The good news is that these, and similar, forces will be going into reverse for fossil fuels, and simultaneously cascading their decline.
The report identifies 5 key areas renewables have self-perpetuating feedback loops.
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Clean electricity as the master cascade. Solar and wind have crossed positive tipping points in many markets; further scaling is now self-propelling.
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Commodity supply chain transformation.
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High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management. Well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation produces visible recovery of fish stocks and biodiversity within years
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Clean cooking and clean household energy. Around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking.
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Adaptation enablers. Things like anticipatory action, adaptation finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. Also, governance, monitoring and social tipping, climate-resilient health systems are explicitly identified as enablers of self-propelling adaptation.
Climate solutions most likely to reach ‘positive tipping points’ revealed by scientists. Global shift towards clean electricity could trigger ‘cascade’ of progress, helping reduce air pollution, cut waste and revive oceans.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
9 Comments
Goddamn I hope so. I’m just upvoting at this point. I’ve considered this is just one, possible, optimistic outcome but I friggin need this today.
This is really nice to hear. It feels like climate news is usually just one disaster after another, so seeing actual progress and reasons for optimism is refreshing. Hopefully these positive changes keep building on each other and we can finally start moving in the right direction.
Hahahahahaha sure! After this decade of gigantic spending the main source of producing energy (ca 87%) is still not renewable. I love these wishful ‘could’ ‘maybe’ ‘can be’ ‘if X then Y’ reports but lets be real: nothing in the world right now points to humans actually giving up consumption for a better planet. Thinking that this will change, is imo futile. I hope these positive tipping points have a base in reality, I really do.
Yes. This all became inevitable/obvious to anyone who was paying attention about 5 years ago.
In about five more years we’ll reach the point where the solution will move from simply inevitable to the point where the transition to clean energy is largely complete and everything will be sustainable even if we never shut down another power plant.
Yeah right. Everyone that isn’t rich enough will be dead by then.
Turns out economics does what fifty years of moralizing treaties couldn’t: make clean tech simply too cheap for capitalism to ignore.
Forget “saving the planet out of altruism”—the real positive tipping point is Chinese manufacturing scaling solar panels and sodium-ion batteries into dirt-cheap commodities.
Deeply misleading post title. The report says that we need to develop and push our climate solutions until they reach positive tipping points and become self sustaining. It says NOTHING about that being most likely to happen. It only gives a few examples where it seems to be happening (solar being the best example where increased adoption made it cheaper to deploy thereby leading to more increased adoption). The writers of the report have a 5 pronged goal to “Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World, and Fix Our Climate.” It says that we SHOULD push for solutions that tip positively on themselves in each of these areas and that we should use solar energy and a few other examples as models. It says nothing about those solutions being likely or sustainable.
I’m all for optimism, but let’s not mislead with editorializing titles. Painting a turd yellow and calling it gold doesn’t help clean up the actual poop.
Too little too late. The planet has already passed certain thresholds that would allowed for maintaining habitability.