We have just five years to stop the world burning

Editorial: Saving the planet will prove vastly expensive and the clock is ticking – but it still lies within our grasp

There remains the hope that, as Sir David Attenborough has always stressed to us in recent years, the pace of the climate crisis can be slowed before it becomes an unpredictable, irreversible threat to life on Earth. But time is running out.

The latest report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a United Nations agency, suggests that there is a two-thirds probability that the world will pass a crucial global temperature threshold within five years. It is as stark as that – more likely than not. As things stand, the next president of the United States will likely preside over the point of no return.

It is a sobering thought that the world has only a one-in-three chance of keeping the rise in the Earth’s average temperature down to 1.5C, as compared to pre-industrial levels. No wonder so many view it as a climate emergency.

Although global warming often means hotter summers and milder winters, and too much is sometimes made of unseasonal weather, the heatwave horrors experienced in Britain last year, for example, may well be repeated more frequently.

The broader danger, though, is of more freakish weather events on a global scale in every respect – in some places colder, wetter or drier, and accompanied by many more natural disasters, which pose a threat to human settlements, food production, biodiversity and indeed life as we know it. There will be more wars because of conflicts over water and access to natural resources, more human migration to escape famine and poverty, and more economic disruption.

The new second-order challenges, such as building safety standards, crop failures and dealing with more melanoma cases, will represent substantial challenges in their own right. Even with the assistance of artificial intelligence, humanity will find it impossible to cope with what our species has done to our own home – almost trashed it.

So the WMO’s update is a timely reminder that the climate crisis hasn’t gone away just because the world has also had to deal with emergencies such as the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the sudden cessation of supplies of natural gas from Russia and Ukraine triggered an equally rapid switch to coal, especially in Europe and even in Germany, where the imminent closure of the nuclear power sector made the crisis all the more acute.

The fact that France, with the most highly developed nuclear power industry on the continent, was still able to generate electricity relatively economically is a reminder that atomic fission, for all its dangers and risks, has to be a part of any move to dependence on renewable energy. Wind and solar are clean, green, cheap, plentiful and inexhaustible sources of energy, but when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, we should not then have to resort to fossil fuels.

The good news is that in Europe, in the US and even in China, there is progress towards a more sustainable future. Battery-electric vehicles are becoming more mainstream. The impending crisis at Vauxhall shows how battery production capacity is essential for a sustainable and secure industrial and energy base.

At the G7 summit in Tokyo this week, world leaders are reportedly going to restate their commitment to the Cop26 targets and once again ignore increasingly marginalised climate sceptics. Few now doubt the science. The world’s seven largest economies are also, at last, ready to disburse the $100bn (£80bn) in financial and technical support to help poorer countries tackle the climate crisis and achieve decarbonisation of their economies.

The last yards are always the hardest. In this race against the climate crisis, there are some formidable obstacles – more financial and political rather than scientific or technological. Early initiatives – such as mandating that carmakers produce lower polluting engines, encouraging recycling, or the 5p charge for disposable plastic bags – were accepted easily, even enthusiastically, by households.

Now the changes to lifestyles are more fundamental – and expensive. There is a danger that they will be perceived and resented as “top down” orders from wealthy elites better able to bear the expense of a greener lifestyle. As things stand, new battery-electric vehicles are around £10,000 costlier than their petrol-powered equivalents, and need a high mileage to recoup the savings on fuel and maintenance: for many flat dwellers, they are quite impractical.

Air-source or ground-source heat pumps are ready to replace gas boilers but aren’t suited to the UK’s aged housing stock, and cost more than £10,000 to buy and install. And making the cost of air travel match the damage it does to the environment would take the cost of a foreign holiday out of the reach of many families. Imposition of “low traffic neighbourhoods” and ULEZ (ultra low emission zone) schemes can provoke a great deal of protest, especially when neighbourhoods are not consulted.

The arguments about climate science being real and man-made have been won. The targets and the mission to limit the rise in temperatures have been agreed at the global level. Yet the debate about “who pays”, as we change the way we live our lives, has hardly begun. It raises uncomfortable questions about living standards and the redistribution of income and wealth. But they must now be faced up to. Difficult as it is, this is inevitable for the success of the Cop26 agenda... and long overdue.