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How Not to Act in an Emergency

Forget AI–we need some human intelligence

We’re getting right to the nub now.

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:

Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.

The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.

Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully:

It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behavior is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time.

And now, with equal care, read the words of the biggest oil producer on earth, the CEO of Saudi Aramco, who was in Houston last week for the annual hydrocarbon festival known as CERAWeek.

“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions.”

That is to say, the powers that be want to abandon what the World Meteorological Organization, in their ‘red alert’ report called the “one glimmer of hope”: that renewable energy installations rose fifty percent last year.

Understand that the battle is fully joined. The fossil fuel industry—as Exxon CEO Darren Woods helpfully explained—is in an all-out fight to derail anything green, because it won’t return “above average profits.” They have plenty of allies: everyone noted Donald Trump threatening a “bloodbath” last week, but fewer noted the actual target of his wrath: electric vehicles. The Biden administration, after listening to the rhetoric at the Houston conference, backed EVs in a straightforward and earnest way today, announcing new rules that attempt to spur the rapid growth of a crucial climate-fighting technology. But of course that produced the requisite reaction: as the Times reported,

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying organization, has started what it says is a “seven figure” campaign of advertising, phone calls and text messages against what it falsely calls “Biden’s E.P.A. car ban” in the swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, as well as in Ohio, Montana and the Washington, D.C., market.

So, like it or not, the climate crisis is going to be a key part of this election campaign. The November outcome may hinge on whether Americans can imagine making even this small change in the face of the gravest crisis our species has ever wandered into: replacing the gas tank in a car with a battery. That doesn’t seem like much to ask?

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