PrintThis lesson was intended to be a broad overview of the concept of mitigation rather than a laundry list of types of mitigation across sectors. Rather than listing out those options, I thought it would be more useful to think about the totality of the problem as it relates to what the science is telling us needs to happen to these emissions trajectories. The SPM reading really reinforces the urgency of the problem - if we want to contain warming to 1.5C we need to halve emissions by 2030 and be net-zero by 2050. And 2030 somehow sounds really far away (in the same way that the year 2000 still feels 'recent' - to me, anyway), but it's 10 years from now. And as we are thinking about turning the cogs necessary for the large scale systemic change we need, a decade doesn't feel so long.
The Davis et al. piece is an update to a reading assignment I used to use for this class (Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies by Pacala and Socolow from 2004). I've tried to update that a bit since it was getting outdated and in the intervening years, we've just kept adding to our emissions, meaning we need more and more wedges. I like to think of these wedges as a precursor to the solutions we see in Project Drawdown. The message is the same in both frameworks, and it's an important one to hear:
We already have everything we need to mitigate GHGs and avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. Everything, except perhaps the political will to deploy the solutions. It's an important framework to explore - we often think that we need to find some magic technological fix, but in reality, we already have lot of tools in our toolbox to pull that emissions curve steeply down. Are they easy? Cheap? Popular? Maybe not. But do they exist? Absolutely.
Reminder - Complete all of the Lesson 10 tasks!
You have reached the end of Lesson 10! Double-check the lesson assignments in the corresponding lesson module in Canvas to make sure you have completed all of the tasks listed there.