This is the first of two chapters that focus on mitigation or emissions reduction. Chapter 6 addresses the primary cause of climate change, which is the emission of CO2 that derives from the combustion of fossil fuels. We review the oppositional forces of exploration and consumption in respect of fossil fuel reserves and the concepts of peak oil, gas, and coal. We turn next to the carbon cycle and how it is altered by widespread fossil fuel combustion. The low hanging fruit in mitigation is to electrify everything within reason and to simultaneously decarbonize our electrical supply. However, grid limitations, scant electrical storage capacity, and the intermittent nature of wind and solar combine to make deep decarbonization a more difficult challenge than is often appreciated. These factors along with the distinct consideration of national energy security help explain why fossil fuels are likely to persist late into this century as a source of dispatchable electric power. Finally, there are economic sectors such as aviation and steel making that lend themselves poorly to electrification and will likely remain recalcitrant sectors.

The penultimate chapter explores the future of academic inquiry on climate and security and how the field of international relations ought to change. I explore several areas where the climate security field will need to develop new approaches and insights, mostly related to the challenges of writing about the future. This includes: how academics can be useful to policy and the need to move beyond the simple phrase of “thread multiplier”; the significance of the end of “stationarity” and what that means for scholarship going forward; the question of what baselines we use for identifying normal climatic conditions and how far back we can go to identify deep structural drivers; that scholars need to explore more fully the links between human security and state security; and that runaway climate change would make all of these security challenges worse and, hence, mitigation needs to be considered a security concern in its own right. Finally, I suggest that the broader field of political science needs to elevate climate change to a systemic structural factor like anarchy and think about what this means for the discipline and for the world.

This chapter explores why, in the wake of similar exposure to drought in the mid-2000s, Syria experienced a civil war but Lebanon did not.

If the incentives to undertake drastic mitigation remain inordinately weak, those in favor of transformational adaptation to climate change will prove very strong, so humanity will spend vast sums of effort and money in this arena. These will range from the personal (buy another air conditioner) to the national (strengthen emergency response capabilities). Agricultural and food systems will need to transform to remain productive in a warmer world. More human intervention including “assisted evolution” will be required to protect natural systems that may increasingly struggle to protect themselves. Cities will need to become more resilient to resist and rapidly recover from the stresses that a changed climate will bring. Infrastructure to hold back rising seas such as the mighty Dutch Delta Works will become common all over the globe. However, over the longer run, humanity will need to surrender lesser value portions of coastline to the waves and execute a broad and painful retreat.

In this pivotal chapter, I examine the 1.5°C emissions pathways urged upon us in the 2018 IPCC SR15 report. I compare those steeply plunging emissions pathways to emissions predictions over the next 30 years made by McKinsey and Bloomberg to demonstrate that the IPCC pathways are unlikely to obtain. To devise what seems a more likely scenario, I utilize the McKinsey/Bloomberg scenarios through 2050 and append to them subsequently the sort of emissions plummet that the IPCC would recommend we commence in 2021. Even in 2050, an emissions nose-dive seems an optimistic scenario but it illustrates a pathway to Net Zero Emissions by 2084. I then translate that emissions pathway into a temperature outcome that shows an increase of roughly 2.7°C above pre-industrial temperatures in the Net Zero year. More importantly, I illustrate that after Net Zero, temperatures and therefore resulting climate damages plateau rather than decline. Worse yet, sea levels would continue to rise for centuries. Having undertaken the enormous sacrifices necessary to achieve Net Zero, I assert that future generations are unlikely to find that state of affairs acceptable. They will demand further action to reduce temperatures and climate damages. They will demand climate intervention.

Sweeping global climate interventions would be nearly impossible to implement without extensive public support. Surveys show an increasing and widespread global consensus that warming is real and constitutes a grave threat. The scientific community is virtually unanimous on these points, though this is poorly understood by the American public, which remains an outlier among developed nations in its degree of continuing climate confusion. Much of American climate exceptionalism derives from a well-funded domestic climate denial industry that has recycled tactics from the tobacco wars of the 1960s to preserve the appearance of scientific controversy where none exists. Despite that, an understanding of the gravity of the situation continues to coalesce. Conversely, knowledge about prospective climate interventions is exceptionally low. The primary exception is the somewhat misguided notion that planting trees can serve as a fully countervailing offset for carbon emissions. Another American oddity is the degree of stock placed in “chemtrailing” conspiracies. SAI is little understood among the general public but is met with strongly negative reactions when described, so much so that there is evidence of a “reverse moral hazard” effect whereby survey participants are more likely to favor strong mitigation if the alternative seems to be SAI.

Mr. McGuire:

I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Mr. McGuire was onto something when, in 1967, he told Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate that there was a great future in plastics. Although mass production of plastics was just taking off in the 1960s, plastic is ubiquitous today. Plastic is inexpensive, lightweight, and durable, making it useful to almost any industry – from construction to electronics to transportation to packaging. The characteristics that make plastic so useful, however, also make it problem.

Plastic is everywhere. Recent reports have found plastic in the ocean’s deepest trench and in the mountain air of the French Pyrenees. How does plastic turn up in such remote locations? Chapter 1 provides some answers, briefly tracing the development and growth of mass-produced plastics from the turn of the twentieth century to today. This chapter lays the foundation for a discussion of measuring plastic in our environment in Chapter 2 and plastic’s impact on our health, ecosystem, and economy presented in Chapter 3.

In this chapter we leap over the divider in our geoengineering toolbox to examine the implements on the other side of our portfolio by considering several prospective solar radiation management techniques. These begin with surface modifications that might in some way increase the albedo of the earth and cause it to absorb less solar energy, including lightening roofs and other built structures, bioengineering crops to be slightly lighter, and manipulating ice to reflect more sunlight. Glaciers could be reinforced to slow their slides into the sea. Turning our gaze upward, marine cloud brightening is a technique that could increase the reflectivity of clouds, while cirrus cloud thinning could reduce the heat-trapping effect of these high wispy clouds. Yet higher up, it may someday be possible to deploy assets in space the might deflect some of the incoming sunlight. However, the surface modification techniques don’t appear to be properly scaled to the problem, and the cloud and space-based ideas remain too speculative to rely upon.