As climate-stoked disasters and record-breaking heat waves piled up after 2014, the sense of urgency among white evangelicals actually declined. Amazingly enough, the mounting evidence they saw or perhaps even experienced did less than nothing to convince them.
I understand your feelings of horror at the idea of what is coming. Your desire to reduce our impact on the climate is commendable. I share it and have structured my life to cause the least impact I can. I have no children. I generate my own power renewably, etc. But like I was saying, it doesn’t matter. Every bit of fossil fuel I spare is going to be used by someone else. We make Paris accords and agreements and resolutions to reduce our consumption. But they are meaningless. Every time we make a 10% or 20% reduction in emissions per capita it is negated by growth in population. Our numbers continue to increase. And the CO2 we emit goes up every year.
The population of every other species on the planet is kept in check by limits on the resources available or they become a resource and are limited by predation. And so they live in balance with the environment, never exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth to support them. But we are clever enough to figure out how to use every available source of energy to keep increasing our population. We long ago exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the earth. We are now relying on fossil fuels to keep us alive. (I’ll skip arguing why basing the survival of your population on a non-renewable resource is a bad idea. See William Catton: Overshoot to read about that.) And so we are stuck in a catch-22 in a few different ways.
First of all, if we just stopped using fossil fuels we wouldn’t be able to produce enough food to sustain our numbers. We wouldn’t be able to transport the food to the people. And we wouldn’t be able to store it and cook it. Oh, but we don’t have to stop, just reduce, one might say. As I already mentioned, that doesn’t work. Every reduction we make is negated by more people needing to use their smaller amount.
The second catch-22 is the aerosol masking effect. Ironically our prodigious use of fossil fuels helps keep the earth cooler, but only as long as we continue to use them. Aerosols produced from fossil fuel use reflect a significant amount of solar radiation back into space. During the Covid-19 shutdown the reduced air traffic was enough to cause a noticeable increase in warming even though that is just one source of aerosols in the atmosphere.
And third, everyone deserves a chance at life. We are loath to say to the young “you can’t live as well as your elders because we have to stop using energy.” And there is no politically feasible way to control the growth of a population. China tried it and look how well that worked. We cannot control our population growth. It will continue to increase until some external force acts upon us to stop it. And with more people comes more energy use.
We already know that increasing CO2 is making climate change worse. We can’t stop increasing CO2 emissions. Ergo climate change will continue to get worse. I haven’t even mentioned how that’s going to effect us, the impacts it will have on crop production around the world. Suffice to say that no matter how much we want to fix the problem, we can’t. For decades scientists have been warning us we have to act now or it will be catastrophic. We never acted in a meaningful way. And now the consequences are upon us. There is no time to stop the car, we are already over the cliff. We just haven’t hit bottom yet.