According to David Wallace-Wells, pictured above, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, "the global carbon surveillance state can't get here soon enough." That statement is the "headline" that tops Wallace-Wells' November 18, 2022, column in The New York Times. As is so often true, that headline is different from what you'll see, online. There, the headline reads: "The Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming." Make no mistake, Wallace-Wells is very much in favor of that!
For my part, I am, too, although the readings I make available to students in the Legal Studies Senior Capstone class I teach at UCSC provide lots of reasons to watch out, in general, for what happens when our government turns into a "surveillance state."
In his column, Wallace-Wells makes the following observation:
A new online tool released by the nonprofit coalition Climate Trace ... allows us to see emissions in near-real time. For a while, we’ve used ballpark estimates for emissions from countries, industries and the planet as a whole. The point of the Climate Trace project is to bring it down to the level of individual polluting facilities: to make it possible to track climate-damaging carbon released from more than 72,000 “steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, [and] cattle feedlots."
A general understanding that carbon emissions are causing global warming that can, ultimately, destroy the habitability of Planet Earth is certainly "step one" towards a solution - towards doing something about it. Hopefully, we have all received that "step one" message. Until, however, we know who is doing what, where, and to what degree, we don't actually have the tools to get ourselves off that "highway to climate hell" that U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has warned us about.
The "gold standard" of legislation (and other actions) to address our global warming / climate crisis is pretty simple: "Every identified emission of a greenhouse gas must be eliminated, at the earliest time that it is technically possible to eliminate that emission, and if it is not technically possible to eliminate an emission then that emission must be reduced, to the greatest degree technically possible, at the earliest time that it is technically possible to make that reduction."
Easy-Peasy to conceptualize and understand this principle. Hard to find the political will to impose the requirement, and almost impossible to achieve if we don't, actually, have anything but generalities to tell us where, and to what extent, emissions are occurring, and who is responsible for the emissions.
Climate Trace can solve one part significant part of the problem. It can tell us, definitively, who is doing the emitting, where, and how much they are emitting.
The political will to make them stop it? Well, that's up to us! The "gold standard," again, is pretty simple:
Every identified emission of a greenhouse gas must be eliminated, at the earliest time that it is technically possible to eliminate that emission, and if it is not technically possible to eliminate an emission then that emission must be reduced, to the greatest degree technically possible, at the earliest time that it is technically possible to make that reduction.
Climate Trace is giving us an invaluable tool to make it possible for us to do what we absolutely must do to preserve and protect the habitability of Planet Earth:
Will we do it? That's up to us!
Image Credit:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/03/david-wallace-wells-on-climate-people-should-be-scared-im-scared
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