The Bleak, Defeatist Rise of “Climate Realism” | It’s not just the Trump administration. Bankers, centrist Democrats, and others are embracing the idea that climate targets were never realistic—and that we should now prepare, ruthlessly, for a new future.

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1. >Amid all the bad climate news flowing out of the Trump administration, you might have missed a quiet new consensus congealing in think tanks and big business. The targets set out by the Paris climate agreement, they argue—to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—are a lost cause. It’s time to prepare for a world warmed by at least three degrees Celsius.

   >Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”

   >The prescriptions that flow from those assessments are bleak. Naturally, Wall Street is looking to find investment opportunities and avoid risks to its clients’ portfolios amid severe droughts, feet of sea-level rise, and widespread crop failures. As reporter Corbin Hiar noted for E&E News, Morgan Stanley projects that a three-degrees warming scenario “could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.” 

2. The targets were always very challenging. The means by which we tried to achieve those targets became increasingly infeasible.

   Personally I would say the clear point of failure was Kyoto in 1997. The major developing nations negotiated an exclusion from emission targets and the developed nations were persuaded by the “climate justice” narrative to go along with it. A brief look at the incredible acceleration of emissions driven by off-shoring of industry will show why we are where we are. Ultimately the climate never cared if CO2 was emitted in Europe or China only about the amount of emission – that total amount was increased by the way off-shoring was enabled and encouraged by

   But more broadly too much of the Western Green movement has been driven by an inherent preference for social engineering over climate engineering – we have lost too many years of research into any other method beyond treaty-driven emission reduction due to fears of “moral hazard”. Even now voices saying that we need to look beyond this approach are timid because they know they will face opposition.

   We do not have to meekly accept higher temperature increases. We have a real choice – but we do have to accept that the approach of the past 30 years has failed and will fail so we need to rethink our assumptions and open ourselves up to different approaches which parts of the climate movement do not like.

3. Least surprising turn of events.

   “We’ve tried nothing and we’re completely out of ideas”

   Next step is “it’s God’s plan and only I can save you from it” fascism.

4. “Because of the economy”

   And we’ve just seen the economy tank for the profit of a couple thousand Billionaires only, and hey no big deal. Total joke, we need energy transition now.

5. Just fyi, you can get banned from r/climatechange if you mention anything like this. Any realism is a 1-year ban.

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