Latest Climate Report: Red Light Flashing March 21, 2023

The just-released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers bad news: We are likely to hit a world average temperature increase of 1.5^o Celsius in about 10 years.

That’s the level most nations of the world agreed to as a ceiling for global warming, in the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. Exceeding that level is likely to unleash more climate catastrophes: deadly floods, heat waves, storms, and droughts.

To prevent those assaults on planetary life, we need to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030  and stop them entirely by the 2050s.

PSR’s climate program helps cut emissions from fossil fuels. Our current focus on methane – opposing fracking and pipelines, rejecting the combustion of gas in buildings and homes – would reduce use of a climate pollutant far more potent than carbon dioxide over its critical first 20 years in the atmosphere.

World policies and price trends, however, indicate a lack of political will. Here in the U.S., power consumption is up after dropping during the worst of the Covid years. President Biden just green-lighted the massive and decades-long Willow Project to drill for oil in Alaska. Strong congressional action is unlikely.

Worldwide, oil companies last year made their highest profits in history – a scenario likely to propel more, not less, fossil fuel production and use. The future of a livable planet is at stake. Our work to slow climate change is more important than ever. So too is the need to step up our results. Fast.