:

      @Wul, yes, what would the natural options for carbon capture, that we could boost (not necessarily within Scotland) with £22bn (or whatever)? What is the optimum approach? Obviously we would have to have a projection for wildfires etc. But we could have compulsory purchase with minimal compensation (based on climate-wrecked landscapes, perhaps) if any within Scottish territorial jurisdiction. We should not be locked into a proprietarian-compensation model; we have seen how that worked out before:
      https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
      The British Crown could in theory do much more in the land it controls worldwide. But our royals have been among the worst enemies of nature since at least the Tudors and James I (Silent Fields: The long decline of a nation’s wildlife by Roger Lovegrove, 2007).

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