Climate Change and Climate

¶ … doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind," ("Great Acceleration," 2015). Technological and environmental progress has been a tremendous boon for humanity, but came at the price of environmental degradation and disaster.

Looking back from the vantage point of 2117 to the success of sustainable economic growth around the world that occurred since 2017, it is a relief to see how humans were able to withstand the temporary, loud, but ultimately divisive and ineffective movements like the "Cooler Heads Coalition" that flourished around the time Obama was President of the United States.

Climate change denial organizations and other conservative coalitions resisted change and government interventions to the point where they were almost willing to sacrifice their grandchildren's planet and human welfare in general just for the sake of making their political opponents work harder.

In a PBS Frontline episode about climate change denial, the narrator points out, "what these people call a fallacy has another name: 'the truth.'" The truth speaks volumes, and it is because the truth prevailed in climate change discourse around the world that human beings were able to steer away from the relatively small cohort of people that denied science simply so they could promote their vision of a small government in America.

What really helped ensure progress around the world towards environmental sustainability was an international coalition that did not require as much participation by American conservatives. The shock and fear that gripped the world in the post-Trump era further catalyzed Americans into leaving behind their alternative facts and misinformation in favor of intelligent discourse and rational choice. As an environmental geographer, I noted that key to shifting the discourse and policy on the environment around the world were books and media including The Madhouse Effect.

Books written by credible analysts poured out during the Trump era in an attempt to stem the tide of anti-intellectualism in America. Knowledge about global warming and climate change permeated school curricula, to the point where children were able to influence their parents and change the voting patterns in crucial electoral districts in the United States.

It was, after all, Americans that presented the main threat to inhibiting global climate change policies because relatively few people in the world denied science to the same degree as policy-driven Americans like those that support the "cooler heads coalition." It therefore took an important shift in consciousness away from anti-intellectualism towards an appreciation of scientific truth in order to change policy related to how industries minimize their emissions and promote sustainable practices.

Also crucial in the change in America was the improvements made to education in the years following Trump. Moreover, it was important to show that legislation and policy related to climate change was not so much driven by politics as by fact, truth, and ethical responsibility. Improving access to information and ceasing the trend towards too much permissiveness towards conservatives also helped. The climate change deniers were revealed for what they were and admitted to being all along: politically motivated by a desire to keep government out of human lives.

The 2015 meeting in Paris that established the "2 degree" standard helped to quantify goals in a meaningful way, shifting the discourse to ways all countries and all industries could pull together in order to meet a reasonable goal. All industries recognized the challenge of working towards developing new technologies that could minimize reliance on fossil fuels, and this is what promoted the start of meaningful changes to the actual climate data and minimized harm.

In fact, emissions control standards and cap-and-trade style legislation helped to reduce actual emissions and therefore prevent climate change from getting any worse. The effects were still evident, of course, in extreme weather events that initially precipitated alarmism among those who were previous climate change deniers. It was important to point out "human impacts on the Earth system do not operate in separate, simple cause-effect responses," ("Great Acceleration," 2015).

This meant showing how climate change is more than just warming temperatures in one area; it means shifting weather patterns and leading to extreme cold as well as rising sea levels and storms. As Plumer (2017) points out, there were three main components to the 2015 Paris meeting that helped to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get our world back on track to the point we are not.

First, the Paris meeting showed how to meet the 2 degree goal through global emissions cutting that were exponential: falling in half each successive decade from the 2020s onwards: what was dubbed a "carbon law," (Plumer, 2017). Also critical was the reflection on land use, especially the way big agricultural industries and forestry industries develop and use their lands.

According to the Paris coalition, the net emissions from land use had to fall steadily "to zero" by 2050 (Plumer, 2017), which did happen as a result of mandating less meat production by governments around the world. The reduced reliance on animal protein was something that was stimulated in part by the growing agreement among scientists that global meat production had increased to the point where it was in fact a major contributor to global emissions.

With population still increasing, it was deemed impossible to also increase meat production without any ill effects. The numbers showed that meat production had to decrease to the point where zero emissions from agriculture by 2050 was a reasonable goal as Plumer (2017) showed. The same was true for deforestation in general. Getting the governments of Brazil and other key nations on board helped to reshape land use values, ethics, and policies.

As Plumer (2017) puts it, land use changes "need to happen even as the world population grows and we're feeding ever more people," (p. 1). Finally, it was critical to develop new technologies.

Plumer (2017) points out that the technologies had to be both ones that reduced reliance on fossil fuels to begin with and also technologies that effectively "suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," until "we're artificially pulling 5 gigatons of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere by 2050 -- nearly double what all the world's trees and soils already do," (Plumer, 2017, p. 1). Direct air capture is one of the technologies that can be used to counteract the effects of emissions.

However, relying on eating up carbon could not itself solve the problems related to climate change. A dramatic shift in lifestyle, technology, and productivity needed to happen. Progressive parts of the world, like Canada and Northern Europe, helped to spearhead visions of green cities and urban living that included access to radical new transportation modes and new construction materials that were more sustainable. As Plumer (2017) puts it, "Leading cities like Copenhagen are going totally fossil fuel free.

Wealthy countries no longer sell new combustion engine cars by 2030, and transportation gets widely electrified, with many short-haul flights replaced by rail," (p. 1). The consumers in progressive nations drove the sustainable economy in meaningful ways, making new technologies trendy and effectively driving the market toward sustainable development. Demands on the private sector increased, so that companies that were not practicing sustainability lost market share and either adapted by shifting their production methods or went out of business entirely.

Changing the way electricity is generated was another important issue in reducing climate change by 2117. This proved to be one of the most challenging issues in helping create a sustainable economy around the world. It was China's reliance on coal and their geographic constraints that made this one of.