Tipping points in the struggle to save humanity from climate breakdown

By Charlie Wilson

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” Shakespeare, Richard II

Time was we never had storms with names…

Time was, articles of this sort never used to come with anxiety trigger warnings, because having to confront the reality of climate breakdown is increasingly terrifying. Now they often do, with links to sites that help convert anxiety into positive engagement instead of paralysing depression. The key point being that fatalism is fatal. So, here’s another blast of the klaxon; as the only viable response to a challenge on this scale is to turn anxiety into well informed action and mobilisation.

It’s also the case that warning articles of this sort can come across as repetitious, because every day the climate and ecological crisis deepens, and every new experience of it is worse than the last. Enver Hoxha’s much quoted remark that “the bad news is that this year will be worse than last year, but the good news is that it will be better than next year” is a good way to sum the situation up.

As the ecology COP takes place in Columbia and the climate COP is imminent in Azerbaijan, a short summary of the situation would be:

  1. The pressure that humanity is putting on planetary resources is breaking through ecological limits, which is beginning to have severe and observable consequences.
  2. The transition to sustainable energy is accelerating, but not fast enough to avert a catastrophic increase of almost 3C in average temperatures by the end of the century on current policies; but even this is sparking increasingly virulent resistance from the fossil fuel sector, expressed politically by overt climate denial from the Right and Far Right.
  3. The United States and its allies are still investing in fossil fuels, aiming to keep the Global South poor as a way to maintain their 3-5 planet lifestyles while making a slow enough and partial enough transition not to disturb existing balance of wealth and power (domestically or globally).
  4. China, while in absolute terms the largest emitter of greenhouses gases, is making a handbrake turn away from fossil fuel use for energy generation, transport and some industry; but this is being framed in trade Cold War terms by the West as “overcapacity” that should be restrained not emulated lest the world is led to an ecological civilisation by their “systemic competitor”.
  5. The Global South is being hit hardest by climate impacts while being denied the finance needed to develop sustainably by finance capital headquartered in the Global North.
  6. Private finance will follow the money, over the edge of the cliff if need be.

Examples to illustrate each point follow.

Climate and ecological breakdown

  • In 2023, natural carbon sinks, forests, soil and oceans, reached the point that they were no longer absorbing surplus CO2. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September, “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems…terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability. Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end”.
  • If that continues to be the case, we are already through a crucial tipping point which makes accelerated efforts to cut carbon emissions even more imperative. A report on this was tucked away on p18 of the Guardian when it should have made screaming headlines on every front page. This is the media equivalent of hearing a fire alarm going off and reacting quickly, to disconnect the alarm.
  •  At the beginning of October, two “once in a century” hurricanes tore through Florida, killing over 200 people, knocking out power for 3 million and doing accumulated damage equivalent to 0.36% of US GDP in a fortnight.  Florida is becoming increasingly uninsurable as a result of it. 95% of the damage done was uninsured.
  • This is just one example of climate impacts in one small part of the US. Wildfires and floods globally this summer, from Europe to China to Africa, have been on a staggering scale. Far more people have died in Africa – with around 1,500 people killed and more than 1 million displaced in western and central parts of the continent – but, in the usual racist calculus of “the News”, Florida and Central Europe have had far more coverage.
  • From July to September this year, China’s direct economic losses due to natural disasters, such as super typhoons and floods, reached 230bn yuan ($32bn), “more than doubled from the first six months of 2024”
  • And this has effects like this even in a temperate backwater like the UK, as the Morning Star reports; “England suffered its second-worst harvest on record this year, with the wheat crop down by more than a fifth, winter barley (primarily important for animal feed, but also for brewing) by more than a quarter and rapeseed (used for animal feed, cooking oil and many processed foods) by almost a third.”
  • At the Biodiversity COP in Cali Columbia, 85% of countries, including the UK, have missed the deadline for submitting  nature improvement plans for the target to protect and restore 30% of land and oceans by 2030. According to Greenpeace, at current rates of progress, this target “will not be achieved in ocean environments until 2107”.
  • Since 1975 global wildlife populations are estimated to have fallen by 73%, tearing the web of life into shreds.
  • According to the United Nations “We are facing an unprecedented water crisis, with global freshwater demand predicted to exceed supply by 40% by 2030”.
  • The knock on effects of this on food security were summarised by Professor Tom Oliver of Reading University; “I think we will certainly, in the next 15 -20 years, see continued food crises, and the risk of multiple bread basket failures…that’s in addition to a lot of the other risks that might impact us through freshwater pollution, ocean acidification, wildfires, algal blooms, and so on.” The political knock-on effects will generate acute turmoil, especially in the most vulnerable countries, but nowhere will be immune.
  • Developed /Global North/Imperialist countries are paying less than 50% of their fair share of biodiversity finance according to Carbon Brief.

Energy transition

Energy-related CO2 emissions account for 70% of the world’s total and hit a record high of 37.4 billion tonnes last year. According to Asia Financial,

  • A rapid jump in global adoption of solar power and electric vehicles — led by China — will bring about peak emissions this year but global progress is still a “long way short” of requirements set out in the Paris Agreement.
  • Annual solar installations increased 80% last year as sharp reductions in the costs of panels and batteries made it cheaper than coal – with battery costs dropping 14% in 2023 and projected to nearly halve by 2026 to $80/KWh.
  • Global coal consumption in power stations is declining.
  • Global EV sales increased 50% last year, are set to take a 25% share of new passenger vehicles sales by next year, heading for 50% by 2031.  This is projected to undercut half of projected oil demand, with the IEA projecting that this will peak before 2030 as a result.
  • The problem is that the two other continental size economies, the US and EU, are together only investing in the energy transiton at just over half the scale that China is. As a result the current trajectory will only halve energy emissions by 2050; well short of Paris Agreement climate targets to reduce them 45% by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050.

All of this is based on a presumption that there will be no major extraneous shocks, like a wider war in West Asia, which would have the immediate impact of making oil both more expensive and more profitable; on the one hand hastening attempts to replace it with renewable energy, on the other making marginal reserves more economic to produce and driving investment in that direction. For major fossil fuel companies in the West, recognising the long term trend away from oil and gas means that the surviving producers will be those with access to the easiest and cheapest reserves to extract will be those that survive the longest. That essentially means OPEC. Nevertheless, companies like Shell and BP are jettisoning their very small renewables interests, because these are less profitable, and they are clearing the deck for a struggle for survival against much larger rivals like Exxon Mobil by doubling down on their core business, even if this dooms them in the long term. Other companies, like Total are trying to diversify into metals, while Equinor is taking a “counter cyclical” investment into renewable energy company Orsted because “They can see oil demand and the oil market in trend decline, and they are trying to de-risk that world”.

China’s dash for renewables

According to Carbon Brief’s latest China Briefing

  • China made 60% of worldwide renewable installations in 2023.
  • Its solar power generation alone will, by 2035, exceed the current total US electricity demand.
  • The IEA projects that China will add 60% of all new renewables installations globally between 2024 and 2030.
  • This means that China will lead a global decline in carbon emissions after 2030, with emissions falling to 8% below 2023 levels by 2030 and 24% below by 2035, based on current policy settings (rising to 17% and 45%, respectively, if announced pledges are met).
  • Nevertheless, to align with the IEA’s scenario for net-zero emissions by 2050, China’s clean power would need to expand 1.5-times faster than current rates and investment – particularly in grids and energy storage – would need to double. This compares to a South East Asia need to quintuple investment by 2035. China’s net zero target is currently 2060.

It is the same story when it comes to electric vehicles. Of the 1.7 million EVs sold in September this year, a 30.5% increase year on year, 1.1 million of them were sold in China. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in the Daily Telegraph (!) “China has introduced a $2,000 cash-for-clunkers scheme to clear old petrol and diesel cars off the road, which chips away at the legacy stock argument. On average, new electric vehicles (EVs) in China undercut combustion cars by 8pc on purchase price”.

  • China has also just set up a state-owned enterprise (SOE), the Resources Recycling Group to recycle used batteries from electric vehicles (EVs), as well as decommissioned wind power and solar equipment. President Xi Jinping says that the establishment of the company is an “important decision” to “perfect an economy that facilitates green, low-carbon and circular development, and advance the building of a beautiful China on all fronts”. The company has been set up with support from National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planner, “to improve recycling in various industries”.
  • China is also turning its back on coal fired power stations, with approvals for new projects down 83% on 2023, and coal fired blast furnaces in its enormous steel manufacturing sector (180 times bigger than that of the UK) with all new steel projects this year being Electric Arc Furnaces. This is as close to a u – turn as anyone might expect and indicates the direction of travel. China is advancing at pace to becoming a High Income Country, pulled along by a high speed electric locomotive at the front, but pushed by a still very big steam engine at the back; but the pull of the first is rapidly going to eclipse the push of the second. The IEA projects that electricity generated by solar alone will be greater than that generated by coal as early as 2026.

The question that leaps out from this is why it is that China, with just 17% of the global population, and a per capita income a quarter that of the UK or Germany and a sixth that of the United States, will make 60% of the worlds renewables investments and buy at least two thirds of the world’s electric vehicles in the coming years?

Whatever label you want to put on China, this says something very positive about it, but also something very negative about the far richer countries in the Global North that are not only failing to pull their weight, but also seeking to slow down the supply of cheap EVs and solar panels, calling it “overcapacity ” (as if we can afford to have fewer of them) and slapping huge tariffs on them. The US and Canada now have a 100% import tariff on Chinese made EVs. The EU has just imposed a 45% tariff. So much for free competition in the global market. This looks very like panic. Previous US tariffs on Chinese solar panels, far from stimulating domestic manufacture, which was their overt justification, simply shifted the source of imports from China to India.

A recent edition of China Daily carried an article by its EU bureau chief Chen Weihua, arguing that China’s “potential contribution to the rest of the world in terms of renewables has been greatly hampered by the trade barriers erected by the US and some other countries”. This matters to all of us, not just to China, because we won’t achieve sustainability in one country. It has to be a global effort. Given the course the US is on however, it is likely to be the case that only when China’s economy is bigger and more technically more advanced than the US, will the latter accommodate and cooperate instead of trying to contain and even disrupt militarily. Without such an intervention, that shift is probably going to take place in the middle of the next decade, but a lot of damage will be done in the meantime.

More widely, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) has reported that the share of fossil fuel in the power capacity of BRICS countries, which include Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other nations, will drop below 50% for the first time this year “amid rapid growth of renewable energy and declining [fossil fuel] development”.

And China is reaching beyond that. China Daily reports that China and the EU need to “heighten collaboration” in key areas, including decarbonisation of power, according to a report by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) and Greenpeace. China Daily also quotes Liu Qibao, a member of the government advisory body Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), saying cooperation between China, Europe and Africa in new energy will “help to address global climate change” while the Japan Times carries a commentary arguing that China’s leadership in clean technology will give it significant “soft power”.

The United States – drill baby drill.

The result of the US Presidential election hangs like a nightmare over the COP. In 2020 arguments over the Green New Deal were a live part of the campaign. This time all the push has been in a reactionary direction from the Trump campaign with the Democrats silent or defensive, with Harris pledging to sustain fracking in Pennsylvania.

Poisonous little diatribes about how awful solar and wind farms are, are now an essential part of Trumps stump word salads. These speeches have been critiqued as lacking coherence but, that’s the point. They are not an attempt to convince anyone by using anything as tedious as facts. They are instead a montage of triggers for knee jerk reactions generating a petit bourgeois delirium that drowns the facts out; because emotion always trumps reason. Trump uses teleprompters, which shows that these rambles are scripted.  This sets a new high for emotional manipulation. But it also indicates how flimsy the hegemony of the section of the ruling class that supports him is; now dependent on the mobilisation of a permanent fever dream amongst frightened people who see their global hegemony slipping away and sense of domestic security becoming precarious in a way that builds and exploits deep rifts in US society that it will become increasingly difficult to contain peacefully.

Trump, if returned, would be America with the mask off. The US would be out of the Paris process and trying to smash it up. Project 2025, which is a blueprint for a second Trump administration overturns any effort at the Federal level to mitigate climate change, any agency tasked with monitoring it and doubles down on fossil fuels and fossil fuel technology – trying to build the New American Century on the tried and tested methods that built the last. This is a bit like trying to revive the British Empire by reverting to gas lamps and is essentially a short term project, can’t work on its own and will do damage to both infrastructure and the social fabric. For example, the New York Times has reported that a rollback of flood-protection rules in 2017 by then-president Trump “has left critical infrastructure projects at higher risk”. Living on borrowed time.

The extent to which climate denial sends you mad is shown by the response of Trump’s base to the Florida hurricanes, which took place two weeks after Governor Disantis ruled that the words “climate change” could not be used in any Florida state statutes, because what you don’t talk about can’t hurt you. Time was that they’d argue that hurricanes were God’s wrathful vengeance against gay marriage. Now members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Green post on X “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done” while mapping the course of the hurricanes onto a map showing that they primarily crossed Republican controlled states. QED. Others issued death threats to TV weather anchors for linking the hurricanes to climate change and, after Trump’s unfounded assertion that there was no money for relief because it all been spent on “illegal immigrants”, FEMA disaster relief workers came in for the same treatment. Self destructive behaviour from top to bottom. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first send mad.

Even if he were to adopt a pick and mix approach to Project 2025, the line of march is clear. The Washington Post reports that “an influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election”. The plans –drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies – reveal a “comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives”, taking “particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane”. Make a donation. Cash it in.

If Harris wins, it will be business as usual. America with the mask on, however much people around the world are seeing through it because of Gaza. The US under the Biden – Harris administration has overseen 20% more new oil and gas licences issued than Trump managed in his first term. Although the Inflation Reduction Act has driven federal subsidies into developing renewable energy alongside this, partly by beggar my neighbour subsidies that suck investment into the US from elsewhere, the continued investment in fossil fuels makes the US now the world’s leading petro-state.

Whoever wins, we can expect the US delegation at the COP to make their usual fuss about coal to distract attention from their own massive investments in oil and gas and point the finger of blame at large developing world countries like China and India. This is a stance that is undermined by the recent revelation that exported US Liquified Natural Gas has a carbon footprint 33% worse than coal when processing and shipping are taken into account.

The choice to invest in rapidly expanding their militaries by the US and its allies by hundreds of billions of dollars in the last and coming few years stands in stark contrast to their miserly and grudging investment in allowing the Global South to develop, with the $100 billion a year pledged at Copenhagen in 2009 still not achieved. The military carbon boot print is not included in the Paris process. There is, nevertheless a peace day at the COP on November 15th, which gives the climate movement a focus to demand that it must be.

Global South

The Global South has 60% of the world’s population, 20% of its fossil fuel output at present, but 70% of the world’s renewable potential and therefore wholesale electrification is key to sustainable development and, as it becomes cheaper, will begin to crowd out fossil fuels. However, given the difficulties of attracting finance, with loans much more expensive, the world’s least developed countries have to spend twice as much on servicing debts as they receive in climate finance, and most of the finance they do receive comes in the form of loans, which creates more debt. The $100 billion a year pledge is, in any case, about a thirteenth of what’s needed annually. The argument over the funding for the loss and damage fund – which is intended to compensate countries in the South hardest hit by climate impacts – will be over relatively small change unless big initiatives like Brazil’s timely proposal for a 2% global tax on billionaires are taken up and enforced. This would raise $250 billion a year and still leave the 1% with obscene amounts of wealth. A similar proposal by Greenpeace in the UK for a National Renewal Tax of 2.5% on all incomes above £10 million a year, reckoned able to raise  between £26 – 36 billion a year, shows that this idea is catching on and taking form. It is an essential proposal to fling back at the Right when they complain about “the costs of Net Zero” on working people. This applies domestically and internationally.

Money, money, money

When looking at investment in the Global North, Bloomberg reports that “The fast money on Wall Street has taken a close look at key sectors in the green economy and decided to bet against them.” On average, the 500 hedge funds they analyse are, “short” on batteries, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen and “long” on fossil fuels. “Managers in the $5tn hedge fund industry say the reason is obvious: despite the promises, clean energy and green technology stocks have lagged far behind the broader market. Deep-pocketed institutions are concluding that many climate investments won’t pay off as quickly, or as lucratively, as they’d hoped.” This is exacerbated by an increasingly hostile geopolitical environment, with obstacles such as tariff wars leaving them unwilling to invest in classic green bets such as EVs or solar power” and with “much of the supply chain for green technology now depending on China, the risk of a full-blown trade war targeting its products has become a direct threat to the financial appeal of clean energy, they said.” In a “sector-by-sector” analysis, Bloomberg says there are “a few bright spots, such as wind power and grids”, but, overall, “the data point to a reluctance among hedge funds to go green”. So, in summary, the short term pressures of profitability and the overarching demands of the US drive to war, makes the global bourgeoisie, from its commanding heights in finance capital, structurally incapable of leading humanity to sustainability. No wonder so much of their politics is now so wildly suicidal.

UK PostScript

A forthcoming article will look at the UK government stance going into the COP, with reports that Ed Miliband’s proposals for an improved Nationally Determined Contribution to take to the COP are being prepared independently of the Parliamentary Climate Change Committee and are getting push back from members of the Cabinet.

Action Points