Zero emissions means no more petrol/diesel or natural gas driven motor vehicles of any kind for personal, business travel and freight (land, sea and air), or industry including tractors and other machinery for agricultural purposes. It also includes the embedded energy in the construction, maintenance and renewal of supporting infrastructure.
How long have we got to phase these out?
Scientists have been saying for decades we must restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees to provide a safety margin that protects us from the risk of tipping points that would put the planet on a hot house trajectory with catastrophic warming of six degrees or more. Earlier estimates gave us twenty or thirty years to achieve this. But scientists now reveal these estimates were optimistic and that 1.5 degree warming is already locked in – even if we cut emissions to zero immediately and that we need to achieve a reduction of 125% by 2030.
We are now told we need to reduce emissions to zero by 2035 to avoid a 2 degree warming. Two degrees warming reduces our chances of stabilising our climate and avoiding catastrophic warming, but TfM believes on the basis of earlier forecasts and the prospect of delays caused by business as usual inertia this figure will be revised downward in coming years so we should not use it as a target – we need to reduce emissions as quickly as we can and aim for zero by 2030, with an interim target of 50% reduction by 2025.
This means removal of all motorised transport, machinery and equipment within eight and a half years.
Politicians and others might like to argue this is unrealistic, but the reality is the planet is not open to discussion on this matter, and responding will challenge our values, aspirations/expectations and choices we must make. This was reflected in my closing address at our last forum, The Future We Must Plan for, but I have added a quotation from Prof Carl Saga’s famous “Blue Dot Speech below, delivered at Cornell University in 1994.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena……Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.