The systemic challenge of global heating

Global heating is happening. The opportunity to prevent it has been missed. Originating in the Industrial Revolution, the ever greater use of fossil fuels impacts the entire world – especially future generations, who contribute nothing to the problem and who have no say today. The near-universal consensus is that the accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases heats the Earth’s climate, that an increase above 2 °C imperils the basis of human life, and that one beyond 3 °C threatens its destruction. Global heating is the flipside of the phenomenal economic and demographic development of the past half century. Ever more people are enjoying, or pursuing, ever more comfortable and mobile lifestyles, the cumulative effect is to push the Earth beyond its carrying capacity. Recognizing these dangers, the 2015 Paris Agreement was a major achievement – but not good enough, because chances are slim that it will be realized and, even if it were, it would not suffice. Global heating is beyond individual or national remedial action. Organizing decarbonization at the proper scale and speed is the formidable global public policy challenge on which the survival of the human species depends. Can governments deliver? And what, if they can’t?