Q: Is a viable solution to global warming compatible with consumer capitalism?
There's a simple way to answer that question: we don't have a choice. On climate, the time is running out so fast that there's no other pathway. Either we make this work within the existing economic paradigm, or we fail.
It's naive to say 'Let's go for de-growth, let's completely divest, or let's think of post-capitalist model and throw GDP in the waste bin'. We have to work with the economic machinery that we have in our engine room.
Q: Why are fossil fuel companies reaching out to you, an Earth system scientist, for advice?
The European-based oil companies - such as Shell, BP and Equinor - have not come to the point where they see the beginning-of-the-end of their business, but I'm sure that they recognise that we have a serious problem.
They are also very clever at engaging with the scientific community and allowing a high ceiling when it comes to entertaining different perspectives. But they still translate everything into their own conclusions, which are mostly aligned with Shell's "Sky Scenarios".
Their argument goes like this: 'We serve humanity by supplying modern energy. Economies need cheap energy because otherwise they just grind to a halt. Don't blame us, we're just providing exactly what you are asking for.'
The Sky Scenario says that even with a 50 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years, Shell can be aligned with science and the Paris Agreement without changing very much.
But this is an illusion that presumes the deployment of unrealistic levels of carbon capture and storage (CCS) - a technology that syphons off CO2 as gas or coal is burned and stores it underground - and tree planting. It is a feel-good strategy for the status quo.
Today we only have three, four, maybe five hundred billion tons of CO2 in our 'carbon budge' left to emit - about 10 years' worth. There is no more room for this type of posturing. And yet companies are still making major natural gas and oil investments in the Arctic and elsewhere. This won't take us to a net zero economy in time.
Q: Could Earth flip from being a self-cooling to a self-warming system?
We should humbly cherish the fact that the Earth system remains in net cooling mode. We are loading the planet with heat by burning fossil fuels. So far the Earth system has responded by dampening that heat. First, land and oceans absorb 50 percent of emitted greenhouse gases. That's the biggest economic subsidy ever. Second, 90 percent of the excess heat we generate is taken up in the oceans. Third, ice sheets and the polar ice cap reflect 90 percent of solar radiation back into space.