A Climate Scientist’s Call for Hope

Michael Mann is among the world’s most influential climate scientists and science communicators, and will forever be remembered for his work developing the “hockey stick graph” that changed the way the public understands the relationship between carbon emissions and the global climate. Currently serving as director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, Mann’s latest book is titled “Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World.”

In a recent interview with Dan Drollette of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Mann assessed the scientific and political landscapes under the second Trump administration, beginning with the necessary recognition that, “We’re certainly facing adversity when it comes to a clean energy transition in the U..S right now, what with the current administration and congressional Republicans working together to advance what’s essentially a fossil-fuel agenda.”

There were a lot of clean energy advocates and climate activists who believed that because many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives of the Biden era were specifically targeted to red states, that would encourage the politicians in those states to embrace these policies. Because these incentives — in the form of battery-manufacturing plants, for example — were not only good for the people of that state, they were a source of good jobs in that state. So, there was a certain amount of faith that the politicians in those states would be interested in doing the bidding of the people they represent. But in fact, we’re learning that it’s far more important to them to do the bidding of the powerful vested interests that have taken over — in particular the fossil fuel industry, which has a stranglehold over today’s Republican Party.

It’s important to take a step back and recognize that even if the United States eases off some of the clean energy provisions and incentives that were passed, we’re already on a decarbonization trajectory.

The market for clean energy is becoming increasingly competitive against fossil fuel energy. In many places, fossil fuel energy is already hugely more expensive than renewables.

And that means that the green transition will continue. The transition will slow down because of the obstinance of the current administration and its congressional enablers — but it will continue.

Because what’s going to determine the trajectory of clean energy is not about the U.S. in isolation. It’s also about what’s happening in other countries — and we’re still seeing quite a bit of progress there, with steady decarbonization of the global energy infrastructure.

[This is happening] for the simple reason that it’s more economical to go with clean energy, especially in developing countries. Why build a huge, expensive electricity grid based on fossil fuels when you can deploy a cheaper, distributed, clean-energy solution based on solar, wind, and geothermal energy? Especially when there’s now good energy storage technology to deal with intermittency issues. So, the transition is happening; it just has to happen faster to have any real effect on reducing global warming.

And that means we do need more incentives. We need to level the playing field even more so that clean energy can compete fairly against fossil fuel energy in the financial marketplace.

I’d say we’re making progress, but we’re not yet making enough progress to keep us under certain critical sort of levels of interference with the climate system — that 1.5 degrees Celsius, or roughly 3 degrees Fahrenheit, level of global warming we keep hearing about so much. We won’t be able to keep our carbon budget below that target if we don’t accelerate this clean energy.

On the subject of the 1.5 Celsius threshold, long held up as the difference between success and failure, he argues that things are not so black and white. 

It’s not like it’s a cliff that we go over. Instead, at 1.5, it’s bad, but at 1.6 degrees Celsius, worse stuff happens. And at 1.7, it’s even worse.

But in my view, this 1.5 figure is a critical target, because at that level of warming, bad things happen — and people in the climate research community and in climate communications have tried to be pretty clear about that.

Maybe a better analogy is that humanity is on a dangerous highway, and the further we drive down that highway, the more danger we encounter. So, we want to get off at the earliest exit we possibly can. But if we miss the 1.5 exit, we don’t give up and drive all the way to the middle of nowhere; instead, we take the next available exit and try to keep warming at 1.6 Celsius or below.

Above all, we should avoid the idea that: “We should give up, because it’s not remotely attainable.” That is so wrong-headed.

And we do have to recognize there are some bad actors out there who are doing everything they can to confuse the issue. They do this by clouding the scene, and sort of fanning the flames of climate denial or delay — or even promoting flat-out climate doom-ism.

[Doom-ism is] a strategy used by polluters and their advocates. The idea is that if you can get enough people to truly believe that it’s too late to do anything, then it follows that the public will accept the idea that there’s no longer any need to take action against climate change — so we can keep burning fossil fuels.

And this kind of thinking was used against something that was very reasonable: an actionable target of a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming of the planet, which was absolutely achievable a decade ago…. When polluters say “You have to give up on 1.5 Celsius because it’s not do-able,” what they really mean is: “We’re not going to let you do it—and when you give up on that target and move to 2.0, we’ll pull the same thing again.”

Read the full interview here.