Balancing the Carbon Budget
While Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt grapple with balancing the UK budget, with all the implications for our taxes and the balancing of our domestic finances, a much bigger and more dangerous budget is ticking away.
We are living on a ‘Carbon Budget’: the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere and still reasonably maintain human life on earth. At the moment we have used up 90% of the budget which would give us a 67% chance of staying within the 1.5°C of warming. UN reports published in November warn that there is no longer a ‘credible pathway to 1.5°C’. Indeed, the trajectory of our current policies is driving us to 3.2°C of warming by the end of this century.
I don’t believe the human race and the eco systems we depend on can possibly survive that, and yet it is within the lifetime of the children in our nurseries and primary schools.
Antonio Guterres, secretary-general to the United Nations has said: “We have dramatic situations in Ukraine, but this is the crisis of this moment. It is the crisis of our lifetime. The defining issue of today’s world. Climate change must be a central priority for all governments, all companies, all cities… civil society everywhere. If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to the greatest catastrophe in the world, we will be doomed.”
Science tells us that Green House Gas emissions must halved by 2030 if we are to avoid the worst effects of Climate Crisis. Yet the latest pledges from governments around the world suggest that in 2030 emissions will still be increasing by 10% each year. We are still heading at breakneck speed in the wrong direction.
“So what I do can make no difference.”
In many ways I agree. Massive changes are needed on a global scale to make a real difference. There needs to be a carbon tax, applying the ‘polluter pays’ principle and providing the dividend for new, fossil free technologies to take off at scale. We need to reassess how our economies work so that we only aspire to growth that can be accommodated on one planet. Massive fossil fuel multi-national companies need to be held accountable and to change direction. The trillions of dollars in the private sector need to be set to work in effecting a swift and radical transition, rather than in applying greenwash.
The extent and the depth of the changes needed is almost unimaginable and certainly puts my daily efforts to reduce my carbon footprint into the shade.
But the alternative is to ‘ru
bber stamp’ the direction in which we are headed. To wash our hands of it and the consequences for our children. We are the global north. Three billion of the world’s population have an annual carbon footprint smaller than that of our refrigerators. We should shoulder our responsibility and speak out!
Since the summer I have been working to re-launch ‘Ring out for Climate!’, encouraging church bells around the world to ring out their warnin
g about the crisis and to speak up for Climate Justice on the eve of COP 27. In addition to writing to all the bishops and deans in England, Scotland and Wales, I wrote individually to over 100 Episcopalian bishops in the USA and all the Anglican bishops in Australia in an attempt to develop the global reach of the initiative. I just hope it achieves something.
We are part of a vast global community and together surely our voice can make a difference!