An extract published in the Guardian, taken from The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg which will be published on 27 October:
“The media and our political leaders have the opportunity to take drastic and immediate action, and still they choose not to. Perhaps it is because they are still in denial. Maybe it is because they are unaware. Maybe it is because they are more scared of the solutions than of the problem itself.”
According to the United Nations’ emissions gap report, the world’s planned fossil fuel production by the year 2030 will be more than twice the amount that would be consistent with keeping to the 1.5c target. This is science’s way of telling us that we can no longer reach our targets without a system change, because meeting our targets would literally require tearing up contracts, valid deals and agreements on an unimaginable scale. This should, of course, be dominating every hour of our everyday news feed, every political discussion, every business meeting and every inch of our daily lives. But that is not what is happening.
The media and our political leaders have the opportunity to take drastic and immediate action, and still they choose not to. Perhaps it is because they are still in denial. Maybe it is because they do not care. Maybe it is because they are unaware. Maybe it is because they are more scared of the solutions than of the problem itself. Maybe it is because they are afraid of causing social unrest. Maybe they are afraid of losing their popularity. Maybe they simply did not go into politics or journalism to uproot a system they believe in – a system they have spent their lives defending. Or maybe the reason for their inaction is a mixture of all these things.
We cannot live sustainably within today’s economic system. Yet that is what we are constantly being told we can do. We can buy sustainable cars, travel on sustainable motorways, powered by sustainable petroleum. We can eat sustainable meat and drink sustainable soft drinks out of sustainable plastic bottles. We can buy sustainable fast fashion and fly on sustainable aeroplanes using sustainable fuels. And, of course, we are going to meet our short- and long-term sustainable climate targets, too, without making the slightest effort.
“How?” you might ask. How can that be possible when we don’t yet have any technical solutions that can fix this crisis alone, and the option of stopping doing things is unacceptable from our current economic standpoint? What are we going to do? Well, the answer is the same as always: we will cheat. We will use all those loopholes and all the creative accounting that we have conjured up in our climate frameworks since the very first conference of the parties, the 1995 Cop1 in Berlin. We will outsource our emissions along with our factories, we will use baseline manipulation and start counting our emission reductions when it suits us best. We will burn trees, forests and biomass, as those have been excluded from the official statistics. We will lock decades of emissions into fossil gas infrastructure and call it green natural gas. And then we will offset the rest with vague afforestation projects – trees that might be lost to disease or fire – while we simultaneously cut down the last of our old-growth forests at a much higher speed.
Don’t get me wrong. Planting the right trees in the right soil is a great thing to do. It eventually sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and we should do it wherever it is suitable for the soil and suitable for the people living there who care for that land. But afforestation should not be confused with offsetting or climate compensation, because that is something completely different. You see, the main problem is that we already have at least 40 years of carbon dioxide emissions to “compensate” for. It is all up there, in the atmosphere, and that is where it will stay, probably for many centuries to come. This historic CO2 is what we should be focusing on when we are using our present – very limited – ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, in various projects such as planting trees. But offsetting, as we have conceived it, is not meant to do that. It was never created for us to clean up our mess. Far too often it has been used as an excuse for us to continue emitting CO2, maintain business as usual and meanwhile send a signal that we have a solution and therefore we do not have to change.
Words matter, and they are being used against us. These are lies. Dangerous lies that will cause further, disastrous delay. Predictions by the UN conclude that our CO2 emissions are expected to rise by another 16% by 2030. The time we have left to avoid creating increasing climate catastrophes in many places around the world is rapidly running out.
You can read the full article here.