"Are we the bad guys?"

Some of you may remember the Mitchell and Webb sketch in which two German SS soldiers in the Second World War on the Eastern Front, awaiting a Red Army assault, pause during the triumphalist rhetoric with which they are bolstering their morale, to reflect more deeply on the situation in which they find themselves. "Are we the baddies?" they ask.  

Well, we are currently engaged in a war, and we are unequivocally the bad guys. The full impact of global warming is not manifested in surface air temperatures because 90% of the warming is absorbed by the oceans. The energy absorbed by the oceans, as indicated by the rate of increase in sea temperatures over the last 150 years, is equivalent to the detonation of 1.5 Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs a second (in fact the figure rises if you calculate it over a shorter, more recent time period). That's over a megaton of yield every minute. The largest nuclear detonation ever was the Tsar Bomb. We're dropping the equivalent of about 40 of them every day due to climate change.  

People in the '50s were anxious about a Third World War starting by accident. It turns out we have been accidentally waging it ourselves the entire time without even realising it, except our chosen enemy has not been the Soviet Union, but our shared home, the planet Earth itself. 

If there were no oceans to absorb all this energy, much of the Earth would already have been reduced to a barren wasteland by us, with average air surface temperatures over 20 Celsius degrees higher than they currently are, and large areas of the Earth completely uninhabitable. 

We have been spared this post-apocalyptic scenario - so far - only by the remarkable good fortune of having such extensive bodies of water on our planet and the fact that the specific heat capacity of water, relating the amount of heat it can absorb to the consequent rise in temperature, is unusually high. We have in effect done the equivalent of subjecting the Earth to a sustained thermonuclear bombardment over a number of decades, and the vast majority of the damage has been absorbed by the oceans. 

So, although we sometimes describe the urgency with which we must address the climate emergency in terms of going on a "war footing" (I have done so myself in my article "banking on the energy transition"), and although that sort of rhetoric is possibly legitimate in terms of motivating people to take urgent action, which we must, we should probably be talking in terms of making peace rather than war, given we are already at war.  

We are involved in a war we cannot win. Wars are fought between men to gain access to resources and opportunities. But humanity, uniquely among animals, has already occupied each available habitat the planet has to offer. Humanity already has every possible opportunity to exploit them, and is able to consume any and all resources as soon the proliferating requirements of our constantly advancing technology identify them as such. There is nowhere left to which we can export our economic crises, no wars and conquests that we can embark upon that can postpone any longer the processes of social collapse precipitated by the decay of value represented by unsustainable economic activities (as I describe in "the wealth of nations"), and no unspoiled paradises left which we can pillage and ruin to try to offset the imbalances introduced by the devastation of our own ecosystems. There is nowhere left to run to escape the consequences of our actions.   

We must make peace with nature, because in destroying nature we destroy ourselves. We need to learn to live with nature. By behaving like colonists and conquerors we have turned ourselves into refugees. Our manifest destiny has turned into the hand of fate. Not just plants and animals and habitats and ecosystems, but we too are collateral damage in this war we fight ultimately on ourselves.  

And a peace treaty with the planet is urgent because we are on the brink of unleashing the ultimate, decisive weapon, in this war we cannot win: methanocalypse, an irreversible feedback mechanism, as discussed in my article. 

The terms of this peace treaty are remarkably simple. We need to install at least ten terawatts of new renewable energy capacity in the next ten years. We need a process of rewilding that requires the planting of at least one trillion trees over a similar timescale. We need electrification and sector coupling to ensure energy generated sustainably by renewables penetrates to all corners of our economies. We need to develop environmental intelligence and an awareness of the consequences of our behaviors. We need to work with instead of against nature. We must be allies instead of antagonists.  

And we need people to understand that this will not cost anything! It will instead release a massive peace dividend. "Every dollar spent in transforming the global energy system provides payoff of at least USD 3 and potentially more than USD 7" (IRENA).

The war we have been waging has not been prosecuted for free. We have simply deferred the costs, which are staggering and are now due if we continue. Assets will become stranded, not because of any decisions we make, not due to any policy positions, but because the environmental consequences of our actions will inevitably be factored into the cost of our assets. The value of assets stranded by environmental degradation dwarves the value of those stranded by tackling it. 

The stranding of assets by the environmental consequences of business as usual will precipitate a Minsky moment, when debt can no longer be leveraged, as the value of everything on which it is secured crashes. This is not just any financial bubble. This doesn't just pertain to tulips or dot com properties or the South Seas. This affects things for which you have to buy insurance or which rely on something that is insured for the preservation of their value, which is to say, this affects everything!  

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has remarked that avoiding this requires a "massive reallocation of capital". In order to future-proof your wealth, you must make it work for you in sustainable ways. Perhaps what is required is to make green energy bonds for offshore wind power as attractive as offshore tax havens for investors and fund managers. Additionally, we could innovate by developing financial instruments based around short selling green energy due to its low incremental cost (due to zero fuel costs), to unlock the initial capital expenditure required. Securing these low incremental costs would also drive improvements in project efficiency and reliability. Peace is a win-win scenario in a war in which everyone loses.  

"To meet global climate objectives, the deployment of renewables must increase at least six-fold compared to current government plans" (Francesco La Camera). This corresponds to the figure of roughly ten terawatts in ten years I stated earlier. Globally, installed renewable energy capacity increased by 0.17TW least year to 2.35TW (IRENA). 

Clearly a six-fold increase cannot be achieved overnight. If we assume the installation rate of new capacity is ramped up from 0.17TW per annum over a five year period to a rate that will deliver over ten terawatts in a ten year period, it needs to increase by approximately 40% per annum compounded over five years to about 1.8TW per annum by 2025, a ten-fold increase.  

We have been living on borrowed time, and that borrowed time has just run out. We are engaged in an unwinnable war on nature whose costs we can defer no longer. It's time to get real. It's time to work with and not against nature. It's time to make peace, carve out those costs and earn our peace dividend.