We Need a Crash Course in CO2 Reduction to Get to Net Zero by 2030
by John Lawrence, December 22, 2020
Right now the world is emitting roughly 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) per year. We need to reduce that by an average of 4 GtCO2 per year for the next 10 years to get to net zero emissions by 2030. We need to do this in order to keep earth's average temperature from rising more than 1.5˚C which would be catastrophic for future generations. So we need to get started immediately because the result of not doing it would be worse than the current pandemic by a factor of 100 or more. In order to get the job done we need worldwide cooperation especially among the world's highest emitting countries which are the US and China. This means that we can't afford to have a hostile or even an adversarial relationship with China. What is more important - quibbling about the defects of their system or saving the planet as a habitable place for future generations.
China was the driver of most of the rise in global emissions in 2019, with an increase of 0.26 GtCO2 compared to 2018. Meanwhile, US emissions declined by 0.09 GtCO2 and those in the EU fell by 0.05 GtCO2, whereas Indian emissions increased by 0.04 GtCO2. The rest of the world’s rose 0.08 GtCO2. 2020 will probably see a decline in worldwide CO2 emissions due to the pandemic, but the reductions for the US and EU are minuscule compared to the kind or reductions needed. They are orders or magnitude too small - less than .1 GtCO2 compared to the 4 GtCO2 necessary to achieve net zero by 2030. The kind of effort needed is probably 100 times the effort of the WW 2 war effort. That's why a Green New Deal is necessary. The larger effort over ten years means that a huge amount of money is necessary to fund it.
In Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet, a Layman's Explanation of Modern Money Theory, J.D. Alt writes, "Five years after the initial agreements of the Paris Accords - and 35 years after initiating the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - carbon-dioxide levels have continued to rise rapidly in the earth's atmosphere. Virtually nothing has been undertaken, or even planned, to reverse what is now recognized, with growing alarm, as an existential threat - within the lifetimes of our children - to life on earth as we currently live it." Alt deals with the reality that an adequate response to the global warming crisis - and it is a crisis, probably the greatest that the human race has ever faced - will require trillions of dollars. This kind of money is more than the conventional means of funding - taxes or Treasury bonds - could ever come up with.
Fortunately, the problem can be solved by means of a new understanding about how money is actually created. We have seen how the Federal Reserve has printed money to bail out the banking industry during and after the Great Recession of 2008. This money did not add to the national deficit or debt. Since the US dollar is a sovereign fiat currency - it is not backed by gold or anything but faith and trust in the US government - it could be created by the Federal Reserve for other purposes than just bailing out the Big Banks. The only restrictions at this time are legal, psychological and political. While the Fed can just create money with a few keystrokes on a computer and give it to the banks, it can't just give it to the US government to be spent on programs like a Green New Deal. To make the money necessary to cope with global warming, certain legal restrictions would have to be changed so that the money could just be spent into the economy like Lincoln did to fund the Civil War, the only restriction being that it be used for a good cause and that only that amount needs to be created at any time that can be spent productively with respect to the available resources. That's the key in order not to increase inflation.
Resources including human resources can be marshaled in a big way during a crisis as they were in World War II when Ford's great World War II aircraft factory, the Willow Run B‐24 plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, produced 14 bombers per day. Liberty ships also were produced at great rates - 3 ships a day. This is the kind of effort that could be brought to bear to forestall global warming. In addition cooperation with China is essential. China's banking structure is capable of marshaling huge resources both human and material as it has done with its Belt and Road Initiative and the fact that it has pulled more than 850 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, according to the World Bank. The country's poverty rate – defined as the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day – fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015. China is capable of performing the same kind of miracles with respect to global warming, but cooperation between the two largest emitting nations and the world's largest two economies is essential.
