The following excerpt is from the introduction to Alex Steffen's new book, Carbon Zero. The rest of the book is available as chapters on Grist and in ebook form on Amazon. You can learn more about Steffen at his website AlexSteffe.com or follow him on twitter @AlexSteffen.
Forewarned
On
Monday the 29th of October, 2012, a tidal surge 13.9 feet high (the
highest ever recorded) washed up and over the waterfront in Lower
Manhattan, pushed forward by the superstorm Sandy. That same week, the
storm destroyed large swathes of coastline from the New Jersey shore to
Fire Island, while driving torrential rains, heavy snows, and powerful
winds inland across the eastern U.S. and Canada. By the time the storm
blew out, it had killed more than 100 Americans, made thousands
homeless, left millions without power, and caused at least $50 billion
in damage. Sandy was, by any reckoning, one of the worst natural
disasters in American history.
Maybe, though, the word “natural”
belongs in quotes. Because what was surprising about Sandy wasn’t that
it happened (indeed, many had predicted that rising sea levels and
storms intensified by warmer oceans would make something like Sandy
inevitable), but that it was seen so clearly, and so immediately, for
what it was: a forewarning of what a planet in climate chaos has in
store for us.
Sandy was far from the first sign that climate
change is here — scientists have been warning for decades of the dangers
of a heating planet, and in the last 10 years we’ve seen a flurry of
unprecedented storms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, and wildfires,
as well as record-breaking heat waves following one after another.
Sandy, though, knocked down walls of denial and inattention that have
kept us from admitting what’s happening to our world.
What’s
happening is that we’re losing the climate fight. Climate change is
here, it’s worsening quickly, its effects are more dire than many
thought they would be, and — if we continue with business as usual —
we’re on a track to unleash an almost unimaginable catastrophe on
ourselves, our children, and our descendants.
“Part of learning
from [Sandy] is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” said
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the time. “Extreme weather is a reality.
It is a reality that we are vulnerable.” He added later, ”Anyone who
says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying
reality.”
Our choice: “extremely dangerous” or “catastrophic”
To
not warm the planet at all no longer remains an option. The Earth is
already dangerously hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution.
We
used to think that warming up to 2 degrees C fell within a sort of
“safe zone,” where we could expect change but not crisis. But in a world
we’ve warmed only by about 1 degree C above the historical baseline,
we’re already seeing massive climate impacts across the planet. These
unexpected impacts, along with new projections from ever-improving
climate models, tell us that the climate is not nearly as forgiving as
we’d like it to be. As the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research’s
Kevin Anderson puts it, “1 degree is the new 2 degrees.” Two degrees,
meanwhile, now appears not just dangerous, but extremely dangerous.
That
means the menu of choices in front of us no longer includes a
completely safe and stable climate. Instead, our choices come down to
two options: a world in which climate change becomes extremely
dangerous, or one in which it becomes totally catastrophic.
To
keep climate change within that merely “extremely dangerous” range,
scientists say, we must limit the rise in global temperatures to 2
degrees C. Allowing warming to accelerate beyond 2 degrees C to 4
degrees C takes us beyond extremely dangerous into downright insane.
Yet
that’s where our current emissions trajectory is leading us: to a world
4 degrees C hotter, perhaps as soon as 2050; and perhaps even 6 degrees
C hotter by the end of the century. Four degrees global temperature
rise involves so many utterly catastrophic impacts — permanent droughts,
large-scale shifts in agriculture, megastorms, rapid sea-level rise,
ecosystem collapses, and so on (all triggering social instabilities) —
that we can’t expect our global civilization to avoid serious
disruptions, and in many places, long-term ruin. A world 4 degrees C
hotter is, as some put it, “beyond adaption.” (A world 6 degrees C
hotter is almost beyond comprehension: To conceive of a world 6 degrees
warmer, imagine alligators in the Arctic.)
A world that’s 4
degrees C hotter would also be vulnerable to nonlinear climate feedbacks
— ways in which the effects of warming (like the melting of the Arctic
permafrost) could rapidly worsen warming itself (by, in this case,
releasing enormous volumes of CO2 and methane now trapped in frozen
soils). Some worry these feedbacks could lead to “runaway” climate
change, wherein a cycle of warming and greenhouse-gas releases and more
warming spirals viciously out of control. At that point, even the
wildest “geoengineering” ideas — for example, creating artificial
volcanoes to fill the stratosphere with sulfate particles, blocking some
of the sunshine headed towards Earth — would be, at best, “Hail Mary”
strategies (and would do nothing to address other catastrophic effects
of rising emissions, like the acidification of the oceans and the
resulting mass die-offs of ocean life). Spiraling climate chaos of this
severity would leave us on a profoundly different planet than the Earth
we now call home.
There is simply no way to put a cost to those
kinds of impacts: Their magnitude transcends economic reckoning, because
their impact could be greater than the entire human economy is worth.
Four degrees of warming, Anderson and many others say, is therefore
something we should avoid literally at all costs, because no economic
cost we pay will be greater than the losses we risk in a climate
catastrophe of that magnitude.
Now, all of this is the sort of
thing that can bum you right the hell out, and it’s not irrational to
let it get to you — there’s a real chance we may destroy civilization
and much of the natural world in the decades ahead, and that’s a valid
reason for being a bit glum. There’s just no shiny side to extreme
climate chaos.
It’s not too late to avoid catastrophe
If
that were the end of the story we could all just start drinking now.
Hell, I’d buy the first round. But it’s not. We still have a choice. We
still, just barely, have the option of choosing to limit warming to 2
degrees and then working hard to restore the climate once we’ve
stabilized it. We can, yet, pause at “extremely dangerous” and pull back
from the brink of chaos.
To do that, we have to limit the total
amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
What’s the limit? Drawing on the scientific consensus, 350.org, the
world’s leading climate advocacy network, puts the number at 565 more
gigatons of CO2 (or about 450 parts-per-million [ppm] of CO2 in the
atmosphere). That’s the most humanity can emit and still, probably, hold
global warming to 2 degrees C.
That means we need to face a fact
almost no one likes to discuss: We need to hit zero. That is, we need,
as a species, to bring our global climate emissions into balance with
what nature can safely absorb (actually, because we need to start
rolling greenhouse gas concentrations backwards, we almost certainly
need to emit less than nature can absorb, in order to take CO2 back out
of the atmosphere and get back to safer greenhouse gas levels, of 350
ppm or less — but one shocking reality at a time is enough). This means
that all the expressions of commitment we’ve heard from politicians
about reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent off 1990 levels,
say, or 80 percent by 2050 or whatever — all of those numbers are
meaningless. The meaningful number is simple: zero, as soon as possible.
Zero, worldwide
A
worldwide transition to a climate-balanced global economy (one which
adds zero CO2 each year to the total CO2 in the atmosphere) lies
completely within our reach. But to achieve it, we’ll need to be honest
with ourselves about geopolitics and reality. Because we have some tough
decisions to make.
Climate change is global, with people
everywhere worsening the crisis. But we are not all equally responsible
for the crisis we face now. Those of us who live in the wealthier
nations got our wealth by cutting down forests, and burning coal and oil
to fuel our industrialization. We are wealthy, to be blunt, because
we’re the ones who put most of the greenhouse gases up there in the
first place.
In the last century, to get wealthier, you needed
smokestacks and clearcuts and coal mines. Poorer nations — whose
economies rely more on older, more polluting technologies — argue that
they have a right to grow their economies to help their people escape
poverty and achieve prosperity. These nations are mostly willing to
negotiate with wealthier countries on lowering their climate emissions
rapidly, but they will need time to transition to low-carbon economies,
and they expect that we in the wealthier countries will lead the way on
cutting emissions rapidly to buy them time. Essentially, the poorer
nations are saying, they have a right to the lion’s share of those
remaining 565 gigatons of CO2.
Even ambitious plans for global
emissions reductions take time. Poorer countries now emit less overall,
but their economies are inefficient and largely dependent on dirty
energy. Lots of work will need to be done for those countries to level
off their emissions, and more work after that for their economies to
become carbon neutral, even with really aggressive innovation —
innovation bolder than any we have seen anywhere in the developing
world. For example, one recent credible scenario by Kevin Anderson and
Alice Bows would have emissions in poorer countries leveling off in
2025, then declining 7 percent per year thereafter, until the global
carbon balance was restored. Seven percent a year, it should be noted,
would be extremely bold: but even that extremely bold goal would demand
that the wealthier countries buy time by zeroing out their own emissions
first. The poorer countries argue this is a matter of “climate equity.”
Since
we need their agreement, and their action, it’s probably smart to just
go ahead and admit they’re right. It would be unjust to ask the world’s
poor countries to absorb the costs of taking actions we ourselves avoid,
in order to solve a problem we mostly created. We need to go first in
zeroing-out our emissions.
But here’s the thing: far from being
some unbearable burden, rapid reductions to net-zero emissions may in
fact offer wealthier nations our best opportunity to rebuild our
economies to prosper in the 21st century. To understand why, we need to
look at the kind of planet we’re becoming: an urban planet.
Our urban future
Humanity
is already an urban species, with more people living in cities than in
the countryside. By the middle of the century, we will likely have as
many as 9.5 billion people living on the planet, with 70-75 percent of
us (around 7 billion people), demographers estimate, living in cities
themselves, and 95 percent or more of humanity living within a day’s
travel of a city. By the 2050s, the overwhelming majority of humanity
will be participating in urban systems of health care, education,
communication, commerce, and government that only a few decades ago were
limited to the “developed” world.
Growth is transforming the very
nature of cities. Every day, at least 200,000 people move to cities or
are born in them. That’s like building a city the size of San Francisco
every four days. Then doing it again, four days later. Then doing it
again — and repeating the process several thousand times in the next 40
years. By 2050, we will have an estimated 3.5 billion more urbanites,
and to house them we will have built a constellation of thousands of
large cities, including a scattering of extremely large megacities, each
home to tens of millions of people. The largest city-building boom in
human history will happen in the next four decades, with each decade
experiencing more change than the one before.
This urban boom
won’t be wonderful for everyone; for many, it may be tragic. Unless we
change our priorities quickly, as many as a billion people — climate
refugees, the rural and destitute, victims of conflict and deep
structural poverty — will live on the very edge of existence. Perhaps as
many as 3 billion people will live in informal settlements — in the
huge slums springing up around many developing world cities. Hundreds of
millions of these slum-dwellers will live in abject poverty.
Inequalities will strain our societies. In the midst of widespread
poverty, 3 or 4 billion others may rise out of poverty to enter the
global middle class, living what we today would consider a “modern” — if
modest — life. A billion may well live in even greater affluence than
we experience today. And the one thing the vast majority of these people
will have in common is their cities, and the ways in which those cities
are linked together.
How we build this coming wave of cities will
largely decide not only the quality of life of the people living in
them, but also the future of our planet. Because how we build our cities
will decide, more than any other factor, how much we heat the planet.
Our urban opportunity
Climate
emissions are a byproduct of the global economy; but the links that
connect that economy together are forged in our great cities. In this
book, we’ll see how the choices cities make about how they grow will
largely determine whether their economies will be clean or dirty; and
the choices these cities make, in aggregate, will largely determine
whether the global economy as a whole will be catastrophic or full of
possibilities.
In 40 years, humanity will live in thousands of
these major cities, each stamping the global economy with its own
character — and burdening the planet with its consumption and pollution,
to greater or lesser degrees. But right now, the economies of only
about 200 cities define the global economy. These cities and the regions
surrounding them are responsible for the vast majority of their
countries’ prosperity, and also of their countries’ greenhouse gases.
Most
of these cities are still in the wealthier nations. If our cities
reinvent themselves, finding pathways to low-to-no-carbon futures, our
nations can rapidly cut climate pollution, even if most of our
compatriots lag behind in reducing emissions. Building cities that
produce no net emissions — that reduce emissions to the extent that the
greenhouse gases generated can be balanced through other actions that
draw CO2 out of the atmosphere (what I call “carbon zero” cities) — may
in fact be the smartest, quickest pathway to lowering national
emissions.
Furthermore, the options that will be available to
those thousands of emerging cities over the next 40 years largely depend
on the choices we in the world’s wealthiest cities make today. The
reason is that innovation and invention move slowly, yet are critical.
When no new solution is available, business as usual is a given. Once a
better solution to a given problem has been found, its spread can be
hastened, though innovation diffusion still takes time. As the wealthier
cities design away their own emissions, many excellent new solutions
will be created, resulting in zero-emissions pathways poorer cities will
be able to follow as they get wealthier.
There’s no time to lose.
The costs of action will rise, not fall, with time. Many big
investments have long life spans: They can operate for decades — and
need to, in order to pay back the costs of their construction. This
makes it politically very hard (and sometimes economically expensive) to
shut down new infrastructure and industrial systems, even when those
systems are producing unwanted results. What we build in the next two
decades will probably be with us for decades more. Making new
investments in old, dirty ways of doing things (like coal-fired power
plants, highways, and suburban sprawl) retards change, and commits us
either to continued pollution or to costly retrofits and replacements in
the near future. But also, the longer we wait, the more the
consequences of climate change already set in motion will hamper our
progress and make us less able to act. All of the impacts of climate
change have human costs, in many cases quite large. Few have any benefit
at all. The longer we wait, the more our economic capacity for change
will be damaged by droughts and floods, rising oceans and spreading
diseases, climate refugees, and political instability. This is not even
to mention the increasingly heart-wrenching human costs or the
psychological trauma caused. Sandy was just a taste of what climate
change could cost us.
Our cities as climate solutions
So,
changing how our cities work proves to be a pretty vital job.
Fortunately, our comparatively massive wealth has left us with a number
of capacities the rest of the world simply doesn’t have: The majority of
the world’s research universities, think tanks, engineering and design
firms, advocacy groups, investment funds, venture capitalists, and so
on, are all concentrated in the wealthiest cities — and even with China,
India, and Brazil growing by leaps and bounds, this central fact of the
concentration of the capacity for innovation in a relatively small
number of rich cities is unlikely to change overnight.
Leading the
way into a carbon zero future will be good for business. Cities that
innovate in design, planning, policy, and products will equip their
citizens with exportable skills and marketable experience before those
in slower cities even know they exist. With thousands of large and small
cities about to boom, the markets for urban innovations are almost
inconceivably vast. There’s a 40-year boom on its way; cities that lead
the way into a carbon zero future will be its great success stories.
Many
of the most important kinds of innovations, policies, and plans needed
to create such urban success stories are local — or are, at least, the
kinds that don’t demand bold national action to succeed. In countries
like the United States, where dirty energy companies have managed to
clog the works of government, the ability to innovate meaningfully at a
local level represents a huge advantage. Our major cities are small
enough that committed people can actually change them, and large enough
that changing them can produce big impacts.
Americans, Canadians,
and Australians, in particular, sail now on a collision course with
planetary realities. Our sprawling suburbs and low-density cities depend
on abundant resources, cheap oil, and low costs for pollution, none of
which the future holds. No amount of political grandstanding will change
that fact. Sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs are unsustainable, and
that which cannot be sustained does not long continue. For the size of
their populations, our cities are the most climate-damaging in the
world.
Even Northern European cities, with their older, more
compact urban forms, better transit, and reputations for climate
leadership, are far from sustainable — they, too, need a lot of change —
but I have chosen to focus on North American cities precisely because
that is where we need the biggest change in the shortest time. (Readers
from the rest of the world should find a few ideas worth mulling over —
much of what applies to North America applies without too much
translation to Australia and New Zealand, as well as in parts to much of
Europe and the prosperous parts of Asia, especially Japan and Korea.
Around the world, leadership will take different forms: the imperative
to lead will be the same.)
I’m writing most directly to my fellow
Americans, though. That’s because I care deeply about my country, as do
most Americans. I believe that if we truly love our country, we must
care about its future; and we can’t care about its future without taking
into account the ways our nation’s actions today are shaping that
future; without attempting to steer a course that will leave our
countrymen better off in the future. To love our country today is also
to wish to see it secure and prosperous tomorrow. So to be patriots, we
have to want to be good ancestors to those who are coming after us. And
being good ancestors today means, perhaps above all else, fighting
climate change. No greater threat faces America in the coming years than
climate chaos. We learned that with Katrina; we’ve learned that with
droughts and floods and wildfires; and now we’re learning it afresh as
our nation recovers from the assault of a superstorm of unprecedented
size. And the biggest storms are still ahead.
Building carbon zero
cities means not only greater prosperity, but more security. Almost
everything we need to do to drop our climate emissions also leaves us
more rugged and resilient to disasters and global instability. Carbon
zero cities mean future-proof cities, or as close as we’re likely to
get.
Our choice could not be clearer, to my mind: Remake our
cities into central hubs in the global climate-neutral economy we’re
moving towards (and ready ourselves for the tough times to come), or
shirk our responsibilities and leave ourselves even more vulnerable to
the onrushing chaos. As a patriot, the right choice for America is plain
to me.
Imagining carbon zero cities
How do
we get to work? Well, we can’t build what we can’t imagine, so the
first task in building carbon zero cities is to reimagine the cities we
have.
Reimagining is hard work. It requires both a robust
conversation about what carbon zero cities might be like, and a far more
creative approach to envisioning the kinds of innovations and solutions
that could get us there. This little book is my attempt to outline one
version of a carbon-neutral city; to get a conversation going about what
kind of change a 90 percent cut in emissions might entail; and to point
out some of the main areas of possible innovation.
It’s worth
emphasizing that this is a sketch, not a blueprint. I wouldn’t even
attempt to ordain a model for zero-carbon development that every place
should adopt. Every city is unique, with its own character, geography,
civic culture, and history. Regional economies and politics have left
every metro area with different workforces, institutions, and business
cultures. The implementation of national policies and local capacities
vary widely. No one set of innovations applied in a specific way will
suit the needs of every city. Large teams of professionals and engaged
citizens should (and I hope, will) take up the actual work of upgrading
their cities. I’m not interested in dictating approaches to anyone.
Indeed,
it seems to me that what we need most right now are not conclusive
answers, but good hypotheses put immediately to the test; and good
hypotheses spring first from reframing our understanding of a given
challenge. I hope that my reframing of this challenge will influence
readers to begin to see their own cities’ challenges in a new light.
But
don’t expect things to look normal, illuminated by the demands of the
future. We have, again and again, mistaken what we think of as “normal”
for “best” and “permanent.” Normal as we knew it in the second half of
the 20th century is already a thing of the past. Already, many of our
older systems are crumbling, revealing themselves to be unsustainably
expensive or indefensibly harmful. Even the timescales of the 20th
century are out of date. Changes that took half a century before are
erupting in a few years now.
The speed of change will not slow. It
is both pulled along by the dire necessity of quick action — for, as
Donella Meadows has written, on a planet full of limits, “Time is in
fact the ultimate limit” — and driven along by the unleashing of
innovation, collaboration, and competition on a planetary scale that
dwarfs anything our great-grandparents could have comprehended. If the
ultimate limit turns out to be time, the last infinite resource turns
out to be creativity.
I believe that planetary limits and human
creativity are now inextricably bound together. I doubt we’ll reinvent
the physical limits of this world, at least in the next few centuries. I
would bet against the emergence of any technologies that allow us to
exceed our planetary boundaries on both a global scale and a sustained
basis. But I would also bet we can build a civilization that works
within our planetary limits, and furthermore, that the realm of
possibilities for human experience within those ecological limits is
essentially infinite.
Indeed, as we cease trying to maximize the
volume of material growth and start emphasizing sustainable prosperity, I
think we’ll find that what we’re able to do with energy and materials
becomes more and more brilliant, meaningful, and enriching. Design
constraints often deliver better results than a belief in complete
freedom. Quite the opposite of imposing hardship, carbon zero targets
may very well spur a renaissance in urban creativity.
The
straining limits that pressure us to remake our cities will likely
produce an unprecedented blooming of applied creativity and civic
acumen. I find it completely likely that the constraints of climate
neutrality and ecological sustainability, boldly met, may produce the
most livable, prosperous, and resilient cities the world has ever seen.
Nothing
in this book is utopian: Most of what I suggest is already being
implemented or experimented with somewhere, though no city I know of has
put all the pieces together in one place. Some of what I suggest still
lives in the realm of conjecture, but that realm is not as far away as
it used to be.
I hope you will take my sketch, use what makes
sense to you, discard what doesn’t, and begin your own drawings of what
the future’s possibilities can be — they are bound to be better than
mine, and the world needs every well-grounded, well-crafted vision it
can get. Please, don’t just read: reimagine.
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