Why combating climate crisis takes so much time

The climate crisis is urgent. According to the United Nations, we need to drop our carbon emissions by a staggering 55% by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We are already likely seeing some of the effects of climate change, such as massive heat waves and melting ice caps. In a typical crisis, people act immediately to deal with the situation, yet the world seems to be painfully slow to act when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.

Some of this is due to opposition from those who benefit from business as usual, such as oil companies, but there are also some genuine challenges we face in the transition to renewable sources of energy.

The oil industry is massive – some estimates of its total revenue are as high as two trillion dollars – and it spends millions pushing back against climate regulations that affect their business. Oil companies stand to potentially lose a lot in the transition to a greener future.

Yet the sheer size of the industry means that it’s not only those at the top who have something to lose. Ordinary workers may also have a rough transition in some ways, and the economy of some communities is very dependent on fossil fuels.

Changing over to renewable energy sources means layoffs and potential loss of earnings for these people. In 2015, some German trades unions pushed back against green energy measures, saying the measures threatened their jobs. A spokesman at the time though emphasized that the union was in favor of de-carbonization as long as there were programs in place to help workers make the transition.

There are those who keep this in mind even as they call for massive reforms. In the United States, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, for example, has an ambitious energy plan that specifically calls for the need to help people in the fossil fuel industry retrain into lower carbon fields as necessary.

Another way that ordinary people are affected is energy access. Most of us in the developed world have the luxury to rarely, if ever, worry about blackouts or how we can access electricity for the day. Yet this is a major concern in large parts of the developing world. India has massive amounts of their population without electricity, and they have strived to make improvements in recent years.

Though climate change is certainly as much of a concern for India as the rest of the world, they have to balance their shorter-term needs with their longer term commitments to a greener future.

This is all in addition to the simple fact that the massive transition and restructuring necessary to switch to renewable energy will naturally take time. As much as we’d like to solve this crisis now, it’s not going to happen overnight. But despite that, we can push as hard as we can to take those important first steps to end our massive dependence on fossil fuels.