Title: Climate Change for Astronomers: Chapters 4-6
Authors: T. A. Rector, R. Mason, K. C. Yu
Authors’ institutions: University of Alaska Anchorage, Independent, Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Status: Published through IOP press [closed access]
The effects of climate change are both highly general and highly local. While we all experience it differently, it transcends borders and regions. No one is immune. Simultaneously, the solutions to climate change must also be international. We can fix this problem – but only if we work together.
The book Climate Change for Astronomers, edited by Dr. Travis Rector, represents a massive effort by twenty scientists to cover the ways in which astronomers talk about and advocate around climate change. There’s far too much packed into its 590 pages for one bite, so we at Astrobites are covering the book’s chapters individually. Today, we’ll take you through chapters 4-6, which cover some of the many consequences of climate change and present a framework for evaluating solutions.
The problem
We’re all familiar with the consequences of climate change – we see them in our daily lives. In Germany, where I live, heat waves every summer kill thousands. In Norway, where I used to live, glaciers are melting. In the western US, where I’m from, wildfires are drastically increasing in intensity and acreage. Tropical storms are more powerful, form more quickly, and move more slowly than they used to, as do extreme blizzards. The list goes on, and we don’t all feel climate change equally. Marginalized people worldwide, including both in developed countries and the global South, are some of the least responsible for climate change but the most vulnerable to its effects.
Agriculture in particular is critically affected by climate change worldwide, with higher temperatures and changes in weather patterns impacting crops and livestock directly. Localized effects of climate change also impact agriculture in that locality – weeds and pests migrate to higher latitudes and altitudes, floods increase the erosion rate of topsoil, and plants can build up toxic substances due to heat and smoke and even change their taste. Excessive heat and smoke inhalation are extremely dangerous to farm workers. On the other hand, agriculture is also the source of around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, with livestock, especially cattle and sheep, accounting for the majority of agricultural emissions.
What can we do?
Ok, so things are pretty bad. But we knew that. In fact, spending too much time talking about the consequences of climate change, especially non-local consequences, can be a demotivator for many people and lead to the incorrect feeling that nothing can be done. As we discussed in Earth Week 2023, it is just as important (if not more) to talk about the solutions to climate change as it is to talk about its effects. Many activists and science communicators say that climate apathy is one of the biggest problems they face in their advocacy, so let’s talk solutions.
As scientists, we might feel most comfortable focusing on the technical solutions to climate change, like changing where we get our energy, increasing our energy efficiency, decreasing our energy consumption, and carbon-capture methods. We covered some existing technical solutions in a past bite, but climate change can also be addressed through social, political, and economic perspectives, and it’s important to recognize that in our work. After all, a technical solution to climate change is useless if it isn’t adopted.
Climate in society
Climate change is a social justice issue. Not everyone contributes to it equally, and not everyone will be able to work to mitigate it in the same ways – someone might drive to work, for example, not because they don’t care about the emissions from their car but because they live somewhere without bike lanes, sidewalks, or public transport. But while these issues are structural, the social norms that led to them can be changed both on an individual level and on larger scales.
Small actions, like eating less meat, biking to work, or buying fewer clothes, reduce apathy and climate doomism and influence the people around us to make the same choices. If your friends choose to avoid short-haul flights, you’ll likely take the train when you can as well. If you install solar panels on your home, your neighbor is more likely to do so themselves. Although these things aren’t enough to solve climate change on their own, they add up as more people do them over a long period of time, and they make us more likely to take larger actions like contacting government representatives, showing up to protests, and organizing other activists.
Climate in politics
These larger actions can in turn lead to political change. The 2015 Paris Agreement sets a carbon emission reduction goal for each signatory country, called the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC). Governments can achieve these goals through a variety of different methods, but it can be difficult to enact legislative change when the long-term gain of a policy is outshone by its short-term challenges, and when fossil fuel industry lobbyists fight any policy that doesn’t benefit them.
However, good climate policy changes are possible! In the US, for example, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and 2023 Environmental Protection Agency rule changes incentivized power plants to implement carbon capture technology through tax credits and new performance standards. This will drastically reduce the carbon produced through power generation by 2030, and is an important and necessary step on the way to net-zero emissions by 2050. On the state level, hundreds of bipartisan climate bills have been successfully enacted, including in Republican-controlled legislatures (a third of the bills in the linked study). Many of these bills focused on climate change as not just a social and environmental issue, but an economic one.
Climate in economics
Economic solutions to climate change need to take into account the concept of an “externality”. Take, for example, the smog pictured in Figure 1. How much would people be willing to pay to not live in these conditions, or how much would they have to be paid in order to live there? That cost is the externality of the process that created the smog – coal burning. Fossil fuels have massive negative externalities to their production and use, both in the short term and the long term. But fossil fuel companies and power plants often don’t have to pay these costs, a phenomenon which acts as an artificial subsidy. Fossil fuel companies are also directly subsidized by governments through payments, tax breaks, infrastructure investments, and below-market-value extraction permits. Renewable energy, however, has also been heavily subsidized to incentivize the development of new technologies.
To de-incentivize fossil fuel use, governments can implement carbon taxes or fees, helping to hold companies accountable for the external costs of carbon emissions. In the EU and in California, a policy known as “cap and trade” reduces emissions by allocating each company an allowed amount of carbon. Companies that go over their allowed limit are penalized, while companies that are under the limit can sell their excess allowance to others. Renewable energy has benefited so much from these types of subsidies and policies that despite continuing political support for fossil fuels, it is now cheaper to use alternative energy sources in many regions.
All of these different solutions interact with each other. Growing popular support for climate activism makes governments more likely to implement policies that fight climate change, including economic incentives for renewable energy sources. These economic factors lower the price of renewable energy and raise the price of fossil fuels, which in turn make people more likely to make choices that benefit the environment. Any given solution for climate change must address these factors in order to be feasible, but change in one sphere makes change in the others more likely. There’s more than one kind of climate tipping point!
This article was written as a part of our Climate Change Series. We’d love to hear what you would like to see from this initiative – if you have ideas, please let us know in this google form.
Astrobite edited by: Roel Lefever
Featured image credit: AAS/IOP Publishing
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