by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations
“I will not sacrifice Great British industry to the drum-banging, finger-wagging Net Zero extremists,” was the headline The Sun in London gave to a piece last week by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, defending the expenditure of 22 billion pounds on the cargo cult of carbon capture and storage. This headline captured the delusion at the core of climate-policymaking around the world: that there is an economically non-disruptive path out of the climate emergency. There isn’t.
Either we close down the fossil fuel industry long before its physical infrastructure is exhausted, strand a whole lot of capital and engage in a non-incremental restructuring of work and the economy; or we will have a world of social breakdown, conflict and economic chaos. This was the picture painted by US analysts 17 years ago in a study titled The Age of Consequences, which warned of the damage at 2.6°C of warming, a target we will likely exceed on present indications: