Ethical Uses of Our Carbon Budget
Today, every time we get in a car, every time we turn on a light or appliance, every time we buy something, we use up a bit more of our carbon budget. At our current rate of carbon emissions growth, we will expend our carbon budget by 2034. We have approximately 330 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 remaining in our carbon budget if we wish to keep the Earth’s temperature rise at or below 2℃.
Building out sustainable systems to replace our climate change inducing systems is the only ethical use of our remaining carbon budget. Without these new systems, we’ll continue on a path towards a world with fewer possibilities, with mass migration and famine, and the possibility of large parts of the Earth’s surface being uninhabitable. Without these investments in cleaner systems, we condemn the future of humanity to untold suffering, which is why this becomes an ethical and moral imperative, not simply a political or economic one.
By building systems that replace existing sources of carbon emissions, we can lower the emissions curve and extend the amount of time we can continue to emit carbon into the atmosphere before we expend our carbon budget. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, nearly two-thirds of CO2 emissions come from electricity generation and transportation. Today, these are easy places find quick reductions in carbon emissions.
Already we have seen the cost for new power generation favor renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and biomass. The reduced cost of these new sources of power are helping to expand the availability of power and meeting our ever growing demand, but are not necessarily replacing existing coal and natural gas fired power plants which drive the majority of emissions from electricity generation. We need to start building enough wind, solar, and biomass generation that it can meet our growing demand, and allow us to start decommissioning older plants before the end of their useful life. The best way to do this is to ensure the cost of building new renewable plants is cheaper than the cost of operating and maintaining the older plants.
Not only are we seeing great progress with regards to greening the power grid, we’re the beginning of a wave of electrification of our transportation fleet. After some false steps in the past decades, we’re seeing a real shift in the attitudes towards electric cars. Not only do we have the mostly bespoke Teslas, but most major car manufacturers are coming out with all-electric models.
More importantly, we’re seeing a shift towards electric for the heaviest transportation emitters: ships, trains, and trucking. The Tesla semi truck isn’t available yet, but it shows that cars won’t be the only electric vehicles on the road. We’re also seeing a push towards electric buses in cities and some exploration of electric ships at sea.
As these trends accelerate, we’ll be able to reduce our emissions over the long-term, but it takes expending large parts of our carbon budget now to build these new systems. We cannot wait until we’ve exhausted our carbon budget to build these systems, by then the ecosystem will be bankrupt and the only way to build out these systems will be to drive the climate even higher than 2℃ above the historic baseline.
If we are to avoid the worse case outcomes from climate change, we must invest in replacing our existing systems with sustainable ones. We are already well on our way to building out some of these new systems and as we do so we need to recognize that not all carbon emissions today are bad, as long as they work towards creating a carbon-free future.
[Note: This is one article in a longer series on climate change, part of a larger look at how local communities can address global issues related to climate change, housing affordability, the local economy, the fiscal solvency of cities, and public health.]
